English Convents Research Articles

Revisiting Douai Ms 785: Musical Cultures of Exiled English Convents through the Lens of a Miscellany

Abstract Scholarship on early modern English Catholic music after the reformations tends to focus on the activities of male musicians and male institutions. Despite increased study of English convent culture by scholars of religious, social, and literary history, there remains little specialist examination of music at post-Reformation English convents in exile, and their role in wider musical networks in early modern Europe is markedly under-acknowledged. This article aims to highlight how complex miscellanies with links to English monastic institutions in exile can offer insight into the convents’ otherwise elusive musical world. Using a hitherto unanalysed miscellany – Douai Ms 785 – this article will show how codicological study of manuscripts, combined with study of concordances and unica, can illuminate the role of English convents in early modern musical networks. In doing so, it will demonstrate the need to understand miscellanies like Douai Ms 785 as witness to interacting, overlapping musical and religious ecosystems in early modern Europe.

Analyzing the Use of AI Writing Assistants in Generating Texts with Standard American English Conventions: A Case Study of ChatGPT and Bard

Analyzing the Use of AI Writing Assistants in Generating Texts with Standard American English Conventions: A Case Study of ChatGPT and Bard

A blind search for intraday gamma-ray transients with Fermi -LAT: Detections of GRB and solar emissions

***General notes. a) I have edited to UK English convention as this most closely matches your spelling and punctuation use. b) A A uses the past tense to describe the specific steps used in a paper and the present tense to describe general methods and recent findings. Please make sure this is followed throughout the paper. For details, see Sect. 6 of the Language Guide: https://www.aanda.org/for-authors/language-editing/6-verb-tenses c) All abbreviations and acronyms are introduced at first use, once in the Abstract and again in the main text. Instrument and program names are introduced at first use (when appropriate) in the main text. All abbreviations should be used consistently. Please check throughout We present a search for intraday transient gamma -ray signals using years of the Fermi Large Area Telescope data. The search is based on a recently developed variable-size sliding-time-window (VSSTW) analysis and is aimed at studying variable gamma -ray emission from gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and the Sun. We refined the algorithm for searches for transient sources in order to solve the search problem within a reasonable amount of CPU time. These refinements allowed us to increase the number of gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, and quiescent solar events detected with the VSSTW technique by several times compared to the previous VSSTW search. The current search revealed a new gamma -ray signal recorded with Fermi -LAT on 2018 January 12. This signal is probably from a GRB and deserves an exploration of the existing archival multiwavelength observations in order to identify it in an unambiguous way. We also report a gamma -ray signal from the solar flare on 2023 December 31 that occurred during the 25th solar cycle.

A Genre Theory Contextualization for Academic Writing in Chinese Higher Education

This paper explores new possibilities for teaching English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing in the context of higher education in China. Using John Swales’ Create A Research Space (CARS) model, the paper demonstrates how genre theory can be integrated into undergraduate writing courses in China’s EFL settings. This method emphasizes teaching students to structure academic papers effectively, thereby improving their understanding and application of the genre-specific conventions of academic English. The paper illustrates how the CARS model aids students by delineating their research territory, identifying gaps, and positioning their studies within ongoing academic dialogues. Additionally, the teaching cycle guides students from modeling the text, to joint construction, and finally to independent writing. Furthermore, the paper highlights the comprehensive implications of this model, including enhancing intercultural communication skills and developing critical genre awareness among students. It addresses the challenges of adapting this model to the Chinese EFL context, such as linguistic and cultural barriers, and underscores the need for contextualized teaching strategies that meet Chinese learners’ needs. To conclude, it is recommended for further research to validate the practical usage of this genre-based EAP instruction in higher education and facilitate future curriculum development.

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 by James E. Kelly (review)

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 by James E. Kelly (review)

(Non)-Conformity to Native English Norms in Postgraduate Students' Writing in UK Universities: Perspectives of Native and Non-Native Students and Academic Staff

Postgraduate writing is a major academic feature through which students' learning progress is assessed. It is thus of paramount importance that students must meet the academic writing demands required by their respective academic schools and departments in order to pass their chosen courses. The study strives to explore the extent to which native and non-native English-speaking postgraduate students are required to conform to the norm of native-speakerism preferable to native English faculty members in some United Kingdom (UK) universities. This study is mainly qualitative and it involves three research instruments: (a) open-ended surveys targeting 111 native and non-native postgraduate students and 65 lecturers from different departments, (b) semi-structured interviews conducted with 13 lecturers and 10 students, and (c) an analysis of lecturers’ feedback on 53 students’ written productions. The findings show that the recommendations to conform to native English conventions exist only in some theoretical research. In practice, however, UK universities and academic staff do not save efforts to enable their students to express their ideas in clear comprehensible academic English. These results yield some insightful penetrations not only to the host universities but also to overseas governments as well. In addition, this study offers some implications for postgraduate students.

