The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750-1900 by Mary Peckham Magray (review)

BOOK REVIEWS471 Late Modern European The Transforming Power ofthe Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1 750-1900. By Mary Peckham Magray. (NewYork: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xiv, 182. $45.00.) Histories of Ireland in the nineteenth century, and especially histories of the Catholic Church in Ireland during this period often contain strikingly minimal treatment of, if not gaping silence about, the life and work of Catholic women religious. In this context, Mary Peckham Magray's The Transforming Power of the Nuns is a welcome and necessary corrective. The book uses primary materials related to over twenty selected convents— of eight religious congregations, all but one of which were founded in Ireland —and primary materials from at least five diocesan archives to develop the author's claim "that women religious were central to the religious and cultural change" that occurred in Ireland in the nineteenth century (p. vii). She further claims that their widespread influence,far from being "the product" of the postfamine reform efforts of churchmen (for example, Paul Cullen), actually began many decades earlier, on the initiative of the women founders themselves. Thus Magray takes issue with the relevant analyses of historians such as Emmet Larkin and Catriona Clear. She wishes to remedy situations in which the historical roles of women religious are either "taken for granted" or seen as limited , by showing, in the case of Ireland, that "the extent and kind of religious change . . . between the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth would simply not have been possible without the dreams, the ambitions, and the persistence of tens of thousands of Irish women who chose to become nuns" (P- 13). Magray's general thesis rests on arguments devoted to the following claims: that "women religious were in the vanguard of religious reform in Ireland," breaking free in notable ways from the generally "subordinate position of women in both the church and society" (p. 10); that "wealthy and well connected women played the crucial role in the re-emergence of women's religious orders and their spread throughout Ireland" (p. 15); that Irish convents "were part of the drive of the emerging [Catholic] middle class both to define itself and to reshape the Irish world in its own image" (p. 45); that the attractiveness of religious communities to women of this period rested not just on the opportunity of doing "meaningful labor," but also on the prospect of living, within the context of celibacy and community,"a spiritual and personal life that was rich in intimate, loving relationships with other religious women" (p. viii); that women "who joined convents in the prefamine period were from extremely privileged class backgrounds" and acquired by mid-century a cultural authority that conferred "the right to help construct and reproduce the new dominant culture" (pp. 75, 74); that women religious in Ireland became "the leading female molders and reproducers of the developing modern Irish 472BOOK REVIEWS Catholic culture," effecting "changes in both the religious attitudes and the normative behavior of the larger Irish Catholic population" (p. 106); and finally, that by the 1860's, and despite their efforts to retain appropriate authority over their own organizations, women religious in Ireland lost much of the semiautonomous self-direction that had characterized their respective foundings and became increasingly subject to episcopal and clerical control and supervision , as an integrated part of the centralized Catholic establishment. In a book that rightly seeks to discover, in the records of the women religious themselves and in as much detail as possible, the actual data about the emergence, development, and public reception of Irish religious congregations, the opportunities for factual error, misinterpretation, and over- or underemphasis are understandably numerous and to some extent unavoidable. In the treatment of Catherine McAuley and the Sisters of Mercy each of these problems occasionally occurs. For example, some biographical information about McAuley is incorrect; her attitude against "particular friendships" was expressed in relation to communal charity, not in relation to chastity; and the motive for the 1864 assembly of Mercy superiors, from which the Mercy Guide was issued, was preservation of the charism and spirit of the Institute in diverse settings, not resistance to episcopal or clerical...