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The Ghost at Ghent

Supernatural phenomena, particularly instances where ghosts or visions seemed to interact with the physical world, provided enclosed nuns with a way to engage with theological debates. Through these experiences, they could affirm Catholic beliefs and doctrines in at time of heated controversies. An example of this can be seen in the strange events surrounding Dame Aloysia German who was visited by a ghost in the Benedictine convent of Ghent.

BL 11621.e.3.(27.), f.8, A ghost appearing before the Duke of Buckingham, of his father.

In October 1635, while still a postulant at Ghent, Aloysia German’s evening prayers were interrupted by three distinct knocks at her oratory. Alarmed, she reported the incident to her novice mistress, who dismissed it as the product of an overactive imagination. Four months later, in March 1636, another Sister heard the same knocks, seemingly confirming that it was not just a product of Aloysia’s mind but a real, physical sound. That night, when Aloysia retired for the night, the curtains she had just drawn were violently flung open by an unseen force. When she called her novice mistress, the same thing happened twice more, with both the novice mistress and another Sister witnessing it.

Terrified, the community decided to use holy water, to get rid of whatever unholy spirit was haunting the place, but the phenomenon persisted. The following night, several Sisters were appointed to watch with Aloysia, and they too reported hearing the knocks clearly. This time, when they called out to the spirit, it responded. It identified itself as the recently deceased John Sherman, a man whom Aloysia had converted to Catholicism in England. The spectre explained that the Virgin Mary had enabled him to reach out to them, and that he requested five masses to ensure his soul’s rest. Had they not responded, he would have remained in purgatory for an indefinite period. None of the Sisters could ever see him, aside from Aloysia, who later reported seeing Sherman, dressed in white, standing by the Epistle during mass, observing the ceremony with perfect reverence.

In Aloysia’s account of the event, sensory language—such as “I heard three distinct knocks” and “I saw the curtains thrown open”—served to present the experience as real and verifiable. This was a concrete event, verified by hearing and sight, and in the presence of auditory witnesses; it could not be doubted. In English Benedictine Nuns in Exile. Living Spirituality, (Manchester University Press, 2017), I argued that the Ghent community crafted the narrative this supernatural event to affirm the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which had been heavily criticized during the Reformation. Through the visitation of Sherman’s spirit, the efficacy of masses for the dead was validated, and the episode also underscored the role of the Virgin Mary as an efficacious mediating figure. Moreover, it highlighted the nuns’ intercessory power; Sherman sought their help specifically—not that of the Virgin Mary herself, who acted as a mere go-between, here—and their response was crucial to his soul’s peace.

It seems plausible that the Ghent Benedictines saw value in documenting such supernatural occurrences, trusting that their stories would serve a purpose. By sharing these experiences, they not only set themselves apart from other English Benedictine communities but also challenged the post-Tridentine emphasis on controlling the female body and voice. Embracing a medieval model of charismatic spirituality, they gained prestige within their Order and beyond, reinforcing their spiritual authority. In an era when Protestantism rejected supernatural manifestations, such visions provided Catholic women with a means to confirm their faith. Given the social and intellectual constraints on women at the time, their voices, often dismissed in theological debates, gained a unique authority when they claimed to come from divine revelation. 

As English Catholics, the Ghent Benedictines defended key aspects of Roman Catholic doctrine—such as the cult of the Virgin Mary and purgatory—by presenting these spectral occurrences as direct evidence. Their narratives align with the broader context of the English Catholic mission, which also used the supernatural to defend the faith. In 1890, The Downside Review published a short piece recounting Aloysia’s haunting, calling it “a beautiful story” which Catholics could easily believe, as it reaffirmed the possibility of a soul returning to seek prayers for release from purgatory. Over two centuries later, the story still resonated as a powerful testament to Catholic beliefs, reinforcing a central tenet of the faith.

The ‘amewsing’ story of Paston’s cat

The Last Supper by Domenico Ghirlandaio (c. 1486)

Religious chronicles are an art form, a savant mélange of erudition, rhetoric, and narrative-fashioning to guide readers towards the desired response, usually admiration, compassion, and the desire to emulate the chaste and saintly lives of the nuns depicted. To achieve those goals, some rely more or less heavily upon narratives of supernatural occurrences, such as miraculous cures, or raptures and visions; others prefer to emphasize the regularity, fortitude, and obedience of Sisters who humbly found their perfect fulfilment in a life of prayer, silence and service. Yet others choose to highlight the noble and exemplary lineage of the Religious, underlining the suffering of their ancestors, particularly during the Elizabethan persecution of Catholic families. Upon reading the Chronicles of the Benedictine nuns at Brussels, it becomes quite clear that the editor of this 19th-century volume was seeking to foreground the continuity of Catholic feeling in the families of the nuns who entered; many anecdotes recount the hardships endured by the nuns’ ancestors but one stands out as another amusing occurrence which was deemed (rightly or wrongly is not for me to tell) miraculous at the time. The episode of Paston’s cat, not unlike that of imprisoned Jane Wiseman and Topcliffe’s horse, involves the thwarting of persecutors through what we are given to understand was divine intervention, via the means of a domesticated animal.

In Elizabeth Paston’s notice, readers learn that her father, Edward Paston, Esq. of Thorpe Hall (Norfolk) used to house priests in one of the properties he owned. Close to a wood, and surrounded by its own moat, this dwelling was ideal to harbour missionaries with all the discretion necessary. It was staffed by a servant, and some (unknown) members of his family, although Edward Paston himself did not share the priest’s dwelling, probably to avoid the sanctions he would have incurred were he to be found in the house with a priest in the event of a raid. Having been informed that a priest lived there, a group of pursuivants surrounded the house and demanded to be admitted. The servant met them at the gate, then went to call her master who, using well-know delaying tactics, refused to let the officers enter unless they could show him their commission. During that time, all trace of Catholic activity was duly hidden: books, Mass equipment, sacramentals, and the priest himself were secreted away into their hiding place in a wall. Disgruntled at their failure to find anything, the officers called for a large blood hound, which immediately located the hiding place and started to sniff intently at the precise section of the wall. Things apparently went very quickly, the dog’s flair was remarkable and all looked lost for both the priest and his harbourers.

Detail from Portrait of Cleophea Krieg von Bellikon by Hans Asper (1538

But God had other plans, as the Chronicles indicate, since at that precise moment and before the pursuivants could notice the dog’s excitement, ‘out came the cat of the house’, and immediately started a rather violent fight with the massive hound; undeterred by the bulk of its opponent, this fiery feline fell upon it time and time again, spitting and scratching, creating havoc. Faced with such a scene, the officers struggled to recall their incensed dog; feeling they had wasted their time, they decided to leave the premises.  And thus was a humble mouser the instrument of God’s divine Providence, and the vector of a holy miracle, through which the life of a priest was spared to toil on the mission another day, and the freedom of the members of the household saved from imprisonment. The story does not say if the cat was given a treat for its valiant efforts.

From Anon.,Chronicles of the First Monastery Founded at Brussels for English Benedictine Nuns A.D. 1597 (Saint Mary’s Abbey, Bergholt, 1898), pp. 92-93.

Marriage, Love and the Cloister, Part Three: Entering Religion in the Wake of Thwarted Marriage Plans

Entering religion in the wake of thwarted marriage plans

At Twelve, I began to think of a Man,
At Thirteen, I Sighed for a Man,
At Fourteen I was Violently in Love with a Man,
At Fifteen I run away with a Man.
But he was a Very Pretty Man – therefore I hope youll Pardon me Sir.’ 1 October 1794

Keeping in mind the idea of a safe haven, and the fact that marriage and the cloister were not necessarily as diametrically opposed as either camp represented them to be, I would like to look at the stories of a number of women who became nuns in the wake of failed marriage plans. English convents do not seem to have been used as discreet locations to place unmarried daughters, at least not as routinely as their Continental counterparts.[1] Yet it would be naïve to believe that all the women who entered did so entirely out of a long-lasting and fervent vocation for contemplative life and that none of them had ever had any other plans but to wed their heavenly Bridegroom. Some vocations were revealed after unhappy experiences, some of which impacted these women’s positions regarding marriage. Unlike the clear-cut and resolute vocations extolled in hagiographical Lives, those intimate journeys took more winding and secret paths.

When Frances Stamford professed at Louvain in 1617, she did so ‘upon a discontent she took, being cross’d by her father in a marriage she desired, for the young gentleman who courted her, and on whom she had settled her affection, tho’ he was of fit quality for her, yet he had no means and therefore her father would not consent to the match’. In the aftermath of this unhappy conclusion, Stamford could have remained at home; perhaps other suitors would be equally as loveable, and more adequately funded. Yet we are told she ‘resolved never to marry any other man, but settled her mind to a religious state’. Did she do so to spite her family, effectively putting a stop to any marriage plans they might have envisaged and escaping their control? Perhaps. But maybe she saw a contemplative life as a salve to heal her wounds and a way to give her heart to a greater lover. The Chronicle explained that, from her first entering, she had expressed the wish to remain a scholar for an entire year, in order to test her aptitude at contemplative life. We can guess that her adaptation to cloistered discipline was, at least initially, a challenge. ‘[Y]et from the first she gave herself seriously to virtue, and regular observance and […] she took great pains to perfect herself’; the Chronicler’s choice of words, the use of ‘yet’, hints at the seeming tension between a religious vocation and entering the convent in the wake of a failed marriage proposal. In the end, however, Stamford proceeded to take the veil to become ‘ever a very regular religious, and a prudent discreet woman, very much beloved in her cloister’. The chronicler praised her for not being ‘over hasty in binding herself’ and turned those difficulties into examples of hardships which the nun overcame through God’s grace and her own constancy.[2] She became an exemplary nun and after serving as Cellaress at Louvain, she too moved to Bruges in 1629 to establish the new house, of which she became Prioress (1629-1635). And so it was that an unhappy romantic fate furnished the Canonesses with one of their most loved foundresses.

