A01=Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Active Apostolate
aposotolic vocations
apostolic religious orders
Author_Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Category=JBSF1
Category=QRAX
Category=QRM
Category=QRMB1
Catholic Recovery
Catholic Reformation women
Circa Pastoralis
De La Croix
early modern piety
English Ladies
English Secular Clergy
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
female Catholic education history
Female Religious
female religious life
Female Religious Teaching
French Ursulines
gender and Catholicism
Havre De Grace
Institute of English Ladies
Jesuit Ratio Studiorum
Marie Guyart
Mary Ward
Mixed Life
mixed life asceticism
Monastic Asceticism
Monastic Observance
Paul Iii
Poor Clares
Poor Clares Convent
Religious Congregation
seventeenth-century Catholicism
teaching congregations
Total Normality
Ursuline Communities
Ursuline Houses
Ursuline Sisters
Product details
- ISBN 9780754637165
- Weight: 521g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 28 Nov 2005
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern women to found new congregations with active vocations. Were these novel communities born out of their founders' rejection of the conventual model? Through the comparative analysis of two congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of women's efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation, this book offers a nuanced interpretation of female religious life and particularly of the relationship between cloistered tradition and aposotolic vocations. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers. This study suggests that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook work which had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what eighteenth-century writers later perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience. It is argued that the founders of new, uncloistered congregations were embracing vocations which they construed as personals sacrifices; they followed the arduous path 'mixed life' in an act of self-abnegation and chose apostolic work as their early-modern reinterpretation of medieval asceticism.
Laurence Lux-Sterritt is lecturer at the Département des Etudes du Monde Anglophone, Université de Provence I, France.
