Modern Carmelite Nuns and Contemplative Identities

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

Modern Carmelite nuns and contemplative identities examines how modern Catholic contemplative nuns in the Netherlands envisioned their spirituality, and offers a contextualised exploration of the discourses they adopted to shape their identity as a female spiritual elite in a male-dominated church and society.As the Netherlands became a modern country in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Catholic religious life flourished, including its most radical manifestation: the contemplative life of cloistered nuns. This book examines the hidden spiritual life of the most numerous among them, the Discalced Carmelites, from their arrival in the country in 1872 up to the recent past. It draws on a range of sources, from convent archives to oral history, to analyse the evolving discourses these nuns adopted to articulate their identity as a female spiritual elite in a male-dominated church and society. Asceticism, vicarious suffering, mysticism and Therese of Lisieux's little way were major themes whose appeal proved persistent. From the 1950s and 1960s onwards, the challenge of renewal and the turn to self prompted them to devise new narratives revolving around contemplative prayer, as they sought to adapt to a culture that accentuates 'authentic' experience and self-expression. Modern Carmelite nuns and contemplative identities includes gendered role definitions, the distribution of power and the problem of memory in its contextualised exploration of how these women shaped their relationship with God and their role in the modern Western world. It will be of interest to students and scholars of history, religious studies, sociology and theology.