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‘Artists Hidden from Human Gaze’: Visual Culture and Mysticism in the Nineteenth-Century Convent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2020

Kate Jordan
Kate Jordan*
Affiliation:
School of Architecture and Cities, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5LS. Email: k.jordan@westminster.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology through the sacred art produced by and for women religious. The practices and devotions that the article explores, however, are not those that drew from the institutional Church but rather from the legacies of mysticism, many of which were shaped in women’s religious communities. Scholars have proposed that mysticism was stripped of its intellectual legitimacy and relegated to the margins of theology by post-Enlightenment rationalism, thereby consigning female religious experience to the politically impotent private sphere. The article suggests, however, that, although the literature of women’s mysticism entered a period of decline from the end of the Counter-Reformation, an authoritative female tradition, expressed in visual and material culture, continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The art that emerged from convents reflected the increasing visibility of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the burgeoning of folkloric devotional practices and iconography. This article considers two paintings as evidence that, by the nineteenth century, the aporias1 of Christian theology were consciously articulated by women religious though the art that they made: works which, in turn, shaped the creed and culture of the institutional Church. In so doing, the article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of religion.

Keywords

Mysticism19th centuryCatholicConventArtNazarene
Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , October 2020 , pp. 190 - 220
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Trustees of the Catholic Record Society

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Footnotes

*

The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Paul Shaw, Central Archivist of The Poor Servants of The Mother of God and to the Generalate of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God; Barbara Vesey, Archivist of the Society of the Sacred Heart; Sr Mary Joseph, Poor Servants of the Mother of God; Sr Teresa Keegan, Poor Servants of the Mother of God, Rome.

References

1 The word aporia is aligned in this article with Alexander Nagel and Lorenzo Pericolo’s description: aporia is conceived as a self-aware internal contradiction or paradox within theology. A. Nagel and L. Pericolo, eds. Subject as Aporia in Early Modern Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

2 Henri Pasquier, Life of Mother Mary of St Euphrasia of Pelletier, foundress and the first Superior General of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Good Shepherd of Angers (London: Burns & Oates, 1953 translation from original 1893), 372.

3 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (California: University of California Press, 1992) and Grace M. Jantzen, Power Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

4 The early canonical texts of mysticism include those by the writer and Anglican priest William Ralph Inge (1860–1954), the psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) and the writer and theologian Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941): William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism: Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford (London: Methuen, 1899); William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1912). These scholars offered an overview which continues to influence discourse. All three foreground literary and written works as intermediaries of mysticism rather than either bodily experience or material culture.

5 Though both draw conclusions from the written work of women, both also stress the significance of women’s bodily encounters. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, has explored in detail the relationship between food and the mystic experience.

6 Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, 190.

7 Luca Sandoni, ‘Political Mobilisation of Ecstatic Experiences in Late Nineteenth-Century Catholic France: The Case of Doctor Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre and his Stigmatisées (1868-27)’, Disputatio Philosophica 16, no. 1 (2014): 19-41.

8 Leonardo Rossi, ‘“Religious Virtuosi” and Charismatic Leaders: the public authority of mystic women in nineteenth-century Italy’, Women’s History Review 29, Issue 1 (2020): 90-108.

9 Pasquier, Life of Mother Mary of St Euphrasia of Pelletier, 372.

10 Robert Fletcher, ‘“Convent Thoughts”: Augusta Webster and the Body Politics of the Victorian Cloister’, Victorian Literature and Culture. 31.1 (2003): 295-313, at 297.

11 Allison Peers, ed. The Complete Works of Teresa of Avila (London: Continuum, 2002). In her seminal work Interior Castle, Teresa of Avila explicitly councils that ‘Mary and Martha must combine’ in order for women religious to have ‘the strength to serve’, 215.

12 Hope Stone, ‘Constraints on the Mother Foundresses: Contrasts in Anglican and Roman Catholic Headship in Victorian England’ (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 1993), 36.

13 Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 2.

14 Timothy Willem Jones and Lucinda Matthews-Jones, eds. Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things (New York: Palgrave McMillian, 2015), 2.

15 Nancy T. Ammerman, ed. Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6. See also Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

16 Inge, Christian Mysticism.

17 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 371.

18 W. Ullathorne, ‘Preface’ in Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan by her Religious Children (New York: Catholic Publication House, 1869), iv. Though Ullathorne rather than Hallahan herself, is using the word ‘mystic’ here, its appearance in an important community volume containing memoirs written by the religious, demonstrates that the term had currency.

19 Ibid., xi.

20 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 306.

21 Ibid., 307.

22 Hereafter referred to as RSCJ.

23 F. Taylor, trans. and Father James Clare, ed. Practical Meditations for every day of the Year on the Life of Our Lord composed chiefly for the use of religious by a Father of the Society of Jesus. Described on spine: New Meditations for Every Day of the year (London, 1868). Taylor also produced her own set of Ignition Meditations, first published in 1880 entitled, Short Meditations according to the method of St Ignatius. This was included in a list of her published works in the Poor Servants of the Mother of God archive (hereafter SMG Archive), but there are no copies in existence.

