Introduction

Monasticism denotes an ascetic mode of living that demands removal from the world, subjection to religious vows, and the pursuit of its primary aim, perfecting one’s love of God. However, the monastic ideal has frequently been portrayed as a misconceived ideal. Denis Diderot, for example, characterised female monasticism in his novel La Religieuse (published 1796 and written 1760) as a compelling manifestation of a misunderstood Catholicism.1 Only family pressure and psychologically cunning strategies can lure young girls into the unnatural environment of an enclosed community of women who are victims of their own maliciousness, sexuality and rivalry, contorted and exacerbated by the oppressiveness of convent life. Diderot’s heroine Suzanne writes about her novitiate: ‘If one observed all its austerities one would never survive …. A novice-mistress … subjects you to a course of the most carefully calculated seduction. Her function is to darken still more the shades of night which surround you, to lull you into slumber, to throw dust into your eyes, to fascinate you’.2 Indeed, the failures, betrayals and falsities of convent life have long attracted the attention of scholars.3 The monastic experience, however, was not mere convent routine, stifling rather than energising the spiritual ideal, but was an integral part of the rich and diverse fabric of Catholic life. The complexity of European monasticism was not only contingent to time, locality and orders, but also to individual convents and abbeys and the range of individuals within them and belonging to the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies connected to them. The Protestant attempts to eradicate monasticism as a papist aberration had only encouraged a widespread revival and reform of the monastic ideal.4 There were, of course, several reform initiatives prior to the Protestant Reformation which continued to be significant after the

1 The argument that Denis Diderot does not take issue with Christianity in general, but merely with monasticism as ‘misunderstood Christianity’, was put forward by Leonard Tancock in his introduction to Denis Diderot, The Nun (London, Folio Society, 1972).