Not enclosed: the 1633 arrangement

The wall that other communities hit first

By the early seventeenth century, the canonical requirement of enclosure for women religious was not a custom but a rule with teeth. The Council of Trent had reaffirmed it in 1563, and the papal constitution Circa pastoralis of 1566 had extended it broadly, leaving very little room for women living under vows to move freely through public space. Enclosure meant walls, grilles, locked doors, and the physical separation of a convent's interior from the world outside — not as a spiritual preference but as a legal condition of recognised religious life.

The consequences for institutional work were immediate and disabling. A woman under solemn vows who needed to cross the street to reach a patient was, in principle, breaking the law of the Church. Communities that tried to build working apostolates around hospitals and schools in this period ran repeatedly into the same barrier. Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, founded in the early decades of the same century, was suppressed in part because it refused enclosure; the organisation that would have most resembled a mobile nursing corps was dismantled precisely for its mobility. The landscape into which Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac stepped in 1633 was littered with the wreckage of earlier attempts.

The mechanism: annual vows and the legal gap they opened

The solution arrived not through a confrontation with canon law but through a sidestep. The women who gathered around Louise de Marillac from 1633 onward did not take solemn, perpetual vows. They took annual vows — simple, private, renewed each year on the Feast of the Annunciation. The theological and canonical distinction was decisive. Only solemn vows created the formal status of a religious in the Church's legal sense, and only that formal status triggered the obligation of enclosure. By keeping the vows simple and temporary, the founders kept the members outside the category that the law was designed to constrain.

This was not legal fiction or an oversight in the rules. The arrangement was deliberate and was understood as such by those who constructed it. The annual renewal gave the community a different kind of stability — one grounded in repeated, conscious recommitment rather than in a permanent juridical bond — while preserving the mobility that the work required. A member could, in theory, decline to renew; the community could, in theory, decline to accept a renewal. In practice these mechanisms were seldom invoked, but their existence shaped the character of the organisation. It was, from the outset, a body built around a renewable contract rather than a permanent state.

The institutional form that emerged was equally careful about language. The community was not, in the canonical sense, a religious order or congregation; it described itself as a company — the Compagnie des Filles de la Charité, the Company of the Daughters of Charity. Its members were not nuns. Vincent de Paul was explicit on this point in his correspondence and in the community's early rule: the Daughters of Charity were to have no monastery but the houses of the sick, no cell but a hired room, no cloister but the streets of the city. The formulation was not merely rhetorical. It described a legal and organisational reality that made everything else possible.

What the arrangement made possible in practice

The immediate consequence was a workforce that could be placed where it was needed and moved when circumstances changed. Paris in the 1630s and 1640s had pressing needs in multiple directions simultaneously — the parishes of the poor, the Hôtel-Dieu with its enormous patient load, foundlings, galley slaves, and the displaced populations generated by the Thirty Years' War on France's eastern borders. A cloistered community could have served none of these simultaneously. The Daughters of Charity served several at once, with members assigned, transferred, and reassigned by the superiors as demand shifted.

The working life this produced was unlike anything available to women religious elsewhere in Catholic Europe at the time. Members rose before dawn, worked in hospital wards through the day, managed supplies, kept records — the admission ledger was an early administrative instrument — and returned to a shared domestic space that was recognisably a household rather than a convent. The habit they wore was the ordinary dress of a French peasant woman, adapted for practical use, its most distinctive feature the large white linen cornette that would later become the community's most recognisable marker. It was not designed to be a religious habit in the traditional sense. It was working clothing, chosen for the context it would be worn in.

The apothecary's stores, the ward rounds, the ledgers — all of this required women who could be out in the world, not behind grilles. The arrangement of 1633 made them legally available to do so in a way that no prior women's community had managed to sustain in Catholic institutional life. The formal approval of the company's rule by the Archbishop of Paris in 1655 and the papal approbation that followed in 1668 confirmed the arrangement without altering its essential character. The vows remained annual; the members remained, in law, laywomen.

The longer shadow

The 1633 arrangement did not resolve every tension it created. Precisely because the Daughters of Charity were not canonically religious, their status was occasionally contested, their houses vulnerable in ways that an enclosed convent was not, their governance dependent on a relationship with the Congregation of the Mission — the Vincentian priests founded by Vincent de Paul — that was cooperative but also asymmetric. The question of authority over the community's internal life would surface repeatedly in the following two centuries.

But the institutional innovation outlasted those frictions. When the emerging secular nursing profession began to develop formal structures in the nineteenth century — training programmes, standards, a distinct professional identity — it encountered the Daughters of Charity as an existing large-scale operation with hierarchies, transfer mechanisms and record-keeping already in place. The two-century head start those organisations enjoyed had been purchased, in the first instance, by a procedural decision made in Paris in 1633: not to be enclosed, not to take permanent vows, and not to call themselves a religious order at all.

The Council of Trent's enclosure requirement had assumed that organised religious women's life and public institutional work were incompatible. The Company of the Daughters of Charity spent the next three and a half centuries demonstrating the assumption wrong — one annual renewal of vows at a time. The canonical distinction between solemn and simple vows ↗ that made this possible was technical, even dry; its consequences, measured in hospital wards from Paris to the edges of Europe, were anything but.