This vignette can be read in different ways. The opponents of religious life would view them as examples of the cloister as a dumping ground for women without marriage prospects. On the contrary, those who extolled the virtues of contemplative life interpreted them as edifying examples of the miracle of Providence, when God chose these women for Himself. Frances Stamford did not choose the convent from the off; yet readers were told it was always a path she envisaged taking, and one which ultimately led her to fulfilment.

Unlike Elizabeth, Margaret or Frances, some young women refused to comply with their families’ dismissal of a beloved suitor and contracted a quick, secret marriage. This was Bridget Gifford’s somewhat rash decision when she was not yet twenty years old. In her late teens, she had promised herself to ‘a fine gentleman, although a younger son that had nothing’. Anticipating her father’s reaction, the young couple wed secretly, but allegedly did not consummate the marriage. Sometime later, when Gifford fell ill, her decision to marry against her father’s wishes weighted heavy upon her conscience. At death’s door, asking for God’s forgiveness, she ‘resolved to become a religious’[3] and she honoured that promise as soon as she was restored to health, as a sign of her gratitude to God.[4]  Thus, when she professed as a Canoness at Louvain in 1621, she had already been married for two years.

Such entries provide an interesting look at religious entries which happened in the wake of failed marriage plans. It seems clear that the convent was not initially these women’s dream life and that they had viewed marriage as a more desirable option, and one which would make them happier. But in the cases above, after the failure of a marriage of the heart, a marriage of spirit provided solace and contentment. Whether they entered to nurse a broken heart or to save face, these women found a haven, a new community of Sisters, and a different way to channel their love within the walls. Early modern women did not always have their say on the topic of marriage or cloister; yet we must be vigilant not to evacuate the notion of choice altogether; not all women who became nuns after a love disappointment were forever unhappy. In the oft-quoted phrase ‘Aut maritus, aut murus’,[5] not being the first choice did not necessarily mean it was a dreaded alternative; on the contrary, such tales could serve to enhance the superiority of religious life over the trappings of an inconstant secular world. These women’s vocations may not have been immediately obvious, but in the end, they applied themselves became well-loved and exemplary nuns. Even taking into account the hagiographical tendencies of the Chronicles, it cannot be denied that, when writing about other nuns, the same chronicler was nowhere near as laudatory. An unhappy engagement did not seem to preclude a happy life as an enclosed religious.

Elizabeth Lovell, who grew up in exile in Louvain with Lady Cross, her grandmother, and became a professed nun there on in 1621. Earlier, she had been courted by ‘an English gentleman of quality’ and, with her family’s approval, things had proceeded to the point that her wedding gown was made. However, after what was rumoured to be a disagreement regarding her dowry, the suitor broke off the engagement.  The Chronicles gloss over this event but acknowledge Lovell was ‘deeply discontented, having settled her affection’. Her decision to enter religion therefore derived from that disappointment. As can be expected from someone who took the veil in such circumstances, Elizabeth struggled during her novitiate, which had to be extended by six months; she came close to leaving several times. Even after she professed, she still experienced ‘great difficulties, and but smal content’ for some years. Yet, little by little, she found her place in the community. She was gifted with a beautiful voice, on account of which she was made Chantress when she moved to Bruges in 1629 to help found the new convent there. She also served as procuratrix and grate Sister, a position of ultimate trust where she oversaw the interactions between the community and the outside. She died in 1634, after devoting herself to the care of her plague-stricken Sisters in the infirmary and becoming infected. The chronicler wrote: ‘In her vocation to religion we may see the great providence of God’.[6] We cannot know whether Elizabeth Lovell entered the convent to nurse her broken heart, or to allow her family to save face; we do not know whether she initiated that move, or if it was her family’s decision, which she then accepted. What is clear, however, is that the convent had not been her first choice; yet she persevered to become a dedicated nun, thereby providing the convent’s chroniclers with another type of exemplary life, one whose path was not as smooth as some, yet equally edifying.

Entertaining marriage prospects and a sincere religious vocation were not always antithetical. In fact, conventual Mss indicates that some religious vocations could reveal themselves through the very medium of a romantic encounter. Agnes Tasburgh professed at St Monica’s in 1622; at first glance, her story is familiar since she entered the convent after she fell in love with a French gentleman who lodged at her family house. Her father, Sir John Tasburgh of Flixton (Norfolk), described as ‘a hot Protestant’, had insisted his children be raised in the Church of England, although his wife continued to practise her Catholicism in private. The Chronicle indicates that Agnes was particularly attracted to this young man especially because he was a Roman Catholic and talked often of matters of religion in a way which resonated with her. When she ‘secretly reconciled to the Church’, this French gentleman’s discourses of the faith fanned the flames both of her newfound devotion and of her love for him. Her hopes were shattered when her father refused to envisage a match and sent his guest away; he ordered his daughter never to see him again. He demanded she return to her filial obedience and to the fold of conformity, and as she ardently defended the Catholic faith, we are told he threatened to cut out her tongue if she spoke another word. With that, he turned her away and she went to her grandmother’s; the elderly relative was more amenable to the old faith, and she managed to find her a place at Louvain, thanks to her acquaintance with Matthew Kellison, President of the English College. This case is interesting because it seems that Agnes’s feelings for the French gentleman stemmed partly from the fact that he could talk to her about spiritual matters and edify her on certain points. One could see her vocation in the making in this attraction and later she did not waver, deliberately preferring Louvain to an unnamed community at Douai which, according to the Chronicle, she declined on the grounds that it was unenclosed and too lax for her vocation.[7]

This example shows that the love of God and the love of a suitor were not always mutually exclusive. Although ultimately the woman would have to choose to commit to one type of life or the other, falling in love did not preclude being devoutly Catholic and dedicated to the cause.

Some concluding thoughts …

Over the last three posts, it has been my goal to address the blanket assumptions that still remain in the popular psyche today. Like the Twitter users reacting to John McCafferty’s portrait of a young, fresh-faced nun, we often contribute to the perpetuation of that oft-quoted maxim, “Aut maritus, aut murus”, a husband or a cloister, as if those two polarities were so mutually-exclusive as to negate any possibility for overlap, or any other possibilities.
The vignettes included in the Augustinian Chronicles of Louvain and Bruges and the documents of other English congregations offer insight into the private lives of some of the women who went on to become nuns there. Allowing room for critical distance and caution, since the process of creating a narrative of course fashioned those memory documents to suit the purpose of edification, they show that the relationship between earthly love and the decision to enter the cloister was a complex, fluid one, which had as much to do with personal preference as it had with family strategies or societal expectations. Many nuns-to-be entered the convent after refusing one or several suitors. For some of those, the cloister was a shelter from a marriage prospect they did not want; for others, there was only ever one Bridegroom in their heart, and they married Him when they became Brides of Christ. And for those who entered less out of ardent religious zeal than out of more worldly motives, it was not impossible to develop a true and sincere love of contemplative life once in the convent.
Even in the convent, the dialectic between romantic love and religious life never stopped being a sensitive issue. Whilst some found perfect contentment in divine love, others met with forms of terrene passions which sometimes challenged their religious vocations.

[1] Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century. Living Spirituality. Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 68-69.
[2] Bowden (ed.), The Chronicles of Nazareth, pp. 11-12.
[4] Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of […] St Monica’s, vol. 2, p. 44.
[5] Ulrike Strasser, ‘Aut Murus Aut Maritus? Women’s Lives in Counter-Reformation Munich (1579-1651)’. University of Minnesota ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1997.
[6] Caroline Bowden (ed.), The Chronicles of Nazareth (The English Convent), Bruges 1629-1763, CRS Records series, vol. 87, Boydell, 2017, p. 10.
[7] Hamilton (ed.) The Chronicle […] of St Monica’s, vol. 1, p. 255.

