University of Nebraska - Lincoln
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French Language and Literature Papers
Modern Languages and Literatures, Department of
1-1-2007
From the Cloister to the World: Mainstreaming
Early Modern French Convent Writing: An état
présent
Thomas M. Carr
University of Nebraska at Lincoln, [email protected]
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Carr, Thomas M., "From the Cloister to the World: Mainstreaming Early Modern French Convent Writing: An état présent" (2007).
French Language and Literature Papers. Paper 50.
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Published in EMF: STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN FRANCE, VOL. 11, THE CLOISTER AND
THE WORLD: EARLY MODERN CONVENT VOICES, ed. Anne L. Birberick and Russell Ganim;
Guest Editor, Thomas M. Carr, Jr. (Charlottesville: Rookwood Press, 2007), pp. 7–26.
Copyright © 2007 Rookwood Press. Used by permission.
Thomas M. Carr, Jr.
Joseph de La Porte's 1769 Histoire lidraire desfemmesfiangaises, his history of
women "qui se sont occupCes avec succks des arts agriables et des Ctudes sdrieuses,"
positions an abbess, HClo'ise, as the first French woman author and devotes thirty
pages to her letters and their translations (1-31). Despite this recognition in the eighteenth century, the paradox of convent writing is how prevalent it was, constituting
in certain periods a large percentage of the published writing by women, and yet how
underestimated and undervalued it has been by literary scholars and historians, and
even was by the nuns themselves. For example; Joan ~ e ~ e only
a n enumerated about
twenty nuns among the approximately 220 women included in her "Bibliography of
Women Writers, 1640-1 71 5" in Tender Geographies (20 1-1 9). More recently, Michel
Bernos in his revisionist study of the role ofwomen in the seventeenth-centurychurch,
Femmes etgens d'Egfise dam h France classqueXVIP-XVIIF sikcle, remarks, "Meme les
nombreuses fondatrices d'ordres et de congrkgations Ccrivent peu, hormis des rkgles,
des avis, des lettres" (23).
However, as can be seen from the checklist at the end of this volume, books by
over fifty nuns were published during the seventy-five years surveyed in DeJean's list, a
list that includes many writers for whom no published work is given. Another twenty
or so names could be added if one were to count the texts written by nuns during this
period, but which were published later, and the number would be much higher still if
one were to count the extracts of texts by nuns included in their seventeenth-century
biographies and the even more numerous obituary kttres circuhiresand shorter relations.
To be sure, religious texts did dominate seventeenth-century publishing, but it is easy
to overlook the extent to which women who were, in fact, largely nuns participated
in this production. While nuns make up only a small minority of thejmmes de kttres
that Myriam Maitre describes in her Les Prkcieuses: Naissance desfemmes de kttres en
FranceauXI/IPsikcle (1 999), they constitute a large percentage ofseventeenth-century
women whose texts were published. Moreover, during the Ancien Mgime, we must
look to convents to find women routinely doing public speaking, producing historical
accounts, and staging plays.
In the 1650s, AngClique Arnauld complained to her nuns at Port-Royal that
8
Carr
From the Cloister to the WorU
they consumed more paper and pens than nuns in ten other monasteries (BnF, ms. f.
fr. 17794, f. 134). Ifshe was correct, it might have been because at just that moment,
many of the Port-Royal nuns had been enlisted by Angklique de Saint-Jean, niece of
Mltre AngClique, to recount their recollections of her leadership. These texts would
form the MPmoirespour servir h f'histoire de Port-Royal, published ninety years later in
1742. But it is also likely that Angklique Arnauld underestimated the amount ofwriting
in other houses, where gathering such accounts was common practice. As Marie de
Chantal GueudrC remarks in her useful overview ofwriting by members of her order
during the Ancien RCgime, "Les Ursulines.. .ont beaucoup Ccrit et mCme fait Cditer"
(2:7). Although the nuns of Port-Royal shunned the more bellettristic forms of convent writing, such as poetry, drama, and salon literature, they did practice most of the
other major forms of monastic writing: autobiography, letters, hymns, devotional texts,
chronicles of orders, and monastic sermons. Such texts must ultimately be understood
in terms of the more routine forms of writing that surround them-organizational
documents, such as constitutions and customary books; pedagogical works; and legal
briefs and memoranda to ecclesiastical authorities, etc. Unfortunately, much of this
convent writing has been lost, first because it most often circulated in manuscript form
rather than as books, and second because, in the case of those texts that were published,
the books themselves have disappeared in the course of Revolutionary confiscations,
expulsions during the Third Republic, and post-Vatican I1 convent closings.
