ABSTRACT
The French-born governess Marie Leprince de Beaumont was one of the most widely read authors across Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In all her writings, Leprince de Beaumont combined her Catholic faith with an engagement in the contemporary debates of the Enlightenment, influenced particularly by two major thinkers: John Locke and Rene Descartes. While expressing typical Enlightenment standpoints, Leprince de Beaumont also placed herself within a broader Catholic tradition, both theological and apologetic, and within a longer tradition of Catholic practices and models. In Leprince de Beaumont's conception of the community of the faithful, centered on concrete praxis rather than theology, a key role was played by two specific groups: women, and the poor. Leprince de Beaumont's work and career as a religious and pedagogical author was marked by a unique pastoral emphasis that is absent from the work of many other religious Enlighteners.