 

Marriage, Love and the Cloister, Part Two: God the Only Bridegroom

God the Only Bridegroom

From what we saw in Part One, it seems clear that not all vocations were clear-cut, and inspirational literature was meant to convince, to select a few cases to construct an edifying body of evidence. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, some equally extreme representations were found in Catholic publications which used the same rhetorical techniques, but to argue the opposite. In those publications, contemplative life was portrayed as an ideal of perfection, and a religious vocation was seen as far superior to a vocation for the secular married state. Marriage to Christ and service in the Church were deemed altogether more worthy.
Early modern nuns were taught that their Divine Bridegroom was a jealous lover. The Cambrai Benedictines were instructed to defect from any relationships they may have had before entering the cloister and to remain vigilant not to form new ones. God must be their only focus:

[She] who pretends to advance in this cariere of divine love, must first purge [her] affections from all carnality, & terrene appetite […] as soon as the world is cast forth & the heart is cleansed from all longation of sinn & affection to creatures, presently the entire satiating & ravishing Love of the eternal spouse Jesus Christ Crucified enters and takes full possession thereof.[1]

Each nun was encouraged to ‘give [her] whole heart to be possessed by God alone, rejecting all other creatures as unworthy to have a share in that gift with which thou present thy God’.[2] To prepare themselves to become worthy, they embarked upon a long process of prayer and devotion. In that context, it is no surprise that the Lives of exemplary nuns often emphasized their rejection of male suitors from the earliest stages of their secular lives.
Romantic pursuits were construed not only as a distraction but as an obstruction on the path to spiritual perfection. The narratives documenting influential nuns took special care to highlight the indifference of these virtuous women towards their suitors. For instance, it is known that Mary Ward, founder of the English Poor Clares at Gravelines and later, of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, rejected three suitors as teenager living in Yorkshire. When recalling these episodes of her life in her autobiography, Ward indicated that she turned down her suitors not ‘fourth of anie desirs to be a religious, nor other reason, but because I could not affect them’. She further explained that her shy and bashful nature made any commerce with men so uncomfortable for her that she found it easy to remain virtuous even when she ‘was several times solicited to falle’.[3] With hindsight, she saw those moments as narrow escapes, and thanked God for preserving her from these matches, so she would be able to become Religious once she had discerned her vocation.

Over time however, the later biographies written by her companions expanded her narrative to frame her refusals of marriage within the discourse of holy chastity and dedication to God. First, the English Vita (c. 1650) expressed Ward’s virtue through inspirational tropes; about the engagement made for her when she was ten years old, the author redeemed the frailty of Ward’s yet immature heart through God’s intervention: ‘The Devine Providence having designed this selected Soule for a higher State, would not let this Love though so innocent have longer place in her Hart reserved to himselfe’. But about the second engagement, which Ward turned down at thirteen, it is said that ‘her mind was so much an other Way, as the very greefe had like to have putt her into mortall Sickeness’.[4] Where Ward explicitly claimed she did not reject her suitor for the love of religious life but out of dislike of him, the vague wording of the Vita let readers interpret the episode differently.

Later still, the Painted Life (c. 1680 – 1717) gave Mary Ward agency on all three occasions, recounting that, on the first, ‘sheprayed fervently, imploring God to prevent this marriage’; on the second, ‘she insisted on turning down this proposal, claiming that in God alone would she place her love.’ Finally, by her third proposal, ‘her heart was so caught up in divine love that she could not consent to any earthly love’.[5] In those materials, specifically designed for edification, Ward was shown as fully dedicated to the religious life from the start: she would not entertain the love of a man when she craved the love of Christ.

In a similar vein, Mary Windsor, who professed at Louvain as an Augustinian Canoness in 1616, had reportedly shunned many occasions to be married, despite the fact that ‘oftentimes men were like to kill one another about her’.[6] This was seen as a sign of her wisdom and of her spiritual discernment: she kept her heart pure, for God only.

For some nuns, those precepts were so deeply absorbed that any possibility of a romantic relationship seemed a grievous offence against God’s will. The idea of a love affair became so odious as to take on the appearance of an evil to be fought at all costs. In their youth, Margaret and Ursula Mostyn, both (in)famous Carmelites who went on to become Prioresses at Lierre, had remained steadfast when their mother had presented them with suitable matches. But unlike the examples given above, both Margaret and Ursula confessed to having been in love with at least one of their respective suitors. Margaret recalled that she had felt an ‘inordinate affection’ for a particular person. Unsettled by these feelings, she experienced visions in which she saw a jealous Christ ‘pictured like a spouse’, demanding to know what this mere mortal man had more than He did.[7] This, in itself, was a common trope. But the Mostyns related to such feelings in very intense ways. At the time of witnessing in their autobiographical documents, they presented it not as a temporary weakness which they recovered from, but as the result of witchcraft. It was the devil’s work. Ursula recalled experiencing visions of the man who ‘had caused her for to fall in love with him previously, by reason of his witchcraft’; the unnamed love interest was then referred to as ‘the devil’, precipitating ‘the beginning of all her temptations’.[8]

Ursula’s and Margaret’s spiritual path was not to be an easy one; they were so tormented that, in 1651, their confessor Edmund Bedingfield found them to be possessed and embarked upon a painful process of exorcism. The Mostyn case is the only documented example of exorcisms being carried out on English nuns, and it is unique in many respects.[9] When the sisters were finally delivered of their demons, Margaret was able to identify 22 who had tormented her with amorous and carnal desires.[10] The Mostyn case can be construed as the extreme expression of an internalized discourse. To desire a person meant that one’s heart was not entirely filled with God; it was therefore reprehensible in a contemplative nun.
The fact that suitors could be demonized as spell-casters indicates that, for some women, the appeal of romance was strong although it went hand in hand with deep feelings of guilt and fear. In those instances, conventual texts often insist that the women’s vocations predated their entry in the convent and took precedence over worldly interests: they refused marriage because their hearts were already set on God. That was the narrative around Margaret Mostyn, who is said to have discerned her religious vocation despite her grandmother’s and her mother’s reluctance, and who viewed marriage as a betrayal of her godly purpose. However, not everyone adopted such a drastic stance regarding marriage.
The passage of time and the nature of the documents make it impossible to evaluate the role played by strong spiritual vocations in instances of rejected suitors. Some women may indeed have had an ardent wish to become a nun, as others yearned to become wives. Some may have been culturally and socially conditioned into cloistered life or into marriage.[11] Others yet may have entered without a solid initial vocation, keen to avoid becoming a wife. With each case, one would likely find all the nuances of spiritual engagement and a variety of dispositions towards marriage.

The story of Mary Morgan (prof 1651) can illustrate this point: she was a wealthy heiress who turned down the proposal of ‘the greatest Earl of the kingdom’; not taking no for an answer, the unnamed Earl then appealed to the royal couple themselves as mediators. When Morgan persevered in her decision, the Earl turned to more violent devices and lay siege to her house. The situation resulted in Morgan leaving the country in disguise to enter the Antwerp Carmel to avoid his unrequited pursuits. Although it would be tempting to join Hamilton in his conclusion that this was a ‘noble young lady, whom our Lord had designed for Himself’, the factors leading Morgan to her decision would, no doubt, have been complex.[12] Some women shunned their admirers, perhaps less out of the love of God than out of a dislike for their prospective husbands, or because the prospect of conforming to the expectations from an obedient wife and mother did not appeal to them. After all, marriage was as binding as conventual life. It implied a life-long contract, a vow of obedience and faithfulness, the loss of personal property, and restrictions on physical mobility outside the home, only this time, to a man of flesh and blood. Despite anticlerical publications insisting that they were a woman’s natural vocation, some marriages may not have been all that tempting. In such cases, the convent represented a safe haven, a shelter from a life of domestic unhappiness.

[1] ADN, Ms 20H-17, ‘A short treatise on the three principall vertues and vows of religious persons’, fos 122-3.
[2] ADN, Ms 20H– 37, ‘Of the love of God’, fo. 144.
[3] Christina Kenworthy-Browne, Mary Ward, 1585-1645. A Briefe Relation with Autobiographical Fragments an a Selection of Letters, Catholic Records Society, Records Series vol. 81, Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008, pp. 108-109; 113-114; 117-118.
[4] Also known as the Briefe Relation, this is believed to have been written by Mary Poyntz, perhaps in collaboration with Winefred Wigmore, Ibid. pp. 4 and 6.
[5] See The Painted Life, paintings 2, 5 and 8.
[6] Hamilton (ed.) Augustinian Canonesses of St Monica’s … Louvain, vol. 1, 158.
[7] Hallett, Witchcraft, 54.
[8] Hallett, Witchcraft, 67
[9] See Francis Young, English Catholics and the Supernatural, 1553-1829, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013, pp. 209-217.
[10] Hallett, Witchcraft, 92 – 106; altogether she names 300 demons.
[11] Elizabeth Rapley … and Caroline Bowden …
[12] Hamilton (ed.), Augustinian Canonesses … Louvain v2, 4

Marriage, Love and the Cloister, Part One : The unwilling nun: an indictment of Roman Catholic practice?

Some months back, John McCafferty posted on Twitter a portrait of A Young Nun, by French artist Claude Mellan (1598-1688).  This drawing attracted interesting reactions as viewers assumed, perhaps from her slightly flushed complexion, that such a charming young sitter must be either an unwilling nun, or a naughty one, bending the rules by wearing rouge in a small act of rebellion. Such interpretations may be those of the majority of people today, and they echo some of the questions posed by Frances Dolan in her 2007 article, ‘Why are Nuns Funny?’.[1] The cloister is, and ever was, a fertile locus for the imagination of those on the outside.[2] Between convents and marriage, modern society has all but abandoned the former in favour of the latter, and the ‘otherness’ of conventual life makes it into an object of curiosity, one we cannot comprehend easily.

