Heretics in the Cloister

Abstract In the aftermath of the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, hundreds of Protestant women and girls were dragged from their homes and confined in monastic communities in order to facilitate their conversion to Catholicism. This article traces the rise of religious incarceration at one prominent Parisian convent, the Nouvelles Catholiques, which collaborated with monarchical officials and quickly became the preeminent site for the imprisonment of Protestant women within the city. The use of monastic incarceration to procure conversion and secure Catholic hegemony in France, as this study demonstrates, marks an important turning point in longer histories of European confinement. Alliance with the monarchy transformed the Nouvelles Catholiques into a utilitarian political site, one in which incarceration was expected to operate as a gendered strategy of social control. The partnership generated significant transformations within the convent and ultimately eroded its institutional autonomy, especially as the sisters ceded oversight of their admissions procedures to monarchical officials and began to receive disinterested, defiant, or duplicitous prisoners who were determined to make their own uses of the cloister.