This blog post by Alexandra Verini recounts the life of Mary Ward, founder of a female religious community and controversial figure in her time. Mary Ward is a fascinating early modern woman who has been relatively little studied. She was a Catholic born in a post-Reformation England and so spent much of her life in Europe where she founded a new congregation modeled on the Jesuit Society of Jesus, which served as a religious community for English Catholic women and a school for girls. Despite her innovations, relatively few scholarly works have focused on Ward, in part, because, before , all documents concerning her life and her society were kept under lock and key at the Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich.
Moreover, five German volumes have made available for the first time the entirety of the Ward archive, which includes letters between Ward and her followers, her spiritual writings, autobiographical fragments and institutional documents. Born in to religious parents from a Catholic family in Yorkshire, Ward spent much of her early life with relatives.
In , she moved to the house of Sir Ralph Babthorpe at Osgodby, Selby, where, at the age of 15, she found a calling to religious life. I traveled to Augsburg last year to see these paintings, which were helpfully explained to me by the sisters of the Congregatio Jesu. In , like many recusant Catholics, Ward left England to join the convent of Saint Clares in Saint-Omer in what was then Spanish Flanders, where she met her future spiritual director Roger Lee The following year she left the convent to start a new foundation of the same order specifically for English women at the nearby Gravelines.
This vision prompted Ward to leave Gravelines to found the Schola Beata Mariae, the first of over a dozen houses devoted to teaching Catholic girls and pursuing missionary work for the Catholic cause in England. These women are shown sitting together in the Painted Life. The value Ward placed on the female community that subsequently gathered around her is manifest in a set of addresses that she delivered in December at Saint-Omer to 60 of her followers.
Her most frequent epistolary correspondent was Winefrid Wigmore shown on the left of the Painted Life image 22 according to a sister from Augsburg. She was denied the female companionship that had been so vital to her mission as the sisters of the Angerkloster were forbidden to speak to her and she was prohibited from writing letters.