In sum, even if nor all nuns wrote, convents could be fertile ground for writers.
Thus,rather than consider a nun author in isolation, it may be more fruitful to envisage
her as a participant in the construction of a common identity within a textual community where writings
- were shared within the monastery or order as well as outside
the convent walls, along the lines proposed for medieval nuns (for an example, see
Roest, "A Textual Community"). Normative texts, such as constitutions and rules,
ordered lives within the convent; epistolary exchanges among nuns, family members,
and supporters extended the discussions that took place in convent parlors; chronicles
and hagiographic accounts recorded a convent's memory and sought to establish its
reputation in the eyes of the public. Perhaps the most complex of such textual communities centered on Port-Royal, and it would be tempting to recast in these terms
Carol Baxter's argument that bonds of sisterhood were a chief factor in maintaining
resistance there to the anti-Jansenist formulary. After all, it was by a textual act-the
signing of the formulary-that the "signeuses" broke solidarity with their peers. Few
convents developed as extensive a network ofwriters within and beyond the monastery
as Port-Royal. But in most, the construction of communal identity was a product of
both textual interchange and the monastic oral culture.
Volume 11 of EMF is a step toward allowing what has come to be known as
"convent writingn in Hispanic studies to move out of the cloister by giving it the visibility to be taken into account more widely, whether in literary studies, in the realm
of spirituality, in historical accounts, or as a form of Pcriturefhminine. Thus as a call for
"mainstreaming" convent writing, this essay will be an Ptatprlsent of French-language
EMF 11 (2007)
9
writing by nuns. It will address (1) the reasons for its neglect, (2) the theoretical issues
that must be taken into account to g o u n d it properly, and (3) some directions that
the study of French convent writing might take.
In the past twenty years, convent writing has gained a strong foothold among
scholars of Italian culture (Weaver 1999,2002; Graziosi) and legitimacy as a discipline
in Hispanic studies. To be sure, two Hispanic nuns have long enjoyed canonical stature:
Teresa ofAvila and Sor Juana In& de la Cruz of Mexico. Representingboth the Old and
New Worlds, they have attracted the sustained attention of literary scholars as well as of
historians; the defense ofwomen's right to access to learning in Sor Juana's "Respuesta
a Sor Filotea" has given this text the status of a feminist manifesto. But interest has
expanded beyond these two figures to many other Hispanic women religious, as seen
in Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau's anthology Untold Sistetr (1989). The introduction to their book offers a compelling feminist rationale for rediscovering the writings
of women religious, and their anthology proved to be the springboard for numerous
studies and editions of convent writings. Although Arenal and Schlau's anthology
included poetry, chronicles, and drama, its centerpiece was spiritual autobiography, a
genre that has continued to dominate studies of Hispanic convent writing.
French nuns in general have not attracted similar consideration, despite the
fact that i n certain genres, such as hagiography and biography, Ursulines like Jeanne
Cambounet de La Mothe and Marie-Augustine de Sainte-Paule de Pommereu, or the
Benedictine Jacqueline Bouette de Bltmur, enjoyed more recognition during their
lifetimes than comparable Italian or Spanish nuns (Suire, 51). La Porte mentioned
fifteen nuns in his eighteenth-century compendium of French women's writing. Only
a few of the nuns discussed by La Porte found their way into the literary history that
introduced women religious authors to the general public in the early twentieth century:
Henri Bremond's Histoire littkraire du sentiment religieux en France. La Porte's nuns
were on the whole too worldly for Bremond, who was interested in women religious
largely to the extent that they were mystics and illustrated what he called the "Invasion
mystique." Bremond's influence is still felt, since the mystics are the women writers
in the realm of spirituality who have attracted the most attention. Still, no French
nun has made a breakthrough like that ofTeresa ofAvila or Sor Juana into the literary
canon. In the realm of French spirituality, the woman who probably attracts the most
current attention is a laywoman, the quietist Mme Guyon. Among nuns, the Quebec
Ursuline Marie de I'Incarnation Guyart is perhaps the most widely studied, as the
1999 colloquium devoted to her shows (Brodeur). Her letters and autobiographical
accounts lend themselves to multiple research perspectives: her chronicle of the early
days of New France, her mystical experience, and her relationswith her son and editor,
Claude Martin. Interest in the best-known French convent poet, Anne de Marquets,
cannot match that in Sor Juana, for whom a thirty-one page bibliography of recent
scholarship has appeared (Oritiz).
