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The Catholic Historical Review 86.3 (2000) 519-520



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Book Review

Vie quotidienne des couvents féminins de Bruxelles au siècle des lumières (1764-1787)

Early Modern European

Vie quotidienne des couvents féminins de Bruxelles au siècle des lumières (1764-1787). By Marc Libert. [Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, volume hors série 9.] (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles. 1999. Pp. 192. Paperback.)

Specialists and graduate students wishing to learn more about the material life of eighteenth-century female religious, and by inference the material life of wider society, will find it in this detailed and useful study.

Though the "daily life" of the title surely included the spiritual activities of the religious, the author makes clear from the start that his study is "far from the [End Page 519] altar, the apostolate, and the quietude" of conventual life and focuses instead on temporal matters. In order to promote sound comparisons with other religious institutions and the world outside, he focuses even more specifically on the accounts of two middling convents in Brussels: the Brigittines (a contemplative order) and the Congregation de Notre-Dame of Lorraine (a teaching order). The chronological scope of the work ranges from the end of the Seven Years' War to the "little revolution" of 1787, a period chosen because of its relative social and economic stability and because of the comparable quality of sources for both monasteries in those years.

The author's findings and presentation, organized in three chapters, reflect the usual strengths and weaknesses of revised dissertations: much interesting and detailed information and a rather sober, even clinical tone. Chapter one, "approche historique et sociologique," sets the context through discussing the general history of convents, basic spiritual problems, the social background of nuns, and connections between convents and the world (including boarders, benefactors, priests, the struggles of cloister). Like other chapters, this one is marked by short paragraphs and a near-encyclopedic mix of topics. Chapter two, "situation financière," does an admirably thorough job of explaining the nature and importance of rents, real estate, the various sources of income in convents (leases, pensions, gifts, dowries, sales of goods) as well as debts (food and drink, rents, loans, taxes, heating, clothing, laundry, medicine, servants, etc.). Most significant here is that the author is able to demonstrate empirically what others have only sensed: the financial structure of modest convents was generally precarious, built as it was on casual income and weakened by spending too high a percentage of income on bare maintenance. Chapter three treats two final aspects of material life: food and medicine. Here the author presents in detailed tables and to the nth degree information about the sorts of meat, fish, grain, pastries, eggs, vegetables, dairy products, condiments, beer, wine, and alcohol consumed, bought, and sold in convents, as well as a review of the intense interest of nuns in medicine, both in calling upon doctors and in treating themselves.

Throughout the work, useful distinctions are made between urban and rural convents, and between middling and great convents: a single nun of the two convents under study, for instance, enjoyed a mere seven percent of what a great abbey such as St. Gertrude's in Leuven spent annually on one of its members. Yet the level of material life in even the poorest convent was higher than that of most of the world outside, because of the durability of convenual buildings, the comparatively varied diet of the nuns, the avoidance of bearing children, and access to medicine. It is in such informative comparisons between the material life of convent and world, and between convent and convent, that the author makes his greatest contribution. Hence, though the book reads a bit like a reference work, there is no denying its useful material and insights.

Craig Harline
Brigham Young University

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