Repeat Performances: Mary Ward’s Girls on the International Stage

by the time of her death in 1645, Mary Ward, a Yorkshire Catholic, had achieved international fame. In 1611, Ward claimed she had received a vision telling her to “Take the same of the Society.” God, she believed, wanted her to found a female institute that faithfully emulated the Society of Jesus, one based on the rules, apostolic work, and educational curriculum at the heart of the Jesuit mission. Over the next two decades, she founded over a dozen religious houses on the Continent, from Belgium and France to Italy and Bavaria, with day and boarding schools attached to each one. The women who joined her in her mission took vows but refused enclosure—a violation of Boniface VIII’s 1563 bull Periculoso, which mandated that female religious stay within convent walls. In a further contentious imitation of the Jesuits, Ward stipulated that the institute superior would answer only to the pope, thus bypassing the limits of local church authorities. Although Ward found few friends among the Jesuits (whose Society forbade female members), and many enemies within the Catholic establishment, she was able to keep the educational part of her mission alive, even after the Institute’s papal suppression in 1631 and her death— thanks in large part to an international cast of noble, secular supporters: among them, Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of the Netherlands; the Elector of Bavaria,