10
Carr
From the Cloister to the World
Academic interest in convent writing has been the daughter of the boom in
women's studies. If Hispanic scholars have been particularly active, it is in part because
their tradition lacks as rich a strain ofwriting by laywomen as France's, where Madame
de Lafayette is credited with writing the first modern novel, and Madame de Skvigni's
letters have long been recognized. Indeed, the trend in women's studies among specialists of French literature has been to recover the writings of other novelists, poets, and
playwrights, rather than to turn to those of nuns.
When it exists, commentary on texts by nuns has generally reflected trends in
broader interpretations ofwomen's religious life. At one end of the spectrum, Mitchell
Greenberg's fascinating unraveling of the strands of sadism, narcissism, and masochism
in Marie de ]'Incarnation Guyart's relation to her son in his Baroque Bodies illustrates
the view of the convent as a symbol of the justification religion provided for the patriarchal, authoritarian, and hierarchical tendencies of French Ancien Rkgime society;
this hermeneutics of suspicion refuses to take the hagiographic tone that dominates
convent writing, indeed most ecclesiastical discourse of the era, at face value. O n
the other hand, Philippe Sellier's more celebratory "Port-Royal: Un embleme de la
rkforme catholique" articulates an image of the nuns' role in the church to which they
would have had little trouble subscribing.
- If the current tendency is more to celebrate
the convent as a site of women's empowerment and autonomy than to decry it as a
prison, still the most prevalent critical stance is found somewhere between the two,
i.e. to emphasize the struggle that nuns had to wage in order to win some measure
of autonomy and agency. In this vein, Daniella J. Kostroun argues that the nuns of
Port-Royal, in refusing to sign the formulary against Jansenius in the 166Os, exploited
contradictions within the dominant political and theological requirement that women
accept a subordinate status to assert their rights to spiritual equality and conscience.
In her 2000 article "Crossing Boundaries: Defining the Field of Female Religious
Writing in Colonial Latin America'' (which is in many ways a dPfense et illustration of
convent writing as a discipline), Kathleen Ann Myers discusses a number of reasons for
the neglect of Hispanic nun authors other than Teresa of Avila and Sor Juana (152).
The same reasons hold largely true for France as well, where they tend to apply to all
writing by nuns.
First, according to Myers, convent writing has been dismissed as mediocre or
worse because it is seen as imitative and formulaic, often employing an oral style or
written without regard to aesthetic ends. Thus Christian Renoux (1989) accuses Jacqueline Bouette de Blemur of plagiarism, because in her 1679 B g e s she made liberal
use of a lettre circuhire written by one of her subjects' successor. But to some extent,
such accusations of artlessness, naivete, or plagiarism reflect a lack of understanding
of the conventions of monastic writing, where imitatio, for example, was a cherished
ideal. Likewise, orality is not confined to convent writing, but characterizes much devotional writing of the period. In his overview ofseventeenth-century religious genres,
"Genres litteraires &inspiration religieuse," Fritz Nies has noted that a good number
of the approximately fifty seventeenth-century religious genres that he identifies were
EMF 11 (2007)
11
characterized by "leur va-et-vient permanent ...entre les domaines de 1'Ccrit et de I'oral"
(21 5). In a somewhat similar vein, although without implying any inferiority, Isabelle
Landy-Houillon has contrasted the Latinate style of the rehtionsof the Jesuit Canadian
missionaries with the fluidity of the epistolary style of Marie de I'Incarnation. If the
Ursuline escaped the model of the Ciceronian period, according to Landy-Houillon,
it is because she, like other women of her day, was excluded from the Latin-based
curriculum of the colf2ges (74-75).
Second, Myers notes that in the twentieth-century literary canon, devotional
writing, whether produced by men or women, was suspect. While the religious dimension of much seventeenth-century writing cannot be denied, devotional texts remain
on the margins of the French canon. Nies points out that most of the religious genres
he lists-genres well known to seventeenth-century audiences-have all but dropped
off the radar screens of many literary scholars (212). Bossuet's sermons are perhaps
the only writings to enjoy canonical status as religious writing per se; Fdnelon's TelPmaque is seen as a pedagogical novel, and Pascal's polemics against the Jesuits in the
Prouinciales and even his apology for Christianity in the Penstes are subsumed in the
broader category of moraliste writing.
Finally, Myers remarks that the study of the minorae among Hispanic nuns
could always be justified as providing background context for Teresa of Avila and
Sor Juana (152). In the absence of any such canonical literary figures, the study of
French nuns has been largely the province of historians of spirituality and ofwomen's
monasticism. A sustained interest in the writings of nuns by a literary scholar such as
Mary M. Rowan, who pioneered the study of convent writing among specialists of
French literature, is exceptional; the three articles listed in the bibliography are only
a sample of her more extensive work in the field. More frequent are studies of the
portrayal of nuns and convents in literature, such as those of Jeanne Ponton or more
recently of Anne Birberick and Manuela Mourgo, like that of Barbara Woshinsky in
this collection. It is thus not surprising that about half the contributors to this volume
come from history departments, since French women religious have remained less the
domain of literary specialists than of historians.
