The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 (review)

Feminists have been studying nuns in recent decades, drawn to the possibilities that these well-organized, financially viable communities offered for feminine self-expression and leadership. The primary sources suggest power to command capital and labour, shape young minds, even win the occasional wrangle with a bishop. Since the same sources reveal self-sacrifice and a very literal Christianity, concentrating on gender politics elicits a nagging voice that the sisters themselves might have assessed things quite differently. Alive to the dilemma, Colleen Gray approaches colonial Montreal's Congregation of Notre Dame with an 'anthropological' sensibility that situates questions of power in the broader context of what gave meaning to convent lives. There is particular focus on one late-seventeenth-century superior, Marie Barbier, and two others from the second half of the eighteenth century, Marie-Josèphe Maugue-Garreau and Marie Raizenne.

The book offers welcome coverage of the Congregation of Notre Dame in the century that followed the work of founder Marguerite Bourgeoys. This was early Canada's largest and most populist order, drawing personnel from labouring backgrounds and educating the common people. Using correspondence, Rules of Order, account books, and notarized agreements, the author provides a directory of professed sisters from 1693 to 1796 and analyzes their backgrounds and activities. Besides supervising farms and hundreds of workers, they produced clothes, shoes, needlework, fur trade provisions, food, and altar supplies. The book reveals the subservience required when mother superiors dealt with bishops as well as their own power to keep penitent sisters on their knees.

The author has a keen eye for telling detail. We hear the splash of chamber pots emptied from second-story windows and visit the cell of a wealthy anchoress built alongside the convent, donning rags and straw shoes but retaining a servant. Though determined to give spirituality its due, Gray lets gossips and renegades rear their heads. Sisters at rural missions apparently tasted freedom and liked it. They complained of being forced to trek through snow by an aristocratic sister 'who thinks of nothing but herself'; they found the mother-house boring and stifling, 'whispering about everything, superior, directors, nothing is to their taste.' There were also runaway sisters, including two who fled their heavy labours in the middle of the night, taking the convent laundry with them; another drowned herself in the well.

The analysis is not invariably persuasive. Too anodyne is discussion of Bishop Saint-Vallier's 1694 attempt to transform an egalitarian, itinerant group of laywomen under female leadership into a hierarchical group of cloistered nuns. His writings insist that his office was sole conduit to the divine will. The sisters' unanimous opposition, and the offence he gave to many colonial groups, belie the author's suggestion that the bishop simply aimed 'to encourage them to flourish as spiritual beings.' Unconvincing too is the attempt to answer a simplistic question about idealism versus ambition by citing Superior Marie-Josèphe Maugue-Garreau's resolution not to 'hurt others with my dry and indifferent replies.' Pious resolve clearly does not capture the whole character of this superior, whom Gray concedes was uncharitable and derisory towards lower-class runaways, who so frightened one mission director that she too fled. In general the book would benefit from fuller engagement with the scholarship of Rapley, Jean, Simpson, Foster, and D'Allaire, and less engagement with Danylewycz, whose work relates to a later period.

To say the analysis could be pushed further ignores the real value of this thoughtful, elegantly written book. Without neglecting feminist issues, it captures the essential spirituality of the Congregation of Notre Dame. Christian imagery and prayer pervaded their days. Catechism is accurately portrayed as the curricular core, literacy the fringe benefit. By artful inversion, the book ends with discussion of the wracked body and enraptured soul of early Superior Marie Barbier, who mutilated herself...