Ebook: The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de L'Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition

In 1631, Marie Guyart stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business, her aging father and--what jars the modern reader--her eleven year-old son.The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l'Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition examines Marie's confounding decision to abandon the young Claude, situating the event within the contexts of Marie's own writings, family life in seventeenth-century France, the Christian tradition, and early modern French spirituality. This book takes up Marie's decision to abandon Claude as an instance of human agency, arguing that the abandonment is best understood neither as a simple act of submission to God's will nor as a simple act of resistance to the norms of seventeenth-century French family life, but rather as something in between. Taking its cue from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this book argues that the abandonment is best understood as an event informed by what had been possible within a Christian tradition that rendered family life inimical to the work of salvation and inflected by what was likely within a seventeenth-century French Catholicism saturated with spiritualities of abandonment.The Cruelest of All Mothers at once complicates and enriches an understanding of Marie de l'Incarnation and makes a valuable contribution to the study of religion by means of a methodology that exploits the fertile space in between the personal and the academic, the private and the public, experience and intellection. In its self-conscious engagement with broader currents in the discipline, this book marks an important intervention not only in the field of religious history but also in conversations about the theory and method of religious studies.