Historians have, in fact, given us excellent studies of female orders: monographs
like those of Yves Chaussy on the Benedictines, Elizabeth Rapley on the congrkgkes
(1990) and on the Ursulines and teaching orders (2001), ~arie-BlisabethHenneau
on the Cistercians (1990), and Marie-Claude Dinet-Lecomte on the nursing orders.
Recent colloquia illustrate the flourishing teams of research centered on many of the
prominent orders: their published proceedings, like those on the Visitation (Dompnier
and Julia), the Carmelites (Hours 2001), and the Annonciades (Dinet et al.) provide
massive updated bibliographies. The 1,100-page Dictionnaire rtr Port-Royal, edited
by Jean Lesaulnier and Antony McKenna, who coordinated the work of over sixty
specialists, offers a bio-bibliographical article on each nun and boarding student of the
abbey who can be identified, along with articles on the abbey's directors, theologians,
solitaires, and others associated with the monastery; it also includes an abundant
12
Carr
From the Cloister to the World
iconography. Two appendices containing the manuscript and printed sources of the
Dictionnaire present an extensive bibliography ofwriting emanating from Port-Royal
and about it. In Belgium, the Archives ginirales du Royaume has published a useful
collection entitled Introduction bibiographique B l 'histoiredes couvents belges antirieurs a
1796that includes a number of monasticons dedicated to individual orders. Although
Patricia Wittberg's 7he Rise and Decline of Catholic Religiow Orders:A Social Movement
Perspective focuses on twentieth-century American communities, her overview of the
history of women's monasticism, precisely because it is written from a sociological
perspective and makes use of such concepts as the "commitment mechanism," offers
fresh insights into the success of the seventeenth-century revival.
But as these examples show, the tendency has been to remain within the tradition
of an order. Overviews have been rare: ~ e n e & v e Reynes's 1987 Couvents defemmes,
on the cloistered contemplative orders, is complementary to Rapley's 2001 study of the
cloistered teaching monasteries, which is particularly innovative for its use of statistics
based on the examination of the records of thousands of nuns. Comparative studies,
such as F. Ellen Weaver-Laporte's La Contre-Rt$orme et les Constitutions de Port-Royal,
which situates the Constitutions of Port-Royal within the broader context of other
constitutions, are needed. Diefendorf's 2004 From Penitence to Charity goes a long
way to filling this need by treating the range of communities in the crucial first half
of the seventeenth century, when so many houses were reformed and orders were
founded, from enclosed contemplative orders to newer, active ones without solemn
vows. While all these monographs make ample use ofwriting by nuns, it is rare for
their authors to pause, as Rapley does in discussing lettres circulaires (2001, 269-70),
to examine the practices that produced it.
Again, we are indebted to historians for the major reference works. The Dictionnaire de spiritualitk usually discusses the writings of the numerous Ancien Rigime
nuns whose biographies are included. Daniel-Odon Hurel's Guide pour l'histoire des
ordres et des congrigations religieuses places less emphasis on writing, but does give the
location of archival sources in its succinct overview of each order.
Finally, the field of convent studies is beginning to organize itself professionally
and to create Web-based research tools. In the U.S., the triennial Conference on the
History of Women Religious, first held in 1989, has expanded beyond its original
American and Canadian emphasis and attracts hundreds ofparticipants. In Europe, the
Centre europien de recherches sur les congrigations et ordres religieux (C.E.R.C.O.R.),
based in Saint-Etienne, has published numerous acts of its colloquia. Medievalists have
been the most active in creating Internet tools, such as the Monastic Matrix, a database
for women's communities between the years of400 and 1600 (http://monasticmatrix.
org), and the German Mittelalterliche Frauenkloster (http://frauenkloester.de).
The three general methodological concerns that Myers notes in "Crossing
Boundariesn-establishing texts with historical rigor, arriving at an understanding
EMF 11 (2007)
13
of relevant conventions of the period, and situating texts in their historical moment
(155-56)-apply,
of course, to all textual studies, but present special challenges in
the case of convent writing. And it should be noted that because this is an emerging
field, a bibliographical inventory of writing by nuns is a necessary preliminary to all
three tasks.
