Pierina de Vastrel

Pierina de Vastrel (1685–1760), sometimes known as la sagesse de Barielle (“the wisdom of Barielle”), was a Cairan cleric born in present-day Transvechia; she is remembered today as one of the earliest proponents of the doctrine of Puritanism within Cairony, and probably the first to set its tenets to paper and provide it with an intellectual underpinning.

Birth and early life

Vastrel was born on 5 Ediface 1685 at Payroc, today the chief town of the Val d’Orran in south-eastern or “traditional” Transvechia; she was brought up with the Orrannol dialect spoken in the region (her first name would normally be rendered as Pierrine in standard Savamese), and it is thought that she did not receive an education in the Savamese language until she was almost twelve years old.

From an early age it seemed likely that the young Pierina would find her future as a cleric; at the time of her birth, her mother Victoria de Vastrel was one of the two officiants at a temple close to the centre of Payroc, and three aunts on both sides of her family held clerical livings elsewhere in the region. Little documentary evidence survives from Vastrel’s childhood, and it perhaps cannot now be known how much leading up to her acceptance to a novitiate was her own decision. However, she travelled to Belny in eastern Dordanie late in 1700, shortly after her fifteenth birthday, to enter a renunciary there (indeed, the same one which her mother had attended).

Early clerical career

By her own later admission, Vastrel’s early years in the faith were difficult. Belny, a centre of learning in the Sabamic lands for centuries, was in an intellectual foment as the ideas which prompted the early Cairan Reformation were taking shape; and Vastrel, coming from a family which had been steeped in the faith for generations, felt the arguments as an almost physical shock. She clashed repeatedly – and, at times, physically – with some of her fellow novices as she defended the status quo.

While this was daunting, this hard introduction to the Cairan clerisy brought her to the attention of an elder figure who would become a significant patron in later years in the person of Ariane de Quinzel; a professor at one of Belny’s university colleges, the Quènie-born Quinzel was a prominent theologian and canon lawyer. She saw something to be encouraged in the pugnacious young woman, and through Quinzel’s support Vastrel began to fall into the orbit of the Brandist faction within contemporary Cairony. Brandism, named after its progenitor, the Ellish matron Margaret Brand, had emerged as a school of thought in Cairony during the Dark Thirty period in the early 17th century, and has often been seen in Cairan studies as an intellectual precursor to Puritanism.

After completing her novitiate, Vastrel remained in Belny for almost three years, where she studied under Quinzel before taking up her first temple appointment in Jagues-Salins in the spring of 1706; this may well have been due to Brandist influence, as the port city had been unusually resistant to the Reformation (in later years it would be a place of refuge for the staunch Orthodoxist and Dordanian queen Édith II).

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In 1727 Vastrel was appointed as matron of the Temple of Oropaesia in Onglefort, a small town to the south of Barielle (into which it has since been absorbed); and it would be from this unprepossessing location that she built the literary corpus that, more than perhaps any other work, set out the tenets of Puritanism that would be carried down into the present day. Certainly, her new living became something of a bolthole from the following year, as the housecleaning carried out by new Holy Mother Téodora de Beldopoule made Brandists like Vastrel increasingly less palatable among mainstream Cairans.

Although Vastrel had been disappointed at the way in which Beldopoule had turned on her former allies, she was pragmatic enough to set it behind her as she turned her sights on the rising Reformation; her first salvo in what would become a thirty-year campaign came late in 1727. Modicum Responsum (“A Measured Response”) very much belied its anodyne title as it took aim squarely at the Petition and the “intemperate, incollegiate and inappropriate” demands made by its signatories towards a broader and more egalitarian practice of Cairony. The emerging doctrines of Puritanism would take much from earlier Brandism as they argued in favour of a clearer, more focused and more disciplined approach, in which group effort under the direction of a more clearly spiritually-attuned leadership would more swiftly bring about the Restoration which is the goal to which all Cairans should aspire.

