Daniella Kostroun-Feminism, Absolutism, And Jansenism_ Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns -Cambridge University Press (2011)

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Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism

Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns

Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism chronicles seventy years ofJansenist conict and its complex intersection with power strugglesbetween Gallican bishops, parlementaires, the Crown, and the pope.Daniella Kostroun focuses on the nuns of Port-Royal-des-Champs,whose community was disbanded by Louis XIV in 1709 as a threatto the state. Paradoxically, it was the nuns adherence to their strictreligious rule and the ideal of pious, innocent, and politically disinter-ested behavior that allowed them to challenge absolutism effectively.Adopting methods from cultural studies, feminism, and the CambridgeSchool of political thought, Kostroun examines how these nuns placedgender at the heart of the Jansenist challenge to the patriarchal andreligious foundations of absolutism. They responded to royal persecu-tion with a feminist defense of womens spiritual and rational equalityand of the autonomy of the individual subject, thereby offering a boldchallenge to the patriarchal and religious foundations of absolutism.

Daniella Kostroun is currently Assistant Professor of History at IndianaUniversityPurdue University, Indianapolis. She is the coeditor (withLisa Vollendorf) of Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (16001800) and the author of A Formula for Disobedience: Jansenism, Gen-der, and the Feminist Paradox, which appeared in the Journal of Mod-ern History and won the 2004 Chester Penn Higby Prize by the ModernEuropean History section of the American Historical Association.

Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism

Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns

DANIELLA KOSTROUNIndiana UniversityPurdue University, Indianapolis

cambridge university pressCambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town,

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C Daniella Kostroun 2011

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First published 2011

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Kostroun, Daniella J., 1970Feminism, absolutism, and Jansenism : Louis XIV and the Port-Royal nuns /

Daniella Kostroun.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-1-107-00045-2 (hardback)

1. Cistercian nuns France History 17th century. 2. Port-Royal des Champs(Abbey) History 17th century. 3. Louis XIV, King of France, 16381715 Political

and social views. 4. Jansenists France History 17th century. 5. Patriarchy France History 17th century. 6. Feminism France History 17th century.

7. Despotism France History 17th century. 8. Religious absolutism France History 17th century. 9. France Politics and government 16431715.

10. France Religion 17th century. I. Title.bx4328.z9p64 2011

273.7dc22 2010031629

isbn 978-1-107-00045-2 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLsfor external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does notguarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Johnny

Contents

Acknowledgments page ix

Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

1 Jansenism as a Woman Problem 18

2 Controversy and Reform at Port-Royal 51

3 Jansenisms Political Turn, 16521661 78

4 The Limits to Obedience, 16611664 104

5 A Feminist Response to Absolutism, 16641669 141

6 The Unsettled Peace, 16691679 182

7 A Royal Victory, 16791709 206

Conclusion 239

Bibliography 247

Index 263

vii

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible had I not received supportand encouragement from many institutions and individuals over theyears. I am forever grateful to my undergraduate mentor, the late NanKarwan-Cutting, for initially sparking my interest in French history.Steven Kaplan, another undergraduate mentor, was the one to suggestthat I study Jansenist women in the rst place. In graduate school,WilliamReddy and Kristen Neuschel were my thesis advisors. Both have remainedvalued mentors and friends over the years. I also want to thank the othermembers of my thesis committee, Donald Reid, Jay Smith, and SusanThorne, for all of their help and advice.

This project could not have been completed without the nancial sup-port I received from the two schools where I have taught, Stonehill Collegeand Indiana UniversityPurdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI). In addi-tion, funding from the Duke UniversityUniversity of North Carolinaat Chapel Hill Center for European Studies; the Center for InternationalStudies at Duke University; the Erasmus Institute of Notre Dame; the Cen-ter for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Los Angeles; and the Mellon Foundation (via the Gutenberg-eproject) supported research for this project.

While conducting research, I received invaluable help from the staffand librarians at the Cornell University Kroch Library Division of Rareand Manuscript Collections in Ithaca, New York; the Interlibrary LoanDepartment at Stonehill College MacPhaidin Library in Easton, Mas-sachusetts; the Bibliothe`que Nationale in Paris; the Archives Nationalesin Paris; and the Rijksarchief in Utrecht, Holland. I owe a specialthank you to Valerie Guitienne-Murger and Fabien Vandermarcq at the

ix

x Acknowledgments

Bibliothe`que de la Societe de Port-Royal in Paris for sharing their knowl-edge and expertise with me, for facilitating my access to large numbers ofdocuments during short research trips to France, and for their hospitalityover afternoon tea.

I have presented portions of the research and ideas that appear in thisbook on earlier occasions and am grateful for the thoughtful feedbackI received from my colleagues. In addition to thanking my colleagueswho provided feedback at annual meetings for the Society of FrenchHistorical Studies, the Western Society for French History, and the NorthAmerican Society for Seventeenth-Century French Literature, I also wantto thank the members of the Triangle French Studies Group, the Centerfor Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies at UCLA, the Womenand Culture in Early Modern Europe Seminar at the Humanities Centerof Harvard University, and the Religious Studies Department at IUPUI.The people in these groups read drafts of my research and provided mewith useful and often in-depth comments.

I do not know how I can ever thank enough my most assiduous readerswho read entire drafts of this manuscript multiple times: Thomas Carr Jr.,William Reddy, Susan Rosa, and the anonymous readers at CambridgeUniversity Press. Others who read my work and helped me to clarify myideas in important ways are Johnny Goldnger, Miche`le Longino, JohnLyons, Sarah Maza, Edward Muir, Malina Stefanovska, Philip Stewart,Dale Van Kley, Ellen Weaver-Laporte, and Rebecca Wilkin. StephanieOHara not only lent her critical eye to the text, but she also helped mewith many of my translations. Others who have helped me, inspired me,and encouraged me as I worked on this project are my colleagues, pastand present, in the history departments at Stonehill College and at IUPUI,Michael Breen, Mita Choudhury, Katie Conboy, Kirsten Delegard, Bar-bara Diefendorf, Cecile Dubois, Eliza Ferguson, Natalie Goss, JanineLanza, Anthony LaVopa, Marina Leslie, Linda Lierheimer, Elie Lobel,Shari Lowin, Keith Luria, Wendy Peek, Jennifer Perlmutter, Amy Smith,Sara Spaulding, Courtney Spikes, Lisa Vollendorf, Sydney Watts, andRaa Zakaria. This book has been improved and enriched by the insightof all the people here mentioned. I am responsible for the imperfectionsthat remain.

I want to thankmy editor at Cambridge University Press, Beatrice Rehl,for believing in this project. I also am grateful for the help I received inproducing the manuscript from Emily Spangler at Cambridge UniversityPress and Brigitte Coulton of the Aptara Corporation. Before nding ahome for this manuscript at Cambridge, I received invaluable guidance

Acknowledgments xi

and advice from Kate Wittenberg, editor of the Gutenberg-e series atColumbia University Press/Epic; Elizabeth Fairhead of the American His-torical Association; and Alisa Plant of Louisiana State University Press.

As every working mother knows, you are only as good as your child-care. For this reason, I want to thank the Early Childhood Program atFairview Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, as well as EvelynHovee, Amy Hovee, Indhu Raghavan, and Sindhu Raghavan for provid-ing reliable, loving care for my children over the years. I owe a specialthanks to Dorothy Delegard and Danielle Houser who traveled to Francewith me to care for my children as I worked in the archives.

Finally, I want to thank those who saw me through this project on aday-to-day basis. This includes the members of my Active ResearchersGroup: Terri Carney, Tamara Leech, Kristy Sheeler, and JenniferThorington-Springer. For more than two years now, I have met on aweekly basis with these remarkable women from Butler University andIUPUI to set my writing goals and to report on my progress. They haveconsistently encouragedme, goadedme, coachedme, and keptme focusedon my project over this time. I also want to thank Hele`ne and Jean-PierreBriand, dear family friends, who have treated me like one of their ownever since I was in grade school. I do not think I could ever have balancedthe demands ofmy family life andmy career as a French historian had theynot always welcomed me and my children to stay with them in Paris andkept us fortied with incomparable French meals. I owe eternal gratitudeto my parents, Val and Winnie Kostroun who have always encouragedme and believed in me. And last but not least, I want to thank my hus-band Johnny Goldnger, my mother-in-law Myrtle Goldnger, and mychildren Kenny and Cody Goldnger. These are the people who make mydaily life joyful.

Parts of the introduction, conclusion, and Chapter Five were publishedin A Formula for Disobedience: Jansenism, Gender, and the FeministParadox, The Journal of Modern History 75 (September): 483522.Permission to reproduce that material here is gratefully acknowledged.

