Ursulines (Company of Saint Ursula)

The Ursulines hold a particular place in the history of the church as the first order of women founded expressly for teaching, and their early form was as unconventional as their purpose.

Angela Merici and a new idea

The Company of Saint Ursula was founded by Angela Merici at Brescia in 1535 and named for the martyr Saint Ursula, with the aim of educating girls, a work then largely unprovided for. Angela original conception was radical for its day: the members were to live in their own homes, unenclosed and without a distinctive habit, consecrated women serving in the world rather than a cloistered community. This lay, dispersed form reflected a vision of religious women active in society, and it anticipated by centuries the active congregations that would later become ordinary.

Enclosure and the schools

The church of the Counter-Reformation was uneasy with unenclosed women, and the Ursulines were in many places brought under enclosure and formal vows, becoming a teaching order of nuns running schools and convents. In that form they spread widely, and they carried the education of girls across the Catholic world, notably to New France, where the Ursulines of Quebec founded one of the oldest schools in North America. The order thus began as a bold experiment in unenclosed consecrated life and became, under the pressures of its age, the pioneer teaching order for women, its founding purpose surviving the change of form imposed upon it.

Angela Merici did not originally intend her Company of Saint Ursula, founded at Brescia in 1535, to be an enclosed convent at all: her members lived in their own family homes, wore ordinary dress, and devoted themselves to teaching girls and works of charity while remaining embedded in secular society rather than withdrawn behind convent walls.

Church authorities in the following decades found this arrangement difficult to reconcile with the expectations then governing women's religious life, and reformers including Carlo Borromeo, reorganising the Company in Milan in the later sixteenth century, pushed it toward a more conventional convent structure, a process that continued as the Council of Trent era church increasingly required formal claustration of women's communities generally, so that by the following century most Ursuline houses had become cloistered in ways Merici herself had not envisioned. Despite this imposed change, the order kept its founding emphasis on the education of girls and became the most influential teaching order for women in Catholic Europe, carrying that mission overseas as well: the missionary Marie of the Incarnation brought Ursulines to Quebec in 1639, establishing girls' education in New France barely a century after Merici's original, quite differently structured foundation in Brescia.