Panel 1: Living Faith: Everyday Religion in Women’s Letters
Nuns and their Confessors: Appeals, Emotions and Gender in the English Convents
In the early modern period the relationship between nuns and their confessors was an important one. Confessors, as well as celebrating Mass and hearing nuns’ confessions, shouldered pastoral responsibilities within the convent. Usually one of the few extra-familial males with whom nuns could communicate with in a meaningful way, confessors became important confidents, even at times acting as mediators in intra-community disagreements and squabbles. Yet the relationship between these two groups has traditionally been over-looked by scholars; even when it is subject to enquiry it has often drawn on more salacious instances of their interactions.
This paper will bring to light aspects of these largely unexplored relationships, between nuns and their confessors, in English convents in late eighteenth-century France, drawing widely on a substantial body of archival material housed in the Archives Nationale de France. The sources, many of which are letters from nuns to their confessors, are multifaceted in their content. These letters detail the hidden anxieties and difficulties that community life posed for female religious. Some speak of internal squabbles and jealousies, whilst others express feelings of loneliness and isolation, and some at times, mental illness. Confessors sometimes interceded with superiors, a practice that was, however, not always welcomed, and in some instances resulting in confessors’ recall. This paper will examine the ways in which these complex and delicate relationships functioned, and in doing so, will bring to light this all to often ignored sphere of emotions, appeals and gender dynamics within the convent setting.
Cormac Begadon is Assistant Professor in the History of Catholicism in the Department of Theology, Durham University. He is a historian of early modern religious and intellectual culture, with a particular research interest in Catholic religious and their interactions with the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Currently he is researching the history of the Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre (Sepulchrines) at Liège, exploring the theme of gender and the Catholic Enlightenment, as well as co-editing a volume of essays, ‘Female religious and narratives of the French Revolution: Identity, memory, and history’.
Marie de Botidoux: Religion in the Life of a Young Woman in Late-Eighteenth-Century Paris
Formal education for girls in eighteenth-century France was conducted primarily by female religious orders and congregations. While we often have detailed records of these institutions, including their interactions with church and state authorities, educational methods, and curricula, we know less about the girls taught there, and, in particular, what they made of their education or its significance for their subsequent lives. Young Breton woman, Marie de Botidoux, attended the prestigious abbey of Panthémont in Paris in the late eighteenth century. Her surviving letters to schoolfriend Martha Jefferson—daughter of future US president, Thomas Jefferson—stretch from 1789 to 1810 and provide extraordinary new evidence of a young woman’s changing relationship with her religion at a time of dramatic political, social, and personal upheaval.
This paper asks how Botidoux—a witty and articulate observer, deeply engaged in the political and intellectual cultures of the early Revolution—navigated her sentiments about the Catholic Church as it came under attack. By tracking Botidoux’s discussions of religion throughout her correspondence—from her amusement at the abbey’s nuns, to her keen interest in revolutionary politics and legislation, to the ways in which she later sought solace in her faith—it reveals in frank, and sometimes intimate detail the different meanings Catholicism could take on for women in this period. In doing so, it also demonstrates how the transformation in the ties between church, state, and society at the end of the eighteenth century were reflected and experienced in the lives of individuals.
Gemma Betros is Honorary Lecturer at The Australian National University (ANU). She has a BA in French and History from the University of Queensland, an M.Phil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, and has held positions at the University of Leeds, the Harvard Divinity School, and the ANU. She is a co-founder of ISHWRA, the new global network for scholars working on the history of women religious and is currently completing her first monograph, Sacred Liberty: The Nuns of Paris, the French Revolution, and Napoleon.
Panel 2: Recovering Voices: Women Religious in Print Culture
Posthumous Presence: Religious Authority in the Lettres à une illustre morte (1770)
The illustre morte never sought renown. A widow, she lived a hidden life in a Polish convent, accompanied by her cherished dog and corresponding regularly with French Catholic apologist Louis-Antoine Caraccioli. When, following her death, Caraccioli published Les Lettres à une illustre morte (1770), the eponymous figure was propelled into the public sphere. In the first half of this little-known work, the author mourns the death of his friend, addressing letters to her ‘shadow.’ In the second, however, the voice of the illustre morte is resurrected and Caraccioli reproduces a series of notes written by her during her lifetime. The one-sided exchanges paint the illustre morte as a laudable figure of devotion and piety – both typical virtues ascribed to eighteenth-century women. There is, however, another side to the figure which has received little attention: she possesses distinct religious and philosophical authority. While living, she planned reforms of religious orders, launched a defence of Nicolas Malebranche’s metaphysics – scandalising local clergy – and, through her canine companion, refuted cartesian automatism. Posthumously, her voice inhabits Caraccioli so fully, he claims that his words have been replaced by hers. My paper will first interrogate the authoritative presence of the illustre morte, establishing the Lettres’ important role in eighteenth-century religious representation. Analysing the character’s portrayal, I will subsequently question the effect of mediation on her literary voice. She is, after all, absent. Does the posthumous nature of this text mute the illustre morte or amplify her, and does this mean she holds any authority at all?
