Agnès Arnauld
French Cistercian abbess
Agnès Arnauld, (1593–1672), was a Cistercian nun and the abbess of the Abbey of Port-Royal, near Paris. She was a major figure in French Jansenism.
Arnauld was born Jeanne-Catherine-Agnès Arnauld, a member of the Arnauld family. She was a sister of the priest philosopher Antoine Arnauld, called "le Grand Arnauld" and of Abbess Angélique Arnauld.
Agnès Arnauld succeeded her sister Angélique as head of the abbey in 1630. She led it during the most repressive anti-Jansenist period. She organised the movement against signing the Formulary of Alexander VII and for this was confronted by Hardouin de Péréfixe, the Archbishop of Paris. She was also the author of the Constitutions of Port-Royal, a text which reformed the material and spiritual rule of the abbey in a spirit of Cistercian renewal.
Her niece Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly (b. 1624) succeeded her as Abbess.
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This entry incorporates text from “Agnès Arnauld” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.