Abbreviations

AN Archives nationales de FranceArs. Bibliothe`que de lArsenalBN Bibliothe`que nationale de FranceBPR Bibliothe`que de la Societe de Port-RoyalMs. ManuscriptMss. Ff. Manuscrits fonds francaisUPR Port Royal Collection, Rijksarchief, Utrecht, Holland

xiii

Introduction

On October 29, 1709, King Louis XIV sent his royal lieutenant of police,along with 200 troops, into the valley of the Chevreuse, twelve mileswest of Paris, to shut down the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs. Sixtyyears earlier, Port-Royal had been a ourishing community containingmore than 150 nuns. By 1709 there were only twenty-two left, all overthe age of fty and several of them inrm. On arrival, the lieutenantassembled the nuns in the convents parlor and read them an order fromthe royal council stating that they were to be removed from the conventfor the good of the state. He then presented them with lettres de cachet(special royal warrants signed by the king) sentencing each nun to exilein separate convents across France. They had only three hours to packtheir belongings, eat a nal meal, and say good-bye to one another. Hethen loaded them into carriages and drove them away. Shortly after that,Louis XIVs men exhumed Port-Royals cemetery, dumped the remainsin a mass grave, and razed the buildings to the ground.

How can we account for this episode in which Louis XIV personallyordered the destruction of a convent containing so few nuns? How couldthese women pose a threat to the state? Port-Royals destruction becomeseven more mysterious when we consider that it occurred at a time ofpolitical and domestic crisis for the French Crown. The war with Spainand a series of bad harvests made the rst decade of the eighteenth centuryone of the more difcult periods in Louis XIVs long reign.1 The kingsadministrative correspondence reveals that he took a personal interest in

1 Andrew Lossky, Louis XIV and the French Monarchy (New Brunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 1994), 271.

1

2 Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism

suppressing Port-Royal in spite of these other pressing crises.2 Indeed, thematter was so urgent to him that his lettres de cachet and his order toclose the convent circumvented a judicial review of the convents statusin a blatant exercise of absolute authority.

Why, then, did Louis XIV destroy Port-Royal?To answer this question, this book explores the role of women and gen-

der in the French Jansenist conict from its origins in 1640 to Port-Royalsdestruction in 1709. Founded in 1215 as a Cistercian convent,3 Port-Royal is best known as the center of Jansenism, the famous seventeenth-century heresy named after the Flemish bishop Cornelius Jansen (15851638) that Louis XIV persecuted throughout his reign. Although scholarsare familiar with Jansenist resistance by men such as Antoine Arnauld,4

Blaise Pascal,5 and Pierre Nicole6 all of whom have had a lasting inu-ence on French philosophy, literature, and pedagogy much less is knownabout Port-Royals cloistered women and the powerful role they playedin the Jansenist controversy. Many of these women were the sisters andnieces of Jansens most illustrious defenders, and like their male kin, theywere highly educated and fully invested in defending the theological andecclesiastical values Jansen promoted in his writings. By uncovering theiractions, this book not only explains the convents destruction but alsoreveals a forgotten episode of female political activism in Old RegimeFrance.

2 Albert Le Roy, La France et Rome de 1700 a` 1715 (Geneva: Slatkine-Megariotis Reprints,1976), 23594.

3 The words convent and monastery technically denote religious communities of eithersex. In this work, I use the term convent according to its popular sense as a commu-nity of women. See article convent in the Catholic Encyclopedia Online: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04340c.htm.

4 Antoine Arnauld (161294), known as le grand Arnauld, was a doctor of the Sorbonneand priest. He is best known for writing the Port-Royal Logic and for his numerousapologetic works on Jansen. His sister Jacqueline (Marie-Angelique de Sainte Madeleinein religion) reformed Port-Royal by enforcing enclosure in 1609. Many of his femalerelatives, including his mother, became nuns at Port-Royal.

5 Blaise Pascal (162362), born in Clermont (Auvergne), was Port-Royals most famousadherent. He was a noted mathematician, physicist, philosopher, and writer. He becameclosely connected to Port-Royal after his sister Jacqueline joined the convent as a nun in1646.

6 Pierre Nicole (162595) was a theologian and writer who originally had ties to Port-Royalthrough female cousins who were nuns there. In 1654 he became Antoine Arnauldsprincipal collaborator and worked with him on many of Port-Royals most signicanttexts, including the Port-Royal Logic. He also wrote several treatises of note on his own.The most famous of these are his Moral Essays (16718), three of which were translatedinto English by John Locke.

Introduction 3

Creating Separate Spheres: Port-Royal and Jansenism

It is surprising that we pay so little attention today to the nuns resistanceto Louis XIV, considering that they left abundant sources documentingtheir opposition in the form of journals, memoirs, and letters. Then again,this oversight makes sense when we consider the deliberate efforts by thenuns and their supporters to downplay and cover up their actions inthese same sources. These efforts had their roots in the earliest polemicalexchanges in France in the 1640s in which critics denounced Jansenism asa heresy by exploiting a traditional association of heresy with unrulywomen.7 The Port-Royal nuns had been connected to Jansen throughtheir confessor, Jean-Ambroise Duvergier de Hauranne, the abbe of Saint-Cyran (henceforth Saint-Cyran), who was also Jansens closest friend andsupporter in France. Jansens critics exploited his connection to the nunsin their sermons and pamphlets to make the case that he had founded anew heresy. To counter these accusations, Jansens defenders insisted onthe nuns disinterest in the theological controversy and on their exactingobedience to the Benedictine Rule (the monastic rule governing Cistercianconvents such as Port-Royal). Thus began a tradition among Jansensmale supporters of distancing the nuns from the conict as much aspossible.

However, this tradition involved a delicate balancing act for Jansenssupporters, because as self-proclaimed disciples of Augustine of Hippo,these men believed that they were defending fundamental truths aboutthe Christian religion, ones that all members of the faith (even disin-terested nuns) needed to know and understand. Specically, they weredefending the doctrine of efcacious grace, meaning they believed thathuman beings are completely helpless in securing their own salvation.They wrote in opposition to Molinists (most of whom were Jesuits sup-porting the writings of their fellow priest, Luis de Molina), who espouseda doctrine of sufcient grace, meaning they believed that humans canparticipate in their salvation through the exercise of free will.8 Becausethe Jansenist debates raged over such a core issue of faith, and becausecritics were denouncing the Port-Royal nuns for meddling in theological

7 The symbol of the heretical woman rst became a common polemical trope in thefourth century. Virginia Burrus, The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander,Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome, Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (July 1991):22948.

8 Leszek Kolakowski, God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascals Religion and onthe Spirit of Jansenism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 35, 2430.


matters prohibited to them by the Pauline interdictions,9 Jansens defend-ers found themselves in the delicate position of arguing for the nuns rightto know theological truths about grace while denying that this knowledgewas rooted in Jansens text and the debates it generated.

This dilemma became a crisis in 1661 once Louis XIV demanded thesignatures of all members of the Church, male and female, to a formu-lary denouncing ve propositions from Jansens text according to theterms set by two anti-Jansenist papal bulls. Jansens defenders saw inthe kings formulary a trap their choice was either to condemn Jansen(and by extension Augustine, they believed) or to refuse to sign the oathand become criminals in the eyes of their king. Neither solution wasdesirable as they considered themselves to be both good Catholics andloyal subjects. They believed that the only reason they faced this dilemmawas because of the machinations of the kings corrupt (Jesuit) confes-sors. In their search for a solution, many of Jansens defenders signedthe formulary with mental reservations that they explained in supple-mentary clauses inserted above their signatures. Antoine Arnauld craftedthe most famous of these clauses, which tacitly argued that the hereticaldoctrine in the ve propositions did not appear in Jansens text. Thosewho signed the formulary with Arnaulds clause condemned the hereti-cal doctrine contained within the propositions with heart and mouth,but remained respectfully silent on the popes attribution of the doc-trinal errors to Jansen. Arnaulds compromise, known as the right/factdistinction, upheld the Churchs right to demand belief inmatters of doc-trine, but denied its authority to demand belief in matters of empiricalfact.

Arnauld encouraged the nuns to sign the formulary with his distinc-tion, believing that the Pauline interdictions justied his call for silenceon the factual question of whether Jansen authored the heretical doc-trine contained in the propositions. A faction of nuns challenged him byasserting that female ignorance of a theological text was no excuse for thedistinction, which they believed was a compromise. They argued insteadthat the Churchs command for female silence demanded the more radi-cal response of rejecting the formulary altogether on the grounds that it

9 The Pauline interdictions were the traditions that prevented women from teaching andstudying theology in the Church. They were based on passages from Paul of Tarsusepistles in which he ordered female silence. Thomas M. Carr Jr. cites the relevant pas-sages from Paul and discusses how their legacy shaped womens spiritual leadership inmedieval and early modern monastic communities in Voix des abbesses du Grand Sie`cle:La Predication au feminin a` Port-Royal (Tubingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2006), 3842.

Introduction 5

violated all reason by asking women to testify to the contents of a bookthat the Church forbade them from reading.

The debate over female knowledge at the time of the formulary createddeep divisions within the Port-Royal community. Blaise Pascal, who hadoriginally collaborated with Arnauld in promoting the right/fact distinc-tion, now rejected his colleagues arguments in favor of those forwardedby his sister Jacqueline, Arnaulds leading critic among the nuns. Thisembarrassing split between Jansens most famous defenders explains whyJansenist apologists, who were already inclined to downplay the nunsparticipation to deect accusations that they were unruly women, nowactively sought to erase their initiatives from the record. By insisting onthe nuns female innocence and ignorance and by glossing over theseevents, seventeenth-century apologists removed the evidence of a highlycharged and fractious moment in the history of Port-Royal.

