Angélique Arnauld, Œuvres complètes, tome i, volumes i, ii, iii: Lettres. Édité par Jean Lesaulnier, Françoise Pouge-Bellais et Anne-Claire Volongo

It has been good in recent years to see so many prominent early modern women thinkers being accorded the prominence that they deserve, not least through this superlative edition of Angélique Arnauld’s vast correspondence. Appointed abbess at Port-Royal at the age of eleven, Angélique was very much the intellectual equal of her brothers Antoine Arnauld and Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, and was instrumental in the transformation of Port-Royal and a number of other convents. While the greater number of her letters were addressed to her fellow nuns and female friends at Port-Royal, she remained in contact with a wide range of theologians, heads of other religious houses, and royalty, wielding considerable influence not only within the abbey itself but also over the ‘Messieurs de Port-Royal’ and many external people seeking spiritual direction or even practical advice.

The mammoth task confronting the editors of Angélique’s complete works is highlighted by the fact that these three weighty volumes of her correspondence, weighing in at just under three thousand pages, constitute only ‘tome i’. Of the nearly two thousand letters that are reproduced here, only eighty-four exist in Angélique’s hand: barring eight hundred newly discovered letters, published here for the first time, all the others were copied in three main manuscripts, in preparation for their eventual publication in the 1730s and 1740s. The editors of this new edition have been assiduous in tracking down the identity of the various hands that contributed to the original manuscripts, with two in particular, Élisabeth de Sainte-Agnès Le Féron and Marie-Dorothée de l’Incarnation Le Conte, identified as the principal copyists and organizers of the letters. As the editors argue, it is likely that the copyists were all nuns who refused to sign the formulaire condemning the five propositions of Jansenism, taking the copies with them to Port-Royal-des-Champs when they were sent there in July 1665, four years after Angélique’s death. Such investigative work is typical of the forensic detail and care taken by the editors in the Introduction. However, somewhat perplexingly, whereas all of Angélique’s correspondents are given short biographical summaries the first time that they appear in the main text, no background information about her own life and works is given. That said, the editors are exemplary in providing brief but wonderfully informative contextual information at the beginning of almost every letter. The letters themselves are arranged chronologically, with undated letters at the end of the third volume. Perhaps unsurprisingly given Angélique’s vocation, they might not have the wit or verve of Mme de Sévigné, but they are written with a clarity and seriousness of purpose, displaying wide reading (especially in the philosophical letters that she exchanges with her scholarly brothers, reflecting her repeated description of herself as a ‘disciple de Saint-Augustin’), and often refreshingly pragmatic and surprisingly relevant. With all of Paris suffering from the plague in 1631, for example, she writes to her brother Robert, ‘Nous fermons soigneusement notre porte, avec tout le reste des précautions humaines’ (p. 105), a sentiment all too familiar to those living in more recent times. When her nephew Simon Le Maistre de Séricourt was dying of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-eight, Angélique’s simple words cannot fail to strike a chord with any parent who has witnessed the death of a child: ‘Priez Dieu […] qu’il me dispose à vous suivre, moi qui vous devrais avoir précédé’ (p. 659). Bearing in mind the fact that she herself cannot have had much choice in becoming abbess at such a young age, it is touching to see her discussing the vocation of a young girl to become a nun, with the advice that ‘il ne faut pas regarder toujours si elle est vertueuse, mais si elle a un vrai désir de la devenir’, concluding that ‘je doute fort qu’il [Dieu] appelle cette bonne fille’ (p. 239).