ABSTRACT
Historians of the Catholic Reformation commonly introduce Parisian laywoman Barbe Acarie (1566-1618) as a mystic whose visions of Teresa of Avila prompted the foundation of Teresa’s reformed Carmelite order in France. Ever since the first publication of her Life just three years after her death by her colleague and spiritual director André Duval, Acarie’s biographers have delighted in recounting the ecstasies that ‘consumed her’.1 The volume of Henri Bremond’s classic Literary History of Religious Thought in France devoted to The Coming of Mysticism, for example, features lengthy descriptions of her incapacitating raptures.2 There is truth to this image. Barbe Acarie was a mystic, and her claim, after reading Teresa’s life, that the saint instructed her to bring the Carmelite order to France did spur efforts to realise this vision. In depicting Acarie as a swooning visionary, however, historians have obscured the practical administrative talents she displayed in orchestrating the foundation of the French Carmelites and Paris’s new Ursuline order as well. They have overlooked her work raising funds and securing permissions for these foundations, along with the very active role she played on the worksite, supervising the construction of the Carmelites’ Paris convent. Most important, they have ignored the spiritual counsel that she offered aspiring and professed Carmelites, first as a laywoman – and a married woman at that – and then, after her husband’s death, as a Carmelite lay sister in the convents of Amiens and Pontoise. Taking a very different approach, this essay will examine the informal and yet very real spiritual authority exercised by Barbe Acarie.
