A Dense Site of Multiple Motherhoods: the Case of the Foundlings of Quebec’s Hôtel-Dieu, 1800-1845

This paper interrogates the historical phenomenon of the foundling program administered by the Augustinian nuns of the Hôtel-Dieu in Quebec between 1800 and 1845 as the dense site of cooperative and collaborative maternal practices. As a point of confluence where disparate streams of maternal practice converge—biological motherhood, sacramental motherhood, nutritive motherhood, and spiritual motherhood—the foundling program provides a test case for interrogating the historical contingencies of motherhood. What does this case illuminate about nineteenth-century ideologies of motherhood and maternal practices? About the role of Catholic devotion and theology in shaping—or resisting—those ideologies and practices? What does it reveal about our own contemporary ideals of intensive mothering? What might taking seriously the phenomena of sacramental motherhood and spiritual motherhood add to our theoretical conceptions of both motherhood as institution and mothering as practice—and to the elaboration of maternal thinking as methodological approach to the study of religion?