Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History ed. by Ulrich Lehner

Abstract

Reviewed by: Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History ed. by Ulrich Lehner Shaun Blanchard Women, Enlightenment and Catholicism: A Transnational Biographical History, edited by Ulrich Lehner (London: Routledge, 2018), xi + 248 pp. Ulrich Lehner, one of the premiere historians of early modern Catholicism, brings together biographical essays of sixteen extraordinary women of the European Catholic Enlightenment. Over the last half-century, historians have amply demonstrated the existence and vitality of an eighteenth-century Catholic Enlightenment that fused the dogmatic and spiritual traditions of Roman Catholicism with the values and methodologies of the moderate and religious Enlightenments. It now falls to scholars to fill in a number of lacunae in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment. While some of the great female Catholic rulers of this era, such as the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780), have received a great deal of attention, the story of the Catholic Enlightenment is often narrated too exclusively as one of modernizing statesmen, reforming bishops, and scholarly male religious. An impressive group of scholars have gifted us with a new point of departure for the study of Catholic women and the Enlightenment. Lehner's introduction situates these contributions in the historiography of the Catholic Enlightenment and gender studies. While research on women and the Enlightenment has "dramatically increased" in the last two decades, "women who were to a varying degree committed to their Catholic faith and the trends of the Catholic Enlightenment have … not gained much attention" (1). This neglect is all the more surprising since many of these women were famous during their lifetimes and some left very strong literary marks well into the nineteenth century. While all sixteen of these short studies are of great value, I will expand upon several in what follows (while at least mentioning all). I have tried to select essays which give a good sense of the overall thrust of this project and of the vitality and diversity of women's contributions to the Catholic Enlightenment. These sixteen women are organized, roughly, into five geographical/linguistic regions: France, the Iberian peninsula, the Italian states, the German-speaking lands, and Britain. Carolina Armenteros highlights the playwright, pedagogical theorist, and educator of royal children Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830) as "the French Catholic Enlightenment's foremost woman representative" (8). In her best-known work, the educational manual Adelaide and Theodore, de Genlis offered an "exceedingly erudite educational method that was an exact opposite of Rousseau's" (13). A friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and d'Alembert, de Genlis broke with the philosophes over her "unwavering [End Page 1045] habit of defending Christianity and attacking 'false philosophy'" (9). Because of this, while de Genlis had an enthusiastic public following, certain circles of enlightened French elites were less enthusiastic about her work. Nevertheless, de Genlis's scholarship on education was "secretly indebted" to Rousseau and she risked reducing religion to social utility and propagating a quasi-deism (13). De Genlis, famous in her day, should be remembered for "eclips[ing] previous educational methods" and contributing "influential pedagogical approaches" which endured well into the nineteenth century (13). Alicia C. Montoya and Therese Taylor also contribute essays (respectively) on French women: Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–1780), also a pedagogue, and Adélaïde d'Orléans (1698–1743), the Abbess of Chelles. It should be noted that, in a study of 254 catalogues of private libraries sold by auction before 1800, the works of Leprince de Beaumont appeared second in frequency only to Voltaire (32). Moving south to the Iberian peninsula, Mónica Bolufer profiles the contributions of the Aragonese noblewoman Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), whose life and work opens "a window into the world of the Spanish Catholic Enlightenment" (50). Amar y Borbón, author of the 1786 Discourse in Defense of Women's Talent, approached enlightenment from a practical, proto-feminist, and religious perspective. As with other Spanish enlighteners, the influences on Amar y Borbón cannot be reduced to a "passive assimilation" of foreign (particularly French) influences, but were grounded in "solid autochthonous roots" (53). Amar y Borbón's views on rational devotion, social utility, and egalitarianism were rooted in Catholic and...