The voice in the wilderness

Over the next three decades Vastrel would return in her writings time and again to the idea that Cairony should be stripped of the superstitions, foreign innovations and atavisms which it had accumulated over centuries, and return to the “purity and simplicity that the greatest among us had ever envisaged”. Just who was that “greatest among us” was never completely clear – and some have argued that the obfuscation was deliberate – but it seems probable that Vastrel was arguing for the end of Cairony’s “golden age” coming about with the death of the Glorious Prophetess, whom most Puritans saw as having synthesised the best elements of Cairan practice since its emergence from Senuminism through the Six Holy Sisters.

For all that the Reformation was spreading like a wildfire in the Savamese states – with Brocquie becoming the first of them to abandon the Orange Orthodoxy, at least temporarily, in 1730 – it was gaining very little purchase in the Great North; and Vastrel’s impassioned advocacy for the maintenance of the old ways was giving her increasing prominence within the families of Transvechia. In 1734 she was proposed as a candidate when the death of Régine de Salbèche left the office of matron of Transvechia vacant, but was unexpectedly defeated; however, she accepted the defeat with good grace, admitting to friends that she considered that she still had tasks to be achieved that holding such high office – and being constrained by the secular demands that it would place on her – would prevent her from achieving.

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The decision by the parliament of Dordanie in 1740 to recognise the Reform interpretation of Cairony would have significant effects on the Transvechian provinces, mostly Dordanian vassals as they were for the most part. As Dordanie fell into civil war – at the beginning of what ultimately became the Second Reform War – increasing numbers of Orthodox Cairans sought an escape from the fighting by fleeing to areas where the Orthodoxy still held sway. Although distant, Transvechia saw part of this influx reach its shores, with many of these refugees gravitating towards Barielle and Santa Constantina, the largest cities in traditional Transvechia. Vastrel was one of several matrons who petitioned, both through the triburion and as individuals, for aid from Dordanian authorities for the newcomers; and her impassioned pleas for fair treatment have been claimed as being an early signal of the Transvechian anger against their Dordanian rulers that would spark the Transvechian Uprising of 1767–71.

Decline and death

Although she became increasingly fragile as she grew older, most sources agree that Vastrel retained her mental acuity almost to the very end of her life; in her last two years, when she was no longer capable of the fine motor control necessary to write, she dictated her works to an amanuensis. (Colette de Soral, the junior officiant who performed this task, would later have a significant career of her own during the Transvechian Uprising.) Probably the last communication known to have originated from the mind of Vastrel was a savage missive sent in late Animare 1760 to Édith-Virginie d’Omeros, who had been installed as the Holy Mother of the Savamese Argan in Conservene of the previous year; Vastrel sought to systematically discredit any claims by d’Omeros to authority over the Cairan communion, dismissing her as a willing puppet of the secular monarchs who had connived at her election, and expressing her own loyalties to the latterly-imprisoned Beldopoule as the properly-chosen leader of the Orthodoxy. This letter, which the later Cairan theologian Pauline de Montrachon described as “scribed in bile and sealed in blood”, is still held within the archives of d’Omeros’ “successor” argan.

This supreme effort was the last significant action of Vastrel’s life, as her weakened body overrode the fierce will which had once ruled it. Vastrel eventually succumbed to her various ailments and passed into the company of Aedif on 3 Floridy 1860, at the age of 74 years.

Legacy

The legacy left behind by Vastrel is long, and at times bloody; although she expressed her stances on Puritanism in rigorously intellectual fashion and frequently went to great lengths to denounce the use of violence in advancing them, her successors – often thinking themselves under threat – have often failed to live up to her sterling example. The savagery displayed by Puritans and their supporters in Ceresora (and, in fairness, in equal measure by their opponents) during its civil war tarnished any arguments which they may have put forward, and the philosophy now termed “neo-Puritanism” which has emerged in the post-war period stresses the need to address one’s own spiritual impurities, rather than any subjective view as regards those of others. Vastrel herself is memorialised in Barielle and in her birthplace Payroc, and also in the name of the Vastrelline Argan of Elland, a neo-Puritan group which broke away from the mainstream Ellish argan in the 1960s.