Modern Carmelite nuns and contemplative identities: Shaping spirituality in the Netherlands

By Brian Heffernan

Discalced Carmelite convents are among the most influential wellsprings of female spirituality in the Catholic tradition, as the names of Teresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux and Edith Stein attest. Behind these ‘great Carmelites’ stood communities of women who developed discourses on their relationship with God and their identity as a spiritual elite in the church and society. This book looks at these discourses as formulated by Carmelites in the Netherlands, from their arrival there in 1872 up to the recent past, providing an in-depth case study of the spiritualities of modern women contemplatives. The female religious life was a transnational phenomenon, and the book draws on sources and scholarship in English, Dutch, French and German to provide insights on gendered spirituality, memory and the post-conciliar renewal of the religious life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526177193

Brian Heffernan

Brian Heffernan is a historian of religion who has published on modern Catholicism in Ireland and the Netherlands

Book preview

Modern Carmelite nuns and contemplative identities

Modern Carmelite nuns and contemplative identities

Shaping spirituality in the Netherlands

Brian Heffernan

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Brian Heffernan 2024

The right of Brian Heffernan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is adapted from Radicaal kloosterleven. Ongeschoeide karmelietessen in de Nederlandse katholieke kerk, 1872–2020, published by Amsterdam University Press, 2021

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 7720 9 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Carmelite nuns at prayer, Arnhem, 16 August 1982 © Catrien Ariëns.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

A note on nomenclature

Map of Discalced Carmelite convents in the Netherlands

Introduction

1Convents, sisters and power

2Mighty victims: suffering and spiritual warfare, 1872–1920

3Little ways, old and new: pain and prayer, 1920–1970

4A new type of Carmelite: renewal, 1950–1990

5Contemplatives in an expressive culture: prayer and the turn to self, 1970–2020

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

Many people gave indispensable assistance in the writing of this book; they are mentioned by name in the Dutch-language edition that underlies this English translation, and I would like to reiterate my heartfelt gratitude to them all. Particular thanks are due to the Federation of Discalced Carmelite Sisters in the Netherlands, which initiated and funded the research for and publication of the original book, and to Liesbeth Cooijmans, without whom neither the Dutch nor the English version would ever have seen the light of day. I thank the anonymous reviewers for reading the English manuscript – and Dr Brian Casey for reading parts thereof – and furnishing many helpful comments and suggestions. The customary proviso that any remaining errors of fact or judgement are mine of course also applies here. Many thanks are due furthermore to Alun Richards, Meredith Carroll and the team at Manchester University Press, Mike Richardson, Anja van Leusden, Catrien Ariëns and, as always, Etienne Chéreau.

Brussels, 27 July 2023

Abbreviations

A note on nomenclature

For reasons of brevity, the word ‘Carmelite/Carmelites’ is used throughout to mean Discalced Carmelite sisters; no prejudice is intended to the claims of other branches of the Carmelite family to this title. The word ‘Carmel’ is used not just as the general term for the order and its form of life but also to designate individual Carmelite convents. The style of naming sisters and friars in this book differs per historical period, to reflect changing practices. Carmelites have a religious name consisting of two parts (for example, Mary Stephanie of the Apostles). In discussions of the period up to 1970 sisters and friars are called by their religious name, and of the period since 1970 by their surname. The names of medieval and early modern figures have been anglicised; those of sisters and friars in the Netherlands from the modern era up to 1920 are given in their French or German versions depending on the language spoken in their convent, and from the 1920–1970 period in their Dutch versions. Edith Stein is always called Edith Stein.

Discalced Carmelite convents in the Netherlands, with provinces and Roman Catholic dioceses

Introduction

On Thursday 13 November 1969 Sister Maria Stephanie von den Aposteln, Anna Semmelmann in the world, died in the Carmelite convent in Roermond in the south-east of the Netherlands, at 79 years of age. She came from a village near Regensburg in Bavaria and was the daughter of a cobbler. According to her obituary, she did what ‘all dynamic village girls did at the time: she fled the village where there was nothing to learn or earn and nothing to do’. She found a job in the kitchen of a student guesthouse in Regensburg. But, ‘gradually, she felt the desire to live entirely for God alone, in solitude and silence’.¹ A priest put her in touch with a community of contemplative nuns, the Discalced Carmelites in Roermond. When she entered the convent, in January 1916, she disappeared into the cloister, the part of the building that was reserved for the nuns and was separated from the world by walls, locked doors and a grille. She lived there for 53 years, leaving only on a few occasions for emergencies. ‘She understood what this life is about,’ according to the author of her obituary.²

