The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois

AnonymousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.8

Word count: 310K words
Chapters: 31

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois by AnonymousAuthor: Anonymous,Language: English, Class: BX: Philosophy, Psychology, Religion: Christianity: Churches, Church movements, Release Date: Nov 1, 2004

Editor's review

This is a biography of Sister Margaret Bourgeois by an anonymous author, a public-domain life of a religious figure that focuses on her founding of a teaching order in Montreal, Canada, and her dedication to women's education. In plain narrative it records her life of faith and the process of founding the order, and it holds some historical value for understanding the history of Catholic religious orders in seventeenth-century colonial North America and the origins of women's education. The style is plain and stresses virtue rather than literary description, making it suitable as supplementary reading for the history of religion and education. Readers should understand its devotional language and church institutions in light of the period, and need not judge it by the narrative standards of modern biography. Those studying religious orders or early Canadian education can draw from it institutional and personal clues; general readers may see it as a window onto a life of faith.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers studying the history of Catholic religious orders and colonial North American religious history
Education history enthusiasts interested in the origins of women's education and needing biographical sources
General readers interested in biographies of nuns and accounts of life of faith

Not a good fit for

Readers who prefer literary biographies and value narrative technique and psychological portrayal
Readers uninterested in religious subjects who want only secular history
Professional researchers expecting modern scholarly apparatus and annotation

Reading tips

Read the opening chapters first to understand the subject's early years and the historical background, then follow the main thread of the order's founding.
Note key milestones and institutional arrangements in the founding of the order as you read, for later reference.
Readers unfamiliar with devotional language may first learn some basics of seventeenth-century Catholic religious orders.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

FAQ

Why is the author anonymous, and does that affect credibility?

The book is attributed to an anonymous author, which is common in public-domain biographies. The content stresses virtue and the founding of the order; readers should compare it with other sources and treat it as suggestive material rather than sole evidence.

Is this book suitable for those studying the history of education?

It is suitable as supplementary material. The book records the founding of the order and the practice of women's education, offering personal and institutional clues, but it is not a systematic treatise on educational history and should be used alongside other research.

Is the English original difficult to read?

The original is in the style of a religious biography, with church vocabulary and fairly plain syntax. Readers with college-level English can manage with a dictionary, and it becomes much smoother once they are familiar with Catholic terminology.

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About the author

Anonymous Author

Anonymous is a collective designation used in English-language publishing for works whose authorship is unknown or unsigned, rather than the real name of a single author. The 716 titles attributed to this name include the Gospel of John, Psalms, Romans, Luke, Philippians, and 1 Corinthians from the World English Bible, as well as the Gospel of John and Psalms from the King James Version. Such texts are mainly religious classics and ancient folk traditions that were copied, translated, and compiled over long periods, making their original authors difficult to trace; they therefore circulated anonymously. Public information is limited, and neither nationality nor dates of birth and death can be confirmed. The significance of anonymity lies in focusing attention on the works themselves rather than on authorial identity, and in reminding readers of the collective and variable nature of texts in transmission.