When a new generation of historians began chronicling the Jansenistdebates in the eighteenth century, they insisted on the nuns perfect inno-cence and ignorance for their own reasons. By this time, both Louis XIVand the last of the Port-Royal nuns were deceased, and a new Jansenistconict had erupted under the regency government over the papal bullUnigenitus (1713). During the Unigenitus controversy, Jansenist histo-rians stressed the nuns innocence to promote a myth of Port-Royal inwhich the convent symbolized all that was religiously pure about Jansensdefenders.10 By insisting on Port-Royals religious purity and completedisinterest in the world, these historians sought not only to contrast theconvents legacy against the moral depravities of the Crown but also touphold it as a new incarnation of the ancient temple of Jerusalem andto cast its male supporters in the role of the Maccabees the Biblicalfamily of priests chosen by God to defend the purity of the Jewishreligion.11 Port-Royal thus became part of a political drama in whichJansens eighteenth-century defenders invested their struggles againstUni-genitus with theological signicance as a divine reenactment of a preg-ured struggle from the Old Testament to preserve the integrity of theChurch from wordly corruption.12

In his six-volume work titled Port-Royal (1840), literary criticCharles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve adopts the myth of Port-Royals worldly

10 Catherine Maire, De la cause de dieu a` la cause de la nation: Le jansenisme au XVIIIesie`cle (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 191.

11 Ibid., 185, 191.12 Ibid., 194.


indifference to transform the convent into a cornerstone of Frances clas-sical heritage. At the beginning of this study, Sainte-Beuve argues thathistorians of Jansenism and historians of Port-Royal fall into two distinctcamps. One deals with the progress of a dogmatic dispute surround-ing Jansens text in the universities, clerical assemblies, and Rome. Thisdispute was noisy, punctuated by stubborn debates, intrigue, andoutcries between Jesuit priests and university theologians.13 The sec-ond camp focuses on the Port-Royal convent, the reform established thereby its abbess Marie-Angelique de Sainte Madeleine Arnauld (henceforthAngelique Arnauld), the penitential practices of the nuns and the solitaires(a pious community of male recluses who congregated at Port-Royal),and the scholarly and literary output of the solitaires. In contrast to theJansenist debates, Sainte-Beuve characterizes Port-Royal by the silence ofthe cloister, the simplicity of its rural setting, and the inner calm of thesoul its inhabitants achieved through private study and contemplation.He acknowledges that the Jansenist debates disturbed Port-Royal with anunfortunate frequency, but he dismisses these disruptions as anomalies,thus keeping the community of nuns and pious men living there intactand inviolable.14

Sainte-Beuves highly inuential study set the pattern for future stud-ies, which continued to reinforce the divide between studies of Jansenismand of Port-Royal. Historians have helped promote this division by con-ceding the spiritual, literary, and philosophical legacy of Port-Royal tothe seventeenth century and by orienting their studies of Jansenism andits noisy politics toward the eighteenth century. Edmund Preclins LesJansenistes du XVIIIe sie`cle et la Constitution civil du Clerge (1929) setthis course by drawing a connection between the ecclesiastical reformspromoted by the syndic of the Sorbonne, Edmond Richer (15601631),and the Civil Constitution of the Clergy of the French Revolution.15

Dale Van Kleys The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (1996),establishes Jansenism as an eighteenth-century phenomenon that rivalsthe Enlightenment as an intellectual and cultural origin of the FrenchRevolution.16 In both cases, even though these authors locate the roots

13 Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (Paris: Gallimard, 19545), 1:114.14 Ibid., 1:11415.15 Edmund Preclin, Les Jansenistes du XVIII sie`cle et la Constitution civile du Clerge (Paris:

Libraire Universitaire J. Gamber, 1929).16 Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale

University Press, 1996). Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuitsfrom France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975). For the concept of origins

Introduction 7

of the Jansenist conict at the turn of the seventeenth century, they limittheir discussions of that period to one chapter and pick up their storiesin earnest in the eighteenth century.

The result from these studies is that we now have detailed narratives ofthe eighteenth-century Jansenist debates as they wended their way in andout of various educational, legal, and political institutions leading up tothe French Revolution. However, no such narrative exists for the seven-teenth century. Instead, we have separate histories for various institutions(the Sorbonne, the General Assembly of the Clergy, the monarchy, etc.)in which the topic of Jansenism arises on occasion. Without a compre-hensive narrative of how politics and Jansenism intersected across theseventeenth century, it is difcult to explain why Louis XIV persecutedthe Port-Royal nuns for heresy with such urgency and why they, in turn,resisted. Thus, to uncover the nuns resistance to the king, we must alsoreconstruct the history of seventeenth-century Jansenist politics. Bothtasks entail shunting aside the myth of Port-Royal.

Port-Royal and Jansenism: An Integrated View

To unpack the myth of Port-Royal and return the nuns to the historicalrecord as agents in a struggle against their king, this book begins withthree assertions. First, anxiety over womens leadership in reforming theFrench Church following the Wars of Religion gave rise to a unique pre-occupation with heretical plots in the French Jansenist debates. Second,the Port-Royal nuns were politically conscious at the same time that theywere religious in their behavior. Third, the French monarchy laid thefoundation for its claims to divine right rule through the persecution ofPort-Royal. These three factors set the stage for Louis XIVs conict withthe Port-Royal nuns.

Chapter 1 examines how social anxieties triggered by womens ini-tiatives to rebuild the French Church following the Wars of Religion17

contributed to the outbreak of the Jansenist debates in France. The theo-logical debates originated in Belgium, but France was where polemicistsaccused one another of heresy and plotting to destroy the Church. Jansens

and the French Revolution see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the FrenchRevolution. Transl. Lydia Cochrane (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 47.

17 Elizabeth Rapley, The Devotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990) 2341. Barbara Diefendorf, FromPenitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004).


critics bolstered their accusations by drawing on the traditional polemicaltrope associating women with heresy. They found a convenient opportu-nity to use this trope in the case of Saint-Cyran. Yet this opportunity onlyexisted because Angelique Arnauld was a prominent reformer in her ownright whose initiatives had already generated considerable controversyand anxiety in French society. By linking Angelique to Jansen, polemi-cists infused their anti-Jansenist discourses with these contemporary fearsand anxieties stemming from her leadership. This overlap between anti-Jansenism and anxiety over female leadership at Port-Royal became anenduring feature of the Jansenist debates.

Chapter 2 explains how the accusations of heresy leveled against thePort-Royal nuns generated among them a new political consciousness. Bypolitical consciousness I mean that the nuns became more sensitive torelationships of inuence both inside and outside the convent, and theyengaged in power struggles to shape the character and policies of the insti-tutions to which they belonged. The nuns approach to politics was rootedin the ideas of Augustine, who believed in a close relationship betweenhuman politics and faith.18 For Augustine, Christians were disinterestedin politics in the sense that, unlike Judaism or Islam, which carried theirown legal codes, the form of government and laws to which Christiansadhered did not matter.19 What did matter was whether politics createdoccasions for impiety and sin.20 He argued that Christians both menand women had a duty to prevent sin both in their own actions and inthe actions of others.21 Augustine emphasized this communal responsi-bility to avoid sin in his work City of God, defending Christianity fromaccusations that it had caused the fall of Rome.22 Rather than weakeningthe polity, he maintained that Christianity created model patriots becauseChristians were vigilant against vice and corruption, the true causes of thedecline of cities and nations. Therefore, Christians were a great benetfor the republic because their religious duty to combat sin overlapped

18 Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianityand Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 35.

19 Ernest Fortin, Introduction. In Augustine: Political Writings, ed. Ernest L. Fortinand Douglas Kries, trans. Michael W. Tkacz and Douglas Kries (Indianapolis: Hackett,1994), viii.

20 Ibid., vii. The quote comes from City of God, V 17.21 Augustine of Hippo, City of God (425), book 19, chapter 16. Catholic Encyclopedia,

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm.: To be innocent, we must not only doharm to no man, but also restrain him from sin or punish his sin. On the equality ofmen and women in the potential for sin, see Augustine, On the Trinity.

22 Fortin, Introduction, ix.

Introduction 9

with the needs of their polity.23 This imperative to combat sin was thejustication for and motivation behind the nuns political behavior.

Other political ideas that the nuns took from Augustine included theassumption that political authority, regardless of its form (monarchy,republic, oligarchy, etc.), is patriarchal by nature.24 They also subscribedto Augustines position that political authority could be used to disciplineheterodox Christians to bring them back to orthodoxy. Augustine arguedthis position during the Donatist controversy, in which he justied theuse of fear and coercion against Donatists as a softening up processor a teaching by inconveniences that would make them more receptiveto true religion.25 His support for the use of force against Donatists isthe corollary to his belief that Christians must accept oppression andsuffering as natural consequences of the human condition. Using themetaphor of the olive press, Augustine argued that the pressurae mundi(the calamities inicted on the human community) always had a positiveresult on the spirit: The world reels under crushing blows; the old man isshaken out, the esh is pressed, the spirit turns to clear owing oil.26 Hecounseled Christians to embrace their suffering, be it the result of politicalor natural forces, as a form of positive discipline designed to purify theirspirit.

