Breaching the Cloister: Laywomen, Convents, and the State in the Early Modern French Empire
Creators: name: Bowen, Haley E
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: convent
subject: laywomen
subject: absolutism
subject: religious women
subject: early modern state
subject: History (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: In the wake of the Catholic Reformation, female religious communities proliferated across the French empire. This dissertation, based upon archival research in Paris, Québec, and Montreal, investigates how and why these convents came to occupy varied roles as sites of refuge, conversion, and imprisonment in the lives of early modern French laywomen. Across the French empire, laywomen from a wide range of social backgrounds fled to convents at vulnerable moments in their lives, seeking to escape abusive relationships, secure comfortable retirements, deepen their faith, and participate in unique forms of feminine sociability. Retreat within the convent, I demonstrate, offered some women a refuge from patriarchal family structures and provided an alternative to the dichotomous paths of marriage and religious vows. Yet as convents came to face greater economic hardship over the course of the seventeenth century and confronted increasing pressure to prove their utility to the public and to the state, many religious communities leveraged their new social role to secure lucrative partnerships with monarchical authorities. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, a growing number of convents collaborated with police and monarchical officials to imprison ‘disorderly’ women, working to convert them into Catholic, monogamous, and economically productive subjects. This dissertation traces the rise of the partnership between convents and the French monarchy from the far reaches of the French empire in Québec City, where convents held indigenous people as political hostages and labored for the conversion of indigenous nations, to the French metropole, where convents implemented the forcible conversion of Protestant women after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. By the eighteenth century, I demonstrate, a handful of communities had adopted incarceration as a cottage industry, promising to reform the “debauched” and heretical women entrusted into their care. French convents’ open collaboration with the monarchy in pursuit of its political goals of social order and discipline, I argue, indicates that nuns were active and self-interested participants in the project of state-building and suggests that convents ought to be meaningfully integrated into revisionist accounts of the rise of the early modern state. The exercise of monarchical power within the cloister did not occur unilaterally, however, but met with laywomen’s engagement and obstruction, as well as that of their families and even of the nuns themselves. As I demonstrate, involuntary pensioners appropriated, managed, and rejected convent discipline and the politicized ideological connotations it carried. The surprising fluidity of the convent between the functions of prison and refuge, and the mixed communities of voluntary and involuntary pensioners that developed there, resists a one-dimensional reading of the cloister as a space of social discipline. Investigating the cloister at the confluence of prison and sanctuary, and situating it in dynamic relation to the family, state, and empire, I argue that convents became critical sites for the articulation and arbitration of an early modern gender politics.