An English Nun’s Authority: Early Modern Spiritual Controversy and the Manuscripts of Barbara Constable

Abstract

In the early seventeenth century, Catholic women who left their homes in England to enter convents in France and the Low Countries were often forced to confront a difficult question: to whom does an English nun owe her obedience? As exiles from their country and often from their families, these women entered an ecclesiastical hierarchy that was at once foreign and familiar. The English Reformation had unsettled the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority, casting obedience to the monarch — expressed through oaths and signified by regular attendance at church services — as the primary duty of an English subject.2 At the same time, the spread of Protestantism led to the disruption of traditional religious hierarchies; in this new religion, priests, popes and saints were no longer necessary intermediaries between an individual and God. The historiography covering early modern English Catholicism has grappled with these issues in the recusant context and revealed the internal divisions of the Catholic community regarding religious and political loyalty.3 But Catholic Englishwomen enclosed in monasteries on the Continent have only recently begun to receive the attention of historians and literary critics interested in how authority, loyalty and obedience functioned both within religious Orders and in the world outside the convent’s walls.4