| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Congrégation de Notre-Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796. By Colleen Gray. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007. xxxvi, 250 pp. $75.00, ISBN 978-0-7735-3227-4.)

Colleen Gray's The Congrégation de Notre- Dame, Superiors, and the Paradox of Power, 1693–1796 is an engaging reconstruction of the lives of the members of a female religious community in eighteenth-century Quebec. The study focuses on the power held by the institution as a whole and by its members, especially its individual elected leaders. Through a careful examination of archival material ranging from account books to the correspondence between the superiors and the bishop of Quebec, Gray discovers that the congregation and its members held a considerable amount of authority, which was unavailable to contemporary secular women. The nuns were pledged to female education and inculcated Catholic piety and obedience in generation after generation of future wives and mothers, thereby ensuring the stability of the colony's social and religious structure. Beyond their pedagogical mission, their spirituality itself had political connotations since their prayers were often officially offered to promote French victory over their British or Indian enemies. Additionally, the nuns owned property, unlike their secular counterparts; in fact, they owned an entire island in the St. James River, which provided crops for their table and rents for running the convent and its missions.

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