English Nuns Research Articles

English Nuns with a Continental Vision: The Adaptation of a Revelation of Six Psalms for Hampole Priory

ABSTRACT A unique fifteenth-century Middle English visionary account survives about a nun of Hampole Priory who saves the soul of her deceased brother. Scholars have long considered it an authentic narrative from Hampole Priory. Yet, near-identical texts in Dutch and German manuscripts suggest that it is a translation of a Continental source instead. My analysis shows that while the Continental versions were designed for female religious readers, the English version was adapted for a lay audience. I argue that Hampole Priory used the reworked narrative to promote its intercessory prayers among and attract donations from lay benefactors.

Victoria Van Hyning: Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2019; pp. xxviii + 388.

Victoria Van Hyning: Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2019; pp. xxviii + 388.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

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 Elaine Hobby THE FEMALE BAROQUE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERARY CULTURE: FROM MARY SIDNEY TO APHRA BEHN, by Gary Waller. Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020. 290 pp. $125.23 hardback; $125.32 ebook. There is much to celebrate in Gary Waller's new book The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture: From Mary Sidney to Aphra Behn, which I read with constant interest, even fascination. As its title indicates, the study refuses the common fragmentation of the early modern period into pre- and post-civil wars and ranges from the poetry, plays, and fiction of Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Mary Wroth to that of Margaret Cavendish (and her stepdaughters Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley) and Aphra Behn. Along the way—and clearly planned from the start as integral to the argument—are writings by figures less well-known in mainstream literary studies, including the English nuns, Gertrude More and Mary Ward. There is also briefer mention of several mid-seventeenth-century prophets—Anna Trapnel, Margaret Fell, Sarah Wight, Elinor Channel—and some discussion of two New World figures, Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson, as well as the extraordinary verse of Hester Pulter (unknown until its discovery in manuscript in the 1990s) and the "scissoring" activities of the women of Little Gidding as they produced their Bible concordances (pp. 138-47). Folded into the argument are discussions of the structures of Petrarchism and reference to Baroque artists including Artemisia Gentileschi. The Female Baroque in Early Modern English Literary Culture is informed, then, by the wide-ranging activities of those engaged in the collective endeavor since the 1970s to recover past women's creativity. Waller repeatedly draws explicit attention to the importance of the "powerful community of scholars" who have, like him, taken part in the endeavor, and he firmly—and correctly, I hope—asserts that "their work has permanently altered how we picture the period" (p. 10). Given the rich findings of the recovery efforts, no single work of this length could take account of all its possible sources. Waller makes his selection through a theoretical model that he sets out in some detail in his first two chapters, approaching the period's writings through Julia Kristeva's psychoanalytic concepts of the "semiotic" erupting through the "symbolic." Throughout the book, it is Kristeva who is most often referred to as an authority (see, for example, pp. 9, 12-14, 30-31, 66-69, 80-81, 90-92, 221-22, 249-50, 278-80) [End Page 395] and whose writings are most numerous in his bibliographies. As Waller elaborates his theoretical framework, other perspectives are also merged with the Kristevan one—Raymond Williams's "structure of feeling" (pp. 20, 115, 152) and Louis Althusser's concept of "interpellation" most importantly (pp. 24, 168)—as he seeks to "go beyond [the] autobiographical reductionism" that he thinks readings of Wroth, in particular, have been limited by (p. 221). For this reader, the endeavor to not be overly focused on biographical frameworks is only partially successful. As I read, despite the great attractions of the writings presented and the most welcome unfussy clarity of the book's style, I was repeatedly frustrated by Waller's drive to find in his writers the Baroque sub-categories that he defines (drawing on José Antonio Maravall) as "fictionalising, hyperbole, melancholy, kitsch, and plateauing" (pp. 10, 17). The first and last of these, especially, seem to prompt Waller to the biographical speculation that he warns against. The theoretical model also seems to have led Waller to select for analysis a disproportionate number of authors where control, editing, or direction from a man or men is at issue: Catholic authorities for Ward and More, Hutchinson's persecutors, the Little Gidding women, and the rather odd selection of civil war prophets, who include such manipulated figures as Channel and Wight without any mention of their dozens of sisters who did not encounter equivalent obstacles. It might be that—allowing for the liberal use of such variants as "pale Baroque," "emergent...

Convent autobiography. Early modern English nuns in exile. By Victoria Van Hyning. (A British Academy Monograph.) Pp. xxviii + 388 incl. 3 figs, 2 tables and 17 colour and black-and-white plates. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press (for The British Academy), 2019. £85. 978 0 19 726657 1

Convent autobiography. Early modern English nuns in exile. By Victoria Van Hyning. (A British Academy Monograph.) Pp. xxviii + 388 incl. 3 figs, 2 tables and 17 colour and black-and-white plates. Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press (for The British Academy), 2019. £85. 978 0 19 726657 1 - Volume 72 Issue 1

Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile. By Victoria Van Hyning. British Academy Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xxviii + 416 pp. $110.00 cloth.

