St. Joan de Lestonnac

St. Joan de Lestonnac was born in 1556 at Bordeaux in France, a niece of the celebrated essayist Michel de Montaigne, and grew up amid the religious strife of her age, her own mother having embraced Calvinism while Joan held firmly to the Catholic faith. She married a nobleman, and in a happy marriage bore several children; upon her husband's death she was left a widow with a family to raise, which she did with devotion.

When her children were grown, she sought to give herself wholly to God, and after a brief attempt at the strict Cistercian life, which her health could not bear, she understood her true calling to be the education of girls, then sorely neglected and endangered by the spread of heresy. In 1607 at Bordeaux she founded the Company of Mary Our Lady, a religious order of women devoted to the Christian formation of young women, one of the earliest such teaching orders. She governed and spread the order despite trials, including a time when she was unjustly deposed, which she bore with humility. She died on 2 February 1640 and was canonized in 1949.