The first task is securing access to satisfactory editions that enable the reader to
discern the nun's voice. Frequently, as Myers remarks, the notion of a single author is
not operative (156). Convent texts are often multila~ered,the product of a collaborative
or sometimes even adversarial process. Seldom did a text go straight from a nun's pen
to the printer. The texts we have of the speeches of Jeanne de Chantal and Angklique
Arnauld are based on listeners' notes. In other cases, a text written by a nun appeared
in print only after having been edited by someone else, in some cases by another nun,
but more often by a male director. Linda Timmermans enumerates numerous ways
this editorial process could introduce "des valeurs masculines et savantes" into women's
writing in her account of the relation between mysticism and the intellectual life of
women (545). Changes might be made in the name of modernizing or improving
the style, but often passages were sacrificed or rewritten to conform to prevailing notions of orthodoxy or sanctity. Thus we must ask whether the quotations of the nun
embedded in biographies are her own words or recreations by the biographer, in the
manner of Livy. What control did nuns have over the editorial process or the decision
to publish? The evaluation of whose voices are being heard and the identification of
the filters that have been applied to these voices are at the heart of the textual issues
involved in providing accurate texts prepared according to the current norms of
scholarly editions.
Today, just as before the Revolution, the task of making the texts of women
religious available has fallen chieflyon the nuns' communities or on male religiouswith
ties to them. Modern editions by academic scholars, such as those by Gary Ferguson
of Anne de Marquets or by Helmut Feld of Jeanne de Jussie, are the exception. But
more scholarly editions are projected, among them the works of Angklique Arnauld,
under the editorship of Lesaulnier; texts by eighteenth-century nuns persecuted for
their Jansenism, edited by Franqoise de Noirfontaine, and chronicles of Likge convents
by Henneau.
The Canadian communities have been particularly well served; all but two of
their major early texts have modern editions. The 1929 edition by Albert Jamet of
the l?crits spirituelr et bistoriques of Marie de 1'Incarnation Guyart has been reissued
to complement Guy Oury's 1974 edition of her letters. Among her large-scale texts,
only her &colesainte lacks a modern edition. Likewise, Jamet's 1939 edition of MarieAndrke Regnard Duplessis de Sainte-Hkl2ne's Les Annaks de I'Hhtel-Dieu a% QuPbec
was reissued in 1984; Marie Morin's Histoire simple et vkritabie of the HBtel-Dieu of
Montreal received a critical edition in 1979. In 1964, the Montreal Congrkgation de
Notre-Dame published an edition of the works of its foundress, Marguerite Bourgeoys.
While the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau's 1671 I4e a% la M2re Catherine de Saint-Augustin,
14
Carr
From the Cloister to the World
containing lengthy extracts of her writings, awaits a critical edition, at least it was
reproduced in 1977.
French communities have a longer editorial tradition, but a much more extensive
corpus. In the nineteenth century, the Visitation prepared an eight-volume edition of
the works of its foundress, Jeanne de Chantal. In the 1980s and 1990s, their Annecy
archivist, Marie Patricia Burns, produced a six-volume edition of Chantal's correspondence, which greatly expanded the number of published letters and established
their texts critically. For the Carmel, Pierre Sirouet, a Carmelite priest, has been
particularly active with editions of the letters of numerous seventeenth-century nuns,
among them Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement Acarie and Madeleine de Saint-Joseph;
in the case of Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement Parigot, a member of her Beaune community has edited her correspondence. Paule Sagot and Marie-ClaireTihon, members
of the Congrigation Notre-Dame based in Lorraine, have published the Relation
autobiographique of their foundress Alix Le Clerc, just as Anne-Amilie Le Bourgeois
included texts by the foundress of her branch of the Ursulines, Anne de Xainctonge,
in her history of her community.
When such books are published privately by the community itself, instead
of by a more commercial house, such as &itions du Cerf, distribution sometimes
remains narrow, and the texts can fail to make their way in significant numbers into
public library holdings. One might say that for French religious, the textual problem
evoked by Myers has become less one of establishing texrs with sufficienr rigor than
of assuring their distribution. While it may be that the market for such books is not
sufficient to warrant a large press run, religious communities also often seem content
to maintain the old tradition of publishing chiefly for their own internal use. One
hopes, for example, that the edition of the works of Catherine de Bar being- undertaken
by various houses of the BCnkdictines du Saint-Sacrement and projected for thirteen
volumes (Joel Letellier in Dinet et al., 348) will be more widely available than the
various volumes of her works that have appeared separately in recent years. Given
the small market for convent writing, digitalizing texts by nuns could be as crucial
to making their works more widely available for study as the preparation of critical
editions of the works of key figures.
