Religious Scholar F. Ellen Weaver Summary

In her 1981 bibliographic essay, religious scholar F. Ellen Weaver highlights a lack of creative studies on women and gender in early modern France. To answer the “exciting challenge” of combining women’s history and religious history during this period, she calls for not only the translation of some of the best French studies and primary sources, but also innovative studies which will use new perspectives, raise new questions, and make use of “the sources available in French archives, libraries, art, music, and so on.” Weaver notes that, prior to the publication of her essay, the majority of studies concerning women and 17th-century society had either been literary, focused on female deviance or were bibliographical in nature and did not …show more content…
For example, in the conclusion of his study on Jansenism and gender in Toulouse, Jean-Pascal Gay appears to endorse a departure from the question of gender; in response to Nicolas Lyon-Caen, who argues that the presence of women in these debates is a symptom of socioeconomic issues and is not in itself a front to the established social order, Gay states, “On a là un débat qui va bien au-delà de la question déjà importante de la nature des phénomènes sociaux et culturels qui se donnent à voir autour du ‘Jansénisme,’ même interrogé à partir de la question du genre.” However, as Weaver writes in regards to her own study on the dynamics of Port-Royal, which was not directly concerned with women, “. . . it is impossible to present a serious study of this movement without emphasizing the strength and character of the women who were prominent in it.” In order to understand the case of Port-Royal, one must examine issues of gender because they directly and significantly impacted the persecution of the convent, the methods of defense employed by the nuns and Jansenist sympathizers, and, after the convent’s destruction in 1709, its