Rebecca (Becky) Short is an AHRC-funded DPhil student at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Her thesis, supervised by Prof. Catriona Seth, focuses on self-fashioning in the works of eighteenth-century author Louis-Antoine Caraccioli (1719-1803). In 2020-2021, she was a visiting student at the École normale supérieure in Paris, and has been the recipient of multiple grants to support her research, including the Sévigné Scholarship during her MA study at King’s College London.
Je ne suis qu’une femme: Madame de Lionne’s Intervention in the Chinese Rites Controversy, 1700-1705
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Chinese Rites Controversy was one of the most contentious debates within the French church. Unsurprisingly, this was primarily a debate between men – Jesuits, Dominicans, doctors of the Sorbonne. The overwhelmingly masculine nature of the controversy makes the intervention by Pauline de Lionne in 1701 all the more extraordinary. Writing in defence of her son, the missionary Artus de Lionne, Madame de Lionne’s public letter to the Jesuits was widely publicised. Fiercely critical of what she argued was their toleration of idolatry in China and writing with anger at the way the fathers at the court in Beijing had treated her son, Madame de Lionne made a significant and unique contribution to the debate. She was conscious that many would see it as inappropriate for a woman to discuss a matter of theological controversy. The letter is full of references to her sex and to the ridiculous nature of the sight of ‘Une femme aux mains avec vingt mille Jesuites!’ In this paper, based on close reading of the text and several printed and manuscript responses and reactions, I shall in fact argue that her invocations of feminine weakness were in fact an effective rhetorical strategy, used both to disarm potential ripostes from the Jesuits and to underline that, as a mother, she had a unique insight into the situation. This episode allows us to examine how women used femininity to carve out a unique voice in an otherwise male-dominated public sphere.
Sean Heath gained a PhD in history from the University of St Andrews in 2017 and has also studied at the University of Cambridge and Peking University. His first book, ‘Sacral Kingship in Bourbon France: The Cult of Saint Louis, 1589-1830 was published by Bloomsbury’ in 2021 and he is the author of several journal articles on early modern French religion and culture. He is currently researching the Chinese Rites Controversy, using sources in French, Latin, Italian and Chinese.
Panel 3: Faith on Trial: Religious Sects and the State
Genre, catholicisme et dissimulation : le procès d’Adélaïde Champion de Cicé
Adélaïde Champion de Cicé, noble française née à Rennes en 1749, est la fondatrice – avec le jésuite Pierre de Clorivière, alors ex-jésuite – des Filles du Cœur de Marie (1791). Les membres de cette congrégation religieuse vivent « dans le monde » pour porter chez « leurs ennemis » la lumière du christianisme. Cette perspective mène à un apostolat sous toutes ses formes, allant de l’éducation à l’orphelinat, en passant par les retraites. Par ces moyens, elles entendent lutter contre l’irréligion et l’impiété. Aucune Fille du Cœur de Marie ne porte l’habit, chacune étant vêtue « selon son rang et sa condition », et elles ne vivent pas en communauté. Le modèle de vie religieuse qu’elles proposent correspond à une adaptation des normes allant à l’encontre du cadre fixé pour les congrégations féminines.
Emprisonnée par la police pour fanatisme puis arrêtée pour avoir hébergé un royaliste impliqué dans l’attentat de la rue Saint-Nicaise, également appelé la machine infernale, Adélaïde Champion de Cicé est jugée et défendue par la ferveur populaire. Son procès permet d’analyser les relations entre Église et État depuis une perspective de genre, à travers les portraits esquissés d’elle, ses réseaux de soutien et son rapport aux religieux de son entourage, notamment l’ex-jésuite Clorivière.
