Power, Position and the pesante charge: Becoming a Superior in the Congrégation de Notre-Dame of Montreal, 1693–1796
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research surrounding convents in mediaeval Europe, post-Tridentine Latin America, and eighteenth-century Canada has argued that well-born religious women achieved top administrative positions within their respective institutions primarily due to their social and financial connections. This study of the Congregation de Notre-Dame in Montreal between 1693 and 1796, however, reveals that ordinary individuals were at the helm as superiors of this particular institution, and that they achieved this position largely as a result of their own demonstrated talents. This interpretation broadens the notion of an ancien regime in which wealth, patronage, and connections ruled the day to include the possibility that an individual’s abilities were also important. The study also demonstrates the persistent efficacy of empirical social history, when used in combination with other methodologies, in historical analysis. Les recherches sur les couvents de l’Europe medievale, de l’Amerique latine post-tridentine et du Canada du XVIIIe siecle donnaient a penser que les religieuses de bonne naissance obtenaient des postes superieurs dans l’administration de leurs etablissements respectifs en raison surtout de leurs relations sociales et financieres. Cette etude de la Congregation de Notre-Dame de Montreal entre 1693 et 1796 revele toutefois que des femmes ordinaires ont ete mere superieure de cet etablissement particulier et qu’elles accedaient a ce poste grâce en bonne partie aux capacites dont elles faisaient manifestement preuve. Cette interpretation elargit la notion d’un ancien regime ou la richesse, le favoritisme et les relations regnaient en maitre pour inclure la possibilite que les aptitudes individuelles revetaient egalement de l’importance. L’etude demontre aussi que l’histoire sociale empirique demeure un moyen efficace, en conjugaison avec d’autres methodes, d’analyse historique.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.034 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".