 

Fountains Abbey

But let us not forget that nuns were equally as mysterious in 17th-century England, where religious houses had been dismantled since dissolution of the monasteries (1536-1540). Over time, the establishment of the Church of England had outlawed Roman Catholic practice and, as a result, those who felt a vocation for Catholic religious life had to leave their homeland to enter religion abroad. Today, I invite you to travel with me through time and space, to meet some of the Religious who lived in English convents in exile, mostly in the Southern Netherland and Northern France. Between 1598 and 1678, 22 of those convents provided for the religious vocations of English Catholic women. Back in England, they were the object of much curiosity, often depicted as places where English girls were entombed alive, cut off from the rest of the world and enslaved in blind obedience, often to satisfy the base urges of clergymen who were more concerned with lust and power than spirituality.

Like most effective hate speech, that type of discourse latched on to some factual elements around which to weave its rhetoric of alienation. Since the decrees of the Council of Trent, contemplative nuns were indeed to observe strict enclosure. The hagiographies of saints, and the edifying texts read in religious communities all praised the virtues of exemplary nuns who embodied the vows of chastity, poverty, obedience and enclosure. Those heroic models lived for Christ only; they shunned the company of other creatures, and especially the distractions and entrapments of romantic love. Somewhere between those two extreme representations, very few sources reveal anything about the women who became nuns and their attitudes to romantic love or marriage, and this is what I would like to focus ontoday. Deliberately leaving aside both the sensationalized sexuality found in anti-Catholic publications [1], and the saintly chastity conveyed in edifying texts, this talk will question the tension between the patriarchal injunctions of the secular world (marriage, motherhood) and the demands of Religious life. How did enclosed nuns experience that famous dichotomy: ‘Aut maritus, aut murus’?

Part One:
The unwilling nun: an indictment of Roman Catholic practice?

In anticlerical publications such as Robinson’s Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, convents were painted astombs in which unwilling women were dumped by their families. They were places of enslavement in which nuns werereduced to the service of their male Superior, and much of the narrative focused on moral – and often sexual- misbehaviour, through bawdy anecdotes. The unveiling of those sexcapades was meant to be entertaining, but served open anticatholic propaganda, debunking convents as dens of inequity, sin, and hypocrisy. Those were unnatural places, where women were deprived of their true, natural vocations as wives and mothers. But nature was bound to find a way, and some of those women, readers were told, went to extraordinary lengths to escape that world of lies and embrace a woman’s true vocation: marriage (and motherhood). This is the kind of rhetoric one would expect in an anticatholic publication, but can echoes of this be found in the documents of the English convents themselves?

There are a few rare cases of runaway nuns, but they appear to be extremely rare. For instance, Christina Charlton (AD015) had entered the Augustianian Canonesses as a postulant with what was described as ‘a full resolution to be religious’. Yet, on 8 April 1677, the enclosed nun walked briskly through the wet streets of Bruges, braving the cold to get to the house of an English Colonel who was stationed there. Once at her destination, she met Captain John Talbot of Carrington, Northumberland, with whom she had contracted a secret engagement. The pair eloped, much to the bewilderment of Charlton’s family and friends. On the morning of her wedding barely one week later, the bride wrote to her Prioress to tell her the news, plunging the community in great turmoil. She explained she had feared being judged as ‘inconstant’ if she returned home to her parents before profession, and cited that dread as a reason for such a hasty marriage. (69) However, it does not seem that Christina Charlton’s decision to run away meant she now hated the religious life she had once felt attracted to. She was a spiritual person, and her daughter Catherine, the fruit of her marriage with Mr Talbot, actually became a nun herself, first entering the Benedictines at Ghent (BA050) before joining the Hoogstraten Carmelites in 1719.[1]

The Canonesses of Bruges were to know a similar, although more public episode 19 years later, with another Northumberland member, Dorothy Errington.[2] By 1696, Errington had been a choir nun for 15 years. She was described as a somewhat too frequent user of the parlour, where she would entertain kith and kin but also talk to English visitors curious to see a nun with their own eyes. That was how she met a certain John Grant, a Protestant, and lieutenant of the army of King William. It is believed that her conversations with Grant began with good intentions; speaking with him at the grate, she eventually effected his conversion to Catholicism. Converting an officer of the ‘usurper’s’ army would have earned her much praise, had it not led to her own apostasy. The chronicler recorded that Grant’s conversion seemed sincere and true ‘at first’ but soon, the pair began their ‘wicked contrivance’. A short time later, Errington would run away with Grant and be excommunicated.

On the night of 27 October, she was seen going through the dormitory in her nightgown, probably with her secular clothes underneath, and ‘she stole secretly out of the enclosure’. Her escape was only discovered the next day. The shock her departure was soon compounded by Errington’s utter lack of discretion, which preempted any attempts by the bishop, the confessor and the nuns themselves to keep the scandal buried. The Annals report that, after her marriage, Errington-Grant lived ‘in very poor condition, yet in appearance better satisfied with that miserable base poverty, than she was here with the engagement of her religious poverty which abundantly supply’d her necessary wants’. All the community’s efforts to entice her to repent her ‘Shameful and scandalous life’ (100) fell on deaf ears, despite enrolling the help of her sister and brother-in-law and having special masses said in the convent church by the neighbouring Carmelite friars for 30 days. It was no good: worse still, Errington and her beau ran away to Sluis, in Holland, where she publicized her plight to the local Protestant and publicly recanted her faith, thereby adding apostacy to elopement on the list of her scandalous behaviour. The Annals report that she ‘was much encouraged by the neighbouring people of that unhappy place, who applauded her crimes so much that they even threaten’d to fall upon [her brother-in-law] if he persisted to disturb her’. Her conversion allowed her to receive alms from the local church and support from her Protestant neighbours. As she traveled North to Scotland, also a Protestant land where her status as a runaway nun would make her popular, she declared she had never had a religious vocation but had made her vows under duress.
Interestingly, the Chronicle noted that her very entry into religion had been conditioned by another romantic entanglement: ‘upon her father’s crossing her in the designe she had to cast herself away by marrying one of his servants’. (101) It seems that Errington felt her vocation was for the married state of life, although she exercised little caution when choosing husband. Being prevented from entering one ill-advised engagement, she ran headlong into another. This, of course, fitted nicely with the anti-Catholic cliché of the oppressed female held captive within the walls, everyday a living death, in a community which stifled her womanly desire and purpose: to marry and bear children.

Yet Errington’s actions beg many questions: did she deny her faith out of conviction? Or did she feel her precarious situation could be better justified if she denigrated the convent? Was she being opportunistic, the better to fund her new marriage? There is no way of being sure. What we do know is that, in 1707, when she became widowed after 11 years of marriage and apostasy, Errington traveled back from Scotland to her brother’s house in Northumberland, and from there (with his help), she obtained the lifting of her excommunication and the right to return to her convent in Bruges. (299-300) Astonishingly, she was even restored to her rank. She died 32 years later, on 14 December 1739, aged 81.
The Chronicle presented the fact that she had returned to her original community instead of seeking another ­— where her sin might not have been so well-known — as a sign of her repentance and humility: ‘[…] she came in the spirit of pennence with a desire of repairing the fault where she had commit’d it.’ Despite those efforts to paint this story of redemption in a positive light, the fact remained that Errington returned only because Grant had drowned 18 months previously, and we can imagine she had been left destitute. The convent may have been her only recourse; in fact, the chronicler could not contain harsh words about her temperament, describing her as ever difficult, ‘disagreeable’ and of ‘a violent temper’.[3]
But alongside those comments about her unruly nature, the Chronicle also highlighted the sincerity of Errington’s personal spirituality in later life. She frequented the sacraments with great regularity — perhaps one of the only aspects of convent life for which she was willingly regular. She had a ‘tender devotion to the passion of our saviour’, as well as ‘great Confidence in our Ladys protection & intercession’. Although she was ill-suited to the rules and regulations of conventual life, the sincerity of her piety was apparently not in question.

From such vignettes, it seems that the Protestant debunking of convents as stifling, imprisoning spaces did indeed have a grounding in reality for some women in the English convents. However, they appear to have been extremely rare events. Such publications latched on to the stories of runaway nuns to serve their discourse by depicting the very structures of the Catholic Church as against nature. They did not seek to represent the lived experience of religious women, but rather to instrumentalize them to serve a political purpose. Despite the fact that they portrayed a nun’s life as antithetical with a woman’s nature and intended purpose in creation, they also failed to reveal that often, the sensational stories of runaway nuns were complex and nuanced. The examples above show women who did not forever reject Catholic piety and practice; rather, they show women who struggled to discern their vocation, the married state arguably being a vocation also, one to which you would commit for life and where you would vow to obey your husband.

