ABSTRACT
In these terms, Denis Simon de Marquemont, Archbishop of Lyon, refused permission in 1616 to François de Sales’s Filles de la Visitation to leave their religious houses for any reason. The Visitandines took as their inspiration the Virgin Mary’s visit to her kinswoman Elizabeth at the time they were both pregnant (Luke 1: 39-40). The Visitandines sought the same freedom to go about exercising charity through good works: “to advance the active life to which they now laid claim, they endowed the Virgin with a new identity: she became a ‘vagabond,’ hurrying across the hills of Judah to serve her neighbor” (Rapley 194). When their claim for freedom was denied, Sales submitted to episcopal authority and Visitation convents were reformed as regular monasteries under the rule of St. Augustine. This decision, made not by the church in Rome but by a Gallican archbishop, underscores the anxieties aroused in Counter-Reformation France when women attempted to cross the threshold between sacred and secular space. Such anxieties manifested themselves in a long and heated debate concerning uncloistered women’s orders, or orders whose missions directed them to leave their cloisters on some occasions. How the boundaries of conventual space are determined, and, more significant, who makes that determination, are questions of utmost import for the history of women’s monasticism. This chapter will examine the convent “threshold” and the varied ways it was crossed, both literally and discursively, in the seventeenth century. It will also crisscross the labile frontiers between history, memoirs and fiction: from the Parisian couvent du Grand Carmel to the imagined communities of Mme de Montpensier and Margaret Cavendish, to the solitary retreat of the Princesse de Clèves.
