Neither Single nor Alone: Elizabeth Cellier, Catholic Community, and Transformations of Catholic Women's Piety

Abstract

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Elizabeth Cellier, known infamously as the “Popish Midwife,”
burst into the historical and literary record during one of the
most dramatic decades in English history, between the Popish Plot
and the Glorious Revolution. From 1678 to 1688, Cellier publicly
accused the government of torturing prisoners, submitted articles
to Parliament, wrote a small book and three smaller pamphlets or
proposals, served as midwife to Mary of Modena, wife of James II,
and proposed the creation of an innovative royal foundling hospital
and college of midwives. She also was tried and acquitted of
treason, tried and convicted of libel, fined £1000, imprisoned in
Newgate, and pilloried, at which time onlookers pelted her with
stones and other missiles. “Singl[e] and Alone,” she described
herself in these troubles. Following the Glorious Revolution, she
disappeared from the historical record as suddenly as she had
appeared a decade earlier. During one turbulent decade, however,
Cellier was so well known that critics paraded an effigy of her
through the streets as part of an anti-papal procession, indicating
the extent to which contemporaries viewed her through the lens of
her Catholicism and feared the threat her religious loyalties might
pose.
Modern researchers recently have rediscovered Cellier’s texts.
Scholars such as Mihoko Suzuki, Helen King, Frances E. Dolan, and
Penny Richards have investigated Cellier’s interest in and impact
on political developments, her championing of more formalized
training of English midwives, her gendered self-representation
through her writings on both these issues, and the intersections
between religion and gender in published responses from her
critics. Valuable as these approaches have been, seldom is
Cellier’s understanding of herself as a Catholic woman explored in
depth. Moreover, little attempt has been made to use Cellier to
provide a window into larger Catholic communities in London or the
evolving roles of Catholic women as writers, activists, and
exemplars within these communities.
Through an investigation of three of Cellier’s texts,
Malice Defeated: Or a Brief Relation of the Accusation and
Deliverance of Elizabeth Cellier (1680), A Scheme for
the Foundation of a Royal Hospital (1687), and To Dr.—
An Answer to his Queries, concerning the Colledg of Midwives
(1687), this study integrates the missing element of Catholicism
into our interpretation of Cellier’s activism and writings. First,
I argue that Cellier’s understanding of her faith and women’s roles
within Catholicism motivated her to act boldly when faced with
mistreatment of her fellow Catholics. Second, her participation
within networks of English Catholics provided her with the means to
act. Finally, her Catholicism provided templates for the actions
she chose to take. Catholicism shaped her efforts by providing
acceptable models for good works in the forms of prison relief and
the organization of women’s institutions. Cellier then accommodated
these models to best meet her needs in the changing political,
religious, and gendered environment of late seventeenth-century
England. In sum, Cellier was neither single nor alone, as she
understood herself, but operated within Roman Catholic traditions
and networks.
While scholars are increasingly recovering the contributions of
women within English Catholic history and literature, analysis
tends to focus on the stories of recusant women heroically refusing
to attend Church of England services and fostering a
household-based Catholicism patterned after fairly traditional
models of women’s sanctity. As I have argued elsewhere, religious
understanding, practice, and lived experience evolve as the
environment in which a religion is practiced alters. We need to
look beyond our expectations of finding women filling traditional
roles to discover unanticipated evolutions in how women
participated in their faith, transforming traditional practices for
women within Catholicism into new forms, with new messages, to
adapt to changing circumstances.
Similarly, as is well recognized, the period of the English
Civil War, during which Cellier was born, witnessed an explosion in
the quantity, validity, and legitimacy of women’s writing and
publishing along with women’s involvement in the public sphere
through political actions such as petitioning or rioting.
Discussions of the Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration, and
Glorious Revolution frequently consider the initial expansion and
subsequent contraction or evolution in women’s roles as tied to
these activities. Protestant women’s voices figure prominently in
such discussions...