Rendering Service to the Community: The Spiritual Life of the Ursuline Nuns of Quebec City, 1639-1780
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation explores the spiritual life of the Ursulines nuns of Quebec City as the central feature of their lives. While other historians have illuminated the political power, economic influence, and social role of the nuns, this study places the nuns’ stated goals of dedicating their lives to God at the centre of this examination and as linked with these other roles. It begins with an exploration of the Ursulines in France, the creation and modification of their constitutions, and the unique rules of the Quebec monastery. It then delves into the spiritual imagery of the Quebec constitutions, focusing on the competing images of nuns as Mary and Martha or as brides of Christ. The dissertation then examines the lifecycle of the Ursuline nuns. It brings a fresh examination on how recruitment was conducted, who entered, the process of the novitiate, the selection of the leadership of the community, followed by the spiritual concerns at end-of-life. It particularly brings attention to converse nuns, who although working as servants in the monastery, were just as dedicated to the life of prayer as the choir nuns. Moving from how the nuns lived, the dissertation then examines how they wrote about themselves. Particular attention is paid to the monastery’s annals and necrology, which documented the communal and individual lives of the nuns. These sources reveal that the nuns put a high value on retaining the religious value of charity, acknowledging Divine Providence, and on serving their monastery. Their religious ideals surrounding education and religious practice were evident in the teaching of Indigenous, French, and English girls who were students at the monastery. The nuns were not blind to racial and ethnic identity, but they prioritized religion in their decision regarding how they educated girls, bringing the nuns into conflict with colonial officials. Their dedication to education meant they schooled a significant number of Quebec girls and women resulting in high rates of literacy. Their spiritual intensity persisted all through the century and a half studied here, shaping their devotional practices and love of cloister as well as teaching.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".