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Review: The Transforming Power of the Nuns: Women, Religion and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900

Magray's study of nuns in Ireland is a considerable addition to Irish social, cultural and religious history. Basing her analysis on a broad range of sources, many of which unfortunately are now closed to researchers, Magray locates the foundation of women's religious congregations and orders in the years between 1750 and 1845, noting the significance of wealthy and influential Catholic lay women in their establishment and survival. It was women themselves, rather than clerics who have generally been attributed with the foundation of convents, who generated the momentum that led to convent expansion in the years between 1750 and 1800. She reveals the founding figures of these communities, women such as Nano Nagle, Mary Aikenhead, Mary Frances Teresa Ball and Catherine McAuley, to be powerful figures who profoundly shaped the nature of their religious communities. These founders, and many other convent leaders, overcame formidable obstacles, often in the shape of the male clergy, to their work. In this instance Magray's dissection of the establishment of the Sisters of Mercy is a superb piece of historical analysis revealing fundamental conflict in areas of gender, class and sectarianism. These founders were women who planned, campaigned and strategised. They left little to chance. Here Magray differs considerably from the work of Caitriona Clear who argues that nuns were generally powerless within the male-dominated hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Magray contends that the subservience to the Church hierarchy apparent in religious communities did not occur until after 1850, when a series of conflicts with bishops undermined the independence and autonomy that had been guarded by these founders from their communities' establishment. She also argues that 'as the creators and enforcers of a new, modem, Irish Catholic ideology that idealised meek and docile women, Irish nuns themselves helped to create the very conditions that robbed them of their autonomy' (p. 130). However, while female religious might have helped to consolidate the idealisation of women as 'meek and docile' the enforcement of the behavioural expectation of this ideology was found in areas of Irish society where nuns had little or no influence. One of the most intriguing chapters in the book deals with the personal and communal relations that existed within and between the religious communities at individual and group level. Magray attempts to explore 'particular friendships' or close personal and emotional relationships within the religious communities by using letters and diaries and a textual reading of the rules, constitutions and annals of the communities. However, unlike her evidence for the other arguments put forward in her book the sources here are too limited and speculative to be convincing. She is on stronger ground when exploring the social and cultural authority exerted by these religious communities. Their promotion of education, sodalities, religious devotions and their work in welfare provided them with a status and power unmatched by lay women in Irish society of the period. Magray argues convincingly for the central role nuns played in the religious and cultural transformation of Catholic life in Ireland in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She has begun a serious argument for their centrality in the 'devotional revolution', an argument that must be considered more thoughtfully by historians of religion in Ireland. NWlS were not a consequence of this 'revolution' but rather a significant force in shaping it.