Sarah Barthélemy is the Catherine de Francheville Fellow in the History of Catholicism at the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham. She is also a visiting professor in History at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles. Her research interests are in gender and history, identity and religious institutions, especially models of apostolic life for women, Catholicism (from the 17th to the 19th century) and global history.
Prophétesses de Sion: Women and the Multipliant Sect (Montpellier, 1720-1723)
On March 6, 1723, Louis de Bernage, intendant of Languedoc, arrested a group of Protestants gathered in Montpellier at the home of Anne Robert, widow of the merchant Jean Verchand. The intendant’s officers discovered in her home an extraordinary worship space, decorated with prophetic texts and complete with a pulpit and seating for over eighty people. Due to rumors about the group’s midnight services and sexual encounters, this Huguenot sect soon became known as les Multipliants. Of the thirteen people arrested by the intendant, six were women. In addition to Anne Robert, the prisoners included Marguerite Verchand (Anne’s twelve-year old daughter), Marie Blayne, Anne Gaussent, Suzanne Loubière, and Jeanne Mazaurigue. Following up on my recent publication on Anne Robert and the trial of the Multipliants, this paper will seek to determine in greater detail the exact role of women in the sect. Along with Blayne, Loubière, and Mazaurigue, did Robert also act as prophétesse in the group? Why and how was Marguerite participating in the sect’s rituals? Finally, how is it that Blayne was the only woman to be executed if these women were all prophétesses in this post-Revocation, post-Camisard War version of Sion?
Otto H.Selles is Professor of French at Calvin University, where he works on the French Enlightenment and protestantism.
Panel 4: Contested Meanings: Women Religious and Revolutionary Politics
What does Liberty Mean to a Nun?
What does liberté mean to a nun? There was no static definition of liberty on which everyone agreed during the French Revolution. Enlightenment philosophes argued that liberty meant expanding the rights of individuals to do what they pleased. Inspired with Revolutionary fervor, on August 26, 1789, the National Assembly issued its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which defined “liberty” in Article Four as, “the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.” New problems emerged when two individuals had conflicting claims to liberty. This word became even more complicated as religious women understood liberty from a religious perspective instead of drawing their ideas from the Enlightenment philosophes. For many members of religious houses and convents, liberty meant freedom from their slavery (to sin) which was found only through God, their deity, and in their identity as sisters in Christ, their savior. In the early period of the Revolution, between 1789 and 1790, nuns and sisters who wrote to the National Assembly used the same word as their recipients, but with radically different interpretations. For the nuns, their religious vocation was the only sure path to freedom. This essay will primarily focus on letters written by sisters and nuns to the National Assembly in the first two years of the Revolution to try to understand how they were both using the language of “liberty,” but also subverting it
Corinne Gressang is an Assistant Professor of History at Erskine College in upstate South Carolina. She specializes in the history of the French Revolution and Catholicism. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in May of 2020. Dr. Gressang currently serves as an Assistant Digital Coordinator for the Society for French Historical Studies and is a member of the executive council for the Western Society for French History. She is currently preparing her book manuscript, ‘Veiled Identities: Nuns in the French Revolution’ for publication.
Jacqueline-Aimée Brohon: Victim-Soul and Revolutionary Prophet”
This paper examines the writing and reception of Jacqueline-Aimée Brohon (1731-1778), a French visionary mystic connected to the Parti Dévot. A single woman who both observed and criticized monastic life, Brohon recorded her vivid experiences in a prayer journal that was later printed as the Réflexions édifiantes (1791), making her one of the few women published on religious subjects during the French Revolution. However, her writing was immediately taken up by Pierre Pontard, a Constitutional Bishop and journalist. He deployed Brohon’s idea of an association of privileged, expiatory victim-souls to argue for a far more radical restructuring of the French church, including monastic disestablishment and the implementation of clerical marriage. Pontard connected Brohon’s writings to the prophecies of Suzette Labrousse, and thus tied her to the illuminist revolutionary circles around the Duchesse de Bourbon. This paper traces the outline of Brohon’s spirituality of female empowerment through suffering, her subsequent enthusiastic reception by Pontard, and her final condemnation by the more moderate revolutionary, Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, who attacked Brohon as an arrogant madwoman in his Histoire des sectes religiesues (1810/1814/1828). The result is not just the story of one female mystic, nor an examination of the Constitutional Church alone, but also a consideration of how male authors twist women’s religious voices to accomplish their own ends.
