Neither Single nor Alone: Elizabeth Cellier, Catholic Community, and Transformations of Catholic Women’s Piety

Elizabeth Cellier, known infamously as the “Popish Midwife,” burst into the historical and literary record during one of the most dramatic decades in English history, between the Popish Plot and the Glorious Revolution. From 1678 to 1688, Cellier publicly accused the government of torturing prisoners, submitted articles to Parliament, wrote a small book and three smaller pamphlets or proposals, served as midwife to Mary of Modena, wife of James II, and proposed the creation of an innovative royal foundling hospital and college of midwives. She also was tried and acquitted of treason, tried and convicted of libel, fined £1000, imprisoned in Newgate, and pilloried, at which time onlookers pelted her with stones and other missiles. “Singl[e] and Alone,” she described herself in these troubles. ¹ Following the Glorious Revolution, she disappeared from the historical record as suddenly as she had appeared a decade earlier. During one turbulent decade, however, Cellier was so well known that critics paraded an effigy of her through the streets as part of an anti-papal procession, indicating the extent to which contemporaries viewed her through the lens of her Catholicism and feared the threat her religious loyalties might pose. ²

Modern researchers recently have rediscovered Cellier’s texts. Scholars such as Mihoko Suzuki, Helen King, Frances E. Dolan, and Penny Richards have investigated Cellier’s interest in and impact on political developments, her championing of more formalized training of English midwives, her gendered self-representation through her writings on both these issues, and the intersections between religion and gender in published responses from her critics. ³ Valuable as these approaches have been, seldom is Cellier’s understanding of herself as a Catholic woman explored in depth. Moreover, little attempt has been made to use Cellier to provide a window into larger Catholic communities in London or the evolving roles of Catholic women as writers, activists, and exemplars within these communities. ⁴

Through an investigation of three of Cellier’s texts, Malice Defeated: Or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier (1680), A Scheme for the Foundation of a Royal Hospital (1687), and To Dr.— An Answer to his Queries, concerning the Colledg of Midwives (1687), this study integrates the missing element of Catholicism into our interpretation of Cellier’s activism and writings. ⁵ First, I argue that Cellier’s understanding of her faith and women’s roles within Catholicism motivated her to act boldly when faced with mistreatment of her fellow Catholics. Second, her participation within networks of English Catholics provided her with the means to act. Finally, her Catholicism provided templates for the actions she chose to take. Catholicism shaped her efforts by providing acceptable models for good works in the forms of prison relief and the organization of women’s institutions. Cellier then accommodated these models to best meet her needs in the changing political, religious, and gendered environment of late seventeenth-century England. In sum, Cellier was neither single nor alone, as she understood herself, but operated within Roman Catholic traditions and networks.

While scholars are increasingly recovering the contributions of women within English Catholic history and literature, analysis tends to focus on the stories of recusant women heroically refusing to attend Church of England services and fostering a household-based Catholicism patterned after fairly traditional models of women’s sanctity. ⁶ As I have argued elsewhere, religious understanding, practice, and lived experience evolve as the environment in which a religion is practiced alters. ⁷ We need to look beyond our expectations of finding women filling traditional roles to discover unanticipated evolutions in how women participated in their faith, transforming traditional practices for women within Catholicism into new forms, with new messages, to adapt to changing circumstances.

Similarly, as is well recognized, the period of the English Civil War, during which Cellier was born, witnessed an explosion in the quantity, validity, and legitimacy of women’s writing and publishing along with women’s involvement in the public sphere through political actions such as petitioning or rioting. ⁸ Discussions of the Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration, and Glorious...