Nuns Without Cloister

Introduction: Religious Life For Women In Seventeenth-Century France
Part One: The Genesis Of The “Little Design”

Introduction To Part One: Le Puy-en-Valey In The Seventeenth-Century

1. The Founders

2. Beginners

3. Early Growth

Conclusion To Part One: The Genesis And Its Fruit
Part Two: Normative Texts And Actual Life In Communities Of St. Joseph

Introduction To Part Two: Expansion In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries

4. The First Printed Constitutions – Vienne, 1694

5. The Superiors Role: A Key To Life In The Communities

6. Structures Of Daily Life

7. Principal Houses And Souers Agregees

Conclusion: Father Medaille’s Legacy

Additional Info
Nuns Without Cloister explores one of the first and most innovative among the non-cloistered women’s congregations established after the Council of Trent. Under the aegis of a Jesuit missionary, the first Sisters of St. Joseph envisioned a direct role for religious women in the secular society of mid-seventeenth century France and quietly broke the ecclesiastical and cultural barriers that opposed it. This book opens perspectives on the sisters’ success through a politics of discretion and the introduction of creative variety in their lives in country parishes or in the urban orphanages, hospitals, and reformatories for fallen women of the ancien regime. Vacher’s methodology, comparing the congregation’s theoretical, prescriptive documents with evidence about the actual life of these communities in southern France, leads to the question of whether and to what degree succeeding generations grasped the original inspiration.

Sisters of St. Joseph preceding the French Revolution established a paradigm for the active, apostolic women’s congregations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that supplied the workforce behind Catholic schools, colleges, hospitals, and orphanages in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. In researching them, Nuns Without Cloister addresses a little understood but central dimension in the early modern foundations of contemporary Catholicism.