Anna Semmelmann’s desire to lead a radical form of religious life was exceptional but not unique. Around the year she died there were about a million Catholic women religious in the world – that is, women who had taken the religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience and were members of an order or congregation.³ Most were active or apostolic religious who dedicated some of their time to prayer while also engaging in external activities, such as in education or healthcare. Cloistered nuns, by contrast, focused exclusively on prayer, contemplation and domestic work within the convent. The distinction is not clear-cut, as in practice it was a spectrum with many different positions, but, for the contemplatives in particular, the ideal of a life led ‘entirely for God alone’ played an important role in their sense of identity.⁴

Around 1969 the contemplatives were a small minority within the wider group of women religious: there were some 70,000 of them, about 7 per cent of the total number. They belonged to various orders, and the most numerous were the Discalced Carmelites; about 11,000, or 16 per cent of cloistered nuns, belonged to this order.⁵ Contemplative women had not always been a minority among women religious. In fact, for most of the history of Christianity, female religious life meant cloistered life.⁶ But the great flourishing of the female religious life across Catholic Europe in the nineteenth century primarily occurred through the growth of apostolic congregations.

It would be mistaken, however, to see this as the marginalisation of female contemplative life.⁷ Cloistered nuns also experienced great numerical growth, more or less along the same curve as apostolic sisters. Moreover, the spirituality of contemplative women in some respects set the tone for spiritual life in active congregations and, further afield, for lay spirituality as well, as the great popularity of the Carmelite saint Therese of Lisieux (1873–1897) shows.⁸ Furthermore, cloistered nuns in many ways defined the public perception of ‘the nun’ or ‘the sister’, of contemplative and apostolic sisters alike. Separation from the world was the key note. In the convent in Roermond where Anna Semmelmann lived, as in other cloistered convents, this was staged dramatically in the architecture: passers-by saw high walls and small windows, and visitors to the parlour sat before a double metal grille with spikes pointing out at them, while the sisters in the enclosed part of the parlour appeared behind the grille with their hair and faces covered by a veil.

The carefully curated image of contemptus mundi, or contempt for the world, that this mise en scène evoked appealed to the imagination, of Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Images of nuns were influenced by how various sections in society valued modernity. This produced strongly contrasting stereotypes, of convents as sinister places of coercion and fanaticism versus convents as oases of peace and harmony in a hectic and harshly competitive world.⁹ Such representations, primarily those created and fostered by nuns themselves, form the subject matter of this book. It presents a cultural history of how Carmelites shaped their contemplative spirituality and identity, from their arrival in the Netherlands in 1872 to the very recent past. The book contextualises this by looking at the social and ethnic make-up of convents, vocations and the complex dynamic of power relations. But its main focus is on how representations of the Carmelites’ relationship with the divine and their discourses of identity developed. As such, important questions in the book are how spirituality and identity were invented or constructed, how and why these constructions changed over time, how they affected collective memory, who produced narratives on spirituality and identity and the extent to which sisters appropriated or contested these or proposed alternatives or adjustments. This focus reflects many religious sisters’ own sense of the centrality of these aspects to their lives – something often obscured in scholarly treatment of modern women religious, which tends to prioritise community life, external work, power and gender, and social background.¹⁰ This is not the case for the historiography of medieval and early modern religious women, possibly due to the predominance of contemplative women before, and of apostolic women after, the French Revolution.

This book is a case study of one order of contemplative nuns. As a case study, its hypothesis is that the Discalced Carmelites were comparable to, rather than essentially different from, other institutes of female contemplatives. The Discalced Carmelites were most closely akin to other ‘second orders’ of mendicant institutes, such as the Carmelite sisters of the old observance, the Poor Clares and contemplative Dominican and Augustinian sisters. But these nuns shared many features with the female branches of monastic orders, such as Benedictine and Cistercian sisters, with contemplative canonesses such as the Norbertine sisters and, to a somewhat lesser degree, with contemplative congregations such as the Holy Spirit Adoration Sisters, the Redemptoristines and the Visitation Sisters. Despite differences in canonical status, organisation, habit, nomenclature and spiritual traditions, these various types all have in common that they approximate the contemplative end of the contemplative–apostolic spectrum along which all religious institutes are positioned. Much of what is written here about the Discalced Carmelite sisters probably also applies to them.