Augustines ideas, which posit an intimate relationship between per-sonal faith and human politics, formed the basis of the nuns politi-cal consciousness and explain why they engaged in the Jansenist con-troversy. When polemicists rst began accusing the Port-Royal nuns ofheresy, Saint-Cyran counseled Angelique to view these attacks as pres-surae mundi, ultimately sent to her by the grace of God to purify her spiritand her reforms. From then on, whenever the convent came under attackAngelique prompted the Port-Royal nuns to turn inward and redoubletheir efforts to combat sin within themselves and in the cloister. As theyfocused their energies inward, they also believed that their personal bat-tles to combat sin were consistent with the needs to combat sin withinthe polity, and that they might even produce real results in this outsidebattle.

23 Ibid., xii. The quote comes from Augustines Letter 138, 2.24 Augustine, City of God, book 19, ch. 16. Peter Brown argues that the paternalism he

suggests as the ideal form of government was based on his own experiences as bishop.Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press,2000), 324.

25 Ibid., 233.26 Serm, 6; cf. Ep. 111, 2. Cited in Ibid., 232.


Chapter 3 introduces the notion that the French Crown persecutedJansenism and by extension the Port-Royal nuns as a strategy tocombat the loyal opposition of noble elites who saw themselves as pro-tecting the Crown from Cardinal Jules Mazarin (1602-61), the powerfulroyal minister that they considered to be a foreign usurper.27 Mazarindeveloped this strategy during the Fronde (164853) when he threw hisweight behind a clerical faction demanding a papal bull against Jansenin the hopes that it would help him dispose of Jean-Francois Paul deGondi, the Cardinal de Retz (161379), archlorshop or Paris, and leaderof a rebellious faction of nobles. Mazarin attacked Port-Royal, then thelargest convent under Retzs jurisdiction, as part of this campaign toundermine his rivals authority. However, this meddling in the Jansenistdebates ignited opposition from bishops and members of Parlement whoargued that Mazarins request for the bull favored papal authority at theexpense of the traditional liberties of the French, or Gallican, Church.Mazarin responded to this Gallican resistance by accusing these recalci-trant bishops and parlementaires of Jansenism. Accusations of Jansenism which implied threats of incarceration and excommunication thusbecame Mazarins tool for intimidating those who opposed him in thename of defending the liberties of the Gallican Church. When Louis XIVcame to power in 1661, he further intimidated Gallican bishops and mag-istrates by declaring the campaign against Jansenism a matter of personalconscience. Within a decade, therefore, Mazarins strategy of persecutingJansenism became an institutionalized royal policy used to bolster theCrowns authority vis-a`-vis elites in the French Church and Parlement.

Agency and Feminism at Port-Royal

The rst three chapters outline the necessary preconditions for the conictbetween the king and nuns that led to Port-Royals destruction. In theremaining chapters, I describe how these developments interacted underLouis XIVs reign. To explain how the conict between king and nunsdeveloped over time, I have found particularly useful the methods of J. G.A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and others whose works are associated withthe Cambridge School for the study of early modern political thought.These scholars share a concern for how human agents employed language

27 Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of AbsoluteMonarchy in France, 16001789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996),11923.

Introduction 11

to suit their political purposes in the premodern era. They acknowledgethat human agents receive language in a preexisting form, which containsmeanings, discourses, and conventions beyond ones control. Neverthe-less, they reject the notion that set language forms determine and denehuman consciousness. Instead, they argue that individual agents ndwaysto create new meanings of language by using it selectively in specic polit-ical and social contexts.28 This ability to create new meanings of languagein turn opens the possibility for new ideological contexts and new formsof political behavior. Political actors thus both create and perpetuate adynamic relationship between linguistic meaning and its context.

Skinners work, which employs the speech act theory of J. L. Austen torecover authorial intention in the writings of early modern authors, hasbeen particularly inuential to this study.29 Skinner calls for a reading oftexts that takes both their locutionary and illocutionary meaningsinto consideration. Locutionary meaning refers to the sense of thewords within the utterance itself, and illocutionary meaning refers tothe performative action and force intended by the author in uttering thosewords. Skinner argues that, to fully understand the meaning of historicaltexts, we must consider both the linguistic content and the linguistic forceintended by their authors when writing these texts.30

The religious debates over Jansenism evolved into a political conictbetween king and nuns because of how human agents invested the debateswith new meanings by situating them strategically within new linguisticand ideological contexts. When tracing male polemicists agency in thisdevelopment, the method is straightforward. For instance, one can clearlydetect the moment when French controversialists tied the problem ofJansen to anxieties over women by locating the passages where they rstmentioned women in their published polemical works.

In contrast, detecting the nuns agency is more difcult because of theway gender via the Pauline interdictions shaped their relationship withlanguage. The Pauline interdictions established the tradition of femalesilence in the Church on the basis of ancient assumptions about womensnatural inferiority and vulnerability to corruption. Because of a fear thatwomen were more vulnerable to sin, the Church commanded silence so

28 Anthony Pagden, Introduction. In The Languages of Political Theory in Early-ModernEurope, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 12.

29 J. L. Austen, How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered atHarvard University in 1955 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).

30 Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Volume I: The Renais-sance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), preface.


that they would be more obedient (the verb to obey is rooted in theGreek word to listen). For the nuns, this tradition of silence and obe-dience meant that they could not openly adopt or manipulate discoursesthe way men did. Instead, they had to approach language using whatscholars of Teresa of Avila have identied as a rhetoric for women.31

This rhetoric is a strategy of persuasion appropriate for both womenwriters and readers because it transmits knowledge about faith and theChurch without using the vocabulary or terminology of trained theolo-gians. Early modern women developed a remarkable variety of rhetoricalstrategies to circumvent the restrictions placed on their sex, ranging fromthe self-deprecating rhetoric of femininity used by Teresa of Avila,32

the psychological automatism33 of the mystical revelations of Barbe ofAcarie, to the audacious refashioning of the perfect nun by Juana Inesde la Cruz.34

In the case of the Port-Royal nuns, I call their rhetorical strategy thescience of saints, which I dene according to how Saint-Cyran usedthe term. Saint-Cyran described the science of saints as the oppositeof scholasticism. Whereas scholasticism involved discovering the truththrough conscious reection and reasoning over sacred texts, the scienceof saints involved receiving wisdom in ways that were above [human]nature . . . [and] seemingly in contradictionwith reason.35 Although peo-ple received this wisdom without using reason, Saint-Cyran believed thatthey internalized it alongside reason to the point that one could hardlydistinguish between the two sources of knowledge. It was no accidentthat all of the Churchs greatest theologians were also saints who ledexemplary lives.36 This aspect of the science of saints overlaps with themedieval ideal of concordia, or complete harmony between ones beliefswith ones actions.37 Concordia meant that whatever these great theolo-gians taught in words they also taught through example. For Saint-Cyran,

31 Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990), 1011.

32 Ibid., 11.33 Linda Timmermans, LAcce`s des femmes a` la culture (15971715) (Paris: Honore Cham-

pion, 1993), 521.34 Kathleen Ann Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish

America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93115.35 Jean Orcibal, La spiritualite de Saint-Cyran avec ses ecrits de piete inedits (Paris: Vrin,

1962), 110.36 Ibid., 111.37 John Martin, Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Indi-

vidual in Renaissance Europe, American Historical Review 102 (Dec. 1997): 130942.

Introduction 13

this ideal was what excluded his Jesuit opponents from the tradition ofsaints. He noted that, of all the saintly theologians, only two from thescholastic tradition (the tradition championed by his Jesuit opponents)had ever been canonized. The problem with the scholastics was that theiremphasis on reason derived from a human appetite for wisdom, the libidosciendi, and not from a true inner desire to submit to Gods grace.38 Thehuman origins of their search for knowledge meant that they could neverachieve the perfection of concordia.

Saint-Cyrans science of saints had special signicance for the nuns. If aChristian could read the scholarship of saintly theologians or contemplatetheir exemplary lives to equal benet, then the Pauline interdictions in noway disadvantaged women because even though they could not readtheological texts, the nuns still had full access to these mens theologicalinsights by observing their pious examples. Conversely, when it cameto the Jansenist debates, the notion that saints exemplary lives werelegitimate expressions of their theological truth meant that these womencould uphold these truths guratively by modeling themselves after thesesaints.39

The concept of the science of saints allows us to see that the Port-Royal nuns too strategically manipulated discourses within the shiftingtheological and political contexts of the Jansenist debates, but in theircase, they communicated guratively by modeling the exemplary andpious behaviors valued by Jansens apologists. Because their writingsalways had locutionary meanings that were grounded in the concernsand actions of pious Christians, these texts took on political signicanceonly at the illocutionary level. In other words, to detect the nuns agencyin the Jansenist debates, we must focus on the performative force of theirpious discourses and on how they implicitly supported or discredited themore overt theological and political discourses of male polemicists.