24 Francis Devas, Mother Mary Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, Foundress of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927), 338-9.

25 Michel de Certeau and Marsanne Brammer trans. ‘Mysticism’, Diacritics 22.2 (1992): 11-25 at 16.

26 Kate Jordan, ‘Ordered Spaces, Separate Spheres: Women and the Building of British Convents, 1829-1939’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2015). This argues that women religious explicitly embraced conflicting practices and ideas in the devotional culture and organisation of the convent. These would not have been understood as ‘paradoxes’ but Inge’s reference to ‘mystical paradox’ indicates that the word was being used in relation to mysticism.

27 Montague Summers, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1950), 41.

28 Susan O’Brien, ‘Terra Incognita: The Nun in Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 21 (Nov. 1988), 110-140.

29 Although versions of the Sacred Heart can be found dating back to the Middle Ages, its most recent incarnation was revealed in a vision to Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647-90), a French Visitation nun.

30 Susan O’Brien, ‘French nuns in nineteenth-century England’, Past and Present 154.1 (1997): 142-180, at 172.

31 Maud Monahan, The Life and Letters of Janet Erskine Stuart, Superior General of the Society of the Sacred Heart, 1857 to 1914 (London: Longman’s Green and Co. 1931), 91.

32 The perceived feminisation of the Catholic Church is the subject of a large body of scholarship, much of which builds on Barbara Welter’s research on the development of Christianity in nineteenth-century North America, including Barbara Welter, ‘The Feminization of American Religion’, in Mary S. Hartmann and Lois W. Banner eds. Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). This trajectory has been problematised in recent years in Patrick Pasture et al., eds. Gender and Christianity in Modern Europe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), which argues that the term ‘feminisation’ carries a variety of possible meanings. In this article, I apply the term in relation to characteristics that were considered feminine in nineteenth-century religious culture, such as emotion, domesticity, sentimentality and anti-intellectualism. For examples of this interpretation of the term, see Rossi, ‘“Religious Virtuosi”’; Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (London: Routledge, 2009); Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); John Shelton Reed, ‘A Female Movement: The feminization of nineteenth-century Anglo Catholicism’, Anglican and Episcopal History 57, No. 2 (June 1988), pp. 199-238; Maria LaMonaca, Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 2008).

33 David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 59. For a more recent examination of the relationship between sacred art and devotion, see David Morgan, The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012).

34 Bernard McGinn, ‘On Mysticism and Art’, Daedalus, 132, No. 2, (Spring, 2003): 132.

35 Joshua C. Taylor, ed. Nineteenth-century Theories of Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 137.

36 Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), Cordula Grewe, The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (Pennsylvania: Penn State UP, 2015).

37 Lydia Salviucci Insolera, ‘L’Ultima Grande Visita All Collegio Romano Di Pio IX, Documenti Inediti”, Archivum Histroriae Pontificiae, Vol, 45 (2007) pp 39-85.

38 See for example, Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, The Valiant woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth Century American Culture (North Carolina: North Carolina University Press, 2016) and Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale: Yale University Press, 1996). For Marguerite Marie Alocoque, see above, n. 29.

39 Hans Belting, Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (Munich: Beck, 1990).

40 Cordula Grewe, The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 2015), 97.

41 Ibid., 103.

42 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Harvard University Press, 1998).

43 Inge, Christian Mysticism, 305.

44 Dominic Janes brings together the characterisation in Victorian culture of both the aesthetic and Oxford movements as effeminate, highlighting the emphasis that both placed on the mystery of the incarnation – the union of man and God – which he suggests speaks to a new (or revived) fusion of the Eucharistic and erotic, evocatively illustrated by Edward Burne-Jones in The Merciful Knight (1863-4) and Simeon Solomon’s The Mystery of Faith (1870). Dominic Janes, ‘William Bennett’s heresy: male same-sex desire and the art of the Eucharist’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17.4 (2012): 413-35.

45 The opportunities available to women in the production of ecclesiastical art have been discussed recently in Lynne Walker, ‘Women and Church Art’, in Teresa Sladen and Andrew Saint, eds. Churches 1870-1914, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design, 3 (2010),121-140; Jim Cheshire, ‘Elizabeth Simcoe and her Daughters: Amateur Ecclesiastical Design in the 1840s’, in Michael Hall and Rosemary Hill, eds. The 1840s, Studies in Victorian Architecture and Design, 1, (2008), 87-95; Jenny Uglow, The Pinecone (London: Faber & Faber, 2013).

46 Julia Wadham, The Case of Cornelia Connelly, (Pantheon, 1957), 192.

47 Perdrau’s name is curiously absent from any accounts of Mater Admirabilis that were published externally. As far as this author is aware, only publications produced by the RSCJ and the Society of the Holy Child Jesus name her as the artist.

48 Pauline Perdrau, Les Loisirs de L’Abbaye, Souvenirs de la Mere Pauline Perdrau sur la vie du Notre Sainte Mere (Rome: Maison Mere, 1931), 14.