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Appartenance et singularité des couvents anglais en exil sur le continent : l’exception anglaise

After the Henrician reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries, as Protestantism settled as the established religion under Elizabeth I, English Catholic women who wished to take the veil had no other choice but to leave their native country to embrace religious life on the Continent, amongst local communities, often in the North of France and the Spanish Netherlands. In those convents, the refugees embodied the plight of a Catholicism without borders which, in the face of Protestant persecution, refused to be defeated and, on the contrary, grew in fervour. Yet although they proudly belonged to the universal Church of Rome, English nuns were different from their Continental Sisters. A brief study of some of the twenty-two convents founded specifically for English entrants during the seventeenth century will reveal the most salient aspects which made English convents in exile exceptional.

LANGUAGE AND POWER IN AN ENGLISH CONVENT IN EXILE, c. 1621 – c. 1631

AbstractScholarship on transnational encounter has predominantly focused on men's cross-cultural interactions. This article breaks new ground by exploring women's roles in similar forms of linguistic and power negotiation within the context of English convents founded in Europe during the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent scholarship on English convents has so far remained silent on the question of how these women negotiated the language barriers that many of them faced. This article proposes an answer by examining the correspondence sent in the 1620s from the English Benedictine convent in Brussels. These letters reveal the changing ways in which English nuns relied on both male and female translators to communicate. In so doing, this article expands existing scholarly understanding of epistolary and literary culture by exploring the authorial strategies employed in the convent, which afforded the nuns a sense of authority over their texts. The letters were vital avenues for the women to express dissent, and raise concerns over the way their community was governed. Finally, despite being enclosed institutions, English convents in exile were not monoglot spaces but porous sites of multi-lingual encounter.

The Literacy of English Nuns in the Early Thirteenth Century: Evidence from London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius D.iii

This study addresses the issue of female literacy amongst religious women in England in the early thirteenth century. Evidence exists for respected and well-educated women such as Hild of Whitby an...

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

Introduction: Women's Literary Culture and Late Medieval English Writing

English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and their Lawyers, 1293–1540, by Elizabeth Makowski

English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and their Lawyers, 1293–1540, by Elizabeth Makowski

Recent Developments in 17th and 18th‐Century English Catholic Studies

AbstractThe last 15 years have brought a revolution to research in 17th‐ and 18th‐century English Catholicism. New approaches, shaped primarily by New Historicism and gender studies, have expanded the materials, questions, and methods driving scholarly investigations. The article describes several primary trends within this revolution: the development of inward‐oriented and outward‐oriented studies examining English Catholicism and English Catholicism's relationship with other discourses, respectively; a growing interest in women's experiences of and contributions to English Catholicism, particularly those of English nuns in exile; and a new narrative for 18th‐century English Catholicism revealing its public as well as private iterations and impacts. Overall, current scholarship draws on a plethora of materials including material objects, texts, and space to construct an increasingly detailed picture of English Catholicism as a complex, dynamic force, and community during the 17th and 18th centuries.

English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and their Lawyers, 1293–1540 by Elizabeth Makowski (review)

English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and their Lawyers, 1293–1540 by Elizabeth Makowski (review)

English Roots and French Connections: The English Benedictine Nuns in Paris

Political and economic circumstances in Europe and the Civil War (1642–1660) in England so reduced the funds of the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai that they were unable to provide for the community. Against sound advice they went ahead with a filiation in Paris in 1651. Thanks to the contacts of Dame Clementia Cary and their chaplain, Dom Serenus Cressy, community life began in rented accommodation in 1652. They moved six times before being enabled to purchase their own property in 1664. This was made possible by the messieurs of Port Royal with whom the community continued to have close ties, although they never seem to have been tainted with Jansenism. Novices were always recruited from England and their dowries and associated gifts and bequests were essential, but the survival of several account books reveals the extent and variety of the support the community enjoyed in Paris.

English nuns and the law in the Middle Ages. Cloistered nuns and their lawyers, 1293–1540. By Elizabeth Makowski. (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 39.) Pp. xvi+201. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012. £60. 978 1 84383 786 2; 0955 2480

English nuns and the law in the Middle Ages. Cloistered nuns and their lawyers, 1293–1540. By Elizabeth Makowski. (Studies in the History of Medieval Religion, 39.) Pp. xvi+201. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012. £60. 978 1 84383 786 2; 0955 2480 - Volume 64 Issue 4

The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses

In 1557, William Peryn, an Oxford graduate and a Dominican, published his Spirituall Exercyses. A notable conservative preacher, he had left England, probably after the Act of Supremacy in 1534. The two nuns to whom he dedicated the book, Katherine Palmer of Syon and Dorothy Clement, a Poor Clare, were among the first English members of the Louvain diaspora. Peryn’s book was heavily influenced both by Ignatian and by Low Countries spirituality. The opportunity to make such ideas available in English, for English nuns, was the fruit of religious exile with its consequent direct exposure to Continental writing and thought. Peryn’s book, intended to provide spiritual direction for exiled English nuns, then subsequently published at home in England under Queen Mary, continued to be read in the seventeenth century, as the institution of female religious life moved permanently out of England.

Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks

The wealth of recent scholarship on early modern English news culture has paid scant attention to women as consumers and producers of news. This article argues that women not only read about the tumultuous events of the Civil War and Interregnum, but that they participated in the collection, transmission, and interpretation of news. Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the Benedictine abbey in Ghent not only operated as the royalists’ postmistress in the 1650s, she also accessed reports from England about unfolding political events, which she passed on to the prince’s ministers. Much of this information was transmitted in correspondence, but the abbess also forwarded printed newsbooks and compiled manuscript newsletters for the royalists. This essay reveals how cloistered nuns engaged directly with the public sphere through their access to news, and how their receipt and transmission of intelligence cemented their position as valuable royalist agents in the 1650s.

Philip Sidney in the Cloister: The Reading Habits of English Nuns in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

This essay's title pays playful tribute to Sasha Roberts's ground-breaking 1998 work on Shakespeare (who creepes into the womens closets about bedtime) in which she investigates the spaces where women read Venus and Adonis.1 Here, though, I focus on the reading conditions of English nuns living in enclosed convents in or near Antwerp during the period from 1619 until 1794 when they returned to England, considering what they read and where as well as the effects of those conditions on their reception of particular texts.From the nuns' accounts, I find no evidence of activity like that alleged in 1623 by Thomas Robinson in his supposed expose of the English Brigittine community in Lisbon into which he claimed the confessor introduced obscene literature: there are few idle Pamphlets printed in England which he hath not in the house.2 This reading precisely located in the 'dark' privacy of the bedchamber late in the evening, after supper, behind closed doors (Roberts 39). In Antwerp, it mostly takes place within the community and follows prescribed book lists. If that sounds less potentially enticing, bedroom reading of a kind is mentioned. One asthmatic nun is said to have read saints' lives at night since she was unable to lie down without being ready to stifle with violen[t] oppression. Her lungs making a noise exactly lik[e] a pare of Bag Pipes (A2, 297).One particular book in the convent is especially intriguing in the context of Robinson's aspersions. The preface to a 1670 edition of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love asks the reader to afford Her a place in your Closet (Cressy, Dedicatory Letter). I wish to examine the implications of that request for our understanding of reading in a same-sex community, and by doing so I am able to draw some wider inferences about female religious closets in the early modern period, situating this understanding within the debate about Catholicism and nationhood.3 I also consider the reception of Philip Sidney's Arcadia by one nun who, having enjoyed the book as a young woman, later rejected it: I explore the consequences of sequential reading, the after-life of books as well as readers, to investigate why one book might be received into the convent while another was refused.First, we need to consider the kind of spaces available in the convent and the meaning of in such a setting. Cultural historians have long associated ideas of personal space, including that of the body itself, with subjectivity. Nascent interiority of the early modern period has often been linked with changes to domestic privacy, with the closet seen as a space of potential solitude and personal re-creation. Mary Thomas Crane has shown that, in fact, privacy was more often to be found outside the house, where an ecological selfhood was shaped within a larger physical environment. Such studies complicate assumptions about the gendering of separate spheres. An examination of the living conditions of English nuns also adds to the intricacy of interpretation. These were women who lived outside the home, in enclosures of a different kind, semi-autonomous, in exile from their homeland during periods of persecution, pursuing a communal, contemplative resolve. The way nuns are spatially envisaged is due in part to antagonistic polemic, Robinson's included, in which convents were represented as prisons where reluctantly encloistered women were in thrall to devious priests. Our understanding of privacy in such contexts needs to be extrapolated from this prevailing propaganda and from the nuns' own idealized accounts in which their convents are often represented as expatriate havens.Notwithstanding the complexity of interpreting competing views surrounding religious women, the nuns' records show their own clear experience of spaces, discernible beyond the more rhetorical tropisms. They also reveal evidence about the conception of their own bodies as both spaces in themselves and as experienced within their surroundings. …

Anglo-Norman Hagiography as Institutional Historiography:

ABSTRACTScholarly work on postconquest English convents has tended to assume that, unlike their male monastic counterparts, English nuns lacked institutional self-awareness and conscious historical documentation. On the contrary, this article proposes that certain convent manuscripts functioned as convent chronicles. This article uses the postconquest foundation Campsey Priory and one manuscript, British Library Additional 70513, a collection of Anglo-Norman saints’ lives belonging to the priory from the thirteenth century, as a case study, demonstrating how these hagiographic texts operate as a Campsey chronicle. It argues that four saints’ lives in particular—the lives of Modwenna, Osith, Audrée, and Katherine—constitute an undercurrent of particularly strong institutional identification in the manuscript. Finally, this case study aims to encourage further research investigating not only networks of female readers in postconquest England but the particular literary cultures of individual convents.