ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the optic of transnationalism to examine how education at convent schools and novitiates prepared girls and young women for missionary life, as nuns. The history of Catholic missionary initiatives, and the role of women religious in mission schools, colleges and hospitals offer immense scope for research. Deploying theoretical perspectives can add to the interpretive work, and in the chapter, the optic of transnationalism has been useful in helping to focus on ways in which orders involved in missionary activity were deeply involved in transnational networks. The chapter presents one Irish convent, the Infant Jesus Convent, Drishane on the Cork-Kerry border, as a case study, and looks at how life in the boarding school prepared pupils for life in the novitiate and convent. Though scholarship on the history of women religious is enjoying attention, and is a growth area in research in Europe and North America, there are countless ways in which historians can still interrogate records.
