Emotional regulation and middle-class Irish education: a case study of nineteenth century Catholic convent schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on an underexplored aspect of the Catholic convent school experience, namely the kinds of socialisation and regulation of emotion maintained within the convent community. Drawing on the emerging history of emotions and the concept of emotional communities first posited by Barbara H. Rosenwein, it considers how historians might better account for the emotional component of education in Ireland, using the Irish convent boarding school as a case study. Analysing records of disciplinary techniques, teacher-training manuals and personal memoirs, it considers how Irish girls were taught to channel, restrain and develop a mature emotional life. This examination of ‘emotional’ education suggests an alternative historical reading of the female ‘accomplishments’ or politesse considered so emblematic of the lampooned convent school girl. Historical analysis of the emotional component of education provides new insight into the socialisation of class and gender in the religious milieu of an Irish boarding school.