Alice was born at Schaerbeek, near Brussels, then in the Duchy of Brabant. A frail child, at the age of seven, she was sent to be boarded and educated at the Cistercian La Cambre Abbey, where she remained for the rest of her life. The name of the abbey is derived from the Latin: Camera Sanctae Mariae and is recalled in the park southeast of Brussels called "Ter Kamerenbos / Bois de la Cambre". Alice was a very pretty girl and lovable child, and soon showed a high intelligence and a great love for God. She became a laysister at the abbey. However, at some 20 years of age, she contracted leprosy and had to be isolated in a small hut. The disease caused her intense suffering, which she offered for the salvation of sinners and the souls in purgatory. Eventually she became paralyzed and afflicted with blindness. Her greatest consolation came from reception of the Holy Eucharist, although she was not allowed to drink from the chalice because of the presumed danger of contamination. However, it is said that the Lord appeared to her with assurance that He was in both the consecrated bread and the wine. She died in 1250, at the age of c. 30. The little we know about Alice's life comes from a Latin biography, composed c. 1260-1275. Authorship of the work is unknown. Scholars have typically believed that the author was an anonymous chaplain at La Cambre Abbey. However, Martinus Cawley suggests that Arnulf II of Ghistelles, abbot of Villers Abbey 1270-1276, is its likely author. Alice's biography was also translated into Middle Dutch, as witnessed by one extant manuscript. By decree of 1 July 1702, Pope Clement XI granted to the monks of the Congregation of St. Bernard Fuliensi the faculty to celebrate the cultus of Alice. Devotion to Alice as a saint was approved in 1907 by Pope Pius X.
Responses to Alice's Life
Alice's biography has been upheld as a model of Cistercian spirituality. Writing in 1954, Trappist monkThomas Merton, for example, called the text "a practical and concise treatise of Cistercian asceticism." Nevertheless, Alice of Schaerbeek was not particularly well known. Chyrsogone Waddell, reflecting on his entry into the Cistercian life in the 1950s, remarked on her obscurity, with Alice being mostly unknown even in devout Cistercian communities of the time. In recent years, Alice has become more well known in medieval scholarship as a member of the so-called "Holy Women of Liège" corpus of thirteenth-century Latin biographies. This situates Alice, and her spirituality, in terms of the beguine movement, an innovation in medieval women's piety that saw women taking up an active religious life outside of monastic enclosure.
