[5] The Ursulines are a Roman Catholic religious order founded at Brescia, Italy by Angela de Merici in 1535, primarily for the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy.

The French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded the city of Québec in 1608 among the Algonquin people as the administrative seat for New France.

The monastery was established under the leadership of Mother (now Saint) Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), an Ursuline nun of the monastery in Tours, and Madame Marie-Madeline de Chauvigny de la Peltrie (1603–1671), a rich widow from Alençon in Normandy.

[8][9] After three years spent in the Lower Town of Quebec City, the nuns moved to a new monastery built on ground ceded to them by the Company of New France.

[6] The community was attacked by the Iroquois in 1661–2, when one of its chaplains, the Sulpician Abbé Vignal, was slain and devoured[10] near Montreal.

The Constitutions, written by Father Jérôme Lalemant (1593–1673), uncle of the Jesuit martyr Gabriel Lalemant, combined the rules of the two Congregations of Paris and Bordeaux, and were observed until Bishop François de Laval decided in 1681 in favour of the former, which binds its members by a fourth vow to teach girls.

On that occasion the rations served to the nuns for nursing the wounded and sick saved them from perishing of starvation.

The Quebec Monastery founded new communities at Three Rivers in 1697, Roberval in 1882, Stanstead in 1884, and Rimouski, with a normal school, in 1906, besides sending missionaries to New Orleans in 1822, Charlestown (Boston) in 1824, Galveston in 1849 and Montana in 1893.

Geneviève Boucher, more commonly known as Mère de Saint-Pierre, (1676-1766) served in the Order for over 60 years and is referred to in its annals as a "perfect Ursuline" and "the Methuselah of our history".

The Irish, Scottish and American elements in Canada have given distinguished subjects to this cloister, prominent among whom was Mother Cecilia O'Conway of the Incarnation, the first Philadelphia nun, one of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton's earliest associates.