Mary Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female Roles in the Early Modern Church

International audienceThis chapter seeks to examine the difficulties which led to the suppression of Mary Ward’s Institute. It will examine the extent to which Mary Ward’s congregation diverged from clerically-imposed norms by comparing her own definition of her vocation (which she gave in her 1622 Plan known as the Institutum ) with male-filtered expressions of what was acceptable. Indeed, plans for the approbation of the Institute were written both before and after Ward’s own Institutum. The earliest document was drafted by her spiritual director, Roger Lee, SJ (1568-1615), and the Institute he described in his 1612 Schola Beatae Mariae was far removed from Ward’s missionary project, offering a more traditional female religious Orders. The same can be said of the 81 Rules which were finally approved after Frances Bedingfield (1616-1704), once a follower of Mary Ward, took it upon herself to initiate a new phase in the history of the English Ladies. When she purchased houses to be used as centres for priests and elementary schools in Hammersmith (1669) and York (1686), a new Institute was born from the ashes of the old one; yet, in order to seek papal approval, it kept its heritage from Mary Ward carefully hidden. Its Rules -actively supported by Bishop John Leyburn, Vicar Apostolic of the London District (1685-1702)- were presented in 1699 by the then Chief Superior Mary Anne Babthorpe (d.1711), and gained Clement XI’s approbation on 13 June 1703. What were the elements which made both Lee’s Schola and Babthorpe’s Rules more likely to gain papal approval than Mary Ward’s own Institutum