The exhibition "Maredsous: a community - a treasure" at The Museum of Ancient Arts (TreM.a) in Namur was inaugurated on Thursday as part of the sesquicentennial anniversary celebration of the Maredsous Abbey that started last summer.
The exhibition, which is open until 10 September, invites guests to rediscover the neo-Gothic monastery and "meet its community, between past and present." The objects on exhibit include drawings, sculptures, silverware and illuminated manuscripts, most of which are on exhibit for the first time in history.
"It will be a first to be able to discover certain drawings, illuminated manuscripts, sculptures and masterpieces of goldsmith’s art," Jean-Marc Van Espen, Deputy-President of the Province of Namur, told Belga. "Many of the objects on display are items regularly used during daily religious celebrations."
The goal of the exhibit is to showcase the vision of the original founders of the abbey, highlight its Gothic art and give visitors a glimpse of the "sometimes unsuspected aspects of monastic life in Maredsous, between prayer and work."
Papal Mass at the Maredsous Abbey on the occasion of the abbey's 150th anniversary. Credit: Belga / Nicolas Maeterlinck
Anchored in contemporary society
Founded in 1872 in the Molignée valley, the Maredsous Abbey follows the Benedictin tradition with a contemporary understanding of how to run a community space both religiously, economically and technologically. This strategy successfully attracts 600,000 visitors a year, making the Abbey the most popular tourist destination in the province of Namur.
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Each of the twenty monks at Maredsous Abbey today has a job outside of their sacred responsibilities, which could be administrative, teaching, working in the library, engaging at scientific research and more. The monastery even has a Computer and Bible Center, and they distributed the Bible on diskettes in 1981 and later published software for analysing the sacred text.
Since its founding the Abbey houses a centre for arts, crafts and publishing that produced the first Latin-French missal, making it above all a cultural centre.