Myers also points out in "Crossing Boundaries" that we must learn to recognize
the various monastic genres and understand their conventions. For example, some
of the religious genrescatalogued by Nies, such as the billet, sentence, solitude, and
risolution, have been so neglected that they must be rediscovered. Likewise, conventions that differentiate convent writing from similar genres must be identified. Myers
notes two dangers of this lack of familiarity (158). One is to interpret as innovative a
standard practice or theme among nuns that the critic encounters for the first time:
the call ofAgnts Arnauld in her Occupations intiriarres (1665) to internalize devotion
was not unique to Port-Royal, but resonated across the spectrum of Counter-Reformation orders, stemming as it did from late medieval devotio moderna. ?he second is the
anachronism that can result from applying without discrimination a modern paradigm
EMF 11 (2007)
15
derived from secular genres, as when a nun's account of her spiritual life addressed to
a confessor is simply seen as a form of autobiography.
A first step toward the recovery of these conventions is to carefully discern the
many genres of monastic writing. Rente Bons has proposed a taxonomy that organizes them around the objective of the work: "textes intimes," "Ccrits d'inttr2t communautaire," writings for apostolic or recreational goals (268-70). Combining such a
taxonomy based on the work's finality with the consideration of its addressee should
prove particularly fruitful: personal devotional writing; texts written for one's director;
institutional documents for the community, whether to preserve its memory or guide
its operation; pedagogical books for students; spiritual direction for individuals; books
aimed at a general public; etc.
For certain genres the process of identifying these conventions is well under way.
Hurel's ' ' ~ ' ~ t u ddes
e correspondances et I'histoire du monachisme: Mtthodes et enjeux
historiographiques" is no doubt a model in that it judges the epistolary practices of
four women's orders as "plus dvl.resn (332) than those among male monastics only
after a thorough examination of the conventions of letter-writing in monasticism in
general. 'The key conventions of the obituary kttre circuhire have been identified in
a number of articles dealing with the Visitation (Baudet-Drillat) and the Carmelites
(Hours 1990), and above all in Jacques Le Brun's series of articles (1983, 1986,
1992) dealing with all orders. But much work remains. While many fine readings of
individual spiritual autobiographies by French nuns exist, such as sigot1ssubtle study
of the literary devices used by Le Clerc in her Relation autobiographique (2004), no
monograph offers an overview such as that found in work on Hispanic nuns by Isabelle
Poutrin or Ronald Surtz. Likewise, other than Weaver-Laporte's study of Angtlique
de Saint-Jean's evolution from the chronicler to the "mythographer" of Port-Royal
(1985), nuns' work as historians has been largely ignored, probably on the supposition that it is merely hagiographic and dominated by institutional loyalty. Whatever
the case, the conventions of this historically oriented writing- will be sorted out when
French convent chronicles and annals receive the sustained attention that has been
paid to Italians ones by K. J. I? Lowe or to German ones by Charlotte Woodford and
Anne Winston-Allen.
Even though teaching orders made use of educational theater much as the Jesuits
did, this vein has been little examined since Marie de Chantal Gueudrt's 1960 Histoire
de I'Ordre des Ursulinesen France. 'The chief exception seems to be Paul A. Scott's study
of La Chapelle's L'llustrephilosophe, assuming the suffix "REL. C." stands for religieuse
cloitrie. Undoubtedly, hardly any of this production was ever published; plays such as
those of Anne Chevalier, the hospitalikre of La Fltche noted by Rente Bons (272-73),
await discovery and examination in convent archives.
Finally, Myers reminds us that it is easy to overlook the institutional, geographical, and historical factors that inflect monastic texts. We assume too often that
convent writing is a homogeneous discourse. While there is a special need for more
comparative studies across orders, identifying the specific style and spiritual character
16
Carr
From the Cloister to the Worki
of each order or house is a necessary preliminary. Geopolitical factors are relevant:
does the text emanate from one of the prestigious Parisian monasteries or from a
provincial source, or from outside France and its colonies, as does Jeanne de Jussie's
Geneva Petite Chronique?The writings of Canadian nuns have begun to be examined
as forms of colonial discourse (Deslandres, Roy, Thdry), and it should be noted that
Ursulines who founded houses in Martinique in the late seventeenth century and in
Louisiana in the 1720s also published texts. Elisabeth Dufourcq situates all such Ancien Rdgime missionary endeavors by nuns within a history of French missions in her
Les Congrtgations reli@eusesj2minines hors $Europe de Richelieu ri nos jours. Writings
that date from the heyday of the Catholic revival in the seventeenth century must be
distinguished from those from later periods when voices critical of religious life were
raised more insistently. The nuns and their editors often had in mind agendas that
included the battle against Calvinism, Jansenism, freethinking, and the Enlightenment.
