Gender, Catholicism, and Spirituality: Women and the Roman Catholic Church in Britain and Europe, 1200–1900 (review)

As a historian of women and religion in the United States, I approached this collection of essays as a bit of an outlier. Nevertheless, I recommend it with enthusiasm to my Americanist colleagues. At the very least, it will be humbling! Having read a collection that identifies common themes over seven centuries, one can hardly complain about the difficulty of doing so for barely over two, and certainly our caveats about American regional variations appear pedantic when compared to a book whose cultural canvas extends from Great Britain to the Netherlands to southern Italy.

Carmen Mangion and Laurence Lux-Sterritt are to be commended for soliciting and editing ten essays that, despite their considerable geographic and chronological range, collectively illuminate a number of themes and patterns that have affected the relationship between women and the Catholic Church across time and place. Quericiolo Mazzonis describes a common trajectory in a chapter on the Ursulines: Angela Merici’s founding vision, centered on a community of secular women predicated on an unmediated experience of the sacred, was eventually corrupted by imposition of traditional convent structures. Other essays in the volume also show how Catholic women used periods of church crisis to justify new expressions of piety, only to see whatever power they gained eroded through a subsequent increase in ecclesiastical and clerical control.

Many essays also testify to Catholic women’s habits of self-effacement. In this respect, Elizabeth Rhodes’ chapter on Teresa of Avila offers an illuminating contrast to Lux-Sterritt’s essay on Mary Ward. While both women challenged assumptions about women’s religious worth, Teresa expressed her unorthodox ideas through the rhetoric of female submission and inferiority, while Ward openly rejected gender prescriptions. The juxtaposition of these two figures is one of several places in the book where contributors posit an intriguing claim that could well become an organizing principle for Catholic women’s experience across centuries and civilizations: the more “spiritually ambitious” a woman was, the less likely she was to succeed.

Obviously these themes have surfaced in the historiography of religious life in the United States. Observing them unfold across the Atlantic and through the centuries will remind Americanists to see our subjects as participants in a transnational network characterized by regular exchanges of people and ideas. Well into the twentieth century, many American foundations remained linked to motherhouses in France, Ireland, Germany, or Italy through relationships between former classmates, biological sisters, mentors, and students, and but above all through a shared rule and shared history. The fact that relatively few studies of women religious in the United States emphasize this, raises the question of whether or not historians in our particular sub-field have been slower than other of our peers to abandon the paradigm of American exceptionalism.

This collection should prompt us to cross disciplinary boundaries as well as national ones. In the opening essay, Anna Welch analyzes liturgical texts used by Franciscan friars in the thirteenth century, to appreciate how the use of innovative sources can lead to new insights. Challenging historians’ unwillingness to cross what is often perceived as a firm disciplinary boundary, Welch utilizes missals and brevaries to chart community celebrations of the feasts of Clare of Assisi and compares them in frequency to the order’s founder, Francis, and St. Anthony of Padua. Welch argues convincingly that the erratic celebrations of Clare’s feasts were owed not, as scholars have long maintained, to her marginalization and diminished status within the Franciscans, but to wider problems plaguing the community through this period. Welch uses this to conclude with a deceptively simple statement that all students of gender and history would do well to keep in mind: while gender should not be ignored, nor should it ever be overplayed. We are all familiar with this trap: frustrated that women have so long been overlooked, it is indeed tempting...