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  • Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed by Barbara R. Woshinsky
  • Linda Lierheimer
Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces in France, 1600–1800: The Cloister Disclosed. By Barbara R. Woshinsky. [Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2010. Pp. xviii, 344. $119.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6754-4.)

Imagining Women’s Conventual Spaces examines the place of the convent in the early modern imagination from the Council of Trent, which imposed strict enclosure on women’s religious orders, to the French Revolution, when religious houses were shut down and the nuns and monks that lived in them dispersed. Arguing that the convent evoked both patriarchal restriction and feminine autonomy, Woshinsky traces the shifting symbolic function of the convent against the backdrop of two centuries of social, political and religious change, from an ideal space of refuge in the early-seventeenth century, to a mysterious, clandestine, and sexualized space, as depicted in eighteenth-century works such as Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse.

The opening chapters examine parallels between architectural spaces and the female body in seventeenth-century French poetry and religious writing. Woshinsky argues that this literature, drawing on a tradition of religious imagery that could [End Page 376] be traced to the Song of Songs, constructed the female body as an enclosed space—a vessel, a walled garden—similar to the convent. The remainder of the book is organized around architectural aspects of the convent that defined this space—threshold, parlor, cell—and guides the reader from the convent walls into its deepest recesses. This architectural motif is perhaps the most innovative aspect of the book and mirrors the author’s emphasis on the permeability of the convent walls and on the ways that conventual space was defined and redefined by the constant crossing and recrossing of physical and symbolic boundaries.

Woshinsky uses the term conventual space to refer to the convent as “both a real and symbolic enclosure” (p. 1). However, this broad definition, which includes allegorical representations of a variety of enclosed spaces and spaces of retreat similar to the convent (the hermitage, the salon), sometimes obscures the author’s argument, especially in the early chapters. Woshinsky wants to argue that all forms of female retreat in seventeenth-century literary texts, religious or not, were conventual spaces. Was there no way of imagining alternative forms of female community in this period without referencing the convent? Perhaps not, but the answer is not self-evident. Also, Woshinsky states that she has chosen not to focus on the realities of early modern convent life or the writings of nuns themselves. This omission seems curious, especially in an age when nuns’ writings were extremely influential both inside and outside the convent. If “conventual space is a locus for reflecting on and questioning the social order from a position marginal to that order” (p. 300), it was also a spiritual space, and the omission of voices of those who experienced it as such provides us with a somewhat lopsided understanding of the diverse meanings of conventual space.

Overall, Woshinsky’s close analysis of literary texts provides us with a rich picture of the symbolic place of the convent in the cultural imagination of early-modern France. Although previous studies have shown that the convent came to represent the despotism of the Old Regime in the century prior to the French Revolution, Woshinsky’s more expansive treatment provides us with a more nuanced and complex picture of what she calls a “convent culture” (p. 302) and the ways that ideas about women’s enclosure expressed and were shaped by the changing social and political landscape of the era.

Linda Lierheimer
Hawai’i Pacific University, Honolulu
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