Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture PDF Download
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Author: Mita Choudhury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
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Book Description
Representations of convents and nuns assumed power and urgency within the volatile political culture of eighteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of literary, cultural, and legal material, Mita Choudhury analyzes how, between 1730 and 1789, lawyers, religious pamphleteers, and men of letters repeatedly asked, "Who should control the female convent and women religious?" These sources chronicled the conflicts between nuns and the male clergy, among nuns themselves, and between nuns and their families, conflicts that were presented to the public in the context of potent issues such as despotism, citizenship, female education, and sexuality.The cloister operated as a symbol of despotism, the equivalent of the Sultan's seraglio or the King's Bastille. Before 1770, lawyers and magistrates praised nuns as the personification of virtuous Christian women, often victims vulnerable to those who would use them to further their own political ends. After 1770, men of letters evaluated nuns according to more secular norms, and concluded that the convent had no purpose in society, except as a reminder of the problems inherent in the Old Regime. Choudhury elaborates on how nuns were not always passive entities, mere objects to be shaped by the political needs of others. But because they relied on men in order to make their voices heard, the place of women religious in the public sphere was a complex one based on negotiations between female action and male subjectivity. During the French Revolution, whatever support they had enjoyed was lost as republicans and moderates began to see nuns as potentially disruptive to the social order, family life, and revolutionary values.
Author: Mita Choudhury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726994
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Get Book Here
Book Description
Representations of convents and nuns assumed power and urgency within the volatile political culture of eighteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of literary, cultural, and legal material, Mita Choudhury analyzes how, between 1730 and 1789, lawyers, religious pamphleteers, and men of letters repeatedly asked, "Who should control the female convent and women religious?" These sources chronicled the conflicts between nuns and the male clergy, among nuns themselves, and between nuns and their families, conflicts that were presented to the public in the context of potent issues such as despotism, citizenship, female education, and sexuality.The cloister operated as a symbol of despotism, the equivalent of the Sultan's seraglio or the King's Bastille. Before 1770, lawyers and magistrates praised nuns as the personification of virtuous Christian women, often victims vulnerable to those who would use them to further their own political ends. After 1770, men of letters evaluated nuns according to more secular norms, and concluded that the convent had no purpose in society, except as a reminder of the problems inherent in the Old Regime. Choudhury elaborates on how nuns were not always passive entities, mere objects to be shaped by the political needs of others. But because they relied on men in order to make their voices heard, the place of women religious in the public sphere was a complex one based on negotiations between female action and male subjectivity. During the French Revolution, whatever support they had enjoyed was lost as republicans and moderates began to see nuns as potentially disruptive to the social order, family life, and revolutionary values.
Author: Tonya J. Moutray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317069307
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
In eighteenth-century literature, negative representations of Catholic nuns and convents were pervasive. Yet, during the politico-religious crises initiated by the French Revolution, a striking literary shift took place as British writers championed the cause of nuns, lauded their socially relevant work, and addressed the attraction of the convent for British women. Interactions with Catholic religious, including priests and nuns, Tonya J Moutray argues, motivated writers, including Hester Thrale Piozzi, Helen Maria Williams, and Charlotte Smith, to revaluate the historical and contemporary utility of religious refugees. Beyond an analysis of literary texts, Moutray's study also examines nuns’ personal and collective narratives, as well as news coverage of their arrival to England, enabling a nuanced investigation of a range of issues, including nuns' displacement and imprisonment in France, their rhetorical and practical strategies to resist authorities, representations of refugee migration to and resettlement in England, relationships with benefactors and locals, and the legal status of "English" nuns and convents in England, including their work in recruitment and education. Moutray shows how writers and the media negotiated the multivalent figure of the nun during the 1790s, shaping British perceptions of nuns and convents during a time critical to their survival.
Author: Jay M. Smith
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271035870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 358
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Book Description
Historians have long been fascinated by the nobility in pre-Revolutionary France. What difference did nobles make in French society? What role did they play in the coming of the Revolution? In this book, a group of prominent French historians shows why the nobility remains a vital topic for understanding France’s past. The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century appears some thirty years after the publication of the most sweeping and influential “revisionist” assessment of the French nobility, Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret’s La noblesse au dix-huitième siècle. The contributors to this volume incorporate the important lessons of Chaussinand-Nogaret’s revisionism but also reexamine the assumptions on which that revisionism was based. At the same time, they consider what has been gained or lost through the adoption of new methods of inquiry in the intervening years. Where, in other words, should the nobility fit into the twenty-first century’s narrative about eighteenth-century France? The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century will interest not only specialists of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution, and modern European history but also those concerned with the differences in, and the developing tensions between, the methods of social and cultural history. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Rafe Blaufarb, Gail Bossenga, Mita Choudhury, Jonathan Dewald, Doina Pasca Harsanyi, Thomas E. Kaiser, Michael Kwass, Robert M. Schwartz, John Shovlin, and Johnson Kent Wright.
Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040249337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 556
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Book Description
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Author: William Doyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199291209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598
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Book Description
An exploration of current scholarly thinking about the wide and surprisingly complex range of historical problems associated with the study of Ancien Régime Europe
Author: Bryan A. Banks
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319596837
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
This volume examines the French Revolution’s relationship with and impact on religious communities and religion in a transnational perspective. It challenges the traditional secular narrative of the French Revolution, exploring religious experience and representation during the Revolution, as well as the religious legacies that spanned from the eighteenth century to the present. Contributors explore the myriad ways that individuals, communities, and nation-states reshaped religion in France, Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and around the world.
Author: James E. Kelly
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317034023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 enclosed convents across Flanders and France with more than 4,000 women entering them over a 200-year period. In theory they were cut off from the outside world; however, in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely, and their communal culture was sophisticated. Not only were the nuns influenced by continental intellectual culture but they in turn contributed to a developing English Catholic identity moulded by their experience in exile. During this time, these nuns and the Mary Ward sisters found outlets for female expression often unavailable to their secular counterparts, until the French Revolution and its associated violence forced the convents back to England. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the cultural importance of the English convents in exile from 1600 to 1800 and is the first collection to focus solely on the English convents.
Author: Ulrich L. Lehner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190232919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
"Whoever needs an act of faith to elucidate an event that can be explained by reason is a fool, and unworthy of reasonable thought." This line, spoken by the notorious 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova, illustrates a deeply entrenched perception of religion, as prevalent today as it was hundreds of years ago. It is the sentiment behind the narrative that Catholic beliefs were incompatible with the Enlightenment ideals. Catholics, many claim, are superstitious and traditional, opposed to democracy and gender equality, and hostile to science. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that Casanova himself was a Catholic. In The Catholic Enlightenment, Ulrich L. Lehner points to such figures as representatives of a long-overlooked thread of a reform-minded Catholicism, which engaged Enlightenment ideals with as much fervor and intellectual gravity as anyone. Their story opens new pathways for understanding how faith and modernity can interact in our own time. Lehner begins two hundred years before the Enlightenment, when the Protestant Reformation destroyed the hegemony Catholicism had enjoyed for centuries. During this time the Catholic Church instituted several reforms, such as better education for pastors, more liberal ideas about the roles of women, and an emphasis on human freedom as a critical feature of theology. These actions formed the foundation of the Enlightenment's belief in individual freedom. While giants like Spinoza, Locke, and Voltaire became some of the most influential voices of the time, Catholic Enlighteners were right alongside them. They denounced fanaticism, superstition, and prejudice as irreconcilable with the Enlightenment agenda. In 1789, the French Revolution dealt a devastating blow to their cause, disillusioning many Catholics against the idea of modernization. Popes accumulated ever more power and the Catholic Enlightenment was snuffed out. It was not until the Second Vatican Council in 1962 that questions of Catholicism's compatibility with modernity would be broached again. Ulrich L. Lehner tells, for the first time, the forgotten story of these reform-minded Catholics. As Pope Francis pushes the boundaries of Catholicism even further, and Catholics once again grapple with these questions, this book will prove to be required reading.
Author: Katherine M. Quinsey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443839353
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
For women in early modern Europe, the Reformation and the Enlightenment entailed both new freedom and new restrictions. In response to an ideology that immured the female mind and spirit inside the body, women found in religion a hope for individual freedom, a sense of self-identity, and a justification for gender equality. Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation Europe invokes the veil’s dual significance, as the marker of the religious woman, and as the metaphoric veil separating female interior life from its public construction. This collection of nine essays focuses specifically on the direct links between emergent feminism and religious faith as experienced through wide cultural, geographic, and confessional differences, united by themes of female subjectivity, selfhood, autonomy, and community. The essays range in topic and scope from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, across Europe, Britain, and North America, through a wide range of experiences and written accounts – its subjects are Philadelphian visionaries and Quaker missionaries, Iroquois leaders and early Canadian nuns, Islamic societies and European female travellers, French mystics and educators, and British writers and intellectuals. These accounts reveal how women across a wide spectrum of formal beliefs and cultural backgrounds found in religion a way to negotiate the restrictions of their outward lives, and a radical source of personal and collective independence and value.
Author: Sarah A. Curtis
Publisher: OUP USA
ISBN: 0195394186
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Civilizing Habits explores the life stories of three French women missionaries - Philippine Duchesne, Emilie de Vialar, and Anne-Marie Javouhey - who transgressed boundaries to evangelize in North America, the Mediterranean basin, and France's slave colonies. Their initiative and energy allowed both the Catholic church and the French state to reestablish global empires in the nineteenth century.
