From Cloister to Court: Nuns and the Gendered Culture of Disputing in Early Modern France

Abstract

This article examines how limited access to the courts and gendered norms of behavior combined to shape early modern women's strategies to pursue and resolve disputes. It describes the decades-long conflict that troubled the Franciscan convent of Sainte-Catherine-lès-Provins in Provins, France. Divided over the issue of reform that would impose stricter enclosure, the community became factionalized and unable to resolve its disputes internally. But access to France's civil courts was limited by the women's ecclesiastical status. Episcopal visitation records permit us to see how gender was implicated in the ways women pursued their grievances with one another behind cloister walls, and in how they shaped those grievances into legal suits civil judges would adjudicate.