Postcards from the Convent

How do you map a Catholic world? My contribution to this roundtable will consider a collection of turn-of-the-century postcards that I have built since the early 2010s, when I began writing about women visitors to the Catholic Summer School of America. Postcard vendors, relying on eBay and small e-commerce sites, became my archive for this now-defunct Catholic leisure space. In contrast, my current work on American Catholic girlhoods--arguing for the elite convent academy as a critical space of nineteenth and early twentieth century white Catholicism--has in part relied on the sheer ubiquity of convent images during the heyday of the picture postcard market in the early 1900s.

What makes a postcard valuable? Is it the postmark placing the image in space and time? Is it use value--the snippets of everyday conversation that make their way onto a postcard’s front or back? For the religious studies scholar, these postcards contain very little religion: I research Catholic landscapes using a collectibles market that is distinctly not Catholic, with cards that were originally bought and sold largely outside of religious spaces. Unlike scholarship on postcards in other areas of the world, the cards I buy rarely show people at prayer--or people, at all. Examining these postcards from the convent, I contemplate the circulation of Catholic images and ideas, the power of place, and the serendipity of search--finding and buying my objects of study.