The Carmelites have been among the most prolific and influential producers of female spiritual thought and writing in the Catholic tradition, including in the modern era; the names of Therese of Lisieux, Elizabeth of Dijon, Teresa of the Andes and Edith Stein alone can vouch for this. Behind these ‘great Carmelites’ stood communities of women that functioned as communities of communication, in which more or less articulated discourses on their relationship with God and on their identity and role as contemplative nuns in the modern world were invented, reinvented and developed. The topics that appear in the works of the great Carmelite writers originated in this larger Carmelite tradition, which was of course also strongly influenced by them in turn. This book looks at the case of the Dutch Carmelite community to examine this ongoing Carmelite tradition more closely.

Women religious beyond national borders

Anna Semmelmann was from Germany but lived her religious life in the Netherlands. She was far from unique in this respect, neither among the Carmelites nor among religious in general. Historians have long accepted that it makes little sense to study medieval and early modern religious women in a national context. Quite apart from the fact that nationhood had different meanings then, the religious life itself was a transnational phenomenon, and many features of these women’s experience were alike across geographical boundaries. This is also true for contemporary female religious life, as scholars have come to emphasise¹¹ – not only because nuns and sisters crossed borders, whether to flee culture wars, launch new apostolates or participate in the colonial-missionary project, but also because they inhabited a largely similar spiritual and cultural universe. For them, the nation state and the project of nationalism were secondary to something else: Catholicism, and the meanings and opportunities for spiritual life and identity formation that it offered. National identity was important to them to the extent that it could be implicated in this alternative project. Add to this that the historical trajectory of Catholicism was broadly comparable across western Europe, going in most places from militant ghetto Catholicism to reform Catholicism to ‘secularisation’, and that the challenges posed by the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) were phrased in a universal language, and the advantages of taking a transnational approach become even clearer.

There are various ways in which such an approach might be operationalised, the most obvious being in the form of a comparative or transnational study. But the current book seeks, more modestly, to contribute to anglophone scholarship on modern women religious by presenting a case study from a non-English-speaking context. If the hypothesis formulated above is correct, then the story of the Dutch nuns told here will be able to yield conclusions and insights that are broadly relevant also for the history of nuns in many parts of the anglophone world – and, indeed, for the West more generally. In particular, the ‘spiritual history’ approach that is employed, with its focus on spirituality and identity, may prove fruitful to the study of experiences of modern women religious elsewhere.¹² Although the book takes the Netherlands as its geographical perimeter, it does not privilege the national context. The varying meanings assigned to national, ethnic and linguistic differences in the spiritual history of the Carmelites in the Netherlands are an important theme throughout.

Catholics and Catholic religious in the Netherlands

The flourishing of the religious life in the Netherlands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries benefited greatly from the arrival of foreign nuns, sisters, brothers and religious priests in two waves, the first in the 1870s from Kulturkampf Germany, and the second around the turn of century from France’s anticlerical Troisième République. Once established, these refugee religious institutes began to recruit Dutch postulants, but foreign recruitment, particularly from Belgium and Germany, remained a feature of their growth. In more recent times, religious recruited in former mission territories who have moved to houses of their institute in the Netherlands have brought about a different kind of internationalisation of Dutch religious life.¹³

The choice of these exiles of the European culture wars to come to the Netherlands highlights the fact that, despite its history of Calvinist privilege and its reputation as one of Europe’s quintessentially Protestant nations, the Netherlands was also a Catholic country. Catholics constituted just under 40 per cent of the population for most of the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the 1970s. The southern and south-eastern provinces of North Brabant and Limburg formed its Catholic heartland, with an almost homogeneously Catholic population, and some of the other provinces were dotted with Catholic-majority enclaves. In absolute figures, Dutch Catholics numbered some 1.3 million in 1869, 2.1 million in 1910 and 4.8 million in 2010, which puts them in the same order of magnitude, at least for the twentieth century, as their British (2.5 million in 1910 and 5.6 million in 2010) and Irish co-religionists (2.8 million in 1910 and 4.4 million in 2010).¹⁴

