“This little book tells of the year in which Lady Catherine Nefs died."

[Manuscript] / Jehan Barrat. Ce petit livre contient lan onquel termina vie par mort feue demoiselle Catherine Nefs… S.l. [Lille?]: Jehan Barrat, 1574. 8vo [22.2 x 14.3] x cm], [5] ff., [1] f. integral blank, [2] folding leaves. Quarter bound in 19th brown and tree-calf paper over card, marbled endpapers, bookplate of Philippe Kervyn de Volkaersbeke (1815-81), the manuscript preserving stab-stitch holes. Only minor edge wear to binding. First leaf dusty, numerous later pencil annotations resolving the script, which nevertheless is neatly written throughout.
 
 
Unusual 16th-century French manuscript account of the family of Catherine Nefs, who died in 1530 at age 101, and her husband, the nobleman Jehan de Steelandt. The mémoire was written in 1574 by their grandson, Jehan Barrat (d. 1576) of Lille, who was 68 years of age at the time. Barrat shares touching memories of his grandmother and of his aunt, Jossine de Steelandt, an Abbess at the cloister of Notre Dame de Roosenberg in Waasmunster.
 
Catherine Nefs had twelve children who survived to adulthood, and Jehan Barrat recalls that “it was such a beautiful thing to see such an old woman in the middle of so many children, who numbered twelve, of whom eleven were married,” the twelfth being a nun.
 
Jossine de Steelandt was a “nun and abbess at the cloister of Notre Dame de Roosenberg in Waesminstre” for about 60 years. She advanced the convent through her good and wise government, added “great works and edifices” of all sorts and renovated the all the buildings, which were old and obsolete, except for the church, which she dared not touch.
 
Barrat writes in a “simple and naïve style” (Volkaertsbeke, p. 3) and with an unusual repetitiveness more often encountered in the speech of an older person than in writing. He is proud of his ancestors’ affluence (e.g., that they went about in clothes made of silk) and remarks that his great grandfather made a pilgrimage (or crusade) to the Holy Land (“faict les voiaiges tant en la terre saincte de Jherusalem comme aussy au mont de sinaij”).
 
The volume carries the bookplate of Philippe Kervyn de Volkaersbeke (1815-81), who partially edited the manuscript in his account of the “De Neve” family in Histoire géneálogique et héraldique de quelques familles de Flandre, a fact which he notes in an inscription on the front flyleaf.
 
 
*Kervyn Volkaertsbeke, “De Neve,” in Histoire géneálogique et héraldique de quelques familles de Flandre, pp. 1-12; Dumont, Généalogies de quelques familles des Pays-Bas, p. 238-39.