Humbeline of Jully

Humbeline of Jully, also known as Blessed Humbeline or Humbelina, was a Burgundian noblewoman of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and the only sister of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. She was born into the household of Tescelin, lord of Fontaine, often called Tescelin le Roux, and his wife Aleth of Montbard, whose family seat was at Fontaine-lès-Dijon in the Duchy of Burgundy. Tescelin and Aleth had a large family of sons, including Guy, Gerard, Bernard, Andrew, Bartholomew, and Nivard, several of whom entered monastic life at Cîteaux and later at Clairvaux. Their mother Aleth was remembered for her piety and for the religious formation of her children; she died while they were still young, and her death left a deep mark on the household. In the early twelfth century Bernard and most of his brothers withdrew from secular life to join the reforming monastery of Cîteaux, whereas Humbeline remained in the world.

Medieval hagiographical tradition, drawing especially on the circle that produced the lives of Bernard, relates that Humbeline married a nobleman and for some years lived according to the customs and display of her rank. She is said to have visited her brothers attended by a retinue and dressed with a magnificence that Bernard, by then abbot of Clairvaux, regarded as incompatible with the conversion he had embraced. According to the story, he refused to see her until she put aside such ostentation, and her brother Andrew joined in the rebuke. The episode became the turning point of her life. Humbeline accepted the correction, adopted a more austere manner of living, and, with the consent of her husband, left secular society to enter the Benedictine priory of Jully-les-Nonnains, a community of nuns dependent on the abbey of Molesme. Other women connected with Bernard's family also entered Jully, so that the house became a female counterpart, in a Benedictine rather than a Cistercian setting, to the monastic vocations of the men of Fontaine.

At Jully, Humbeline lived under the Rule of Saint Benedict. She rose to be prioress of the community and was remembered for humility, penitence, and the governance of her sisters. The priory stood in the orbit of Molesme, the Burgundian house from which Cîteaux itself had sprung, and thus her monastic life remained close, geographically and spiritually, to the early Cistercian movement without belonging to it by formal affiliation. Contemporary documentation of her administration and inner life is scarce; what survives is largely the portrait drawn by later Benedictine and Cistercian writers, who present her as an example of conversion from aristocratic worldliness to regular observance. That portrait should be read with caution, yet it is consistent with the well-attested pattern of Bernard's relatives entering religion in the first decades of the twelfth century.

Humbeline died at Jully in the first half of the twelfth century. Later tradition most often assigns her death to 21 August 1136, although some notices give other years in the same period, and the precise year cannot be established with the certainty available for major public figures. She was buried at the priory. Veneration of Blessed Humbeline took root in Benedictine and Cistercian calendars, and her feast is kept on 21 August. She was not the subject of a modern papal canonization or beatification according to the procedures of later centuries; her cult belongs to the medieval recognition of holiness within her family, her order, and her region. Historical knowledge of her remains limited and is bound up with the far fuller record of her brother Bernard and with the early history of the nuns of Jully.