Legal emancipation was for the most part achieved in 1796 and was enshrined in the 1848 constitution, and from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards Dutch Catholics experienced a process of cultural, political and economic emancipation that went hand in hand with the international rise of ultramontanism. As in other religiously mixed countries, such as Germany and Britain, emancipation came with the aspiration on the part of the clergy and lay elites to create a well-regimented, segregated, self-contained Catholic social bloc or ‘milieu’.¹⁵ This ambition was never fully realised, but it was the project on which bishops, priests, religious and laity expended their energies for many decades.

The Dutch Catholic community soon punched above its weight internationally, particularly through its enthusiasm for the missions. This was facilitated and encouraged by the Dutch Redemptorist Cardinal Willem van Rossum (1854–1932), who was prefect of the Vatican’s mission department, the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, from 1918 to 1932.¹⁶ This extraordinary contribution to the missions prior to the Second Vatican Council is one reason to regard Dutch Catholicism as an interesting case; Dutch Catholics’ reputedly extraordinary zeal for church reform in the 1960s and 1970s is another.¹⁷ The almost exclusive interest of scholars in the progressive wing of Dutch conciliar and post-conciliar Catholicism has recently been challenged, and the current book will show that conservatism, traditionalism or resistance to change were as much part of the Dutch Carmelites’ experience as a desire for reform.¹⁸ Dutch Catholicism was a force to be reckoned with in international Catholicism in the twentieth century, due first to its missionary and later its reformist prominence. But in many ways its historical development resembled that of Catholic communities in other western European countries, with which it was linked through transnational ties.

Historical writing about women religious

This book is the first historical study of modern cloistered nuns in the Netherlands, but it is not the first on Dutch women religious in the modern age. Over the last 50 years or so a body of work has emerged in response to earlier scholarly disinterest in women religious.¹⁹ Traditional secular historiography was mainly interested in the deeds of great men, and regarded religion as an obsolete phenomenon of little consequence. Church historians were, of course, interested in religion, but mostly in the institutional church and its male hierarchy and clergy, except for a few great female saints. Religious sisters as a group were not regarded as a subject worthy of study.²⁰

This forgetfulness was challenged in the 1960s and 1970s by the rise of women’s history, which sought to recover women’s neglected contributions to society and to highlight examples of female agency – the ability of women to define and pursue personal and societal goals independently.²¹ Feminist perspectives gave rise to debates about whether women religious should be seen as prime victims of patriarchal oppression or examples of embodied subaltern resistance.²² The new turn resulted in a number of pioneering historical studies of the history of women religious in the Netherlands that were methodologically innovative in foregrounding these women’s own experiences, and that attempted to weigh their impact on the emancipation of women.²³

Historical interest in women religious received a boost in the 1980s from what has been called the feminisation thesis. This theory postulated that Western Christianity became feminised in the course of the nineteenth century, on the one hand because the percentage share of women among practising believers and religious grew, and on the other because piety supposedly became more ‘feminine’ in character.²⁴ The growth of female apostolic congregations was important proof in this argument. A wave of new studies followed, including the French historian Claude Langlois’s seminal 1984 work Le catholicisme au féminin. The Dutch theologian Annelies van Heijst’s 1985 study of emancipation among apostolic women religious was a Dutch example.²⁵

The approach changed again in the 1990s, as a result of the cultural turn in the humanities. The focus in historiography shifted from political and socioeconomic history to culture, defined as the collective representations that help form and determine human perception, signification, feeling and experience.²⁶ For church history, this meant a new interest in lived religion, which no longer took the institutional church and theology as norm and synecdoche for the history of religion but investigated the experiences and representations of the faithful themselves.²⁷ For women’s history, it meant a shift towards the history of gender and the historicisation of gender roles and identities. As a result, the categories that had been used by the proponents of the feminisation thesis to gauge ‘feminisation’ were themselves problematised.²⁸ Incidentally, the rise of gender history also opened the way to enquiry into masculinity and male piety, leading to a second substantial critique of the feminisation thesis.²⁹

