The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition by Mary Dunn

Reviewed by: The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition by Mary Dunn Stephanie Paulsell (bio) The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Tradition, by Mary Dunn. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. 208pp. $45.00 In the first issue of Spiritus, Mary Frohlich argued for the self-implicating quality of the field of spirituality. “Spirituality,” she wrote, “can be an academic discipline only insofar as it coheres with its deeper character as a spiritual discipline.” To study spirituality, she insisted, asks “the utmost of us, both in our living and in our scholarship.” With The Cruelest of All Mothers, Mary Dunn has given us a powerful example of the study of spirituality as a discipline that implicates the scholar’s own lived reality. In this polished jewel of a book, Dunn explores the story of Marie de l’Incarnation’s abandonment of her eleven-year-old son, Claude, in the light of her own experience of motherhood. The Cruelest of All Mothers tells the story of Marie Martin, a young widow and mother in seventeenth-century France who had been drawn since childhood to religious life. After the death of her husband, Marie put Claude in the care of a wet nurse for his first two years and went to live in the attic of her father’s house, where she devoted herself to prayer and study. After she reunited with her son, they moved in with her sister and her sister’s husband. Marie assisted with their family business and helped with the upkeep of the household. Even as her days filled with physically demanding work, Marie “was constantly occupied,” as she put it, “by my intense concentration on God.” She took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, received communion every day, engaged in ascetic practices, and met regularly with a spiritual director. However, religious life in the world did not satisfy her. Her desire to enter a religious community grew stronger and stronger, but because Claude was still a little boy, she remained with him. When Claude was eleven years old, however, Marie abandoned him, with no material resources, to the care of her sister and brother-in-law and entered the Ursuline convent. Claude haunted the Ursuline house, crying at the grille of the choir, entering the enclosure whenever he saw the door open, sticking his arms through the communion rail. He once stormed the convent with a group of his friends, crying for his mother to be given back to him. Marie could hear his voice amid the fray, but she stayed put, worried mainly that she might be asked to leave. Eight years after she entered the order, Marie left for Canada to found the first Ursuline community in the New World. For the next thirty-three years, Marie would live a rich and eventful life, founding a school for indigenous girls, translating catechisms into indigenous languages, serving as the superior of her convent, and dealing with secular and religious authorities in the managing of her community. During these years, she also kept up a regular and intimate correspondence with [End Page 269] the son she had abandoned in which she gave shape to the story of their separation, casting it as a Christ-like sacrifice, a submission to the will of God. Claude entered a Benedictine community as a monk in 1641, and he used his mother’s abandonment of him as a way to persuade her to share with him her deepest spiritual secrets. You deprived me of knowing you, he argued. Share with me now your spiritual goods. She eventually acquiesced and wrote her autobiography for him, asking him to keep it private and not to share it with others. Claude went on to edit (heavily) and publish his mother’s work along with more than two hundred of her letters (also edited). Until a manuscript of Marie’s autobiography and a few other letters were discovered a century ago, Claude, as Dunn puts it, “controlled the discursive production of Marie herself,” reclaiming the mother he had once lost. Dunn turns the story of Marie and Claude through a kaleidoscope of...

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