During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of European, Indian, and African descent, enslaved and ...free, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. Although religious women had gained acceptance and authority in seventeenth-century France, the New World was less welcoming. Emily Clark explores the transformations required of the Ursulines as their distinctive female piety collided with slave society, Spanish colonial rule, and Protestant hostility.The Ursulines gained prominence in New Orleans through the social services they provided--schooling, an orphanage, and refuge for abused and widowed women--which also allowed them a self-sustaining level of corporate wealth. Clark traces the conflicts the Ursulines encountered through Spanish colonial rule (1767-1803) and after the Louisiana Purchase, as Protestants poured into Louisiana and were dismayed to find a powerful community of self-supporting women and a church congregation dominated by African Americans. The unmarried nuns contravened both the patriarchal order of the slaveholding American South and the Protestant construction of femininity that supported it. By incorporating their story into the history of early America,Masterless Mistressesexposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.
Born and raised in a New England garrison town, Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) was captured by Wabanaki Indians at age seven. Among them, she became a Catholic and lived like any other young girl in ...the tribe. At age twelve, she was enrolled at a French-Canadian Ursuline convent, where she would spend the rest of her life, eventually becoming the order's only foreign-born mother superior. Among these three major cultures of colonial North America, Wheelwright's life was exceptional: border-crossing, multilingual, and multicultural. This meticulously researched book discovers her life through the communities of girls and women around her: the free and enslaved women who raised her in Wells, Maine; the Wabanaki women who cared for her, catechized her, and taught her to work as an Indian girl; the French-Canadian and Native girls who were her classmates in the Ursuline school; and the Ursuline nuns who led her to a religious life.
En 1727, Marie-Madeleine Hachard, jeune ursuline de Rouen, quitte la France avec des consœurs, appelées par le roi et la Compagnie des Indes à fonder un hôpital et une école à La Nouvelle-Orléans, en ...Louisiane, où tout est à bâtir. Ses lettres relatent son voyage en France, la longue et périlleuse traversée de l’Atlantique, la pénible remontée du mythique delta du Mississippi et les débuts de l’établissement des ursulines. Son sens de l’observation, son indéniable courage, sa franchise et son humour donnent à sa relation de voyage et de séjour une touche inusitée. Dans l’Amérique coloniale du XVIIIe siècle, ces femmes missionnaires sont confrontées aux enjeux politiques, religieux, sociaux et économiques de leur époque. Elles se démarquent de leurs confrères par leur liberté d’esprit et d’entreprise. Leur apport mérite d’être mieux connu. Cette édition éclaire aussi les relations entre la France, le Canada et la Louisiane, et les expéditions de Cavelier de La Salle autour du Mississippi.
Il presente volume unisce storia religiosa e prospettiva di genere offrendo percorsi di vita femminile consacrata tra adeguamento alla norma, intraprendenza in seno alla comunità, conflitti e ...concezioni diverse della spiritualità. Vicende complesse vissute tra XVIII e XIX secolo sullo sfondo di due rivoluzioni: la prima in seno al convento, che vide opporsi due fazioni capitanate rispettivamente dalla madre fondatrice e dalla figlia del fondatore; la seconda, epocale, che portò alla fine dell’Antico Regime nei territori della vecchia Confederazione elvetica e che diventò per le orsoline una controrivoluzione agguerrita per la riconquista della loro vita di comunità. I preziosi documenti manoscritti di mano femminile qui editi – in particolare il libro degli Annali – fanno luce sulla società dell’epoca: redatti in una minuziosa e preziosa cronistoria permettono di entrare all’interno di un Collegio orsolino e di coglierne le diverse sfaccettature, illustrandone la varietà e la densità delle relazioni e i giochi di potere. Non da ultimo, consentono di riflettere sulla literacy e sulla agency di donne cattoliche provenienti da regioni alpine.
