Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France. The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (review)

Susan Dinan's interesting examination of the early history of the Daughters of Charity, founded by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 1633, contributes to the growing body of research on the Catholic Reformation which demonstrates that although "there were moves toward more clearly articulated confessionalization and social discipline, no one top-down and orderly process occurred in the Catholic Church" (p. 1). As one of the most active and largest female groups to emerge during the Catholic reform movement, it is surprising that the work of the Daughters of Charity has until now been subject to relatively little scholarly scrutiny. To Dinan's credit, she has succeeded in unearthing, collating, and analyzing a variety of rich sources that reveal a confraternal group that provided the inspiration and model for the most prevalent forms of Catholic social engagement in the modern world.

Dinan argues that the Daughters of Charity owed their success to the willingness of their founders to reinterpret Tridentine regulations to meet the needs of society, ever more subject to growing poverty, and to answer the spiritual need of women to express their religious faith through active projects of compassionate charity that mirrored the example of Christ. This latter aspect of the Daughters' origins and ethos does not receive sustained attention as the book focuses principally on the strategies employed by their founders to ensure that the group remained a confraternal and uncloistered association and on the struggle to cope with the complexities of administering an organization that grew rapidly to 1660 and even more quickly thereafter (forty-two establishments between 1638 and 1661). But these are extremely valuable concerns, in terms of understanding the ability of Louise de Marillac to negotiate contracts, maintain even relations with higher and local clergy and with hospital administrators, and to train talented Daughters to assume positions of leadership within satellite communities. Within both, Dinan makes several important observations, of which the most significant is the suggestion that the reason why the Daughters remained unenclosed and free from public opprobrium was that they did not, ultimately, pose a threat to the Church itself. Their work in hospitals, galleys, and schools was driven by an identity of modesty and piety, and they provided indispensable social and evangelical services to the Catholic Church's mission and to the Catholic monarchy.

The Daughters also, indirectly, provided greater opportunities for aristocratic women to participate in the piety of social welfare, for they evolved partially from de Marillac and de Paul's realization that social prejudices and hierarchical assumptions would not permit high-born women to deliver food or nurse the sick in poor districts. Clearly, therefore, while bowing to some contemporary social rules, the founders innovated by providing, for the first time, an environment and structure that simultaneously shielded and liberated women who sought to live their vocation within the world. The relationship between the aristocratic Ladies of Charity and the Daughters merits further investigation, for the former provided the favors of patronage that supported the Daughters' activities, but Dinan's research should provide the basis to develop such a challenging project in the future. Finally, there are occasionally frustrating editorial errors in this book which are beyond typographical and actually result in the omission of factual information (p. 80, 87). This is a pity in a book that will serve as an essential reference to the study of the "feminization" of the Catholic reformation in France.