Not enclosed: the 1633 arrangement
A religious community of women founded in Paris in 1633 was expected to be walled in. This one was not, and the reason was a technicality about vows — simple and annual rather than solemn and perpetual. Four pieces on the mechanism, the law it sidestepped, the two people who built it, and what it produced.
Not enclosed: the 1633 arrangement
A women's religious community at that date was expected to be cloistered; annual rather than perpetual vows were the mechanism that let these members leave the house.
What cloister actually meant
Enclosure was a canonical requirement with real physical consequences, and working in a public hospital was incompatible with it.
Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac
One supplied the structure and the other ran it, and the correspondence between them is the primary source for how it worked.
A deployable workforce
Training, assignment and transfer between houses made it an organisation rather than a set of individuals.