Plenary III: Faiths

Abstract: Discerning Spirits:
Women and Spiritual Authority in Counter-Reformation France

Presented by: Barbara B. Diefendorf, History, Boston University

One of the weightiest tasks of the spiritual directors who provided advice and counsel to devout Catholics in the Catholic Reformation was the discernment of spirits--the judgment of whether an individual's spiritual impulses were the product of divine inspiration or malign forces. Normally a task for trained priests, the discernment of spirits was certainly not a job for women. They lacked the sacerdotal authority of priests. They were also generally viewed with suspicion when they made claims to spiritual insight because of the presumed weakness of their sex. Some women, however, rose above this gender bias. They were recognized as spiritually gifted and even attributed a special talent for the discernment of spirits. Credited by others with an informal spiritual authority that they could never officially claim, these women made use of their gifts to probe the inner lives of women and men who sought their counsel. Operating informally as spiritual directors, they offered instruction in the practice of piety, guidance in the choice of a vocation, and programs for meditation and prayer, in addition to advising on questions that more narrowly involved the discernment of spirits. Most of these extraordinary women were religious whose gifts were employed primarily within the context of their convents, but a few laywomen also acquired such a reputation for the discernment of spirits that they were called upon to offer an opinion in cases that perplexed learned theologians. In several celebrated incidents, they were credited with exposing fraudulent claims of divine possession that had fooled credulous priests. This paper explored the problem of women's spiritual authority, asking how they gained this authority, how they used it, and how it operated within the institutional and conceptual frameworks of a male-dominated church.