Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewWriting Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800. Jaime Goodrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. Pp. 222.Paula McQuadePaula McQuadeDePaul University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800, Jaime Goodrich makes a bold argument for the centrality of early modern women’s writing to early modern studies. Her textual corpus is convent writing—that is, the textual productions of women living in Benedictine convents on the Continent between 1600 and 1800. Goodrich’s overarching claim is that just as Shakespeare’s plays are often used to illuminate both the wider Western literary canon and enduring philosophical problems, so convent writings constitute a distinct feminine subculture which can shed light on both canonical literary movements and feminist philosophy. If we can “think with Shakespeare,” she pointedly observes, “what happens when we think with nuns?” (22).This could easily have been a very different, less ambitious book. Goodrich is a first-class textual scholar, who was among the first to gain access to convent archives. Writing Habits draws upon over one thousand manuscripts and rare books, written in Latin and French as well as English, and composed or used by early modern women. Goodrich might have written a book demonstrating how these works, while not literary in a traditional sense, showcase a variety of otherwise unknown women writers working and thinking in disparate genres. Importantly, these works reveal early modern women talking to one another on subjects that have nothing to do with men. They thus pass the Bechdel test with flying colors—unlike, as my students are quick to point out, most texts composed by early modern women and men. Put in the simplest terms: Writing Habits could easily have been a recovery project, the type of book that has dominated the study of early modern women writers since the field’s inception in the late 1980s.But Goodrich refuses to put Baby in a corner. She insists that convent writing can provide a lodestar for both the larger field of early modern literature and for feminist philosophy. She makes the case most persuasively in her afterword, “Thinking with the Dead: Notes Toward a Feminist Philosophical Turn,” in which she outlines the four-point critical praxis that guided her analysis. This includes, first, recovering the “philosophical implications of early modern texts beyond Shakespeare”; second, approaching “early modern texts as documents with philosophical relevance to the contemporary world”; third, thinking “with early modern texts about philosophical ideas”; and, fourth and perhaps most intriguingly, entering “into a space of reciprocity with the early modern text, viewing its author as a philosophical equal who is engaged in exploring the existential nature of life” (163). As Goodrich observes, this is a “radical act.” It requires that we acknowledge our connections to the past, that we see both “present-day scholars and past writers” as “participants in the shared, never ending philosophical project of understanding the world in which we find ourselves” (163). It also presumes that we offer women’s writing the same consideration that we provide canonical male-authored texts of the period.In her introduction, “Buber and the Benedictines,” Goodrich anchors her project in the “turn to religion” by scholars of early modern drama in the first decades of the twenty-first century. These scholars relied upon the writings of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) and his ethics of alterity to “think with” Shakespeare philosophically; or, as Julia Lupton puts it, to “think alongside Shakespeare about matters of shared concern (as one speaks with a friend)” (quoted on 22). Elaborating upon this movement, Goodrich turns to the writings of Martin Buber (1878–1965), whose “attention to communitarian dynamics” better reflects monastic life (6). An important influence on Levinas, Buber urges human beings to embrace an ethics that views other people not as objects but as independently existing subjects with developed consciousnesses. Such an ethics, Buber urges, facilitates humans’ appreciation for, and relationship with, the eternal Other. This ethics is perhaps best developed by living in a God-centered community, since such a community encourages humans to stand “in a living reciprocal relationship” to God and one another (7). Goodrich sees Buberian ethics and convent writings as mutually illuminating: in Writing Habits, she invites the reader to “think alongside them” about human community and the possibility of transcendence. At the same time, as female-oriented spaces, convents can “further conversations among feminist philosophers, theologians and thinkers” concerning the relationship between Buberian “paradigms” and “female experience” (9).Writing Habits has four chapters in addition to the introduction and afterword. Each of these chapters explores the philosophical implications of a different genre of convent writing. Chapter 1 considers administrative texts, the community statutes and regulations that set forth the rules governing communal life. Goodrich argues persuasively that we should see these rules not as punitive but enabling; they are a form of discipline that enabled communal life to flourish and facilitated a nun’s communion with God (19). Chapter 2 turns to more recognizably literary genres such as the spiritual miscellany and meditation. Traditionally, these genres have been valued for the insights they reveal concerning personal religious experience, but Goodrich emphasizes their embeddedness within the communal life of the convent (19). In what is perhaps the strongest chapter (chap. 3), Goodrich considers Benedictine death notices and monastic histories. She argues that the purpose of death notices was not simply to memorialize a deceased sister, but to establish her participation within a spiritual community that transcends the boundaries of time and space. These works linked an individual nun both to her predecessors and to future postulants in an imaginary, God-centered community contained within a larger Catholic community of saints. Monastic histories similarly emphasized God providence for the community, again subsuming the individual life within the larger communal identity (20). Chapter 4 considers the role of polemical writing in the establishment of community identity. Januslike, polemical writing was directed outward, but looked inward, as it sought to strengthen communal identity by linking the convent with the imagined community of the broader church (20).Early in Writing Habits, Goodrich observes that “from a monastic perspective, this book’s use of Buber is less objectionable than its focus on texts as objects” (14). At first, this statement gave me pause. But the more I wrestled with it, the more I realized its accuracy—and the extent to which it underscores the degree to which convent writing constitutes a distinctly feminine subculture. Convent writing is best illuminated through the philosophical writings of Martin Buber precisely because its female authors conceive their writings and their community as entities which transcend historical time. Convent writings articulate an understanding of the human being and community that transcends history and the timespans of human life. These women writers understand themselves as participating within a communion of saints that includes living members of their convent, those who lived hundreds of years previously, and sisters yet to be born. They saw their compositions not as material objects but as tools to help this imagined community achieve its greater purpose: union with a transcendent God. While we need to recognize the texts as emerging from particular locations and within specific historical periods, Buberian philosophy better illumines the radical alterity of convent life and the challenge it offers to contemporary ideas of literary history and the individual.Writing Habits charts a new path for the study of early modern women writers. Moving beyond the field’s traditional emphasis upon the recovery of lost female voices, Goodrich proposes that we “think with” early modern women writers, that we allow their writings to shape our understanding of early modern literature and contemporary feminist philosophy. It is a bold and thought-provoking argument, supported by painstaking archival work and intricate analyses. Early modern studies can learn a lot by thinking with the nuns. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 120, Number 3February 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/722310HistoryPublished online November 11, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.