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  • Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism
  • Elizabeth Rapley
Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism. By Laurence Lux-Sterritt. [Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700.] (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. viii, 236. $99.95.)

The historiography of religious women has come a long way. Shaking off the victimhood described by Diderot and passing through the status of near-invisibility accorded it in official church histories of the past, it emerged into daylight as women's history took hold. Nuns, it was discovered, were not all sad little persons of limited import; indeed, some of them, like Teresa of Avila and Mary Ward, were veritable Amazons in the faith. The fact that they opened new horizons for religious women proved that feminism could take root, even within the convent.

It is frustrating, though, that the enhancement of our empathy for these women of the past takes place at the very time when our understanding of the values inherent in their way of life has dwindled almost to zero. It means that we have difficulty in seeing where they are coming from. As Lux-Sterritt points out, "Since cloistered piety has all but disappeared from modern life, physical isolation and immobility have, on the whole, come to represent passivity and inactivity, notions the twenty-first century is quick to dismiss as useless" (p. 178). In the early seventeenth century, however, the contemplative life was still highly prized. The intense activism of the Counter-Reformation did not diminish respect for the monastic tradition; if anything, it enhanced it.

This is the point that the author is making. Various groups of women appeared on the scene, anxious to do their part in the re-Catholicization of the world. The difficulty was that the work they chose to do required them to be present in that world—and this offended all sorts of sensibilities, both ecclesiastical and societal. In short order they were forced back toward the cloister. Their reactions differed. Mary Ward, foundress of the English Ladies, refused outright—and she suffered for it, being imprisoned for some time as a condemned heretic. Yet her institute survived, and continued to operate outside the cloister. The Ursulines of Toulouse (the author's principal subjects) behaved more circumspectly, accepting clausura while insisting on the right to continue teaching outsiders. Militant on the one hand, modest on the other, but, as the author argues, together they were of "momentous importance," "because, despite working from within the patriarchal confines imposed upon them . . . they managed to lay the foundations of a new system of education for women; indeed, their activities enlarged the pre-existing feminine roles within the Church" (p. 27).

Despite their pioneering work, however, they were not rebels defying the established order. "In fact, sources have shown that most apostolic women demonstrated a spiritual affinity for the cloister and that they all respected the religious values it represented" (p. 8). The difficulty for them came from "the ambiguous relationship" between the values of the contemplative life and those of the apostolate. As they stepped out into their new ministry, they still had one foot planted firmly in the old monastic tradition. "[T]hey should not [End Page 418] be regarded as feminist 'loose cannons' within the Catholic Church but rather as women whose seventeenth-century vocation operated a rich transvaluation of medieval asceticism and inscribed a teaching apostolate within a traditional religious and penitential context" (p. 193).

This is a point worth remembering. Different people prod the Church forward; some of them are her most loyal members.

Elizabeth Rapley
University of Ottawa
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