Jansenist Women Negotiate the Pau Following Saint Paul, women were excluded from public religious roles and expected to eschew theology for affective devotional practices. The article explores the gender bind this placed on Jansenist nuns and laywomen, who felt compelled to declare their stance, by focusing on Marie-Catherine Hecquet.
She was pried from a convent and browbeaten into marriage. It compares her to her seventeenth-century models, the Port-Royal nuns in the formulary disputes, and to eighteenth-century nuns who protested against Unigenitus. She replied that she would gladly sign the creed, but that since she had only heard good things spoken about the three men he named, she could not sign any blanket condemnation.
She would sign a condemnation of propositions the Church condemned, but refused to attribute them to the Jansenists. The distinction the young woman drew in agreeing to condemn propositions the Church condemned, but refusing to attribute them to Jansen, was exactly the one used by the nuns of Port-Royal in the formulary disputes in the s. However, only one of the propositions could be found textually in the book. Many intellectuals of the time commented on the moral, scientific, and theological issues raised by the case β Voltaire, La Mettrie, Louis Racine β and it continues to attract interest 2.
Homassel also wrote a biography of the aunt who raised her which was only published in and was republished in 3. In addition, family letters have been preserved in the Archives Nationales, and manuscript accounts of the persecutions she endured as a Jansenist are found in at least two libraries in France.
Her father was a self-made entrepreneur who ran a successful enterprise in Abbeville that manufactured upholstery material. When her mother died, he sent her to Paris to be raised by a widowed aunt who was pious, but not a Jansenist. He largely ignored her until all his sons died, and he had no heir for his business.
