Hillman presents a fascinating account of the role that women played during the Catholic Reformation in France. She reconstructs the devotional practices of a network of powerful women showing how they reconciled Catholic piety with their roles as part of an aristocratic elite, challenging the view that the Catholic Reformation was a male concern.

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.

The first study of how women from different backgrounds encountered the Counter-Reformation in early sixteenth-century Münster.

This work considers how Frenchwomen participated in Christian religious practice during the sixteenth century, with their words and their actions. Using extensive original and archival sources, it provides a comprehensive study of how women contributed to institutional, theological, devotional and political religious matters. Challenging the view of religious reforms and ideas imposed by male authorities upon women, this study argues instead that women, Catholic and Calvinist, lay and monastic, were deeply involved in the culture, meanings and development of contemporary religious practices.

Chronicling the history of the Daughters of Charity through the seventeenth century, this study examines how the community's existence outside of convents helped to change the nature of women's religious communities and the early modern Catholic church. Unusually for the time, this group of Catholic religious women remained uncloistered. They lived in private houses in the cities and towns of France, offering medical care, religious instruction and alms to the sick and the poor; by the end of the century, they were France's premier organization of nurses. This book places the Daughters of Charity within the context of early modern poor relief in France - the author shows how they played a critical role in shaping the system, and also how they were shaped by it. The study also examines the complicated relationship of the Daughters of Charity to the Catholic church of the time, analyzing it not only for what light it can shed on the history of the community, but also for what it can tell us about the Catholic Reformation more generally.

From Penitence to Charity radically revises our understanding of women's place in the institutional and spiritual revival known as the Catholic Reformation. Focusing on Paris, where fifty new religious congregations for women were established in as many years, it examines women's active role as founders and patrons of religious communities, as spiritual leaders within these communities, and as organizers of innovative forms of charitable assistance to the poor. Rejecting the too common view that the Catholic Reformation was a male-dominated movement whose principal impact on women was to control and confine them, the book shows how pious women played an instrumental role, working alongside--and sometimes in advance of--male reformers. At the same time, it establishes a new understanding of the chronology and character of France's Catholic Reformation by locating the movement's origins in a penitential spirituality rooted in the agonies of religious war. It argues that a powerful desire to appease the wrath of God through acts of heroic asceticism born of the wars did not subside with peace but, rather, found new outlets in the creation of austere, contemplative convents. Admiration for saintly ascetics prompted new vocations, and convents multiplied, as pious laywomen rushed to fund houses where, enjoying the special rights accorded founders, they might enter the cloister and participate in convent life. Penitential enthusiasm inevitably waned, while new social and economic tensions encouraged women to direct their piety toward different ends. By the 1630s, charitable service was supplanting penitential asceticism as the dominant spiritual mode. Capitalizing on the Council of Trent's call to catechize an ignorant laity, pious women founded innovative new congregations to aid less favored members of their sex and established lay confraternities to serve society's outcasts and the poor. Their efforts to provide war relief during the Fronde in particular deserve recognition.

This text offers a major reassessment of the thought and activities of the most famous figure of the seventeenth-century French Catholic Reformation, Vincent de Paul