ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |7 pages

Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism

Prolegomena

chapter 1|14 pages

Piety and popularity

The life and works of Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830)

chapter 2|13 pages

Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780)

A popular religious pedagogue

chapter 3|15 pages

Adélaïde d’Orléans (1698–1743)

The Abbess of Chelles

chapter 4|13 pages

Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833)

An intellectual woman

chapter 5|10 pages

María Gertrudis Hore (1742–1801)

The neoclassic poetry and Enlightenment thought of a cloistered Spanish nun

chapter 6|14 pages

María Lorenza de los Ríos y Loyo, Marquesa de Fuerte-Híjar

Women’s writing and charity in the Spanish Enlightenment

chapter 8|16 pages

Faith, science and the modern body

Anna Morandi’s studies of human anatomy in wax

chapter 9|18 pages

The scientist and the saint

Laura Bassi’s Enlightened Catholicism

chapter 10|17 pages

Maria Eleonora Sporck (1687–1717) and Anna Katharina Swéerts–Sporck (1689–1754)

Practitioners and promoters of the word at the edge of the Enlightenment 1

chapter 11|15 pages

Between nation and universe

Caroline Pichler’s (1769−1843) Catholicism

chapter 12|13 pages

Faith, education, renewal

Amalia von Gallitzin (1748–1806)

chapter 13|12 pages

Maria Kunigunde of Saxony (1740–1826)

Abbess, princess and industrial pioneer in the Free Secular Women’s College in Essen

chapter 14|13 pages

Between revolutionary Jacobins and English Catholic Cisalpines

The roles of Elizabeth Inchbald (1753–1821) in the age of Enlightenment