49 Leopoldina Keppel, Mater Admirabilis 1844-1944 (London: Sands and Co. c.1944), 12.

50 Pauline Perdrau, Les Loisirs de L’Abbaye, Souvenirs de la Mere Pauline Perdrau sur la vie du Notre Sainte Mere (Rome: Maison Mere, 1931). It was by no means unique for women religious to have studied art before entering the convent. Emma Raimbach, for example, was a talented professional artist who was awarded in 1826 a silver medal by the Society of Arts and regularly exhibited at the RA. After entering the Convent of the Good Shepherd, Hammersmith in 1847 she continued, painting deeply personal work that reflected her spirituality and vocation but which was no longer sold – little, thereafter, went on public display. Of the few of these that did, was a painting entitled ‘Mother Regaudiat and three penitents’ which was exhibited at the RA and was subsequently donated to Bishop Wiseman. For a short biography of Raimbach, see Review of the Principle Acquisitions of the Year 1919, Victoria and Albert Museum (London: HMSO, 1922), 56.

51 Various Sacred Heart sources name the tutor as ‘Stetz’ but the annals of the Society of the Holy Child of Jesus name the tutor of both Perdrau and Connolly as Flatz. Gebhard Flatz was at the time resident at San Isisdoro. Both Cordula Grewe and Monique Luiard have suggested that the artist who tutored Perdrau was Maximillian Seitz.

52 Grewe, The Nazarenes, 109.

53 Keppel, Mater Admirabilis 1844-1944, 20.

54 Although Perdrau was not explicit about the Marian iconography that she employed, she drew from a widely-understood tradition. The painting includes lilies, symbolising purity and also the twelve stars which relate to a reference in Revelations to Mary’s crown of perfection. These were both common features of depictions of the Virgin in nineteenth-century Catholic art and would have been familiar and legible to all women religious.

55 See for example, Keppel, Mater Admirabilis, 1844-1944.

56 Alfred Monnin, Mater Admirabilis: ou Les Quinze Premiers Années de L’image de Marie Immaculée (Paris: Carlo Douniol, 1865). Monnin notes that Pius IX commissioned papal medals of Mater Admirabilis which had an international distribution.

57 Monnin, Mater Admirabilis, 2.

58 Eleanor C. Donnelly, ‘Mater Admirabilis’, The Irish monthly II, (November, 1874): 662-663.

59 Reproductions of Mater Admirabilis are found in every Society of the Sacred Heart school and convent across the world. Antonia White’s novel, Frost in May, describes the story of Mater Admirabilis being told to new schoolchildren. In this fictitious account, Perdrau becomes an Irish novice who is the great aunt of one of the pupils but the broad description of the painting and its subsequent miraculous transformation conforms to the traditional story. Antonia White, Frost in May (Virago Press, 2006), ch. 3.

60 Monahan, The Life and Letters of Janet Erskine Stuart, 341.

61 Grewe, The Nazarenes, 97.

62 Ibid., 97.

63 According to tradition, St Luke painted the first Christian icons, notably the first image, from life, of the Virgin Mary.

64 Monique Luiard, La Société du Sacré-Coeur dans le monde de son temps, 1865-2000 (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2009), 28.

65 An anonymous chronicler of Connelly writes: ‘The two postulants sat and worked together at recreation in one of the corridors and there they conceived the idea of painting on the wall a picture of our Blessed Lady as a young maiden… the picture was executed in fresco by Mademoiselle Perdrau, aided by Cornelia who made a copy of it for herself and always cherished a devotion to this representation of our Blessed Mother’. Anonymous, (A Religious of the Community) Foundress of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus (New York: Toronto, Longmans Green and Co., 1922), 78.

66 Frances Taylor, Memoir of Sister Mary Clare Doyle SMG, internal publication of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God, 32.

67 Devas, Mother Mary Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, 60.

68 Devas, Mother Mary Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, 260.

69 SMG Archive, ref II/H/2 ‘A.M.D.G. The Poor Servants of the Mother of God. Necrology. Book 1 (1872-1945) (for community use only), (1956). Italics are my own.

70 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 534.

71 Primary sources which discuss this include, Henri Pasquier, Life of Mother Mary of St Euphrasia of Pelletier, foundress and the first Superior General of the Congregation of Our Lady of the Good Shepherd of Angers, (London: Burnes & Oats, 1953 translation from original 1893). Some limited secondary research has been undertaken by Mary Schoeser in English Church Embroidery, 1833-1953 (London 1988).

72 Very little work has been produced on the artistic output of male communities. My own research has revealed that monks were as active as women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engaging in activities such as designing buildings (St Wilfred’s, Preston by Ignatius Scoles) and producing stained glass (Dom Charles Norris at Buckfast Abbey). Kate Jordan. ‘Building the Post-Emancipation Church’, in Carmen Mangion and Susan O’Brien, eds. The Oxford History of British and Irish Catholicism. Volume IV: 1830-1913 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2021). The production of art by lay women is also under-researched. See above, n 45.