Mangion, Carmen (2025) Detachment as an "Emotional Practice" in British convents, 1950s-1970s. In: Fetheringill Zwicker, L. and Cucchiara, M. (eds.) Women, Religion, and Emotions in Modern Germany and Beyond. Women and Gender in German Studies 17. London, UK: Camden House, pp. 146-166. ISBN 9781640141742.
Abstract
Catholic convents in the twentieth century were home to very distinct emotional communities that offer a bounded site within which to study the interrelationship between the body and emotions. Convents taught, prescribed, and regulated habits, rituals, and practices that aided in reaching emotional states of being. This essay examines English Catholic convents as sites of changing emotional expressions and experiences from the 1940s to the 1970s paying particular attention to detachment as an emotional practice. It analyses the role of the nuns’ bodily movements and auditory practices in creating emotional detachment through the lens of Scheer's four emotional practices: mobilizing, naming, communicating, and regulating. Auditory practices and bodily movements were integral to lived religious experience, and also significant to maintaining community structures and relationships. The sources used for this chapter include governance and prescriptive documents such as the Rule, Constitutions, and custom manuals which identify the rules and regulations of religious life. Reports, memoirs, and oral testimonies are used to interrogate the shifting understandings of detachment and the related adjustments to bodily movements and auditory practices. The first section of the essay examines how detachment was taught in the convent novitiate as a positive practice intended to enable a prayerful life. The next section interrogates how in the 1940s to the 1970s emotional detachment was re-evaluated and linked to negative meanings. As a result, new ways of convent living were introduced that altered auditory practices and bodily movements. Some nuns received these changes with joy and relief, and others with confusion and anger. Such contradictory responses resulted in emotionally charged atmospheres. Using the example of emotional detachment, this essay argues that convent practices embodied and shaped expressions of emotions, thus influencing religious identities and everyday female religious life.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | history of emotions, detachment, women religious, nuns, Catholic Church, gender, women's history |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Depositing User: | Carmen Mangion |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Mar 2025 11:46 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Apr 2025 07:30 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54126 |
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