ABSTRACT
In 1563, the Council of Trent issued an edict imposing strict enclosure on women’s convents. By 1792, the French Revolutionary regime had closed all monasteries in France and expelled all the religious living within them. These tumultuous changes, occurring over little more than two centuries, fixed the contemporary imagination on enclosed women’s spaces. Always an object of fascination, they were regarded with greater intensity than perhaps ever before. This book examines the representation of conventual spaces in seventeenth-and eighteenthcentury France within a multi-disciplinary framework of post-Tridentine religious thought, architecture and history. In a larger sense, it seeks to delimit the place of women’s enclosure in the early modern imaginary and in our own. I choose to speak of “conventual space” rather than “the convent” because this study includes other female sites of retreat, from the private room or “closet” to the women’s refuge, which build on monastic features or functions. The conventual space, as I envision it, is both a real and a symbolic enclosure-a structure encompassing and expressing the religious, political and social powers that affect women’s lives, women’s responses to these forces, and their active role in shaping their own surroundings. The conventual space is thus a dynamic and dialectical one. Is this space public? Private? Sacred? Is the convent prison or refuge? Does it signify inclusion in the body of the church,1 or forced enclosure? Or is a prison/refuge dichotomy too narrow? Finally, to what degree, in what sense, could early modern writers achieve the “mastery of enclosed spaces” attributed to the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson in the second epigraph above? These are some of the questions this book addresses.
