Chronicling the history of the Daughters of Charity through the seventeenth century, this study examines how the community's existence outside of convents helped to change the nature of women's religious communities and the early modern Catholic church. Unusually for the time, this group of Catholic religious women remained uncloistered. They lived in private houses in the cities and towns of France, offering medical care, religious instruction and alms to the sick and the poor; by the end of the century, they were France's premier organization of nurses. This book places the Daughters of Charity within the context of early modern poor relief in France - the author shows how they played a critical role in shaping the system, and also how they were shaped by it. The study also examines the complicated relationship of the Daughters of Charity to the Catholic church of the time, analyzing it not only for what light it can shed on the history of the community, but also for what it can tell us about the Catholic Reformation more generally.

Here are the rules, conferences and writings of these two Vincentian founders who, through service to the poor, left an indelible mark on the church in France in the seventeenth century and beyond to the present. Louise (1591-1660) first came to Vincent (1581-1660) for spiritual direction and they became coworkers and friends for the rest of their lives.

Born illegitimate, St. Louise (1591-1660) became a great apostle of charity. Together with St. Vincent de Paul she established permanent institutions to put haphazard works of charity onto a stable footing--hospitals, child care institutions, homes for the aged, care for those in prison and on the battlefield, psychiatric centers and home nursing care. Impr.

First Published in 1996. Following the author's previous work, Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century in 1986, an increased interest in feminism, science, and gender issues resulted in this subsequent title. This book will be valuable to scholars working in a variety of academic areas and will be useful at different educational levels from secondary through graduate school. This annotated bibliography of approximately 2700 entries also includes fields, nationality, periods, persons/institutions, reference, and theme indexes.