Bolster, Angela (1925–2005), historian and nun, was born Evelyn Bolster in Mallow, Co. Cork, on 1 April 1925, only daughter of Michael Bolster, railway employee, and his wife Ellen (née Buckley). She had three brothers of whom James remained in Mallow and Pearse became a priest and ministered in Devon. The Bolsters were an old Mallow family, some of whom feature in a brief History of Mallow published by Bolster in 1971 (as part of a series of Cork town histories sponsored by a local tourist organisation). Members of her family appear to have been active in the IRA during the war of independence; her history of the Knights of Columbanus describes Redmondites as mere 'parliamentarians' while reserving the term 'nationalist' for separatists (p. 13), and the same work's description of 1920s' politics suggests personal preference for Fianna Fáil over Fine Gael.
Bolster was educated at the Convent of Mercy, Mallow, and St Aloysius's school in Cork city, run by the Mercy community of St Marie's of the Isle. She entered the St Marie's of the Isle community on 24 September 1944 and was professed on 21 April 1947, taking 'Mary Angela' as her name in religion. (All members of the order took Mary as a name; Bolster published variously as Sister M. Angela, Angela Bolster, and Evelyn Bolster.) She graduated BA from UCC in 1950 with a double major in history (being named student of the year), received the H.Dip.Ed. (with first class honours) in 1951, and for some years taught religion, history, Irish, and German at St Aloysius's. She joined the Irish History Teachers' Association in 1954, and in 1958 was a founder member of its South Munster branch. In 1957 she took up historical research; she received a first-class MA (1959) in history (summa cum laude) from UCC, and became the first nun to receive a Ph.D. (1963) from the NUI.
Bolster's first major publication was The Sisters of Mercy in the Crimean war̵ (1965). This was based on her MA and Ph.D. dissertations (encouraged by Archdeacon Thomas F. Duggan (1890–1961), PP of Kinsale (1954–61), and supervised by James Hogan (qv)), which drew on hitherto unstudied material in the archives of various Irish Mercy convents to tell the story of the nuns, led by Mother Mary Francis [Joanna] Bridgeman (qv) of Kinsale, who had volunteered to act as military nurses during the Crimean war. Perceptions of these nuns' role had hitherto been dominated by the hostile view of them found in the letters of Florence Nightingale, who described 'Reverend Brickbat' and her nuns as incompetent, insubordinate, and more concerned with proselytism than nursing. By drawing on the nuns' own accounts and on research in British official sources, Bolster showed that Nightingale's version was highly (and to some extent deliberately) distorted and that in many respects the nuns were more professional and effective than Nightingale. Although Bolster's account has strong apologetic tendencies, it was founded on a solid documentary base and its portrayal of Nightingale's vindictive and unscrupulous self-promotion anticipates later reassessments of 'the lady with the lamp' by scholars such as the Canadian historian F. B. Smith.
In its opening up of untapped archival resources and its insistence on the importance of the work of the Mercy order, The Sisters of Mercy set the pattern for Bolster's later work. It appears from its citations that Bolster had undergone training as a professional archivist and had worked at the Vatican Archives, and this training underpinned her later career in which she undertook extensive research in French, British, and Roman archives as well as searching out local material.
In the mid 1960s Bolster was commissioned by Bishop Cornelius Lucey (qv) to write a history of the diocese of Cork based on the earlier research of Canon Patrick Cahalane (1888–1963), who had gathered a mass of materials from various archives with the aim of producing a two-volume history (a chronological account from St Finbarr (qv) to the contemporary era, and an account of the individual parishes). After his death his papers, consisting largely of a rough chronology and a mass of semi-legible notes, were found to be unpublishable. Bolster took the work in hand and after extensive further archival research published the first volume as A history of the diocese of Cork from the earliest times to the Reformation (1972). Its acceptance of the historicity of Finbarr was one of several targets of a notoriously splenetic review in the Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society (lxxviii, no. 227 (Jan.–June 1973)) by Seamus Pender (1906–90), former professor of history at UCC, who accused Bolster of plagiarising Cahalane's research and producing 'an epideictic display of pseudo-scholarship meant to impress nubile novices and scrupulous seminarians'. Bolster's reply in the next issue displays her as a spirited controversialist; she answered many of his specific points convincingly (though her views on the historicity of the twelfth-century Life of Finbarr remain determinedly uncritical). She worked on a study of St Finbarr in the mid 1980s, but this was not published.
Three further volumes of the history (sponsored by Lucey's successor Bishop Michael Murphy (qv)) were published by subscription through Tower Books of Cork: A history of the diocese of Cork from the Reformation to the penal era (1982), A history of the diocese of Cork from the penal era to the Famine (1989), and A history of the diocese of Cork: the episcopate of William Delany 1847–1886 (1993). The work supplied much new material from archival sources but was criticised for insufficient secondary reading, for some carelessness in matters of detail, and for its Roman catholic bias. The series concluded with Delany's death because of the non-availability of documentation for the reigns of his successors and because of Bolster's advancing age. (She suffered a serious illness, which left her immobile and housebound for a time, between the appearance of the second and third volumes.) Her pamphlets, locally published in Cork, on the history of the Lough Parish (1971) and the North Parish (1981) may be seen as spin-offs from the diocesan history.