The Pauline restrictions are only one reason it is harder to detectthe nuns agency in these debates. Another reason has to do with theAugustinian roots of their ideas about politics. Augustines most politicalwork,City of God, rarely mentions the word politics. He remains silenton the subject because he forwards a political theory that paradoxicallydenies its political nature because in his view Christians should engage

38 Jean Orcibal, La spiritualite de Saint-Cyran, 110.39 Angelique Arnaulds older brother Antoine Arnauld dAndilly (15891674) published

several translations of books of saints lives for Port-Royal, including the complete worksof Teresa of Avila. His published works are listed in his entry in the Dictionnaire de Port-Royal.


in politics only to avoid sin. Even though Christians act politically in thesense that they try to persuade others in the decision-making process,Augustine denes these actions as religious and not political because theyare motivated by divine grace and not by human volition and its willto power. Therefore, as in the case of their language, the nuns politicalactions are more difcult to detect because they remain grounded indiscourses of religion that deny any human interest or agency behindtheir acts.

Although the nuns complex relationship to language and politics hasdeep roots in the Christian tradition, these women remain elusive tous because of the way social scientists have dened agency to privilegetraditionally masculine and humanistic behaviors in the Western tra-dition.40 Nevertheless, once we consider the nuns behavior according totheir own principles about language and politics principles that causedthem to deny their own agency at the very moment they sought to inu-ence others we see that they, too, strategically moved discourses withindifferent contexts to create new meanings and ideological contexts. Theiractions also shaped the course of the Jansenist debates and promptedLouis XIV to see them as a threat to his authority.

Limits to Absolutism and Early Modern Feminism

The methods of the Cambridge School help explain how the Jansenistdebates evolved over time. These methods also help us see how Jansenismrelates to the histories of absolutism and feminism. In the case of abso-lutism, Dale Van Kley credits Jansenism for limiting absolute authorityin ways that contributed to the outbreak of the French Revolution. Hisexplanation for why Jansenism brought absolutism to its knees has todo with the way it reected and opposed the foundations of divine rightmonarchy.41 As the French Crown tried to raise itself above the con-fessional fray following the Wars of Religion, Jansenism synthesized thetwo poles of religious opposition that had challenged its authority duringthe civil wars: What marched under the banner of Jansenism some-how united some of the biblical, doctrinal, and presbyterian ecclesiasticaltendencies of the Protestant Reformation with the apologetical miracles

40 Webb Keane, From Fetishism to Sincerity: On Agency, the Speaking Subject, and TheirHistoricity in the Context of Religious Conversion, Comparative Studies in Society andHistory 39 (1997): 676.

41 Van Kley, Religious Origins of the French Revolution, 12.

Introduction 15

and some of the chief social constituencies of the Catholic League.42

Catherine Maire similarly describes Jansenism as a polar opposite toabsolutism: [Jansenism] was [absolutisms] . . . religious mirror, its phan-tom. . . . Against the political religion of reason of State, Jansenismopposed a religious politics, that of an absolute God.43 Whereas his-torians have found this reexive relationship useful for explaining whyJansenism successfully limited absolute authority, the question of howthis movement somehow united these different religious factions, orhow it became absolutisms religious mirror in the rst place remainsunanswered. This study argues that this reexive and oppositional rela-tionship between absolutism and Jansenism derived from the Port-Royalnuns resistance to persecution. This persecution originated in the gen-eral disorder and turbulent political climate following the Wars of Reli-gion. In these years, Angelique unwittingly sparked controversy throughher reform efforts and allied herself with Saint-Cyran one of Riche-lieus devout critics out of circumstance and necessity. Later, once theCrown began persecuting Port-Royal as part of its campaign to sup-press Gallican resistance among French bishops and parlementaires, thenuns resisted strategically by moving their discourses about their obser-vance of the Benedictine Rule into the new ideological context createdby the Crown so that when they defended their reform, their argumentshad the force of supporting the Gallican cause. The mirror oppositionbetween Jansenism and absolutism by this point was no accident; it wasthe product of the cumulative layers of meaning that became attached toPort-Royals reform as the nuns defended it within different ideologicalcontexts.

Attention to the dynamic relationship between meaning and context,a central notion of the Cambridge School, helps explain how Jansenismbecame the mirror opposite to absolutism. Another central concept fromthis school that all speech acts contain both locutionary and illocu-tionary meanings helps us situate the nuns resistance to the Crownwithin the history of feminism. One of the more persistent and con-tested issues among historians of women is how to dene feminism inthe past. Although nobody questions the modern origins of the termfeminism in its ideological sense, there is debate over whether we canstill call past instances of female agency and resistance against patriarchy

42 Ibid.43 Catherine Maire, Port-Royal: La fracture janseniste. In Les Lieux de memoire, vol 3,

Les France, book 1: conits et partages, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 474.


feminism. Some historians have dealt with the problem by avoiding theterm altogether in studies that consider the period before the late nine-teenth century, which was when the word rst came into use.44

Others, notably Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, have dealt withthis problem by arguing that we should not consider instances of earlymodern feminism as isolated precursors to the real feminism of themodern period, but as instances of feminist activity that are specic totheir historical context. To this end, Akkerman and Stuurman have iden-tied six subperiods or waves of feminism starting with late medievaland Renaissance feminism (14001600) and ending with contemporaryfeminism (1960present). According to their periodization, the Jansenistdebates correspondedwith the wave of rationalist feminism (17001800),the era when the long-standing querelle des femmes (a literary debate overthe status of women that dated to the fteenth century) became increas-ingly focused on the question of womens capacity for reason and accessto learning.45

Joan Scott has also argued that feminism must be viewed as contingentto its specic historical and cultural context, but she posits a differentmethod for identifying its expression in her work, Only Paradoxes toOffer.46 Drawing from the words and example set by the eighteenth-century feminist Olympe de Gouges, Scott argues that feminists are thosewho raise and confront the paradoxes of an ideological system thatespouses universal equality (in de Gouges case, the liberal ideology ofthe 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen ) while it upholdssexual difference as a natural fact and basis for social differentiation. Scottmaintains that de Gouges strategy of exposing paradoxes is a fundamen-tal element of feminism: The paradoxes I refer to are not the strategies ofopposition, but the constitutive elements of feminism itself.47 By den-ing feminism as paradoxical in expression, Scott creates the possibilityfor a comparative approach that subordinates ideological differencesamong women to a structure of agency.48

44 Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought inEuropean History (London: Routledge, 1998), 2.

45 Ibid., 12. Joan Kelly, Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes. In Women,History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1986, 65109. Timmermans, LAcce`s des femmes a` la culture, 20.

46 Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man.(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

47 Ibid., 5.48 Ibid., 16.

Introduction 17

The advantage of Scotts method for this study is that she essentiallydenes feminism as a speech act that uses gender paradoxes to create anillocutionary force of asserting female equality. The Port-Royal nuns per-formed this type of speech act for a brief moment in 1664 after the arch-bishop of Paris ordered them to sign the formulary condemning Jansenout of human and ecclesiastical faith. The notion of human faith wasan old one used to denote the component of faith that is based on crediblehuman authorities and reason. From the nuns perspective, the archbishoprelegated their consciences to second-class status by asserting that theyshould make their oath out of human faith, not out of a fully divinefaith. The nuns sense of mistreatment was further reinforced when thearchbishop met with them individually to pressure them to sign throughthreats and intimidation. When the nuns resisted as they had before withgender-based arguments that highlighted the contradictions between theChurchs command for silence and the kings command for their judg-ment against Jansen, their resistance took on the force of asserting femaleequality inmatters of faith and conscience. In this way, the nuns feminismwent beyond that of most secular feminists of the day, for although theirfocus on the contradictions of Louis XIVs policies were tacit assertionsof womens capacity for reason, their defense of female reason entailed ademand for equal rights (in this case, the right to conscience).

This brief moment of feminism reveals how discourses over religion,gender, and reason combined under pressure from absolutism in the sev-enteenth century to pry open a space for the more radical language ofindividual equality that came to dominate the eighteenth century. ThePort-Royal nuns became part of this moment of rupture because of theirbelief in the Augustinian notion that both men and women shared thesame potential for sin.49 Thus their defense of reason was not orientedtoward an Enlightenment belief in human progress but toward a Christianimperative of protecting ones soul from eternal damnation. Nevertheless,by staying committed to a particular worldview and set of beliefs in theface of the new invasion of conscience by Louis XIV, their struggle openeda door in which individual equality could be articulated.

49 Michael Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2003), 40.

1Jansenism as a Woman Problem

Jansenism was the product of a theological debate that erupted at the Uni-versity of Louvain shortly after the posthumous publication of CorneliusJansens Augustinus in 1640.1 Augustinus not only revived theologicaldebates over efcacious versus sufcient grace within the Catholic Churchbut it also exacerbated tensions between members of the regular and sec-ular clergy when Jansen, a bishop, attacked the Jesuit order by likeningthe theses of recent Jesuit theologians to the heretical doctrine of ancientPelagian authors.2 The Jesuits of Louvain countered with the charge thatJansen was the one who was reviving doctrinal errors by repeating themistakes of Michael Baius, who preceded him on the faculty at Louvainand whose writings had been censored by Pope Pius V in 1567.3

Even though these debates over Augustinus originated in Belgium, theybecame most volatile in France and resulted in bitter factional strugglesinvolving public denunciations and arrests for heresy. Among the reasonsfor this vehemence was a pervasive anxiety over the social readjustmentstaking place among the French nobility in the years following the Warsof Religion. These readjustments involved an increase in the number ofnew robe nobles who, in contrast to the traditional sword nobles,gained their title through professional and administrative service rather

1 Jean Orcibal, Jansenius dYpres (15851638) (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1989), 1556. Leopold Willaert, S.J., Les origines du jansenisme dans les Pays-Bas Catholiques(Brussels: 1948).

