Devotional Culture and Intellectual Community in the English Convents in Exile

Abstract

AbstractThroughout the 17th century, English convents located in France, Portugal, and the Low Countries offered Catholic women an alternative to England's religious settlement. These exilic communities enabled multiple forms of exchange, grounded in the devotional cultures that flourished within specific religious orders, including Mary Ward's unenclosed order modeled on the Jesuits; new foundations of Benedictine, Augustinian, and Poor Clare convents, among others; and the continuous community of Syon Abbey, forced into exile at the dissolution. In the last decade, editorial projects and data collection have begun to reveal the richness and variety of surviving textual materials, and recent scholarly work has built upon these recovery efforts to demonstrate the significance of the convents in exile to the national and religious identity of English Catholics, Civil War and Interregnum politics, and the development of canonical literary history.