Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenth-Century English Cloisters

Abstract

In the post-Reformation Church, strict monastic enclosure compounded the traditional religious and social ideologies limiting nuns' opportunities to support themselves. The English cloisters, established in France and the Low Countries, were further frustrated by their isolation from England which provided novices, alms, and much of their regular income. To survive the nuns transformed their everyday tasks into revenue-raising activities. A combination of prayer, needlework, hospitality, education, and housework generated sufficient income for most convents to withstand the economic and political hardships of the seventeenth century. These strategies can best be understood as a reworking of the centuries-old Martha/Mary metaphor, in which Martha stood for the active apostolate and Mary represented the contemplative life. Monastic archives show that the nuns reinterpreted the metaphor in such a way that they could not only gain commercial benefit from religious duties, but they could also inject different meanings into prayer and domestic chores.