Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. By Emily Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xvi, 287 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3122-9. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5822-6.)

Abstract

Monastic foundations are fertile grounds on which to explore thickets of clashing cultures, societies, and religions along the western reaches of the Atlantic world. Carrying over traditions and assumptions from deep in the European past, members of these communities typically reinvented themselves and their missions in the midst of colonial adventurers, empire-minded expansionists, and nationalists of all kinds. Women's communities in these environments presented additional complications. The communal arrangements that grouped women together made them convenient targets of clerical and social control while, paradoxically, concentrating female social influence and economic power. These societies of women acted and were acted upon, observed and were observed, and provided the stage for individuals who were at once conservative and profoundly radical. Emily Clark, writing of the Ursulines of colonial and early national New Orleans, brings us the most complete and nuanced portrait we have of these processes in a North American setting. Written with elegant precision and presented with the care for which this imprint is known, Clark takes on with exquisite sensitivity the difficult task of describing how a specialized community can at once influence and reflect its surroundings. Across the eras of French, Spanish, and early American control of Louisiana, the Ursuline community safeguarded its educational mission by virtue of its own conservatism and “high social standing,” while “paradoxically creat[ing] a site where newly drawn lines of social and ethnic distinction could be ignored” (p. 150).