The Nun’s Cell as Mirror, Memoir, and Metaphor in Convent Life

In the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, French nuns from various orders created miniature simulacra of the cells in which they slept, studied, and performed their devotions. Each diorama contains an effigy of the nun, a prie-Dieu, devotional objects such as a crucifix, handiwork, and artifacts to foster study and contemplation. This book examines the lives of the brides of Christ as depicted in these dioramas, proposing that the material objects found in the chambers trace the contours of the collective and individual identities of the nuns who created these cells. Viewed as a type of memoir, the cells furnish the sisters a stage upon which to rehearse the meaning of their lives. The dioramas create a tension between the private and public presentations of the self, between verisimilitude and self-fashioning, and between reality and representation. The book contextualizes the miniature cells within the larger discourse of gender, identity, self-representation, monastic devotion, and the power wielded by the aesthetics of scale.