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Founded: c. 1142Category: Religious sites in France
Historical period: Birth of Capetian dynasty (France)
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Le Reclus Abbey was a Cistercian monastery in the present Talus-Saint-Prix near Sézanne. It was founded by Bernard of Clairvaux in c. 1142 around the hermitage of Blessed Hugh the Hermit (Hugues le Reclus), from whom the abbey took its name. Hugh had at first retired from the world to an arid place in the parish of Saint-Prix known as Fons Balimi around 1128–1130, before being joined by a few companions. He was mentioned in 1176 in the cartulary of the Abbey of Saint-Pierre-d'Oyes (canton of Sézanne) in connection with the sale of a pond and of land to Le Reclus Abbey by Hugh, Count of Baye, who also confirmed his uncle Simon's gift of the rights of the forest of Talu to the abbey because of its extreme poverty. Hugo possibly died that same year; after his death the villagers kept his memory alive by burning a lamp on his grave. Probably also in that year Le Reclus became a daughter house of Vauclair Abbey.
Le Reclus was always a poor monastery, but nevertheless survived up to the French Revolution, when it was suppressed.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.