For historians of religion, these changes brought women religious to the forefront of attention, with research focusing on topics such as the ‘spirit of humility and self-forgetfulness’ in convents and the performance of identity by sisters.³⁰ It also brought to light the ‘polysemic nature of the meanings that women’ gave to religion and the ‘multiplicity of appropriations’ of religious representations.³¹ The work of the American author Elaine Showalter offered the Nijmegen scholars Annelies van Heijst and Marjet Derks a heuristic concept that proved useful to analyse this polysemy: double-voiced discourse. The underlying notion is that the only language available to subaltern or marginalised groups is that of the dominant group, so that the speech of subaltern groups incorporates both the dominant voice and their own muted voice: ‘interweaving of silenced voices in the dominant discourse … concurrence and contradiction within the same linguistic space’.³²

Van Heijst and Derks and their colleagues José Eijt, Marit Monteiro and Gian Ackermans used this concept to interpret the experiences of women religious. Van Heijst has emphasised that sisters’ use of mainstream religious discourse must not be regarded as ‘surface noise’ to mask an alternative agenda.³³ Instead, as Monteiro has argued, it was the ‘only language in which [they] could express who they were or what they wanted’.³⁴ This approach continues to be used, as Kristien Suenens’s 2020 biography of four Belgian foundresses of congregations shows. Suenens has pointed out that recent authors have come to understand female agency in a broader sense, not simply as conscious resistance to oppressive structures but also as the ability to act at all, even within established structures.³⁵

In 1995 Derks, Eijt and Monteiro founded Stichting Echo (the Echo Society) to promote historical research into the interaction between faith and gender, and of religious in general. Since then many publications on Dutch religious have seen the light under the auspices of this organisation – and, indeed, otherwise – including the thematic series Metamorfosen. Studies in religieuze geschiedenis (‘Metamorphoses: Studies in Religious History’).³⁶ In their 2010 book Ex caritate, Van Heijst, Derks and Monteiro apply the most recent insights to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of apostolic women religious in the Netherlands.³⁷

Many publications that were published through the mediation of Stichting Echo were commissioned and funded by the religious institutes themselves.³⁸ The interest that Dutch religious take in their own past was also evident in the establishment of the Dienstencentrum Kloosterarchieven (Service Centre for Religious Archives) in the village of Sint Agatha near Nijmegen in 1990, renamed Erfgoedcentrum Nederlands Kloosterleven (Heritage Centre for Dutch Religious Life) in 2002, to act as a repository for the archives and other material heritage of religious institutes in the country.³⁹ This interest was driven by the process of ressourcement that all religious institutes underwent in the wake of the council, which encouraged religious to seek their ‘authentic’ charism. It has been a great stimulus to historical research, but, as Monteiro, Derks and Van Heijst have observed, ressourcement-inspired research is not without its risks. It is often focused exclusively on individual institutes, which obscures wider thematic connections and nourishes an unhistorical, particularistic approach. There is also the danger that historians are drawn into the process of self-historicisation that is part and parcel of ressourcement, and rewrite the past according to the requirements of the post-conciliar self-image of the institute in question.⁴⁰

Even more recently, disclosures of sexual abuse of minors by religious have led to a new interest in their history, including that of women religious. This is particularly true in Ireland, where public and scholarly discourse about women religious has gone from positive assessment as ‘voluntary associations of women, united in sisterhood and service’ to that of nuns as ‘primary abusers of poor children and unwed mothers’, in Elizabeth Butler Cullingford’s evocative summary.⁴¹ The publication in 2013 of a report on abuse of girls in the Dutch Catholic church addressed the same issue, although the ensuing debate has been more muted than in Ireland and has yet to result in extensive scholarly treatment of this aspect of the legacy of women religious.⁴²