[1] Bowden, The Chronicles of Nazareth, 68-69
[2] had been sent back to Northumberland on 28 April 1674 to claim her annuity from her father, who ‘took no care of her’. On that occasion she had returned to the convent, but
[3] Bowden, The Chronicles of Nazareth, 97-101

 

 

 

What conventual archives can tell you even before you look inside the boxes

After the long disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I had not had the pleasure of working in monastic archives for quite some time. My last research trip dated back to 2018 and it was right here, in the wonderful archives of the Benedictine Abbey of Douai, Upper Woolhampton, where I sit as I type these words. For five days of blessed peace, quiet and silence, I have been happily reconnecting with the smells, textures and colours of seventeenth-century manuscripts (and with their age-old dust, too). Time seems to expand, away from the daily deluge of demanding and urgent emails; and with that, it seems the mind can breathe again, and think. At last.

The library and archive building at Douai Abbey.
Douai Abbey church.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I contemplate the amazing range of documents collected in the Douai archives, I am struck by the immense responsibility of such places: archives preserve the histories of dozens of communities through the ages, from their foundations to the present day. If those boxes happened to disappear, the memory of hundreds, even thousands of religious men and women would be plunged into oblivion forever.

Abbess’s pectoral cross and ring from St Scholastica’s Abbey, Teignmouth.

Opening each box is not unlike opening a present, and wondering what is going to be inside; each document is a little discovery, a voyage through time and space, an intangible thread suddenly connecting the researcher to the person who wrote that manuscript, and also to the people and places it evokes. Finding just the right information, or an unexpected object, is a thrill. I am quite sure every researcher has experienced that ‘wow’ moment at least one time in their career.

But it also seems to me that one can already catch a glimpse of the histories of those communities without opening one single box. Let me explain what I mean. For instance, should you wish to look at the documents of any given community in any archive, you might be surprised at the size on their collections. Some are modest, tiny even, but others are enormous, covering shelf after shelf, in dozens of boxes. From such discrepancies emerge questions: what happened? Did the documents get lost in transit, or maybe destroyed in a fire or a natural disaster of some sort? Or maybe they were expunged willingly, either by their owners or by their opponents (as was the case, say, in Revolutionary France)? Conversely, if the collection is large, does this mean the community was well-established and wealthy, and therefore able to acquire more books, or write more than its counterparts? Or was it representative, but was simply lucky to be better preserved? Does it mean that this community was longer-lived than the others, thereby accumulating more documents?

Beyond size – and this is quite striking at Douai – there is the story told by the boxes’ reference numbers. Take the example of the English Benedictines convents founded in the seventeenth century on the Continent. Should you have an interest in the Ghent community, you will find that its reference is BO, which can be intriguing at first glance. Yet it is logical: after leaving the Continent for England and settling first in Preston (Lancs), then at Caverswall Castle (Staffs), the nuns finally moved to Oulton (Staffs), hence the reference BO (Benedictines, Oulton). If there is no separate collection for the Ghent house, it is because the history of the community did not stop when they left Ghent: rather movingly, the early modern documents are part and parcel of the modern community archive; documents relating to the Ghent Constitutions, for instance, are in the same box as the Constitutions of the 20th-century convent at Oulton. They belong together. Hence, at Douai, the reference numbers for all 17th-century conventual archives reflect the location of the community at the time when they entrusted their documents to Douai for safe keeping. For instance, the Brussels Benedictines are filed under the letter T for Teignmouth, or the Carmelites of Lierre under CD, for Carmelites, Darlington.

The collection of the Benedictines of Ghent, marked as ‘Benedictines, Oulton’.

Still without opening the boxes, you will see yet another indication of the extraordinary peregrinations of those witnesses of the past. Let us take the Ghent house again as a case study: at Oulton, boxes had been numbered simply box 1, box 2, and so forth. There was no need for a more complex referencing system. This had to be changed when they arrived at Douai, so the prefix BO was added. And more recently, proper cataloguing was the occasion of a more rationalised approach to the boxing of certain items, so the reference numbers have changed again (this time, hopefully, for good).

Gathering unnumbered documents

 

The same applies to the Carmelites of Antwerp, whose collection has been recently sorted and boxed differently, or the Carmelites of Lierre where, for example, the material which used to be in CD box 3 is now referenced CD box 28 after recent sorting and cataloguing.
Undoubtedly, this can be a bit of a headache when searching for precise documents with references which no longer apply, but it testifies to the fact that those archives are still very much living things: they evolve, they relocate as they move to other depositories, they change appearances as they get filed and itemized in more modern ways, and they are given new reference numbers in the same way we change passports every so often.

And amazingly, this is all before you even take the lid off a box, such is the witnessing power of archives. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and dive back in …

 

Mary Knatchbull, an Early English Businesswoman?

Mary Knatchbull, an Early English Businesswoman?

MA students Agnès Guery and Clémentine Raoux looked into the life and most salient traits of Abbess Mary Knatchbull. Their work shows how this extraordinary woman has been a figure of great interest to scholars for her activities in support of the exiled king, Charles II, but it also points out a crucial and all-pervasive truth about her: she was, first and foremost, a contemplative nun who, through her dealings with the outside world, sought to further to cause of English monasticism. 

 

Who was Mary Knatchbull?

‘Despite the monastic ideal of dying to the world, nuns were neither ignorant of politics, nor cut off from the networks of power’,[1] and that was very true of Mary Knatchbull, who was the abbess of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception, in Ghent for many years.

Mary Knatchbull (1610-1696), Abbess of the Ghent Benedictines, by John Michael Wright, n.d.

Mary Knatchbull (1610-1696) was from a Catholic gentry family in Kent, who sent six of its female relatives to the Ghent Benedictines in the 17th century. She was one of the first novices of the Ghent convent established in 1624, and her aunt, Lucy Knatchbull was the first abbess. Mary Knatchbull was professed in 1628 and occupied several official positions such as novice mistress and prioress before becoming an abbess. Because she ‘had proven herself a capable administrator under the two preceding superiors’,[2] she was elected abbess at 40 years-old, in 1650, had her golden jubilee by 1678, and remained in office until her death.

When she was elected, she ‘inherited a serious debt of some £6000 resulting from a building program undertaken by her predecessors, but also an otherwise flourishing community of eighty members.’[3] Despite this, she was respected and admired by the nuns of her convent: ‘she was much venerated within the order, being described by its chronicler, Abbess Anne Neville, as having great virtue and wisdom and being widely renowned for the eloquence of her pen’.[4] She managed to open three other convents.

Yet, Mary Knatchbull was not only a respected and successful spiritual leader; she was involved in politics as well, especially during the exile of Charles II, and she played an important role in his Restoration, which ‘reveal[s] a woman operating with significant influence in two discrete spheres: the enclosed cloister and the royalist court in exile’.[5]


An Abbess Undercover

After the Civil Wars leading to a break of the monarchy in the three kingdoms with the appointment of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, Charles II had to leave England and flee to the continent in 1651. He returned in 1660 for the restoration of monarchy. During this particular period for England, many Catholics, among whom Mary Knatchbull, sought the opportunity to be noticed by the exiled monarch and decided to help Charles II in his Restoration to the crown, in the hope of obtaining a toleration of their religion.

Prior to these events, the convents of English nuns in exile on the Continent had cultivated networks of contacts at home. They were already working to keep the practice of Catholicism alive on and off the English soil. They had ways of communicating with recusants, to get information about the situation in their homeland, but also to recruit more apprentices and future nuns. While many nuns prayed for the Restoration of Charles II, Mary Knatchbull decided to do more for it, using the network she already had, while keeping her actions within the ‘established traditions of female recusant activism against the English Protestant state’.[6]

The Ghent convent thus became ‘one of several mail networks used by the royalists’.[7] Mary Knatchbull received letters for or from Charles II or his close advisors, which she hid in her own mail to send to and from England. This network was seen as quite a reliable one, if not the most. This was probably due to the views men had on women at the time: letters addressed to women and written by other women were not seen as dangerous and, hence, were not as tightly controlled by the government’s intelligence services.[8]

 In addition, her contacts in England kept her informed on the political situation there, and she could then send this crucial information to Sir Edward Hyde, a member of the exiled court. Mary Knatchbull was thus not only offering a safe route for their letters, she also maintained an important correspondence with some members of the exiled court, such as Hyde or Ormonde, the king’s closest advisors. In 1659, she exchanged weekly letters with Edward Hyde about ‘English affairs, in conjunction with news about the situation in Dunkirk, and details of Charles’s ongoing negotiations with the Spanish and French kings to garner their military support.’[9]

Not only did she work as a messenger, she also ‘placed her convent’s resources at their [Charles II and his ministers] disposal’,[10] she offered them hospitality and helped Charles II and his court financially when they needed it: ‘With the permission of her nuns, the abbess arranged loans through her merchant ‘frindes’ for the royalists, using the convent as security’,[11] and all this despite her convent’s own financial issues. We do not know how much Mary Knatchbull lent to Charles II, but we can imagine it represented a large sum of money since it was one of the reasons that led the Ghent convent to struggle economically even more.

If Mary Knatchbull never explicitly said that she expected Charles II to pay her back or do anything for her in exchange for her generosity, ‘she was sufficiently experienced to understand the concept of reciprocity in the exchange of favors’,[12]  and was doing all of this hoping mostly for more toleration towards Catholics.

