Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism
A Transnational Biographical History

Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism explores, for the first time, the uncharted territory of women?s religious Enlightenment. Each chapter offers a biographical insight into the social and cultural context of female Enlighteners and how Catholic women in Europe used the thought and values of Enlightenment to articulate their beliefs about how to live their faith in the world.

The collection of portraits within this book offers a closer look into the new understanding of womanhood that emerged from Enlightenment culture and was conceived independently from marital relationships. They also highlight the distinctive contributions that women made to political and religious philosophy, spirituality and mysticism, and the efforts to bring scientific knowledge to the attention of other women.

Guiding readers through the complex religious, intellectual and global connections influenced by the Enlightenment, Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism brings the achievements of Enlightenment women to the foreground and restores them to their rightful place in intellectual history. It is ideal reading for scholars and students of Enlightenment history, early modern religion and early modern women?s history.

Introduction: Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: prolegomena

ULRICH L. LEHNER

1 Piety and popularity: the life and works of Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830)

CAROLINA ARMENTEROS

2 Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780): a popular religious pedagogue

ALICIA C. MONTOYA

3 Adélaïde d’Orléans (1698–1743): the Abbess of Chelles

THERESE TAYLOR

4 Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833): an intellectual woman

MÓNICA BOLUFER

5 María Gertrudis Hore (1742–1801): the neoclassic poetry and Enlightenment thought of a cloistered Spanish nun

ELIZABETH FRANKLIN LEWIS

6 María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo, Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar: women’s writing and charity in the Spanish Enlightenment

CATHERINE M. JAFFE

7 Teresa de Mello Breyner, Countess of Vimieiro (1739–1798?)

RAQUEL BELLO AND ELIAS TORRES

8 Faith, science and the modern body: Anna Morandi’s studies of human anatomy in wax

REBECCA MESSBARGER

9 The scientist and the saint: Laura Bassi’s Enlightened Catholicism

PAULA FINDLEN

10 Maria Eleonora Sporck (1687−1717) and Anna Katharina Swéerts-Sporck (1689−1754): practitioners and promoters of the word at the edge of the Enlightenment

VERONIKA ČAPSKÁ

11 Between nation and universe: Caroline Pichler’s (1769−1843) Catholicism

ANKE GILLEIR

12 Faith, education, renewal: Amalia von Gallitzin (1748–1806)

ANDREAS OBERDORF

13 Maria Kunigunde of Saxony (1740–1826): abbess, princess and industrial pioneer in the Free Secular Women’s College in Essen

UTE KUEPPERS-BRAUN

14 Between revolutionary Jacobins and English Catholic Cisalpines: the roles of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) in the age of Enlightenment

MICHAEL TOMKO

15 Fénelonian reform, Catholic Jacobites and Jane Barker’s Enlightenment dramas of conscience

ANNA BATTIGELLI

16 Izabela Czartoryska and Catholic devotion in the eighteenth-century Polish garden

AGNIESZKA WHELAN

Ulrich L. Lehner is William K. Warren Professor at the University of Notre Dame. A member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he has received awards and fellowships from the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the Notre Dame Institute of Advanced Study, the Earhart Foundation, the German Humboldt Foundation and the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. He is the award-winning author of several scholarly works on early modern and modern history of religion.