The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France

Nora D.S. Robins is Collections Co-ordinator (Internal) of the
University of Calgary Libraries.

Prior to the seventeenth century, the only place for Catholic women who
sought religious life was in contemplative orders, cloistered behind
walls. Following on the heels of the Counter-Reformation, groups of
Catholic women throughout Europe sought to respond to the crises of
faith with a new form of religious life quite different from that of the
traditional cloister.

Dévotes chronicles the move from contemplative orders to a more active
religious life by examining the role of women in seventeenth-century
French religious reforms. This serious study explores the central role
of laywomen in the climatic changes in French Catholicism between 1600
and 1685.

Many pious laywomen—dévotes—wished to respond to perceived
societal needs by teaching, nursing, and ministering to the poor. The
dévotes became les filles séculiиres (congregations of laywomen) from
all classes of French society. Their congregations formed the new
religious orders such as the teaching Ursulines and St. Vincent de
Paul’s Sisterhood of Charity.

Rapley provides a good picture of the difficulties faced by these women
in their efforts to gain acceptance for their commitment to an active
life of charity. Rapley contends that the complex of social sources that
developed in the seventeenth century—and especially the education of
women—was the creation rather than the creator of these new religious
congregations. In particular, the history of feminine education—of the
girls who benefited by it and the nuns who dispensed it—intertwines
with the history of the Church’s changing attitude toward the women in
its service.

Interestingly, New France was well served by these new congregations.
The Ursulines came from France to Quebec, while Marguerite Bourgeoys
founded the Congrégation de Notre-Dame de Montréal in the 1670s.

Dévotes is enhanced by extensive chapter notes, a 14 page
bibliography, and black-and-white pictures. Rapley is a sessional
lecturer in history at Carleton University.