Working for her own cause too

Mary Knatchbull’s participation in Restoration efforts had put the convent and herself in a difficult position financially. After 1660, her main goals were to retrieve the money lent to Charles II by securing funding for the community, and to extend that said community by creating new daughter houses.

Firstly, the abbess saw financing the royalists as a good investment, since she hoped the Ghent community would therefore be rewarded somehow. However, it seems that 1660 and Charles II’s Restoration to the English throne marked a turning point in the abbess’s ability to influence the court. Indeed, the king had priorities other than the toleration of Catholicism. But Mary Knatchbull was not one to wait for things to happen on their own. In 1661, she decided to take a trip to London to ensure the promised money would be paid. She was successful in obtaining a £1000 payment, and the promise of £2000 more to come. However, by 1663, they still had not received the money. They finally secured an annual pension of £500, which was better than nothing.[13] Their hopes of gaining favour and pioneering the return of English convents on English soil had come to nothing.

The Benedictine nuns at Ghent had one last hope for Catholic toleration with the new king James II’s in 1685. However, their dreams were shattered with William of Orange’s Glorious Revolution and the Toleration Act of 1689, which still restricted the religious liberty of Roman-Catholics in England.

The Ghent Monastery, in the Annals of the Ghent Benedictines, n.d.

After the Restoration, Mary Knatchbull realised Catholic toleration was not on the way. To avoid financial precariousness, she maintained an epistolary relation with her existing contacts and new ones, such as ‘the English royal family and significant courtiers’,[14] to maintain a high profile for her community as well as get funding. She consequently decided to withdraw from politics and to focus on other projects, such as the creation of new daughter houses, which she had already started in the 1640s.

First page of the Annals of the Ghent Benedictines, n.d.

Indeed, at that time, the Ghent monastery suffered from overcrowding. Mary Knatchbull obtained in 1651 the authorisation from Anne of Austria, Queen Regent of France, to start a new foundation in Boulogne in 1653.[15]

In the early 1660s, she wanted to build a new convent in Dunkirk this time. It is not clear if Charles II gave his written approval for such a design, as the proofs mentioned by the Ghent nuns have not been discovered yet. With the advice of the Jesuits, Mary decided to proceed with the foundation, in the hope of winning the king’s written approval later.[16] In September 1662, the king denied giving his approval, but at the same time, Dunkirk was sold to the French crown. The monastery then received the royal consent of Louis XIV and everything was settled.

The last house Knatchbull founded was the one in Ypres in 1665, although her role in the foundation is difficult to ascertain due to little evidence.[17] This house was not successful as it suffered from recruitment difficulties and was not financially stable. However, their situation was not isolated: other communities faced similar issues, in the second half of the seventeenth centuries. In her annals, Anne Neville argues that ‘Perhaps the sisters did not listen carefully enough to advise and adapt sufficiently to circumstances.’[18] The convent became an Irish Benedictines house in 1682.

Conclusion

Mary Knatchbull was held in high esteem by her fellow nuns, as well as being admired for her social and financial skills. In 1682, Mary Joseph Lawson, a nun of the Ghent community, wrote in the preface of an antiphonal for the abbess that she was, ‘soe constant a comfortable support to us in all Quire dutyes.’[19] Her career as an altruistic person showed the influence of a woman both in the spiritual and political spheres, at the highest levels. Throughout her life, she was a confident woman who knew what she wanted and used all that was in her power in order to achieve her aims.

 

[1] Laurence Lux Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 124.

[2] Claire Walker, “Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration,” The Historical Journal 43, no. 1 (March 2000): 4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3021011.

[3] Caroline M.K. Bowden, “Knatchbull, Mary (1610–1696),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (September 2004), 1, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/66452.

[4] Bowden, “Knatchbull, Mary,” 2.

[5] Caroline M.K. Bowden, “The Abbess and Mrs. Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s,” Recusant History 24, no. 3 (1999): 288, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034193200002521.

[6] Claire Walker, “Crumbs of News: Early Modern English Nuns and Royalist Intelligence Networks,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 648, https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-1720607.

[7] Walker, “Prayer,” 8.

[8] Bowden, “The Abbess,” p297.

[9]  Walker, “Crumbs of News,” p645.

[10] Ibid, p634.

[11] Walker, “Prayer,” 6.

[12] Bowden, “The Role of Mary Knatchbull,” 5.

[13] Walker, “Prayer,” 17.

[14] Bowden, “The Role of Mary Knatchbull,” 6.

[15] Ibid, 2.

[16] Ibid, 5.

[17] Ibid, 7.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 8.

‘Why are nuns funny?’ or how the habit does not make the nun.

Why are nuns funny?’ or how the habit does not make the nun.
A study of how making fun of nuns eventually unveiled their power of action.

For their assignment, MA students Manon Martin and Gabrielle Mota had to read and reflect upon Frances E. Dolan’s seminal article ‘Why Are Nuns Funny? Huntington Library Quarterly 70.4 (2007); 509-535. Here is their personal interpretation of some of the most salient traits of the article. 

An examination of how the Early Modern English Nuns were mocked and sexualized, which ironically led to their empowerment in their daily and spiritual life.

‘Why are nuns funny?’ is an article written in 2007 by Professor Frances Dolan, whose research focuses on early modern English literature, law and history. In her article, Dolan argues that making fun of nuns for their ‘fantasies’ or marginality was in fact a way for men to maintain a status quo regarding gender relations and thus had consequences not only on the nuns, but also on women in general. Representations of nuns also served as a gateway towards a criticism of their Catholicism. Indeed, after the Reformation, Catholics had to either convert to Protestantism or remain Catholic in secret, which led many women to flee England and go to the Continent, to start a new life as enclosed, exiled nuns or for other women, to become part of the recusants, that is to stay in England and participate in the sheltering of Catholic seminary priests, as well as Jesuits. Anti-Catholicism was in full swing, and many pamphlets or books made fun of nuns and caricatured them for being both women and Catholics. For this blog post, we chose to focus on how men in caricaturing nuns actually tried to control women’s bodies as ‘the cloister made literal and architectural symbolism for describing the female body and the technologies necessary to protect its vulnerable apertures’ (Dolan 2007, 516), but also how it actually, ironically, empowered women more than it discredited them.

What Professor Dolan demonstrates in her article is how making fun of nuns used laughter as a stranglehold on female bodies. Indeed, it started with the idea of enclosure: ‘walls and doors’, ‘locks and keys’, all of these elements representing a form of secrecy as well as a physical obstacle which made it impossible for men to remain in control of nuns’ bodies, as they could not enter convents. Garthine Walker, in her article Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England, also argued that ‘locks and keys constituted common metaphors for sex in various kinds of early modern narrative’ (Dolan 2007,517): nuns, who supposedly entered the convent by making a vow of chastity, were in fact vow-breakers and convents allowed for more sexual license than the secular world, whether it be with priests or between nuns themselves. Paradoxically, they used the supposedly sexual aspect of what was happening inside convents to control nuns, lock them in and explain their desire to be enclosed: ‘At least the insistence on nuns as women of pleasure concedes that whatever is happening inside convents is of interest to the nuns; nuns want to be there.’ (Dolan 2007, 513). In these narratives, nuns were mocked for their willingness to remain chaste and became more human when they broke their vows as Dolan states: ‘The nun who succumb to her libido, with other nuns or priests, is laughably but reassuringly human’ (Dolan 2007, 515). Actually, nuns were made to be funny because they thought that by accepting the vow of chastity, they would break from nature which is something impossible, and therefore the nuns became grotesque and so laughable: ‘Thus nuns are also just that little bit funnier because they are women who propose to discipline the bod’ (Dolan 2007, 517). Nuns’ sexuality was at the centre of the laughter and especially their supposedly inability to remain chaste. Priests exercised a control over the nuns which appeared similar to the one of the husband in a marriage, thus questioning which kind of ‘entrapment’ was preferable.