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration by Bronagh Ann McShane (review)

Reviewed by: Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration by Bronagh Ann McShane James E. Kelly Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration. By Bronagh Ann McShane. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2022. Pp. xv, 324. $115.00. ISBN: 9781783277308.) Long considered nearly impossible due to the disparate nature of the sources, Bronagh Ann McShane has produced the first overarching study of Irish women associated with religious orders in the early modern period. Gathering evidence from mentions scattered throughout a range of materials, McShane successfully traces various forms of Irish female religious commitment from the dissolution of religious houses in the 1530s and 1540s to the end of the seventeenth century, including both those at home and in mainland Europe. Her opening two chapters consider the suppression and survival of female religious life during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries. McShane judges the reformation in Ireland to have been far less systematic than that in England, though, unlike their male equivalents, it did manage to crush institutional expressions of female religious life. Having to rely on some conjecture to draw conclusions about what happened to the women after their convents were dissolved, McShane uncovers evidence of different types of religious life being adopted, including as tertiaries affiliated to male mendicant orders, and the short-lived but pioneering Catholic Reformation experiment that was the Mná Bochta (Poor Women), who worked alongside the small Jesuit mission in an active apostolate. Fairly heavy on detailed financial records and Irish family history, these two chapters are followed by a shift in focus to look at migration, and those women who went abroad to pursue their vocations. Really hitting her stride, McShane tracks several Irish women who made the journey to mainland Europe. Some entered local convents, though a number headed to English houses established in exile, especially the Poor Clares at Gravelines. Nevertheless, a Dominican convent was [End Page 405] founded for the Irish nation at Lisbon. Intriguingly, it seems to have been markedly different from the exile English convents; both enjoyed local support, though the Irish Dominican convent appears to have been wealthier than the majority of English ones, and was a popular destination for Portuguese nun recruits as much as it was for Irish women. The final section examines the return of professed female religious life to Ireland. The slightly more tolerant 1630s witnessed a cautious return, which flourished under the Catholic confederacy of the 1640s before being crushed during the Cromwellian wars. Following the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, McShane outlines attempts at again fostering female religious life in the country that reached greater heights under the Catholic toleration that followed the accession of James II. However, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite wars halted official advancement, McShane judging, though, that it was nowhere near as traumatic as the Cromwellian period, and female religious life continued in Ireland into the eighteenth century. Tracing down these stories across a variety of sources is an impressive achievement that should not be underestimated. At times, the book's shifting focus affects its wider definitive positioning, whether to go all out for Irish national history, the history of the Catholic Reformation, or gender history. There is also a question at the book's heart: as McShane acknowledges, the formation of Irish women religious in exile English convents was "pivotal" (p. 249); yet the question of why there was not an equivalent exile movement for Irish women religious is not answered. With far greater numbers of Catholic women in Ireland, why was it that the English conventual movement was so much bigger? That this book raises such a question is testament to McShane's convincing achievement. Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700, fills an obvious gap in the scholarship and, proving that it can be done, should encourage others to work on early modern Irish women religious. James E. Kelly Durham University James E. Kelly Durham University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press

Reporting Verbs in L1 and L2 English Novice Academic Writing

The paper contributes to the research on academic attribution by exploring syntactic-semantic patterns of English reporting verbs used by three types of academic writers, namely L2 novice (with Czech as their L1), L1 novice and L1 expert academic writers. It investigates the impact which both the EFL and EAP challenge has on the use of these verbs by L2 novice academic writers. Our approach combines contrastive analysis and learner corpus research, focusing on academic writing in English in the discipline of economics. The results suggest that although similarities among the groups prevail, Czech novice academic writers tend to resort to patterns associated with informal, conversational rather than academic style. Pedagogical implications of the findings could include raising students’ awareness of the practice of appropriate academic reporting as one of the skills needed for them to accommodate themselves to the conventions of English as the academic lingua franca.

Female preaching in the English Catholic community, 16 <sup>th</sup>–17<sup>th</sup> centuries

The article is focused on the preaching and missionary work of the English Catholic woman in the 16th — 17th cc., as it was represented in a wide range of texts: biographies of pious Catholic Englishwomen written by their secretaries, chaplains and the nuns of the English convents in the Netherlands and France, chronicles and registers of these convents, conversion stories and letters by Catholic women. A study of these sources makes the author conclude that references to female preaching appeared only in manuscript texts that existed within private space and were intended for female audience — for the nuns and their female relatives in England and abroad. The texts were linked to English Jesuits. The descriptions of the episodes of female preaching followed some general rules. The Catholic Englishwomen taught or preached to only those below them in social standing: children, relatives, or servants, but never to the men of the status, which equaled theirs, because it was thought that to convert a man a preacher or a teacher needed to produce rational arguments, and women were not considered to be capable of this. It is shown that this view reflected the gender stereotypes of the time, not the reality of female missionary work.

