The well-tempered mystique

Can the history of contemporary Catholicism be made without listening to this "other voice"? Many studies have focused on religious practices, preaching, the teaching of dogma and moral questions: everything that the magisterial authority invites us to believe and do. In fact, these are clerical discourses, almost exclusively male. The "other voice", however, almost entirely feminine, is non-professional writing, the story of a spiritual life, by women who confide, in thousands of forgotten pages, often still unpublished, their experience of God. . Dominique-Marie Dauzet endeavored to read some of them in their familiar and intimate literary genre - diaries, notebooks, correspondence: lay people (Elisabeth Leseur Jeanne Schmitz-Rouly, Camille C. and Mary Kahil) and nuns (the Carmelites Marie-Aimée de Jésus Quoniam and Elisabeth de la Trinité, the norbertine Marie Odiot de la Paillonne and the Benedictine, abbess of Solesmes, Cécile Bruyère). The challenge is to decipher this doubly paradoxical feminine approach: the voice of a voiceless sex in the institution, on the one hand, and the difficult literary relationship of a divine relationship, on the other. The book scrutinizes the ambivalent status of these writings strained by the desire to tell the ineffable, writings sometimes forbidden, sometimes permitted, even ordered, by the male vis-à-vis.
To patiently read these women from between 1850 and 1950, a world emerges, which is also, and certainly in depth, contemporary Catholicism.

Biography of Dominique-Marie Dauzet
Born in 1961, Dominique-Marie Dauzet is a Premonstratensian religious at Mondaye Abbey (Calvados). Curator of the diocesan archives of Bayeux and Lisieux, lecturer at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (2001-2005), professor at the Center for Theological Studies in Caen, he has published numerous works on the history of spirituality, in particular Marie Odiot de la Paillonne, Brepols, 2001.