And since texts written by nuns were frequently published posthumously, they were
often enlisted in the service of a cause that was not necessarily that of their authors.
As we come to appreciate the amount of convent writing that exists, its many
forms, and its quality, it becomes increasingly evident that no single vector of reading
does it justice. The earliest impetus behind the promotion of writing by nuns was
probably the resolve of religious communities to win recognition for their holiness or
to publicize their prominent members' spirituality.Just as obedience to a superior could
trump a nun's reluctance to write of her intimate spiritual experience, so the corporate
interests of an order could lead to publication of texts intended by the nun for only
a few eyes at the most. Jeanne de Chantal of the Visitation, canonized in 1767, may
have been the only early modern French nun to be declared a saint before the Revolution, but we undoubtedly owe the publication of many texts by other nuns of this
period to the hope that their writings would advance their cause before the diocesan
and Roman tribunals. The 1965 recommendation of the second Vatican Council that
religious congregations return to their sources has been a more recent incentive for
orders to sponsor scholarly editions of their founders' writings.
Such institutional loyalty was seconded in the last part of the twentieth century
by the feminist impulse that one finds in pioneering works such as 1989's UntoldSisters. Although mysticism is not reserved for women, and certainly not for nuns, it has
attracted attention as a form of discourse that lends itself to women's expression. After
reviewing the work ofprevious commentators on the link between women and mysticism, Timmermans affirms, "L'expkrience feminine de la mystique fut donc propice
a I'dclosion d'un discours proprement feminine" (614). She notes that mystical texts
tend to privilege experience over learning, digression over scholastic organization, and
spontaneity over logical construction.
When nuns write for other nuns, as is the case of the lettres circulaires studied in
this volume by Rapley or in the chronicle ofJeanne de Jussie, they illustrate a relatively
EMF 11 (2007)
17
rare form of kcriturej3minine:women writing specifically for a tight circle of other
women. The extent to which this practice results in a distinctly feminine style or tone
merits further examination. O n the one hand, Le Brun finds that biographies of nuns
written by women and intended for a female public have a different tone from the
official biographies written by men for the general public (1986, 390). O n the other
hand, Diefendorf remarks, after studying nuns' biographies, "I expected to find greater
difference of both substance and style between male-authored and female-authored
[biographies] or autobiographical accounts than has in fact proved to be the case"
(2003,246). To what degree is the feminization of the various forms of spiritual writing
practiced by nuns a reflection of the fact that nuns were not trained in formal rhetoric
and were normally relegated to the minor genres (monastic conferences rather than
formal sermons, devotional texts rather than treatises on theology)? Is there a more
positive side to this feminization-the emergence of a conscious tradition ofwomen's
writing making use of imagery, allusions, historical models, etc.-meant to reflect the
female experienceand to appeal to a female audience?Convent writing is undoubtedly
gendered writing, but its parameters remain largely ill-defined.
Yet as can be seen in Myers's programmatic essay "Crossing Boundaries,"
neither spirituality nor feminist studies is any longer the sole rationale for reading
convent writing. Besides other approaches mentioned by Myers, such as new historicism and colonial studies, and the examination of genres previously alluded to, such
as autobiography and historical writing, other prominent genres merit attention. PortRoyal may have frowned on Jacqueline Pascal's poetry, but among the Visitandines
(Bordes), Ursulines (Gueudri 2,56; Oury), and Carmelites, the writing ofverse and
hymns was encouraged, and poetry and hymns by nuns were frequently featured at
recreation sessions. While Marquets is the only nun to have the honor of a modern
scholarly edition, she is far from ;he only ~ o m i h i c a nto have had her poetry published
during this period; and, as is the case with convent drama, much more of this verse
circulated in manuscript than was published. The study of less obvious genres, such as
travel literature and rkcits de captivitk, will be rewarding,
- as will the study of the reception by early modern nuns of the writings of medieval women religious, particularly
of the great mystics such as Brigitte of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. Overviews
situating the publication of texts by nuns in the history of the book are needed. The
number ofnuns who might have thought of themselves as authors writing for publication, such as the Benedictine Jacqueline Bouette de Blkmur, is extremely limited, as
it was in fact for laywomen. What happened when a text written for a nun's private
use or for a limited number of readers was later prepared for publication, either by
that same nun or by others? The strategies used by the nuns themselves or by their
editors should be compared to those implemented when texts by other women were
published: use of the author's name or initials on the title page, choice of dedicatee,
protestations of modesty in the ref ace, etc. Moreover, the practices of male editors
merit further attention, along the lines of Marie-Florine Bruneau's discussion of Marie
de 1'Incarnation's son Claude Martin in Women Mystics Confront the ModPrn World.