Early Stuart Clergyman Poets: A Prosopographic Approach

This essay is a prosopographic study of the group of published poets, born between 1570 and 1610, who were employed as clergymen. It argues that this period saw an important shift in the organization and occupational structure of the church, which helped to produce a generation of university-educated, high-status clerics who were also accomplished versifiers. Poets such as George Herbert and John Donne were not anomalies but part of a wider trend that profoundly shaped English verse conventions. The essay thus makes a case for considering institutional history as an important influence on literary history.

A Corpus-Driven Study on Three Elements of Third Personal Pronoun Endophora in English Abstracts of Chinese and Foreign Theses.

The corpus is applied to compare and analyze three elements of the third personal pronoun endophora in English abstracts of Chinese and foreign theses. It is discovered that there is no significant difference in the total frequency of third personal pronoun endophora used by Chinese and foreign masters, but there is a significant difference in three elements of third personal pronoun endophora. Native Chinese-speaking masters tend to choose “it” as the anaphor, while native English-speaking masters are inclined to select “them” as the anaphor; antecedents used by native Chinese-speaking masters are mostly consistent with keywords of theses, while antecedents used by native English-speaking masters are rarely consistent with keywords of theses; distances between antecedents and anaphors set by native Chinese-speaking masters are much longer than those set by native English-speaking masters. These findings are beneficial for Chinese masters in terms of better understanding the writing conventions of English abstracts of foreign theses and further improving the language quality of English abstracts in their theses.

The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller

Reviewed by: The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn by Gary Waller Jaime Goodrich (bio) The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn Gary Waller Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 288 pp. €105, cloth. Over the past fifty years, scholarship on early modern women writers has grown exponentially as critics have discovered, edited, and analyzed a significant corpus of previously unknown works. Gary Waller was an early pioneer in this field, and he continues to break new ground with a new book that applies Julia Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque to key texts by early modern female authors. In the first two chapters, Waller lays the groundwork for the rest of his study by conceptualizing the Baroque. Admitting that it is difficult to define this term, Waller focuses on five key "Baroque tendencies" (20, his emphasis), as follows: 1.) "fictionalizing" (29), or narrative multiplicity; 2.) "le pli" (31), or acts of folding that move into infinity; 3.) paradoxical juxtapositions of hyperbole and melancholy; 4.) kitsch, with its emphasis on duplication; 5.) "plateauing" (31), or the indefinite postponement of climax. The second chapter then turns to Kristeva's concept of the female Baroque, itself based on Teresa of Avila, in order to redress the lack of scholarly attention to the role of gender in the Baroque. Surveying different early modern exemplars of femininity (the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, the Petrarchan mistress), Waller poses a key question: "Given the dominance of these largely oppressive models for women,…how were Baroque women writers and artists able to explore their own lived experiences as providing an 'owned' source of meaning" (66)? He finds an answer in Kristeva's theory of the semiotic mode, in which a feminine subconscious erupts through patriarchal language. The remainder of the monograph analyzes the ways that various Englishwomen rebelled against patriarchal domination through writings that display Baroque characteristics. Chapter three covers the Catholic female Baroque, by way of Gertrude More and Mary Ward. In the next chapter, [End Page 218] Waller turns to the Protestant Baroque with a discussion of Mary Sidney Herbert, Aemilia Lanyer, the women of Little Gidding, Anne Bradstreet, and Anne Hutchinson. Chapter five considers works by women associated with the court, with special attention to the role of masques and country house drama: Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, and Hester Pulter. The next chapter is the strongest in the book, providing a compelling and fascinating analysis of labyrinths, narrative multiplicity, plateaus, and folds in Wroth's Urania. Finally, chapter seven considers how Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn moved beyond the Baroque toward the Enlightenment. The project of situating English literature—and especially works by women writers—in relation to the Baroque is an intriguing and timely one, particularly since scholars such as James E. Kelly have recently begun to consider the role of Englishwomen on the continent (English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800, Cambridge University Press, 2020). Yet the very indeterminacy of the Baroque becomes problematic, as this key term is frequently paired with qualifiers that are never defined. Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalms are "emergent or incipient Baroque" (121), Anne Bradstreet's poetry is "'accidentally' Baroque" (150), Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley's dramas are "at least 'pale' Baroque" (186), and Aphra Behn's Love Letters is "clearly if superficially Baroque" (268). As variants of the Baroque proliferate, the concept itself takes on a multiplicity that is aptly ironic and may leave readers wondering what, if anything, truly constitutes the Baroque. Furthermore, the inclusion of authors whose works are "accidentally," "pale," "incipient," or "superficially" Baroque serves as a distraction from the more successful analysis of writers such as Wroth and the women of Little Gidding. Indeed, what unites all of the writers covered in this book is not their connection to stylistic traits of the Baroque but rather to the Kristevan female Baroque described in chapter two. As Waller observes in the postscript, "in the Baroque…women were able, to greater or lesser extents, to give voice to counter-dominant surges and explorations of 'intimate revolt,' discovering many means by which paternal realms might...

