The 25th and final session of the Council of Trent (December 1563) ordered the enclosure of all female religious orders, meaning that religious women, upon taking vows, would remain in the convent for life.

There is a beauty in spatial fixity (something that moderns have forgotten), but enclosure did diminish the ability of Ursuline nuns in France to instruct illiterate peasants in church doctrine. That reduction in mission might have caused them to turn their attention toward lands claimed by France abroad.

The Ursulines faced another intrusion on their educational mission. It came from a source other than the church: France's emerging absolutist state. The purpose of state-supported education was (and is) to produce workers, not to draw souls toward God.

Most of the story that follows comes from a chapter on the Ursuline Convent at New Orleans in Petra Munro Hendry's "Reimagining the Educated Citizen: Creole Pedagogies in the Transatlantic World, 1685-1896." But before the nuns set sail, I want to pause over a couple of broad assertions by Hendry that are debatable and worthy of consideration.

In the first, Hendry draws from the work of Natalie Zemon Davis on the nature of early........

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