Cover of Venus in the Cloister by L’Abbé Duprat (1683) where he depicts nuns having sexual intercourse with priests and being idle. Found in:
/review.gale.com/2021/04/06/early-modern-art-and-social-history-in-erotica/

The article also questioned the institution of marriage: was marriage preferable to the enclosed convents considered as ‘Cabinet of Wickedness’ (The Adamite, or the Loves of Father Rock and His Intrigues with the Nuns 1683)? Some early modern writers such as Margaret Cavendish, emphasized that ‘unsympathetic’ marriages were less preferable than life in a cloister: ‘Marriage is a very Unhappy Life when Sympathy Joyns not the Married Couple, for otherwise it were better to be Barr’dup within the Gates of a Monastery, than to be Bound in the Bonds of Matrimony.’ It appeared that the patriarchal authority in a marriage, was sometimes so important that it was the same as being in a convent, not being able to see the outside world, and some women thought it would be better to be enclosed without a dominant male authority. However, male authority was also to be found in the convent. Indeed, anti-Catholic authors insisted on the nuns’ ‘passivity’ (Dolan 2007, 526). Nuns, as women, were considered inferior and gullible and so, they were seen as following the orders of priests without questioning them, being blindly obedient. It led to comic situations as Professor Dolan states: ‘Ballads about bawdy priests show them reassuring the nuns they confess that sex is not much of a sin, and besides they can always forgive it afterward, so why worry ?’ (Dolan 2007, 526), or, ‘These nuns routinely have sex but not because they want to; they do it because they have been told to and they are incapable of distinguishing right from wrong, or desire from duty’ (Dolan 2007, 528). Overall both in marriage and in the convent, there was a male authority above that controlled and manipulated the female body and desire, and the nun or the wife was subjected to this power. As in marriage, vows of obedience and chastity were taken by nuns yet, in anti-catholic representation of nuns, they are seen as doing whatever the priests or confessors asked them without questioning the meaning of these vows thus making Catholic practices phoney. The enclosure of nuns as a means of control over their bodies, did not prevent the very pornographic and sexual innuendoes, but actually served a broader purpose. Indeed, nuns were only an allegory for women in general, the subalterns, those who did not have a word in society’s organization and ruling and yet, some of them were the most fervent helpers in the quest of missionaries against Protestantism. To allow for the hierarchy to stay stable and prevent change, men ridiculed nuns and therefore women, so as to reassure themselves: ‘These texts insist that nuns are funny because women are when they are cast, as so often, in the role of the grotesque body ridiculously exposed’ (Dolan 2007, 517). As we perceived it, exiled or hidden nuns were endowed with a kind of mystical dimension, hidden in their convents, never seen and actually only known through rumours and stereotypes. Yet, using these stereotypes helped empowering nuns and women and allowed quite a lot of upheavals, led or at least arranged by women, getting these men to be fooled.

Frolicsome Friars and Naughty Nuns Both sources were found on Pinterest : https://www.pinterest.co.uk/malcm2557/frolicsome-friars-naughty-nuns/

What was very interesting in this article, was that laughing at nuns was a way for men to displace their anxieties about gender relations, since these women were enclosed and out of reach for many. That is why there were a large number of ways to make fun of nuns, as we saw earlier, to control them, when the reality was more complicated: ‘Ridicule then helps to distance the nun from other women and to manage the disturbing possibility that the normative expectations for women institutionalized through marriage and the family are just as excessive and doomed as those institutionalized through the cloister’ (Dolan 2007, 514). Men thought that nuns in cloisters went to extremes, because in reality it was not possible to control them fully when they were enclosed, while it was easier to control one’s wife. Yet both marriage and the cloister were a form of entrapment, as excessive as the other, but it was not considered as such by men, as they were not able directly to manipulate nuns. That is why they made fun of women who made a vow of chastity: they were ‘using ridicule to ward off the unsettling possibility of their success.’ (Dolan 2007, 517). It is easier to think that they will fail and that they are not resistant enough than to think that they will succeed and thus are not the weak and feeble women they were considered to be. Besides, ”such representations also suggest that nuns are not to be taken seriously.’ (Dolan 2007, 513). Again, using humour was a way to diminish the power of nuns: we know from our modern point of view that women in cloisters and from their houses in England, had an important role in the Jesuits’ mission, one of the most well-known example being Mary Ward’s Institute that formed and trained so-called ‘Jesuitesses’ who would then go back to England to work for the English catholic mission.

In the end, one can observe that it is a case of the biter bit, if we may say so. What is at stake in this ridiculing of nuns is for women to be discredited and men to stay in a position of power. Faced with the threat of Catholicism and the important boom of conversions to Catholicism, men were out, leading missions, and women, recusant women, were left at home, with the power to arrange everything and help priests in disguise to diffuse their faith. This ridiculing of nuns and of women actually resulted in empowering them and enhancing their strengths more than their weaknesses. It was quite ironical indeed to see, that these weaknesses, imposed on them by men, were actually what made their strength. Women were thus able to lead networks of hidden correspondences for instance, without no one noticing, as they were thought idle and illiterate and therefore, discredited. No one could think that ‘nunnified’ (John Gee, New Shreds of the Old Snare, 1624) women were actually not so dumb and foolish as it had been thought for centuries onwards…

Religion, christianity, religious orders, caricature on vices, of monks and nuns, Germany, 2nd half 16th century. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-religion-christianity-religious-orders-caricature-on-vices-of-monks-58519058.html

 

Eventually, nuns can be perceived as ‘scapegoats’ for men and the early modern English society. As Frances Dolan explains in the last pages of her article, a nun is ‘A whipping girl for both women and Catholics, the nun offered both titillation and a safer target than the Stuart monarchs.’ (Dolan 2007, 531)

Mary Ward and the Power of Words

Mary Ward and the Power of Words. 
A Discursive Opposition to Patriarchy

 

Mary Ward (1585-1645)

This semester, I asked students to write a reflexive piece on some of the readings ascribed in the curriculum of my Masters course on women and early modern British and Irish Catholicism. Paul De Riggi, Kristen DiGuglielmo, Ahmed Limaeim, and Justine Segui, Masters students at my university of Aix-Marseille, France, worked on an analysis of Christina Moss’ article ‘Women May Be Perfect as Well as Men’: Self-identity and Patriarchal Oppression in the Writings of Mary Ward and her Followers, 1999. Here is their contribution, which foregrounds the inclusion of Mary Ward’s work in this blog, alongside her enclosed and exiled compatriots. More will be added about Mary Ward’s vocation and Institute, including a bibliography of primary and secondary sources, in the next few weeks. 

 

Mary Ward, born in Yorkshire, was a prominent figure in the survival of Catholicism in England during the great persecutions of the early modern period, as she advanced an English Catholic spirit across the Channel. Mary Ward’s early years predisposed her to a life of contemplative prayer. Yet, the purpose of her life would be presented to her through a series of epiphanies starting in 1607, revealing to her that she was not destined for a life of silence and enclosure but rather one of active service committed to ‘TAKE THE SAME OF THE SOCIETY’[1] in 1611. This established a female mission modelled on that of the  Society of Jesus, providing women with the same education as the Jesuits did for men.

In her 1999 article, published in Critical Survey, Christina Moss sheds light on the ways in which Mary Ward and her English followers shook the foundations of patriarchal discourse through different modes of writing. It was through these writings that Ward sought to bypass the Church’s restrictive rules (reinforced by the Council of Trent in 1563) on women’s ‘potential capabilities’. [2] Ward’s writings include her Autobiography in which she details her revelations, her successive plans sent to the Pope for the creation of her Institute (Schola Beatae Mariae (1612), Ratio Instituti (1616), Third Plan or Institutum (1621)), and numerous letters and requests addressed to the papacy and her community.

According to Moss, Ward’s main assertion is that ‘women may be perfect as well as men’.[3] Being perfect meant gaining spiritual union with God through the practice of charity and a life of service, leading a person to their eventual sanctification. Given the opportunity to carry out God’s will, women gained the freedom to obey God in whatever way He would call them.

Ward believed that since women were traditionally excluded from education, they were not preoccupied by the constraints of the ‘human intellect’[4] and therefore were made more likely to perceive and receive God’s will and words, rendering them ‘more open than men to the virtues of sincerity and justice’.[5] Moss emphasises that Ward did not attempt to overthrow social differences between men and women but insisted on women’s equal ‘potential capabilities’[6] as mentioned earlier. Furthermore, she asserted that difference did not equal inferiority. Ward believed that failure could not be attributed to gender: if failure there was, it was from human imperfection and not simply because of one’s sex.[7] Although she pledged obedience to the Pope, she questioned the authority of the Church and asserted that her vision held more importance than the establishment’s rules.[8]

It was in 1609 that God revealed to her that her place was not within the Order of St Clare, where she would have fulfilled a vocation of contemplative prayer. At a crossroads in her religious vocation, Ward joined a community of sisters based in St-Omer. Her second vision in 1611 provided a clear directive about her religious mission. This led her to transition the community into her ‘Institute of English Ladies,’[9] what later became the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She later sought recognition for the Institute from the papacy as a counterpart to the Society of Jesus. Indeed, modelled on the Formula Instituti, the Jesuits’ constitution, Ward produced three plans – Schola Beatae Mariae, Ratio Instituti and Institutum.

Having been either refused or ignored by the papacy, each plan was a revision of the previous. Her plans were strategic outlines demonstrating the need for an institutionalized education for women. Moss argues that Ward’s programme was ‘appropriation rather than authorship’[10] since she strove not to reinvent the wheel but only to duplicate the male versions of the pre-established Society. Ward created many female religious houses were created across the Continent, for example in Liège (1616), in Rome (1622), Munich and Vienna (1627) and Prague (1928).

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

In settlement to her third plan proposed to the Pope, Mary Ward included a memorandum called Memorial, in which she reassured the Holy See that she and her followers posed no threat to Rome. Unlike her female predecessors, Ward was the only one who managed to address the Pope directly. Normally requiring a male intermediary to speak for the woman, Ward included her Memorial to specify her intentions. She applied as much pressure as she dared upon the Pope, claiming that a directive from God must not be so easily dismissed.[11] Ward was later accused of heresy and schism and punished by ecclesiastical penalties in 1631, with the passing of the Bull of Suppression by Pope Urban VIII which completely derailed Ward’s Institute. Ward was imprisoned thereafter in Munich.

