The Charterhouse of the New Light of the Holy Saviour at Bloemendaal outside the city of Utrecht, or Nieuwlicht, rediscovered

The Carthusian charterhouse of Nieuwlicht outside Utrecht was the fourth foundation of the order of the Carthusians in the present Netherlands, established in the summer of 1391 by Zweder van Abcoude. In 1579 it had to be abandoned permanently. Shortly afterwards it was put up for sale and demolished. What makes Nieuwlicht special are its many surviving documents with information on its foundation, construction, and the locations of buildings of the charterhouse. On the sole basis of historical sources, it was impossible to reconstruct a plan of the charterhouse. The same can be said of the archaeological evidence from the site, which was heavily robbed in the late sixteenth century and further disturbed by twentieth-century urban development. Its documents contain remarkable evidence for individual buildings, and the people connected with them; the archaeology allows a spatial understanding of the complex, the phasing of development, and even the probable identification of individual burials. The result is a reconstruction of the plan of Nieuwlicht, the Utrecht charterhouse. - © Brepols.