2 Lucien Ceyssens, Que penser nalement de lhistoire du jansenisme et de lantijan-senisme? Revue dhistoire ecclesiastiques 88 (JanMar 1993): 10830. Antoine Adam.

3 Francois de Cleyn, Histoire de la controverse janseniste (1645), trans. Leon Wuillaume(Rome: Institutum Historicum, 2001), 165.

18

Jansenism as a Woman Problem 19

than military service to the Crown.4 The integration of these new familiesinto the nobility most notably through the 1604 edict of the paulettemaking most venal ofces fully inheritable gave rise to a debate overto what extent individual talent, merit, and virtue could be legitimatecriteria for ennoblement.5

As Carolyn Lougee has demonstrated, anxiety over the social mobilityof new nobles was expressed in a revival of the querelle des femmes in therst half of the seventeenth century because of womens important role inintegrating new families into noble society in their salons.6 In the seven-teenth century, this long-standing literary debate over the inherent natureof women became more narrowly focused on whether women asserted apositive or negative inuence on French society.7 Those who supportedthe new social mobility within the nobility forwarded pro-women or fem-inist positions lauding womens moral and intellectual contributions tosociety, whereas those opposed to this change adopted traditional misog-ynist discourses tying women to social unrest and disorder.8

This anxiety among the nobility and the accompanying querelle desfemmes became integral to Jansenism through the case of Port-Royalsreforming abbess, Angelique Arnauld. Angeliques story reveals how thesame social tensions and cultural arguments found in Parisian salonswere also taking place in the Church. Angelique was the third child andsecond daughter of Antoine Arnauld Sr. and Catherine Marion, bothof whom came from families that had been recently ennobled throughadministrative service to the Crown.9 When Angelique was eight yearsold, her family had her named coadjutor to the abbess of Port-Royal-des-Champs, a thirteenth-century Cistercian convent that traditionally hadbeen governed by daughters from the noble families that controlled Port-Royals neighboring estates. She became abbess in 1602 at the age of ten.Then, on the eve of her eighteenth birthday, she reformed Port-Royal toa strict obedience of the Benedictine Rule.

4 Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit, 13.5 Carolyn Lougee, Le paradis des femmes: Women, salons, and social stratication in

seventeenth-century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 4233.Smith, The Culture of Merit, 845.

6 Lougee, Le paradis des femmes, 6.7 Ibid., 5.8 Ibid., 6.9 Alexander Sedgwick, The Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancien

Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Angeliques father is com-monly referred to as Antoine Arnauld Sr. to distinguish him from his more famous sonwho shares his name.


At rst, the male Cistercian leadership applauded her reform and com-missioned her to reform other convents. But when it became clear thather strict obedience to the Benedictine Rule led her to go so far as topromote women to leadership positions based on their merit alone and,in some cases, at the expense of women from more prestigious families,these leaders withdrew their support. Anxiety over Angeliques commit-ment to social mobility eventually led to a querelle des femmes in acontroversy known as the Secret Chaplet affair in 1633. In this querelle,(which erupted seven years before the publication of Jansens Augusti-nus) Angeliques critics forwarded the misogynist argument that as adisorderly woman, Angelique was naturally susceptible to heresy. Hersupporters adopted the feminist position that women were equal to menin their capacity to sin, and that it was her critics, and not Angelique,who were causing disorder.

Angelique was not the only woman in the French Church to sparka querelle des femmes. Catholic thinkers began debating the womanproblem after numerous women, both lay and religious, distinguishedthemselves as enthusiastic, dedicated, and self-disciplined revitalizers ofthe Church in the years following the Wars of Religion.10 However, inAngeliques case, the querelle des femmes at Port-Royal transformed intoa larger controversy when Catholic polemicists exploited her associationwith Jansens close friend and ally, Saint-Cyran, to argue that Augustinuswas part of a heretical plot to undermine the French Church.

When these polemicists appropriated misogynist discourses associat-ing women with heresy to enhance their anti-Jansenist positions, theygave new meaning to Jansenism. In France, Jansenism grew to becomesomething more than a theological debate among clerics. It became awoman problem that reected pervasive anxieties over readjustmentsand cultural changes within French society.

Port-Royals Reform and Early Controversies

Angelique Arnauld was one of several important female reformers whoreshaped the Church in the rst decades of the seventeenth century. Thestory of her reform especially the dramatic journee du guichet (day of thewicket gate)11 on which she reestablished enclosure at Port-Royal against

10 Linda Timmermans, LAcce`s des femmes a` la culture, 399405.11 The wicket gate is a small window set within the convent door through which people on

either side can communicate.


her fathers will is famous in France. Her lial disobedience has cometo represent the independent spirit associated with Jansenist resistanceto despotism.12 Yet at the time of her reform, Angeliques conicts hadnothing to do with Jansenism and were instead rooted in challenges shefaced to her authority as abbess because of her familys relative low socialstatus among nobles. Her response to those challenges was to reform Port-Royal in a way that aligned the values associated with the robe nobilitywith the Benedictine Rule. Just as these nobles relied on the new valuefor individual merit, social mobility, and dutiful service to royal ofceas criteria for their promotions, Angelique emphasized the BenedictineRules call for selecting members based on religious vocation, its positionagainst dowries as a necessary condition for entry to the religious life,and its repeated call for obedience to its tenets to secure her authorityas abbess. However, her synthesis of robe and Benedictine values provedto be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, her reform bolstered herauthority as abbess, secured her familys endowment at Port-Royal, andincreased her familys prestige among other nobles. On the other hand,her reform created turmoil within her family, put her at odds with otherreformers, and eventually sparked a debate over heresy at Port-Royal.

Angelique rst developed her synthesis of robe and monastic values ata time of fervent reform in France. After the Wars of Religion, many peo-ple embraced more ascetic and disciplined forms of Catholic worship.13

Within the Cistercian order this trend took the form of the strict obser-vancemovement that developed at the abbeys of Citeaux andClairvaux.14

Angelique developed close ties with the leaders of this movement andadopted many of its practices, including the controversial abstinence fromeating meat.15 Although her reform strategy t into these broader trendsin the French Church, the exact timing of the reform of the Port-Royalconvent in 1609 had signicant consequences for her and her family. Infact, Angeliques reform secured her familys endowment at Port-Royalat the very moment it faced the possibility of losing it.

The familys hold on Port-Royal was tenuous from the beginning be-cause it had lied about her age as well as that of her younger sisterAgne`s when petitioning to have them named coadjutor to the abbesses

12 Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 1:17677.13 Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 68.14 Louis J. Lekai, The Rise of the Cistercian Strict Observance in Seventeenth-Century

France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968).15 Louis Cognet, La reforme de Port-Royal, 15911618 (Paris: Editions Sulliver, 1950),

1924.


of Port-Royal and Saint-Cyr, respectively, in 1598. The girls were onlyeight and ve years old at the time, well below the age of consent forthe Church, which was sixteen, and even further below the required ageof eighteen to hold ofce as an abbess.16 In Angeliques memoirs, com-posed many years after the fact in 1655, she attributed her familys lie tosocial ambition.17 Studies of families within the robe nobility and wealthymerchant classes support her assessment. These families actively soughtto integrate themselves into the existing nobility through marriage, bypurchasing landed estates, and by seeking Church beneces for youngeroffspring.18 Placing the girls at these two convents ts this pattern. Bothconvents were ancient institutions traditionally populated by daughters oflocal noble families with long lineages, and placing daughters among theseolder nobles was a way for a family to advance its prestige. These place-ments also t into a common pattern in which older families accepted newelites within their ranks because they brought with them new money.19

For example, when Angelique became coadjutor to Port-Royals abbess,her family contracted workers to renovate several of the convents dilap-idated structures.20 These were repairs the families who traditionallyplaced daughters at Port-Royal could no longer afford to fund.

Although the lie about the girls ages was a sign of ambition, it alsoreected a sense of urgency within the family because of circumstance.When the Arnauld family began seeking positions for its daughters inconvents, there were already six children four of whom were girls.Because dowries to join convents were cheaper than marriage dowries,families with multiple daughters typically placed them in convents asan economizing measure. The familys concern for securing its daughtersfutures was exacerbated by insecurities over its prospects for gaining royalpatronage. Angeliques father, the politique lawyer Antoine Arnauld Sr.,should have been a logical candidate for such patronage, as Henry IV

16 Cognet, La reforme, 1819.17 Marie-Angelique de Sainte Madeleine Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-

Angelique Arnauld de ce qui est arrive de plus considerable dans Port-Royal. Ed. JeanLesaulnier. Chroniques de Port-Royal 41 (1992): 11.

