The Mother Tongue: Textuality, Authority and Community in the Post-Teresian Reform Female Monasticism (ca. 1560–1700) is the National Science Centre (NCN, Poland) founded research project guided by Dr Julia Lewandowska (Faculty of “Artes Liberales”, University of Warsaw).
Scientific goal of the project
The main objective of “The Mother Tongue” project is to examine the relevance of early modern women religious’ thought in the critical period of the history of the Christianity which saw the threat and subsequent rupture within the Western Church –especially turbulent and symptomatic in the Hispanic Monarchy, the self-proclaimed defender of the Roman Catholic Church unity against the Protestant Reformation– by investigating four sets of problems:
- the changing dynamics of intellectual, religious and secular culture that has prescribed the models for female agency and voice within the public and ecclesiastical discourses;
- the practices of female spiritual leadership and religious authoritynegotiated through their textual production that responded to the Church in crisis;
- the meanings and implications of their reflection and cultural production;
- the spiritual, literary, and intellectual impact of their texts within and beyond female monastic communities.
Therefore, the crucial aim of the project is to locate, analyse and interpret women religious’ writings along with their influence over the literature, culture, and the Christian spirituality in the Early Modern Spain and Europe after the Discalced Reform (from the 1560) that responds roughly to the conclusion of the relevant Council of Trent (1545-1563). This goal will be achieved by study of the representative corpus consisting of barely known or little studied texts –to a significant extent manuscripts and old prints– created in the milieu of female catholic monasticism in the Spanish Empire. This geopolitical context is understood as the nucleus of the reform of Discalced Carmelites by Teresa de Jesús from Ávila (1515-1582, O.C.D.), and therefore critical for the renewed spirituality that constituted the most original female-authored Catholic answer to the Church’s crisis. However, unlike most existing research projects tackling similar topics, the project expands the research area geographically and chronologically. The Mother Tongue project consider those European lands where the discalced reform had major implementation, i.e. Spanish Habsburgs’ dependencies, Kingdom of France, and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the mid of the 16th to the 18th century, i.e. considering the process of continuity and impact of the Teresian tradition over almost 150 years.
Expected results and their anticipated impact
The intellectual legacy of nun authors in post-Teresian female monasticism –barely known in the cultural history of The Western world– significantly enriches our knowledge about the presence of thought, writing and agency of women in the history of the Catholic Church and the early modern literary and intellectual culture. Approaching them from the interdisciplinary perspective that embrace literary and cultural history, women’s studies, history of ideas and religion, and historiography will allow to exceed dominant readings of nuns’ writings understood solely as “devotional” or “mystical” and therefore separated from dominant public discourses and wider impact on spiritual, political and intellectual culture. In this sense, the inclusion of the written reflection of these religious authors that came after Teresa de Jesús as her “spiritual daughters” into the heritage of cultural history and European thought may constitute a new and transforming interpretation of the women’s place and role in the context of the early modern history of culture and religion.
The project assumes queries in almost thirty religious, diocesan, regional, national and papal archives in Spain, Portugal, France, Poland, Belgium and the Vatican. Through an interdisciplinary approach situated at the intersection between cultural and religious studies, literary studies and the history of Church and religion, it aspires to show the contribution of religious women’s thought to intellectual culture as a fruit of wider infra and extramural collaboration, existence of networks and a positive sense given to the community. In terms of international collaboration, the project is thought as a platform for establishing or deepening existing research exchanges with, among others, the Universitat de Barcelona, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Universitat d’Alacant, Universidad de Sevilla, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Madrid), Pontificia Universitat Gregoriana and Universiteit Antwerpen.
Principal Investigator
Dr Julia Lewandowska
Duration of the Project
2021–2025