An Order Enclosed Against Its Founder's Original Design

Angela Merici did not originally intend her Company of Saint Ursula, founded at Brescia in 1535, to be an enclosed convent at all: her members lived in their own family homes, wore ordinary dress, and devoted themselves to teaching girls and works of charity while remaining embedded in secular society rather than withdrawn behind convent walls.

Church authorities in the following decades found this arrangement difficult to reconcile with the expectations then governing women's religious life, and reformers including Carlo Borromeo, reorganising the Company in Milan in the later sixteenth century, pushed it toward a more conventional convent structure, a process that continued as the Council of Trent era church increasingly required formal claustration of women's communities generally, so that by the following century most Ursuline houses had become cloistered in ways Merici herself had not envisioned. Despite this imposed change, the order kept its founding emphasis on the education of girls and became the most influential teaching order for women in Catholic Europe, carrying that mission overseas as well: the missionary Marie of the Incarnation brought Ursulines to Quebec in 1639, establishing girls' education in New France barely a century after Merici's original, quite differently structured foundation in Brescia.