18 Robert Forster, Merchants, Landlords, Magistrates: The Dupont Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 324. Nancy LymanRoelker, One King, One Faith: The Parlement of Paris and the Religious Reformationsof the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 4958.

19 Robert R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of EarlyModern France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 1608. Donna Bohanan,Crown and Nobility in Early Modern France (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 16.

20 Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-Angelique, 1213.


rewarded the loyalty of the politiques with the bulk of his patronage afterthe Wars of Religion.21 Angeliques father, however, was a controversialclient because his claim to fame was the 1594 trial in which he arguedbefore Parlement on behalf of the Sorbonne faculty to have Jesuit andCapuchin priests removed from its ranks. The family realized that, asthe recently converted Henry IV tried to improve relations with Rome,Arnaulds attack against the Jesuits and Capuchins which ultimatelyled to their expulsion from France would make him a difcult client torecommend to papal authorities.

Recognizing that Antoine Arnauld Sr. was a weak candidate for royalpatronage, the family put the girls grandfather Simon Marion in chargeof soliciting their nominations to ecclesiastical ofces. The well-connectedMarion had no trouble receiving a royal brevet in 1598 naming the girlscoadjutors to the abbesses of Port-Royal and Saint-Cyr. As for solicitingpapal approval for these nominations, the family lied to papal authori-ties about the girls ages, making them appear older than they actuallywere.22 Angeliques bull of conrmation listed her age at seventeen.23

The bulls also stressed Marions piety and generosity as the rationale forthe girls conrmations. For instance, Angeliques bull cited the extraor-dinary piety of M. Marion and described how he had already savedPort-Royal from certain ruin through his generous nancial support.24

Such emphasis on Marions good qualities no doubt reected the familysefforts to deect attention away from the controversial aspects of theArnauld familys reputation.

According to Angeliques memoirs, her familys lie and all the ambitionit represented doomed her to a dangerous and unhappy childhood.25 Itwas dangerous because her family, caring more about social prestige thanher religious education, did little to protect her from sin. For instance,during her novitiate, her parents put her under the care of AngeliquedEstree, the abbess of Maubuisson. Maubuisson was notorious for host-ing concerts, balls and illicit rendezvous between Henry IV and hismistress Gabrielle dEstree, the abbesss sister.26 In addition to exposing

21 Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate, 15891661 (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1996), 392.

22 Cognet, La Reforme, 28.23 Ibid., 29.24 Ibid.25 Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-Angelique, 14.26 Genevie`ve Reynes, Couvents de femmes: La vie des religieuses clotrees dans la France

des XVIIe et XVIIIe sie`cles (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 92.


her to sin, the Arnaulds doomed their daughter to unhappiness becauseas a young girl she had no vocation for the religious life. When shereturned to Port-Royal after her novitiate at Maubuisson, she describedhow she spent her days walking in the countryside to visit with neighborsor reading the Lives of Plutarch.27

Angeliques negative attitude toward the religious life changed in 1608,however, after a Capuchin monk delivered a sermon at Port-Royal. Shedescribed in her memoirs how, after hearing his sermon on the Beati-tudes, she was suddenly struck with a desire to be a nun.28 Her conver-sion resulted in the journee du guichet. In her memoirs, she describedhow, up to that day, her parents had treated Port-Royal as a personalcountry estate, entering the cloister at will to visit her and oversee theconvents affairs. When they realized that she had locked them out in thename of religion, her parents especially her father started poundingat the doors, yelling at her, and denouncing her as a disobedient, patri-cidal, ungrateful daughter.29 Angeliques niece Angelique de Saint-Jeandescribed in a relation how her aunt suffered tremendously during thisordeal and was only able to hold her ground because of a higher forcethat propelled her to obey the Benedictine Rule over her father.30

Angeliques embrace in her adolescent years of ascetic religious prac-tices against her familys wishes follows a pattern found in memoirs writ-ten by children of the robe nobility in the seventeenth century.31 Manymemorialists described how they struggled to submit to their familysdemands before they found relief by embracing the religious life.32 Atrst glance, Angelique seems typical in her quest for autonomy withina family that raised her to obey without question its decisions for her

27 Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-Angelique, 14.28 Ibid., 16.29 Angelique de Saint-Jean Arnauld dAndilly, Relation sur la vie de la Reverende Me`re

Angelique de Sainte-Magdelaine Arnauld. In Memoires pour servir a` lhistoire de PortRoyal et a` la vie de la Reverende Me`re Marie Angelique de Sainte Magdeleine Arnauld,reformatrice de ce monaste`re, Angelique de Saint-Jean Arnauld dAndilly ed., 3 vols.(Utrecht, 1742), Vol. 1: 458.

30 Ibid., 50. The painful detachment Angelique felt from the rupture with her father issimilar to that described by Teresa of Avila in her writings. Alison Weber, Teresa ofAvila, 57.

31 Barbara Diefendorf, Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and ParentalConsent to Religious Vocations in Early Counter-Reformation France, Journal of Mod-ern History 68 (1996): 266. Most of the children studied by Diefendorf came fromelite and noble families. They joined religious orders such as the Jesuits, Capuchins,Carmelites, and Feuillantines.

32 Ibid., 274.


future. Yet in her case, the conventional elements of her story cover up adeeper conict in which she reformed Port-Royal to defend her positionas abbess after her family experienced setbacks that made her author-ity vulnerable to outside challengers. The rst of these setbacks was thepublication in 1602 of her fathers Franc et veritable discours au Roysur le retablissement qui luy est demande pour les Jesuites (A Plain andSincere Discourse to the King Concerning the Reestablishment of theJesuits), a pamphlet that repeated much of his 1594 anti-Jesuit speech,with special emphasis on the dangers inherent in the Jesuits position thatthe Pope has the power to excommunicate kings and to exempt subjectsfrom their oaths of allegiance to the Crown.33 This publication, whichappeared on the eve of an agreement between Henry IV and the popeto readmit Jesuit and Capuchin monks in France resulted in AntoineArnauld Sr.s disgrace after the king received it as an obstruction to hisefforts to cooperate with Rome.34 Three years later, Simon Marion died.Because his merit had been the rationale for nominating Angelique andAgne`s to their ofces, his demise, in conjunction with their continuingminority, made their authority as abbess questionable and vulnerable tochallenge. The familys fear of losing control over its Church beneceswas apparently realized in the case of Agne`s, who left Saint-Cyr in 1608for Port-Royal shortly after a group of Capuchin priests began preachingthere.35

This moment, when the family lost Saint-Cyr and when the sameCapuchin monks were also preaching at Port-Royal, was when Ange-lique who was just a few months shy of the legal age for being anabbess initiated her reform. At rst, Angeliques father vehementlyresisted this reform, believing that she was acting under the inuence ofCapuchin monks. He accused the Capuchins of being hypocrites whoused reform as a pretext to gain entry into the house and beg money offof it, which would take the place of having to run their own farm.36

However, once M. Arnauld realized that Angelique was able to direct herreform independently of the Capuchin monks, he supported her.

In fact, as soon as Angelique turned eighteen, M. Arnauld sent a peti-tion to Rome asking the pope to issue new bulls of conrmation for hernomination based on her merit as a reformer. In his petition, Angeliques

33 Antoine Arnauld, Franc et veritable discours au Roy sur le retablissement qui luy estdemande pour les Jesuites (1602).

34 Cognet, La Reforme, 17.35 Ibid., 701.36 Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-Angelique, 18.


father admitted that she had entered the convent at too young an age, butstressed that God had favored her with so much benediction that shehad already established reform at [Port-Royal] at the age of seventeen anda half.37 In the wake of the familys many setbacks, Angeliques reformhad become the best rationale for conrming her nomination. Thus thejournee du guichet conict reected more than teenage rebellion or astruggle for individual autonomy; it reected an upheaval in the socialorder in which the daughter stepped forward to replace her grandfatheras protector of the familys nancial interests and social ambitions atPort-Royal based on her merit as a reformer.

The journee du guichet was the rst of three major conicts Angeliquefaced as a reformer in the years preceding the Jansenist debates. Theremaining two conicts similarly took place when others took advantageof her familys relatively low social status among Frances elite to chal-lenge her authority as an abbess. These conicts occurred at Maubuissonin 1618 after the abbot of Citeaux commissioned her to reform the con-vent, and in Paris in 1635 after she moved there to establish the Instituteof the Holy Sacrament. As in the journee du guichet, Angelique defendedher position in these later conicts by emphasizing her obedience to theBenedictine Rule and, by extension, her merit as a reformer.

