Writing the History of Women Religious Today: Possibilities and Problems

Abstract

Deirdre Raftery Studies • volume 107 • number 427 Writing the History of Women Religious Today: Possibilities and Problems Deirdre Raftery In 1987, Irish historian Catríona Clear wrote: ‘Nuns have suffered the fate of historical marginalisation’. Now, over thirty years later, it is worth considering the degree to which this situation has changed. Do scholars recognise the many possibilities for research on women religious? And, if so, what problems do they encounter when they embark on projects that draw on the archives of women religious? This special issue of Studies reflects the fact that there has been significant growth in this area of historical resarch. The papers here are all drawn from the 2017 conference of the History of Women Religious – Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI), which I had the pleasure of convening at the School of Education, University College Dublin (UCD). The conference theme was ‘Sources and the History of Women Religious’, and delegates attended from the USA, Canada, Spain, Israel, Germany and the Netherlands. The H-WBRI is a research network that, despite its name, attracts scholars from around the world, all of whom are undertaking historical research in areas including biographical studies of nuns, congregational histories, studies of monastic life and explorations of women religious in education and healthcare. When I first hosted a H-WRBI conference at UCD back in 2014, it became very clear to me that this research field was finally ‘taking off’in Ireland. Irish scholarship was very well represented, and the 2014 conference resulted in a book, Education, Identity and Women Religious: Convents, Classrooms and Colleges.1 This book added to existing scholarship by Catríona Clear, Mary Peckham Magray, Margaret MacCurtain, Phil Kilroy and Máire Kealy.2 Most recently, Jacinta Prunty has published a major study of the Irish monasteries, asylums and reformatories of the Sister of Our Lady of Refuge. In Galway, scholars including Bronagh Ann McShane and Marie Louise Coolahan are working on women religious in early modern Ireland, while at UCD my own doctoral and post-doctoral researchers are examining many aspects of the history of convent education, and together we have worked with UCD Digital 262 Writing the History of Women Religious Today: Possibilities and Problems Archive to develop several online projects to showcase the importance of congregational collections. There are many possibilities for using the archives of women religious in research. The 1980s saw American scholars drawing on novitiate records, as they developed a major study of ageing and the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. Known widely as the ‘Nun Study’, this research was conducted with the cooperation of living members of the Schools Sisters of Notre Dame (SSND) in seven US provinces, who agreed that, after death, their brains would be donated to the study. Communities of sisters form a relatively homogenous group, and are therefore an ideal population for medical research. A breakthrough moment in the research came when the team located autobiographical essays by the sisters in the archives. These essays had been written when the women first entered the novitiate and, together with other archival data, helped to inform the researchers of the pattern of study the sisters had maintained over their lifespan. Further, by studying the handwriting samples of deceased sisters whose brain tissue had been examined, the team were able to conclude that a lack of ‘linguistic density’ in writing was a strong predictor of the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in later life. While the main value of the Nun Study was its contribution to the medical understanding of aging and of quality of life, it also served to remind congregations of the purposes to which researchers may be able to put their records: we simply do not know how archival records will be used in the future. Other possibilities for research drawing on the archives of women religious include studies of education and healthcare, while the experiences of sisters as missionaries has only recently begun to attract attention. Scholarly studies of sisters as global travellers have benefited from the rich travel journals that some nineteenth and early twentieth century sisters kept. In my own work, I have used the theoretical framework of transnationalism to explore how Irish sisters...