From 1969 Bolster was assistant lecturer and tutor in history at UCC, but in 1975 she left to work for a Dublin diocesan commission to promote the causes for canonisation of various persons associated with the Dublin archdiocese; she was also entrusted with the cause of Catherine McAuley (qv), foundress of the Sisters of Mercy. A commission appointed by Archbishop John Charles McQuaid (qv) had in 1957 reported favourably on McAuley's canonisation to Rome, but it had operated on the assumption that all her writings were known. (The canonisation process requires the examination of all the candidate's writings to certify their personal sanctity and freedom from heterodoxy.) As subsequent research, principally by Bolster herself, uncovered a significant number of additional McAuley letters and reminiscences of her life by contemporaries, she realised that the work of investigation would have to be done again from the beginning. Having obtained a formal release from her diocesan duties for the purpose of these researches, she travelled widely, visiting Mercy congregations and missions around the globe to lecture on McAuley. In 1978 she took a prominent role in the nine-day official celebrations of the bicentenary of McAuley's birth, editing the souvenir pamphlet Catherine McAuley 1778–1978. The high point of the celebrations was the announcement that the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints had given its formal approval for the introduction of the cause. (At this time the Mercy order, with 22,000 members, was the largest catholic women's congregation in the world.) In 1979 Bolster became vice-postulator of the cause; she was one of the first women to perform this function, as a result of post-Vatican II changes in procedure.
In 1988 Bolster's edition of McAuley's correspondence was privately published by the Cork and Ross Sisters of Mercy. Bolster's magnum opus on McAuley was a two-volume positio or brief prepared under the guidance of the Jesuit scholar Fr Peter Gumpel and submitted to the Congregation for Causes in 1985 for approval by panels of historians (1986) and theologians (1989); such briefs are not published, if at all, until after the conclusion of the cause, and are not conventional biographies. Bolster did, however, publish several short accounts of McAuley including Catherine McAuley in her own words (1978), Catherine McAuley: the story of a woman of prayer and compassion (a graphic-book presentation of her life, one of a series on saints' lives produced by Editions SADIFA of Strasbourg), My song is of mercy and justice (1984), Praying with Catherine McAuley (1994), Catherine McAuley, prophet of mercy (1996), Venerable Catherine McAuley: liminal for mercy (1996), and Odyssey of mercy (1998). She also co-wrote with John Coolahan Carysfort 1877–1977: two centenary lectures (1978); her contribution deals with Catherine McAuley's educational thought and the history of the Carysfort teacher training college run by the Sisters of Mercy (which closed in 1988).
In 1979 Bolster published a commissioned history of The Knights of Saint Columbanus based on their archives. Although generally supportive of the Knights' work to maintain a catholic Ireland, Bolster was critical of their secrecy. The completed book attracted some criticism from within the Knights because it accepted that many members joined for personal gain (while denying that the organisation as a whole was corrupt) and because of its favourable references to former Supreme Knight Vincent Grogan (who had left the organisation under scandalous circumstances, and whom some Knights believed should have gone unmentioned). Bolster asserted her authorial independence, however, and her book remains the standard account of this controversial organisation.
In the 1960s Bolster contributed to the Cork and Ross diocesan magazine, The Fold, on subjects concerning diocesan history and the activities of the Mercy Order. She also published articles in Collectanea Hibernia and Archivium Hibernicum, and contributed entries on McAuley and on Bishop Francis Moylan (qv) to the Dictionary of Irish Biography (2009 and online). She was a member of the Cork Historical Guides' Association, and frequently lectured on aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish history. In September 1984 she was appointed first diocesan archivist of Cork and Ross by Murphy, and applied her archival skills to organising and conserving the previously uncatalogued diocesan archive and making it available for research. She published Mercy in Cork 1837–1987 (1987), a history of the congregation's role in the diocese. In 1992 she was appointed to the Pontifical Commission for the Preservation of the Church's Patrimony. She resigned as diocesan archivist in September 1994 to concentrate on reflection and on furthering the cause of McAuley.
Bolster was formed amid the confidence and high expectations for renewed expansion of the mid-twentieth-century Irish catholic church, and her professional training marked the increased professionalisation of the church's apparatus in the decades immediately before and after the second Vatican council. Both the diocesan history and the work on McAuley regularly compare the troubled times described to the upheavals within church and state in the era after Vatican II, and suggest (in accordance with the Vatican II documents themselves) that the solution to these problems lies in the rediscovery of the charisms of such figures as Catherine McAuley. Bolster was certainly an institutional historian, but had a fundamental commitment to the source, so that her works remain useful resources for historians, whether or not they share her perspectives. As a historian she cannot be fully understood without reference to her religious vocation and to the Cork society which formed her and whose self-understanding she worked to promote. She died 2 February 2005 at the Convent of Mercy in Cork and was buried in the St Marie's of the Isle community plot at St Finbarr's cemetery, Glasheen, Cork. In 2008 her papers were transferred from St Marie's of the Isle to the Mercy Congregational Archives in Dublin on permanent loan.