At Maubuisson, her plan for reform involved removing the conventsleaders from their ofces and replacing them with new nuns recruitedby her. Angelique encountered considerable resistance in her rst taskwhen the family of Angelique dEstree Maubuissons infamous abbessand Angelique Arnaulds former mentor launched an armed invasionof Maubuisson to defend dEstrees authority over the convent againstAngelique Arnauld, whom they considered an illegitimate usurper. Aspart of this invasion, they evicted Angelique Arnauld from the conventwith their swords drawn.38 Her family defended her in their own fashionby issuing through Parlement arrest warrants for her attackers.39 TheCistercian leadership settled the conict by appointing a new abbess toMaubuisson, Charlotte de Bourbon-Soissons, a daughter of the Bourbonand Conde families. With Soissons as abbess, Maubuisson came under

37 Cognet, La Reforme, 109.38 Arnauld dAndilly, Relation de plusieurs entretiens de la Me`re Angelique avec M. Le

Maitre son neveu, qui les ecrivoit sur le champ dans le dessein de sen servir un jour pourson Histoire. In Memoires pour servir a` lhistoire de Port Royal, Arnauld dAndilly ed.,vol. 1: 2867.

39 Ibid., 288.


the protection of a family that exceeded Angelique dEstreess in militarymight and reputation.40

Angelique returned toMaubuisson to continue her reform efforts there.AlthoughCharlotte de Soissons had helpedAngeliquewith her rst task ofremoving Angelique dEstrees, she balked at her second task of recruitingnew nuns when she realized that Angelique was admitting them withoutdowries. By accepting women from families that had neither the wealthnor the patronage connections to secure a dowry, Angeliques recruitingpractices threatened Maubuissons social prestige. Soissons petitionedthe abbot of Citeaux to remove Angelique from Maubuisson, and whenthe abbot complied, Angelique returned to Port-Royal in 1623, takingwith her thirty nuns including all of those whom she had admitted toMaubuisson without dowries.41

Port-Royals growth in membership after the Maubuisson incidenthelped set the stage for Angeliques third major conict in the yearsbefore the Jansenist debates. This conict erupted after she moved to Parisand partnered with Sebastien Zamet, the bishop of Langres, to found anew religious order called the Institute of the Holy Sacrament. Angeliquedecided to move Port-Royal from its original location at Port-Royal-des-Champs (located twelve miles west of the capital) to a new location,Port-Royal-de-Paris, in the Faubourg St. Jacques in 1625. One reason forthe move was the unhealthy living conditions at Port-Royal-des-Champs,which was situated in a valley surrounded by swamps. There the nunssuffered from malarial fevers, and twenty-seven out of the sixty nunsliving there at the time died between 1623 and 1625.42 Another reasonfor the move was turmoil within the Cistercian order caused by a succes-sion dispute after the death of Denis Largentier, the abbot of Clairvaux.Largentier had been a principal architect of the strict observance move-ment, and the dispute over his successor threatened a backlash against hisadherents.43 Angelique petitioned authorities in Rome for permission to

40 Louis Cognet, Me`re Angelique et St. Francois de Sales. (Paris: Editions Sulliver 1951),167.

41 Ibid., 169.42 William Ritchey Newton, Port Royal and Jansenism: Social Experience, Group For-

mation and Religious Attitudes in Seventeenth Century France (PhD diss., Universityof Michigan, 1974), 162, n218. Angelique reported that there were 60 women livingat Port-Royal-des-Champs in 1623. So the twenty-seven deaths represented 45% of thetotal population.

43 Cognet, La Reforme, 130. Lekai, The Rise of the Cistercian Strict Observance, 13846.Joseph Bergin, Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld: Leadership and Reform in the FrenchChurch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 22247.


remove Port-Royal from the jurisdiction of Citeaux into that of the arch-diocese of Paris. She cited the threat posed to the nuns by the conventsunhealthy climate as the reason for her request.44

Angeliquemoved Port-Royal to Paris in 1626with the help of SebastienZamet, the bishop of Langres.45 Zamet had experience with this type oftransfer, having recently helped the nuns of Notre Dame de Tard transferout from under the jurisdiction of Citeaux and into his own by movingthem into Dijon, the urban center of his diocese.46 While discussing Port-Royals transfer, Angelique and Zamet decided to collaborate on a projectto found a new religious order based on the perpetual adoration of theEucharist. They called their new order the Institute of the Holy Sacramentand envisioned it as the monastic counterpart to the Company of the HolySacrament, a secret lay society that was currently being formed at thattime.47 They hoped that branches of their contemplative female institutewould proliferate alongside male chapters of the company in cities acrossFrance and serve them as institutional centers for prayer and worship.To get started, they exchanged nuns between the convents of Tard andPort-Royal, with the goal of eventually combining the two communitiesto form their institute.48 With signicant help from Angeliques sisterAgne`s (who was also her coadjutor at Port-Royal) and from the abbessof Tard, they began putting their plans into action.49

Because the plan was for Angelique to serve as superior for the newinstitute, she needed rst to step down from her position as abbess ofPort-Royal. To this end, she petitioned Louis XIII in 1628 to relinquishhis right of nomination at Port-Royal in favor of the system of triennialelections as spelled out in the Benedictine Rule. When the king honoredher request, Angeliquewas able to place the nal capstone to her reform.50

44 Arnauld, Relation ecrit par la Me`re Marie-Angelique, 44. When Angelique moved toParis, she did not relinquish control over the property of Port-Royal-des-Champs and itsrevenues.

45 Angelique learned about Zamet through Francis de Sales when she was at Maubuisson.Cognet, Angelique Arnauld and Francois de Sales, 236.

46 The nuns of Tard moved out from under the jurisdiction of the Cistercians and intohis jurisdiction as the bishop of Langres. Louis Prunel, Sebastien Zamet: eveque-duc deLangres, pair de France (15881655) (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1912), 205.

47 Ibid., 239. Raoul Allier, La Cabale des Devots, 16271666 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1902),1601.

48 Prunel, Sebastien Zamet, 208.49 Ibid., 208, 22930.50 She made this request on the heels of the kings victory at La Rochelle against the

Protestant rebellion. Jean Racine, Abrege de lhistoire de Port-Royal (Paris: Societe lesBelles Lettres, 1933), 38.


The implementation of triennial elections at Port-Royal also allowedAngelique to fulll her long-held desire to leave the convent, a recurringtheme in her memoirs. She attributed this desire to two sources. In herchildhood the wish to leave stemmed from her forced vocation.51 Onceshe reached adulthood and had her spiritual conversion, she expressedthis wish as a desire to free herself from the burden of her ofce.52 Byturning Port-Royal over to the elective system, Angelique nally founda way out. The kings patent letters stipulated that the house could gov-ern itself through elections for as long as her reform remained intact.Should the reform ever lapse, the house would revert to a daughter fromthe Arnauld family (at that time, there were four of them living in theconvent) and by extension to the system of royal nomination.53 Thus,instituting the elective system at Port-Royal was a way for her to leavePort-Royal without jeopardizing the reform on which so much of herfamilys spiritual, social, and nancial legacy depended.

As Angelique prepared to leave Port-Royal to lead the Institute ofthe Holy Sacrament, she wrote to a fellow nun a letter expressing herextreme joy: Is it possible that we are too happy to have found the realpath to the Truth? For myself, I am ecstatic, M. de Langres is a trueman of God.54 She had many reasons to rejoice. She had nally freedherself from the yoke of her past to pursue an authentic religious life,one guided by her vocation and not by family obligation. She no longerhad to adhere to the strict demands of the Benedictine Rule, which shedescribed as worthy of veneration but never made for women.55 Incontrast, the new institute adopted the Augustinian Rule, which followedthe directives that the ancient bishop had outlined for a group of nunswithin his diocese of Hippo. Like the nuns of Hippo, Angelique wantedto be guided by a saintly bishop, and she believed she had found him inZamet.

51 Cognet, La Reforme, 501.52 Ibid., 162.53 Extrait des Registres du grand conseil du Roy, February 29, 1629, AN series L 1035 4.54 Angelique de Sainte-Agne`s Marle de la Falaire, Relation de la Soeur Angelique de Sainte-

Agne`s Marle de la Falaire: ou` elle rapporte tout ce quelle a remarque dans les voyagesquelle a faits avec la Me`re Angelique au Lys, a` Poissy et a` Paris. In Memoires pour servira` lhistoire de Port Royal, Arnauld dAndilly ed., vol. 1: 409.

55 In a letter to M. Feron, the archdeacon of Chartres on March 25, 1627, Arnauldexplained that she wanted to place the new institute under the Augustinian Rule becausethe Benedictine Rule was never successfully applied by nuns: Veritablement, mon Pe`re,cette re`gle est digne de grande veneration, mais elle ne fut jamais ecrite pour des lles.Prunel, 2223.


Angeliques spiritual good fortune spilled over into the material realm.In spite of a slowing economy that was straining nancial resources inmost Parisian convents, she and Zamet found high-prole patrons toendow their new institute.56 With the support and enthusiasm of wealthyand powerful women such as the duchess of Longueville and the marquisede Maignelay (the sister to the archbishop of Paris), they purchased anexpensive building in the center of Paris, just a few blocks away from theroyal palace of the Louvre, to house their new institute. On the day ofthe ceremonial opening, Angelique led the procession of nuns from Port-Royal-de-Paris across the city to the new institute, riding in a carriage withher noble patrons.57 This procession marked the height of her success asa refor

Documents

Daniella Kostroun-Feminism, Absolutism, And Jansenism_ Louis XIV and the Port-Royal Nuns -Cambridge University Press (2011)