Richard T. Yoder is a PhD candidate in History at Pennsylvania State University, where he is writing a dissertation on gender, knowledge, and the French Convulsionnaires. He obtained his BA in Religious Studies at the University of Virginia and his MPhil in Theology (Ecclesiastical History) at the University of Oxford. His first academic article, “From the Dove to the Eagle: Jansenist Visual Culture Between Piety and Polemic,” received the Peter Guilday Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association. He is also, along with Shaun Blanchard, co-editor of ‘From Port-Royal to Pistoia: A Jansenist Anthology’, which promises to be the first ever Jansenist sourcebook in English translation.
Panel 5: Representing Faith: Spaces and Objects of Devotion
Wellsprings of Devotion: Marian Apparitions and Female Pilgrims in Revolutionary France
A pilgrimage craze swept through northeastern France in the summer of 1799. Hundreds of thousands of Catholics hit the road to visit the miraculous spring of Hoste and numerous related places of recent Marian apparitions in Lorraine and beyond. While hostile elites repeatedly linked this vast pilgrimage movement to counter-revolutionary conspiracies, some revolutionary observers perceived a mere curiosity attracting mostly superstitious and flighty women. A devout miracle report foregrounded female actors as well, invoking the Virgin Mary as merciful protectress of France and choosing women’s stories as examples of miraculous cures that had taken place at Hoste.
This spectacular episode raises anew the question of how women’s actions and stereotypes about women informed French revolutionary-era Catholicism and anti-Catholicism. Gender mattered constantly in Catholic and revolutionary responses to the apparitions. Yet revolutionaries and clergy did not simply narrow down the discourse by coding ‘woman’ as essentially pious. Closer analysis of the apparitions and pilgrimages shows that women’s eminent visibility had far more variegated political and personal as well as judicial and theological reasons. Consequently, this visibility emerged on a broad spectrum of embodiments and representations, from disabled women on a quest for healing, to sightings of a tricolor ‘patriotic’ Virgin, to nuns clandestinely roaming the forests around the miraculous spring. The story of Hoste thus testifies less to a feminization of religion than to the plurality and fluidity of Catholic femininities in late-eighteenth-century France.
Kilian Harrer is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre 1369 “Cultures of Vigilance” (University of Munich, Germany). He holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he defended and deposited his dissertation on “Places of Power, Spaces of Peril: Pilgrimage and Borders in Western Central Europe, c. 1770–1810” in May 2021. His peer-reviewed scholarly publications on religion in eighteenth-century France include “The Keys of Heaven in the Hands of Women: History, Hierarchy, and Gender in Early Modern Catholicism,” (Catholic Historical Review); and “La suppression de cinq paroisses à Tours (1777–1782): Un exemple de rationalité administrative au siècle des Lumières,” (Dix-Huitième Siècle).
Handmaids of the Sacred Heart: Nuns’ Production of Paraphernalia and the Making of Sentimental Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century France
The cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was the first Catholic devotion to emerge in the context of the eighteenth-century media revolution and the concomitant rise of the public sphere. To promote the cult, its early supporters relied on the snowball effect of a combination of print and material objects that circulated widely among devotees of the Sacred Heart, fostering their sense of belonging to an emotional community that resisted the active pushback of Jansenists and philosophes. In the proposed paper, I want to look more closely at the emblems of the Sacred Heart that nuns of the Visitation Order produced for laypeople, who wore them as charms to fend off evil. My goal is to reconstruct the order’s distribution networks and its members’ interactions with consumers of the images and textile objects the nuns sent out to the laity. Drawing on theoretical work from media studies, I intend to shed light on the role of cloistered nuns and the ephemera they produced in creating an imagined community of devotees of the Sacred Heart. The paper contributes to ongoing historiographical debates on the social function of female religious, the commercialization of devotional objects, as well as the role of media and material culture in the formation of distinct Catholic publics in pre-revolutionary France.
Samuel Weber is a social and cultural historian of early modern Europe. He is particularly interested in the interplay between media and religion in the Catholic Mediterranean. His work on the cults of the Immaculate Conception and the Sacred Heart looks at how the second media revolution of the eighteenth century amplified the voices of both the proponents and the critics of these divisive devotions and, in so doing, contributed to the fragmentation of Catholic public opinion. Since earning his Ph.D. from the Universities of Bern and Durham, Samuel has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern. In the academic year 2021/2022, he is a Swiss National Science Foundation-funded postdoctoral fellow at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Women and Religion in Eighteenth-Century France 