In an era of major change in the demographics and distribution of Catholic religious orders and communities, the Daughters of Charity remain the largest community of Catholic women, with approximately 15,000 sisters in a hundred countries. Founded in the early seventeenth century, the community was also the largest female group involved in caring for the sick and poor in ancien régime France by the time of the French Revolution. The Daughters endured a temporary setback during the Revolutionary years when their community was dissolved and dispersed, but their restoration under Napoleon ushered in a period of massive international expansion. In this extensive study, Matthieu Brejon de Lavergnée concentrates on the first phase of their development over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the balance of his analysis tilting to the 1700s.

The streets as a cloister is a translation of a book originally published in French in 2011 and fits comfortably within the growing body of literature on early modern female religious life, while simultaneously offering new insights and acting as a foundation for future research. A number of other scholars have recently published studies of the Daughters’ early history: the most notable are Susan Dinan's analysis of the confraternal origins of the group and the practicalities of their work to assist the sick and poor during the lifetime of their first superior, Louise de Marillac, and Rosemarie Peake's study of moral management within the early community. The breadth and reach of Brejon's work is clearly distinguished from these. This is not simply because he covers the first two hundred years of the Daughters’ history, though this is significant in itself because it enables him to identify continuities and changes in the principles and practices of the community's life from its origins to its dissolution. He has also had unprecedented access to an abundance of archival sources preserved in the Daughters’ archives, as well as to the more well-known sources scattered in French departmental archives and in the Archives Nationales. The result is a prosopography which sheds light on the community's centralised and local government, its provincial expansion, patterns of membership and aspects of vocational practice and everyday life such as material culture and devotional preferences.

The book broadly adopts a chronological structure but becomes more thematically focused as it proceeds. The first five chapters summarise the foundation of the community to 1660, using the emblematic figures of the founders, de Marillac and Vincent de Paul, and the first member, a young peasant called Marguerite Naseau, the evolution of formal community life and the acquisition of official recognition from royal and church authorities. Six more chapters cover the post-1660 period according to the themes of vocation, spirituality, expansion, the development of the motherhouse in Paris and types of service to the poor. Of these, Brejon's attention to demographic patterns is remarkable, for he provides a breakdown and analysis of the geographical and social origins, ages, training and roles of the thousands of women who joined the Daughters from the 1630s to the Revolution. There are valuable findings on offer here to the reader, especially when these statistics are combined with his calculations regarding the founding of new establishments. This enables him, for example, to elucidate how the number of entrants and membership in general affected the type of establishment (parish or hospital), that the Daughters founded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus, though they grew in number in the eighteenth century, the Daughters founded fewer establishments, while at the same time becoming more associated with hospital foundations (which required a greater number of workers than parishes). In this period, they became especially recognised as nursing sisters in the public eye, and Brejon demonstrates that their later cultivation of this vocational speciality in the modern era should be traced back to the strategic choices taken by their leaders in the 1700s. While specialist scholars of the community may have surmised this in the past, Brejon is the first to prove it unequivocally.

Though available in French for nearly a decade, it is a pleasure to see this book now available in English too. It will become the standard study of the Daughters in ancien régime France. Furthermore, the translation will render it readily accessible to a larger audience, notably the growing number of undergraduates in History, Religion and Gender Studies who (however regrettably) do not read French. The inclusion of a representative document from the archives at the close of each chapter is especially welcome and will be a helpful addition to seminar classes.