The religious lives and activities of non-cloistered women—particularly women of mixed ancestry, Indigenous women, and women living within colonial societies—have rarely occupied a central place in the history of Catholic missions. By examining tertiaries, beatas, and consecrated virgins associated with the Order of Preachers between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this project moves beyond interpretations based either on exceptional individual lives or on a single model of patriarchal and colonial domination exercised through the Crown, the papacy, and the religious orders. Women who acquired sufficient religious knowledge, social standing, material resources, or intellectual authority could participate deliberately in Christianisation and influence the forms that Catholicism assumed in overseas societies.
The project examines how gender, social status, ethnicity, and religion intersected in the lives of women in the Americas and Asia. Models of female spirituality inherited from late medieval Europe did not simply reproduce themselves overseas. They were adapted to local structures of kinship, labour, property, racial classification, and religious authority. This process generated theological and devotional writings, missionary narratives, confessional texts, and pragmatic juridical and canonical documentation. The research will compare the pastoral strategies directed towards women by different religious orders and, from the seventeenth century onwards, within the institutional framework of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide. It will also consider how women appropriated, modified, or resisted the roles assigned to them.
The principal case study is the Dominican Province of the Holy Rosary. Founded at the end of the sixteenth century, the Province established a missionary network extending from the Philippines to Taiwan, Fujian, Tonkin, Japan, and other Asian territories. Its capitular acts, chronicles, necrologies, correspondence, and prosopographical records make it possible to reconstruct the activities of women whom institutional sources often absorbed into collective categories. Particular attention will be paid to beatas, tertiaries, consecrated virgins, catechists, teachers, benefactors, widows, and custodians of churches and devotional objects. Their work connected households, female congregations, local Christian communities, and missionary institutions.
The study also considers the emergence from the Beaterio of St Catherine of Siena in Manila of a female congregation devoted to missionary and educational work: the Tertiary Sisters of the Province of the Holy Rosary, later known as the Dominican Missionary Sisters. Rather than treating this congregation as an entirely new departure, the project situates it within a longer history of female religious work. Precedents from the Iberian Peninsula, New Spain, and Peru establish the broader comparative framework, while the Philippine and Chinese evidence shows how inherited forms were altered by colonial classifications, local family structures, clerical scarcity, religious proscription, and the social organisation of relations between the sexes.
Consecrated virginity preceded the earliest forms of monastic life, but the religious movements of late medieval Europe expanded the possibilities of communal and semi-communal life for unmarried women devoted to prayer, contemplation, teaching, and charitable service. In overseas settings, these traditions acquired new institutional and social forms. Some women lived collectively under a superior; others remained within their families while practising chastity, teaching doctrine, visiting the sick, or maintaining places of worship. The project therefore shifts attention away from exceptional and learned religious figures towards broader groups whose ordinary activities sustained Christian communities.
The sources also produced representations of women that require critical analysis. Ecclesiastical, colonial, Enlightenment, and anticlerical writings placed religious women within recurrent oppositions: obedience and autonomy, enclosure and public action, sanctity and superstition, civilisation and supposed backwardness. In Asian contexts, these representations were further shaped by changing European attitudes towards China and other societies, ranging from admiration to hostility. Such categories did not merely describe women; they classified their conduct, determined which forms of authority appeared legitimate, and influenced what entered the historical record.
The project argues that women’s religious work was one of the conditions through which itinerant missions became local churches. Women taught prayers and doctrine, prepared others for the sacraments, governed communities, provided material support, preserved devotional objects, and maintained Christian ties during periods of clerical absence or persecution. These activities did not amount to unrestricted autonomy. They remained conditioned by ecclesiastical supervision, family authority, social inequality, racial classification, and economic dependence. Yet the same structures that constrained women also made their mediation necessary. Their trajectories reveal a Catholic world shaped by unequal interdependence, in which discipline, religious work, and local authority were continually renegotiated.