Contemplative nuns

The Dutch historiographical development that has been described here has focused primarily on apostolic women religious.⁴³ There are various reasons for this. First, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were unmistakably their heyday: their growth was more spectacular, their numbers higher and their public profile more pronounced than those of contemplative sisters.⁴⁴ Second, the post-conciliar process of renewal followed a different course for contemplative orders from the one it followed for many apostolic congregations. Contemplatives have strong traditions of reflection on their own identity that long pre-date the council. In addition, reform did not have the same urgency for them as for many active religious, who had to redefine their aims and identity as their collective work projects changed or disappeared altogether. Although the struggle for reform was acute for contemplatives, and they too were confronted by ageing and the prospect of institutional extinction through demographic decline, the rupture with the past was not as sharp and the resulting identity crisis not as severe. Consequently, interest in their own past – or the desire to find historical confirmation for a newly acquired discourse on institutional identity – has not been as marked. This, and possibly a less favourable financial position, can explain why contemplative religious in the Netherlands have not been as forthcoming as their active counterparts in commissioning historical research.⁴⁵

By contrast, medieval and early modern nuns, particularly the female mystics of the thirteenth century and later, have been a frequent subject of research for international historians and literary scholars. In their studies of the religious writings of women, Caroline Walker Bynum and Alison Weber have looked at gender, embodied spirituality and the rhetorical strategies that these women devised to create a position of enunciation for themselves.⁴⁶ Weber’s observation that mysticism had a great capacity ‘to challenge and confirm traditional gender roles, to open and foreclose opportunities for women, and to uplift and denigrate them’ is surprisingly similar to the emphasis on ambiguity that marks Dutch studies of modern apostolic women religious.⁴⁷ In his study of the body and penance among late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish Carmelite sisters, the French historian Antoine Roullet has similarly pointed to the polysémie of their penitential practices.⁴⁸

Belgian and French historiography contains a more extensive body of studies of modern cloistered nuns.⁴⁹ In 2012 the Belgian historian Anne-Dolorès Marcélis published an extensive study of Carmelites and Poor Clares in the province of Namur, entitled Femmes cloîtrées des temps contemporains, which has served in some ways as a model for the current book. Her analysis of the sources focused on three distinct dimensions: the normative, the ‘imaginary’ and the real.⁵⁰ This layered approach resulted in a synthetic description of societal and ecclesiastical context, representations of identity and spirituality, gender roles and the personal narratives of sisters. It is indebted to Jacques Maître’s psychoanalytical sociology of religion, which has had only limited impact on Dutch- and English-language scholarship.⁵¹ Although the terminology of her book is dependent on psychoanalytical theory, the book has yielded insights that show some affinity with the analysis of double-voiced discourse.

There is yet another corpus in French historiography that is relevant to the current study: Claude Langlois’s work on the Carmelite Therese of Lisieux. In his many books on this French saint, Langlois describes her as a self-conscious author, strongly rooted in her Carmelite and religious context (which Langlois has himself extensively analysed), while also making an original spiritual and literary contribution to the religious thought of her time.⁵² Another important work is the French historian Dominique-Marie Dauzet’s 2006 book La mystique bien tempérée, in which he examines the writings of various nineteenth- and twentieth-century female spiritual writers, mainly religious sisters.⁵³ Their writings about the spiritual life constitute ‘other voices’ alongside those that can be found in the published works of male clerics – voices that had, however, been made ‘well-tempered’ by the priests with whom these women engaged in negotiations about their insights and writings.⁵⁴

A recent Belgian research project on ‘religious bodies’ led by Tine Van Osselaer has studied female stigmatics and their public cults in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁵⁵ There are many similarities between the spirituality of the women studied there and of the Carmelites, for whom, as shall become evident, pain, suffering and public recognition thereof were immensely important, at least until the 1960s. Van Osselaer and her fellow researchers have observed that stigmatisation, traditionally the preserve of cloistered nuns, became an increasingly lay and domestic phenomenon from the nineteenth century onwards.⁵⁶ This raises questions about laywomen’s evolving experience of Catholicism, but also about the topic at issue in the current book: the identity and spirituality of cloistered nuns in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A book about the Dutch Carmelite sisters

This book is indebted to several of the historiographical trends that have just been mentioned. It is a condensed and partly reworked English translation of a Dutch-language book published in 2021.⁵⁷ This was the outcome of a research project supervised by Stichting Echo and commissioned and funded by the Federation of Discalced Carmelite Sisters in the Netherlands, a body that unites most Dutch Discalced Carmelite convents.

Stuart Hall has observed that ‘we all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific’ – a position that comes with