Translating authorial presence

Abstract Of increasing interest in cross-linguistic variation in academic discourse is the way in which writers use first-person pronouns (FPPs) to promote their agency. While research has shown that language specific socio-cultural, rhetorical and lexico-grammatical factors impact levels of self-concealment vs. self-promotion, less attention has been paid to the ways in which translated texts are sensitive to these discoursal traditions. We address this gap by analyzing frequency, rhetorical use, and grammatical form of FPPs in a corpus of research article (RA) abstracts in biology written by Russian and international researchers in two peer-reviewed bilingual journals. Three subcorpora were analyzed: (i) L1 Russian abstracts; (ii) the same abstracts translated into English; (iii) abstracts by international biologists in English from the same journals. The FPP tokens were identified and their frequency, rhetorical use, and forms were compared. The results show significant differences between the corpora which supports previous findings on cross-cultural variation in authorial presence in research genres. The results also suggest that the translation not only transfers L1 linguistic code but also adds a stronger emphasis on author agency. Implications for translating RAs into English as an exercise in linguistic, cognitive, and pragmatic equivalence as well as for accommodating discourse conventions of English as a lingua franca of science are explored.

James E. Kelly. English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800.

J<scp>ames</scp> E. K<scp>elly</scp>. <i>English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800</i>.

Bowden, Caroline (2012–13), and Michael Questier (2008–11), principal investigators. Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in Exile 1600–1800. Database.

Bowden, Caroline (2012–13), and Michael Questier (2008–11), principal investigators. Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in Exile 1600–1800. Database.

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c.1600–1800, by James E. Kelly

The key insight behind James Kelly’s meticulously researched exploration of early modern English convents in Catholic Europe is that ‘nationality was but a characteristic’ of these convents’ identities, ‘rather than the defining element’ (p. 186). In contrast to scholars who have foregrounded these institutions’ ‘Englishness’, Kelly argues that, even if they could never completely escape their national identity, English convents understood themselves first and foremost as members of an international Catholic Church. In this sense, Kelly’s work is part of a broader historiographical reaction against the exceptionalism that has traditionally dominated the study of early modern English religious history. This reaction has been particularly pronounced among historians of English Catholicism, who are increasingly coming to recognise that English Catholics at home and abroad were not isolated from the broader international movement for Catholic renewal often referred to as the ‘Counter-Reformation’, but active participants in it. Kelly’s work furthers our understanding...

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

Stock or Soil? The Growth of Early American Literature

English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800. James E. Kelly.

<i>English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600-1800</i>. James E. Kelly.

James E. Kelly English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800

James E. Kelly English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800

The Differential Use of Reformulation Markers in Three Sub-corpora: L1 English, L2 English, and L1 Persian

Given that reformulation is an integral component of scientific texts in which the explanation of terms and ideas is prevalent (Candel, 1984; Thoiron & Bejoint, 1991), this study aims at examining the form, frequency, and function of reformulation markers in three sub-corpora, namely, L1 English, L2 English, and L1 Persian research articles of psychology. The study is based on a corpus of 60 research articles amounting to a total size of 1,105,433 words. Drawing on the list of reformulation markers provided in Hyland (2005) in the case of English sub-corpora and a list of Persian reformulation markers prepared by three experts in the Persian language, we searched the corpus automatically for all the instances of reformulation markers. In the next step, all the instances were examined in their textual context in order to identify their function. The results indicated that L1 English sub-corpus contains the highest frequency of reformulation markers followed by L2 English and finally L1 Persian. There were also differences with regard to forms and functions, as well as parenthetical uses of reformulation markers across the three sub-corpora, specifically between L1 English and L1 Persian, suggesting the existence of intercultural variation in the use of reformulation. Besides, Iranian researchers writing in L2 English tend to adapt their writing style to the norms and conventions of English at least as far as reformulation is concerned. The study concludes with some implications for EAP writing and teaching.