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Mary Ward's English Institute: The Apostolate As Self-Affirmation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Laurence Lux-Sterritt
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Extract

Mary Ward (1585–1645) is known as the foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an Order of women which continues to educate thousands of girls around the world. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, her foundation was a religious venture which aimed to transform the Catholic mission of recovery into one that catered for women as well as men. It maintained clandestine satellites on English soil and opened colleges on the Continent, in towns such as St Omer (1611), Liège (1616), Cologne and Trier (1620–1), Rome (1622), Naples and Perugia (1623), Munich and Vienna (1627) and Pressburg and Prague (1628). There, it trained its own members and undertook the education of externs and boarders. The Institute's vocation was not only to maintain the faith where it was already present but also to propagate it; as such, it went far beyond the accepted sphere of the feminine apostolate and its members were often labelled as rebels who strove to shake off the shackles of post-Tridentine religious life. To some modern historians, Mary Ward was an ‘unattached, roving, adventurous feminist’; to others, she was a foundress whose initiative deliberately set out to lay tradition to rest and begin a new era for the women in the Church.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , October 2006 , pp. 192 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2006

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References

Notes

1 Collinson, Patrick, ‘“Not Sexual in the Ordinary Sense”’ in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), p. 127.Google Scholar

2 Bar Convent Archives (thereafter BCA), B18, Institutum, f. 19.

3 Ibidem., f. 23.

4 Ibidem., f. 22.

5 Chambers, M.C.E., The Life of Mary Ward, 1585–1645, 2 vols (London, 1882–1885), vol. 2, p. 27:Google Scholar ‘Those who in respect of the fear of persecution […] I cannot at the first bring to resolve to be living members of the Catholic Church, I endeavour at least so to dispose them that understanding and believing the way to salvation, they seldom or unwillingly go to heretical churches’.

6 Chambers, Life, vol. 2, p. 28.

7 BCA, B17, f. 2, Three speeches of our Reverend Mother Chief Superior made at St Omer having been long absent.

8 Ibidem., f. 3.

9 Westminster Diocesan Archives (thereafter WDA), B25, f. 56.

10 Ibidem., f. 54.

11 BCA, CI, Letters against the Jesuitesses, f. 311.

12 WDA, vol. 16, f. 207. In her article ‘“Wandering Nuns”: The Return of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the South of England, 1862–1945’, Recusant History 243 (1999) 384–96,Google Scholar Sr. M. Gregory Kirkus, IBVM, explores what she calls ‘the purposeful mobility’ of the members of the Institute in more recent years.

13 BCA, B5, letter 4 to Mgr Albergati, 1620.

14 See Cover, Jeanne, Love, the Driving Force: Mary Ward's Spirituality and its Significance for Moral Theology (Milwaukee, Wis., 1997);Google Scholar Littlehales, Margaret, Mary Ward (1585–1645). A Woman for All Seasons (London, 1974)Google Scholar and Mary Ward, Pilgrim and Mystic (London, 1998). Note also articles suchas Byrne, Lavinia, ‘Mary Ward's Vision of the Apostolic Religious Life’, The Way Supplement 53(1985) pp. 73–84;Google Scholar Grisar, Joseph, ‘Mary Ward, 1585–1645’, The Month 12.22 (1954) pp. 69–81;Google Scholar and Wetter, Immolata, ‘Mary Ward's Apostolic Vocation’, The Way, supplement 17 (1972) pp. 69–91.Google Scholar

15 Peters, Henriette, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, trans, by Butterworth, Helen (Leominster, 1994), pp. 44–54.Google Scholar

16 Hamilton, Adam, The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses of the Lateran, at St Monica's in Louvain, 1548 to 1625 (Edinburgh, 1904), p. 180.Google Scholar See also Connelly, Roland, Women of the Catholic Resistance (Durham, 1997), pp. 191–93.Google Scholar

17 Painted Life, panel 9.

18 BCA, B4, autobiographical notes, transcribed in Orchard, Emmanuel, Till God Will: Mary Ward through her Writings (London, 1985), p. 10.Google Scholar

19 BCA, B18, Schola Beatae Mariae, item 54.

20 BCA, B18, Ratio Instituti, f. 16.

21 BCA, B5, letter 4 to Nuncio Albergati, 1620.

22 BCA, box 4, necrologies, f. 4.

23 Ibidem., f. 15.

24 BCA, B18, Schola Beatae Mariae, item 14.

25 BCA, B9, notes written during the Spiritual Exercises, 1612–14, resolution 27.

26 BCA, A 12, A Briefe Relation of the Holy Life and Happy Death of our Dearest Mother, ff. 15–16. This is a posthumous biography, written jointly by Mary Poyntz and Winefred Wigmore, Mary Ward's closest two followers, c. 1650.

27 BCA, B9, notes written during the Spiritual Exercises, 1612–14, resolution 5.

28 BCA, B9, retreat notes, April 1618.

29 BCA, box 4, necrologies, f. 17.

30 The Painted Life, panel 10.

31 See, inter alia, Blumenfeld-Kosinski, R. and Szell, T. (eds.) Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, 1991);Google Scholar Newman, Barbara, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia, Penn., 1995);Google Scholar Petroff, Elizabeth, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women Mysticism (New York, 1994);Google Scholar Watt, Diane, Medieval Women in their Communities (Cardiff, 1997).Google Scholar

32 BCA, B5, letter 4 to Mgr Albergati, 1620.

33 Ibidem.

34 Ibidem.

35 BCA, B18, Ratio Instituti, f. 5.

36 BCA, box 4, necrologies, f. 15.

37 BCA, B18, Institutum, f. 20.

38 BCA, B9, notes written during the Spiritual Exercises, 1612–14, resolution 35.

39 BCA, B9, Various Papers, ‘The Loneliness’, f. 34.

40 BCA, B12, Briefe Relation.

41 The Painted Life, panel 30.

42 The Saints represented are Benedict, Pachomius, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Clare, Bridget, Scholastica and Teresa of Àvila.

43 Peters, Mary Ward, pp. 256–57.

44 BCA, B5, letter 86, f. 93 d.

45 BCA, B5, letter 44, f. 71.