Contested Identities: Catholic Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

Abstract

This well-researched and densely packed scholarly study, developed from the author's doctoral thesis, does at least two important things. First—and, in this reviewer's opinion, successfully—it systematically uncovers, analyses and describes the internal workings of a large sample of Catholic women's religious communities in Victorian England, looking at such distinct aspects as women's motivations for entering a convent; the experience of the novitiate; class and ethnic tensions; and tussles over authority and governance. Following in the footsteps of Susan O’Brien, and drawing upon a wide range of diocesan and congregational archival materials, Carmen Mangion adds usefully to our knowledge of nineteenth-century English Catholic convents, outlining procedures, clarifying definitions and tabulating congregational growth. This aspect alone makes her book a valuable contribution to the field of English Catholic history. It is in its second aim—to scrutinise the ‘identities’ of women religious through ‘the lens of gender, ethnicity and class’ (p. 7)—that the book seems to run into problems: mainly structural, but also analytic. The book's chapter headings (‘becoming visible’; ‘choosing religious life’; ‘forming a novice’; ‘evangelising’, ‘professionalising’; ‘building corporate identity’; ‘class and ethnicity’ and ‘authority and governance’) accurately indicate the content, argument, or both, of the chapters to which they refer; but the three sections into which these eight chapters are organised (‘developing identities’, ‘working identities’ and ‘corporate identities’) do not seem to be properly integrated into an over-arching argument: the thesis alluded to in the book's main title. One is left with the uncomfortable sense that two different books are struggling for mastery within the same monograph: a straightforward survey of Victorian women's religious congregations, which might be called Women Religious in Nineteenth-Century England; and a more trenchant, but not yet fully developed, thesis about the role of gender, class and ethnicity in Victorian female religious communities, which might be called Contested Identities.