In 1631, Marie Guyart (later, Marie de l’Incarnation) stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business, her aging father and—what jars the modern reader—her eleven-year-old son. The Cruelest of All Mothers examines Marie’s confounding decision to abandon the young Claude, situating the event within the contexts of Marie’s own writings, family life in seventeenth-century France, the Christian tradition, and early modern French spirituality. This book takes up Marie’s decision to abandon Claude as an instance ... More

In 1631, Marie Guyart (later, Marie de l’Incarnation) stepped over the threshold of the Ursuline convent in Tours, into the cloister and out of the world, leaving behind the family business, her aging father and—what jars the modern reader—her eleven-year-old son. The Cruelest of All Mothers examines Marie’s confounding decision to abandon the young Claude, situating the event within the contexts of Marie’s own writings, family life in seventeenth-century France, the Christian tradition, and early modern French spirituality. This book takes up Marie’s decision to abandon Claude as an instance of human agency, arguing that the abandonment is best understood neither as an act of submission to the will of God nor as an act of resistance against the prevailing norms of seventeenth-century French family life, but rather as something in between. Taking its cue from Bourdieu’s understanding of human agency, this book argues that the abandonment is best understood as an event informed by what had been possible within the Christian tradition and inflected by what was likely within the context of seventeenth-century French Catholicism. The final chapter of the book draws on the work of Julia Kristeva to propose how, in another time and place, it might have been possible for Marie to imagine motherhood itself—and not its renunciation—as sacrifice in imitation of Christ.