History
The abbey was founded about 1196, by its patroness Gisèle, with the support of the monastic community of the abbey of Villers, following the Cistercian rule. Henry I, Duke of Brabant donated the Étangs d'Ixelles, a water mill, and the domaine of the monastery. The Abbaye de la Chambre de Notre-Dame, hence La Cambre, remained under the spiritual guidance of Villers, one of the most important Cistercian communities.
Saint Boniface of Brussels (1182–1260), a native of Ixelles, canon of Sainte-Gudule (future cathedral of Brussels), who taught theology at the University of Paris and was made bishop of Lausanne (1231), lived eighteen years in the abbey and is interred in the church. The mystic leper saint Alix lived in the community at the same epoch.
During the numerous wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the abbey was largely destroyed, but it was rebuilt in the 18th century, in the French form it largely retains.
The terraced garden and formal clipped bosquets were restored in the 18th-century manner starting in 1924.
Read more about this topic: La Cambre Abbey
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)