Shaping the Spiritual Exercises: the Maisons des retraites in Brittany during the Seventeenth Century as a Gendered Pastoral Tool

Mostaccio, Silvia [UCL]

In the second half of the seventeenth century, on the periphery of Catholic Europe, Brittany was the site of intensive missionary activity aimed at both men and women. Based on a heterogeneous corpus of manuscripts, printed books, and iconographic sources, this article shows how, far from Rome, Jesuits and devout laywomen adopted a gendered perspective in reconceptualizing mission. In the city of Vannes, the Jesuit Vincent Huby and the aristocrat Catherine de Francheville instructed large groups of men and women in the Spiritual Exercises. They supervised two retreat houses to welcome them and created a “missionary kit” of moral images adapted to their gendered pastoral field. The Breton context presents a particularly good example of the importance of gender to missionary interactions. Here, the Jesuit “way of proceeding” allowed for the integration of local communitarian perspectives, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the mission.