18
Carr
From the Cloister to the World
Secular currents and genres found their way into convents. In her repertory of
prPcieuses who can be identified with confidence, Maitre lists three abbesses, MarieMadeleine-Gabrielle Adelaide Rochechouart-Mortemart, Marie-Eldonore de RohanMontbazon, and Eleonore de Souvre, who have all been published, and Antoine
Baudeau de Somaize listed at least two more religious in his 1661 Grand dictionnaire
hprkcimes.Another avenue of research is the investigation of the impact nuns' writing might have had on women working in secular genres; after all, many young girls
were exposed to convent writing during their stays in monastery boarding schools.
Such interaction continued in exchanges in convent parlors and salons; the study of
the interpenetration of these two spaces has been inaugurated by Rowan (1985) and
Weaver-Laporte (1997).
Even if the infused science dessaintswas thought most befitting women religious,
some nuns were counted among thejmmessavantes known for their learning acquired
by study. Dominicans like Julienne Morel1 of Avignon, and Louise de Marillac and
Fran~oiseOudeau of Poissy published translations from Latin; Madame de Sevigni
maweled at the learning and intelligence ofAngklique de Saint-Jean Arnauld &Andilly
of Port-Royal (letter of 29 November 1679). Timmermans studies nuns who ventured
into the realm of theology, which had been reserved for men, using the example of an
abbess of Fontevrault, before examining the intellectuals among the second generation
nuns of Port-Royal (786-806).
Studies of mysticism that consider nuns in the context of laywomen and male
mystics have long been a model for the mainstreaming that makes liberal use ofconvent
writing beyond the cloister itself. One thinks of the classic studies of Bremond and Michel de Certeau. More recently, writing by nuns has been proposed as a sort of missing
link in the creation of secular genres. Volker Schrijder has shown how Gabriel Joseph
de Lavergne Guilleragues appropriated the spiritual yet erotic language of mystics such
as Teresa of Avila in order to create in his Lettresportugaises a style that typifies a common notion of kcriturejminine: "cette prose passionnee qui se contente de transcrire
au courant de la plume, sans se corriger ni se relire, son experience subjective" (298).
Thus, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, writing specifically about female mysticism, contends
that without the ecstatic writing- of Madame Guyon and her convent predecessors, such
as Marie de ]'Incarnation Guyart, "vernacular literature as the Enlightenment would
know it would have taken another course" (279). In his Being Interior, Nicholas D.
Paige proposes that convent autobiography provides a transition in the development of
autobiographical interiority between Montaigne and Rousseau. Paige found that this
form of interiority "flourished best and earliest" (4) in the spiritual autobiographies
most often written by seventeenth-century nuns. Broomhall presents a much broader
model in her Women a n d Religion in Sixteenth-CenturyFrance. She notes that until the
end of that century, "the mystic literary tradition in France seemed to have more impact
among the femal; laity than within the convent (144). Perhaps more importantly,just
as she seeks to break down confessional polarization between Catholics and Protestants,
she looks for similarities in monastic and lay experience (144). Whether she is writ-
EMF 11 (2007)
19
ing about external devotional practices, religious violence, or institutional religion, to
enumerate three of her chapters, Broomhall includes nuns in her account.
In conclusion, considering that the concept of convent writing is hardly established at present in French studies, it is premature to envisage a time when convent
writing will be so completely mainstreamed that scholars will cite works by nuns,
not because they are written by nuns, but simply because they make an important
contribution to the subject at hand. In reality, because of the nature of convent writing, its frontline disciplines are likely to remain women's studies, church history, and
spirituality well into the foreseeable future. In the meantime, convent writing must
attain sufficient visibility that texts by nuns are cited as a matter of course by these
disciplines' foremost practitioners, not just by specialists in women's monasticism.
A collection of essays such as this that combines work by specialists in monasticism
and by contributors who bring some other area of expertise to the study of nuns
represents a step in this direction. In any event, the immediate task is to provide the
tools to appreciate the specificity of convent writing. We must become more aware
of the significant amount of writing done by nuns, whether it has been published or
awaits discovery in archives, just as we must acquire a much firmer grasp of its rhgks,
constitutions, and coutumien so that we can identify its genres and understand their
conventions in the context of other forms of Ancien Rkgime writing. This approach
will allow convent writing to leave the cloister and take its place in the broader world
of early modern textuality.
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20
Carr
From the Cloister to the World
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Cushing-Daniels, Nancy. Breaking Boundhries, Forging Friendhip: ?he Convent and
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