L’Écriture de soi: lettres et récits autobiographiques des religieuses de Port-Royal. Angélique et Agnès Arnauld, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly, Jacqueline Pascal by Agnès Cousson (review)

Previous commentators have studied the spiritual doctrine of the nuns of the reformed Port-Royal (1609–1709) and situated this doctrine within the broader Jansenist movement. Agnès Cousson’s study of the writings of the convent’s three major abbesses, all members of the Arnauld family, and of Jacqueline Pascal, a prominent convent member and sister of Blaise, examines how these texts express a paradox within the convent. On the one hand, their letters and autobiographies stress the need for the annihilation of the self according to the ascetical demands of neo-Augustinian spirituality. On the other, these works express something other than the restrained, muffled voice of the cloister. Cousson analyses the complex emotional register of these communications as the nuns express their ongoing attachment to their families, their grief over death, and their anxiety concerning salvation. Especially insightful is her analysis of how the nun-authors conceived their convent as one elected by God to a special martyrdom over questions of conscience. With such a vocation to be exemplary witnesses to the truth concerning grace, the cloistered nuns justified the broad written diffusion of their convictions to an external world in peril of its soul. This resulted in the most voluminous extant canon of literature produced by any convent in early modernity. Cousson’s erudite study of Port-Royal’s most personal literature raises an extra-literary question about the nature of Port-Royal’s cloister, a question posed by critics early in the reformed convent’s history. When Port-Royal moved from its isolated rural location in the valley of the Chevreuse, why did it choose to move into the crowded, affluent neighbourhood of Faubourg Saint-Jacques? The association with the nearby Oratorians predictably plunged the convent into theological controversy. A stone’s throw from the Sorbonne, the convent could not avoid the overspill from the theological disputes raging in the lecture hall, some of which involved the theories of Antoine Arnauld, the brother of Angélique and Agnès. The new large convent church was clearly designed to draw lay people to sermons preached there; Jacqueline and Blaise Pascal were prominent members of the congregation. The insistence of the reforming abbess Angélique Arnauld on the reopening of the convent school and accommodating laywomen on retreat on the convent grounds guaranteed regular contact with a disproportionately aristocratic external public and with the bourgeois. Like the convent’s writings, the very structure of the reformed Port-Royal exhibits a tension between a desire for the desert silence of the ancient Thebaid and a militant vocation to give public warning to the bishop and the courtier in danger of losing their souls owing to doctrinal error and abuse of power.