First page of A Briefe Relation, from https://www.marywarddocumentary.com/the-life-of-mary-ward/

In her article, Moss elaborates on the clever ways in which Mary Ward and her followers found means to communicate at all costs when they were geographically separate. This network of letters was characterized by the development of a codified language resulting in a ‘shared self-identity’.[12] Whether it was using lemon juice as ink in letters that could only be read when heated or the use of male pseudonyms, these women found means to work a system of constraints.

After her death in 1645, her Ladies ensured Ward’s legacy in continuing to write despite papal strictures. As a matter of fact, Winifred Wigmore and Mary Poyntz wrote her biography A Briefe Relation of the Holy Life and Happy Death of Our Dearest Mother in 1650, which enabled them to keep up the fight as they made sure Ward’s name was not forgotten.

Her autobiography played a significant role in illustrating her missionary intentions. Although Church regulations held that women were not allowed to express themselves on religious matters, Ward broke her ‘vow of silence’ driven by God’s revelation to her. It is important to note that it was Father Roger Lee who encouraged Ward to take up the pen and recount her spiritual reflections. However, instead of her autobiography being strictly spiritual in nature, Ward’s writings served as the foundation to her activist mission. This led Louise Schleiner to conclude that Ward was a ‘Catholic activist for women’s education’[13] and through her subversive use of her autobiography, writing became the ‘sphere where [Catholic women] … had come to be granted a voice’.[14] Ward controlled the content of her writings and thus commanded her mission through them.[15] In this way, she was not a puppet pulled by strings and manipulated by the male hierarchy, neither by Father Roger Lee nor by the Pope; she was an agent to God’s will alone.

So, was Mary Ward a feminist then, as Retha Warnicke[16] claimed?

From The Painted Life of Mary Ward; Mary Ward and her English Ladies

Although Mary Ward was only following God’s will and directives, it is worth noting that she did not approve of the patriarchal oppression of the Church. Moss explains Ward’s argument that if, as a woman, she could hear God’s will, any woman could.[17] In her 1621 Institutum, she appropriated military imagery which is usually attributed to men alone, and which is reminiscent of Ignatius Loyola’s: ‘serve beneath the banner of the cross as  a soldier of God’.[18]

In response to gendered critiques which accused her and her followers of being ‘galloping girls’ and ‘but women’, Mary Ward explained, ‘if we were in all things inferior to some other creation, which I suppose to be men [w]hich I dare be bold to say, is a lie then, with respect to the good Father, I may say: it is an error’.[19] She further claimed that ‘if [men] would not make us believe we can do nothing and that we are ‘but women’, we might do great matters’.[20]

However, it is hard to argue that Ward was a feminist as she consistently remained within the boundaries of the traditional female attitudes of the 17th century in humility and respect. The fact that the Schola Beatae Mariae was ordered by ad drafted with her confessor Father Roger Lee proves that she respected male guidance. Henriette Peters argues that ‘If Mary Ward herself had outlined these plans or commissioned them, her visions – and especially that of 1611 – would have lost credibility’.[21] Yet, as Father Lee’s Schola promoted a traditional female religious order, she revised her plans which became more and more radical and missionary like.

Overall, rather than being a proto-feminist, Mary Ward was a missionary whose only vocation was to accomplish God’s will: establishing equal opportunity and education for the Jesuits and English ladies and by extension all women. Although she dedicated her life to the cause, it was not until 1909 that Pope Pius X recognized Mary Ward’s activism as the foundation of the Institute. Ultimately, her Institute had to wait until 2003 to finally be recognised as the Congregation of Jesus.

From the Painted Life of Mary Ward. In opposition to other ecclesiastical members trying to get physically closer to God, Ward is the only one to receive a golden light representing her mystic communion.

 

[1] M. Emmanuel Orchard IBVM, Till God Will: Mary Ward through her writings (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 61. Referred in this blog post as TGW.

[2] Christina Moss, ‘‘Women May Be Perfect as Well as Men’: Self-identity and Patriarchal Oppression in the Writings of Mary Ward and her Followers,’ Critical Survey (1999): 99.

[3] Orchard, TGW, 61.

[4] Moss, ‘Women May Be Perfect…’, 99.

[5] Ibid, 99

[6] Ibid, 99

[7] Ibid, 104.

[8] Ibid, 101.

[9] Laurence Lux-Sterritt, ‘Mary Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed Female Roles in the Early Modern Church,’ Gender, Catholicism and Spirituality (2010): 165.

[10] Moss, ‘Women May Be Perfect…’, 101.

[11] Ibid, 101.

[12] Ibid, 106.

[13] Louise Schleiner, Tudor and Stuart Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 196.

[14] Ibid, 25.

[15] Moss, ‘Women May Be Perfect…’, 101.

[16] Retha Warnicke, Women of the English Renaissance and Reformation (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983), 179.

[17] Moss, ‘Women May Be Perfect…’, 99.

[18] Orchard, TGW, 64.

[19] Orchard, TGW, 58.

[20] Ibid, 58.

[21] Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation, trans. Helen Butterworth (Leominster: Gracewing   Publishing, 1994), 121.

 

Join our Nuntastic talk at Aix-Marseille University

This session will explore the building of common narratives through the study of the texts of the English convents exiled on the Continent; whilst they sought to publicize the shared values and opinions of religious Catholic communities, conventual founding texts such as autobiographies, biographies and chronicles bore the distinctive trace of the person who had shaped them. 

Please join us for our online session on Mise en texte, with guest speakers Jaime Goodrich (Wayne State University) and Victoria Van Hyning (University of Maryland), on Monday 24 January 2022, 16.30 to 18.30 (GMT+1, Paris time.)

REGISTER

 

Jaime Goodrich, “Mise en texte in early modern English Benedictine convents”

This talk will present an introduction to mise en texte within the setting of the English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the 17th century. As a brief opening discussion of mise en texte in the genres of statutes and chapter speeches will demonstrate, this phenomenon was essential to textual production within the convent setting since generations nuns rewrote the texts of their monastic predecessors for new purposes. The remainder of the talk will focus on the role of mise en texte in Abbess Anne Neville’s comparative history of English Benedictine convents, entitled The beginning of the Congregation of the english Benedictin Dames (c. 1672-89). The most complex and comprehensive piece of historical writing to survive from the English Benedictine convents, Neville’s account has served as an important source of historical information for historians and literary scholars. Yet it also deserves consideration as a literary text, particularly for the way that Neville weaves together various sources, most notably letters from Abbess Mary Vavasour of the Brussels Benedictines. Through an examination of the way that Neville incorporates these sources, I will show how she used mise en texte to construct an authorial persona in keeping with the primary Benedictine value of humility.

Victoria Van Hyning, “Mise en Texte in the Conversion Narrative of Catherine Holland”

This talk will focus on the autobiographical conversion narrative of the Augustinian nun, Catherine Holland, who was the daughter of a Protestant father and a Catholic mother. Holland ran away from home in order to join the Nazareth convent in Bruges. She wrote her autobiography shortly after becoming a nun. The text was written in order to articulate her commitment to her new chosen life, and to signal her belonging in her community. Holland drew on Augustine’s Confessions when she wrote her own autobiography. Confessions is one of the most important autobiographical works ever written, and was of course particularly important for an Augustinian nun. Protestants and Catholics in the early modern period regularly disputed ownership of the Church Fathers (Augustine among them), and accused one another of falsely claiming theological lineage to these important thinkers and writers. As a result, so much early modern literature is filled with polemical arguments about these writers, and it was common for people on most sides of the argument to deploy certain ideas, textual passages, and sayings to signal their understanding of these issues, and thus their belonging within a particular religious community. Mise en texte in these cases was about belonging. Catherine Holland’s text is a valuable example of mise en texte many times over. It reveals how her reading practices shaped her autobiographical impulses, while the physical manuscript itself reveals how later generations of nuns kept reading and interacting with the narrative.

Biographical notices

Jaime Goodrich is Professor of English at Wayne State University. She specializes in early modern literature, with a particular focus on early modern women writers and religion, especially Catholicism. Her first monograph analyzed early modern Englishwomen’s devotional translations (Faithful Translators: Authorship, Gender, and Religion in Early Modern England, 2014), and her second monograph discusses the philosophical implications of spiritual texts written by English Benedictine nuns (Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600-1800, 2021). In collaboration with Laurence Lux-Sterritt, she is currently finishing an edition of documents related to spiritual quarrels among the Brussels Benedictines during the 17th century.

Victoria Van Hyning is an assistant professor of Library Innovation at the College of Information Studies (iSchool) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where teaches subjects related to archives, crowdsourcing, librarianship, outreach, engagement, inclusivity, and design. She has a background in medieval and early modern English literature, and much of her work is concerned with women’s writing and the material contexts of literary production. She has published several articles on early modern Catholic culture, and her first book, Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile was published by OUP in 2019. In addition to her literary work she researches and creates crowdsourcing projects that invite members of the public to learn about primary source documents and transcribe them for research and cultural heritage institutions. She joined the UMD iSchool in 2020 after two years at the Library of Congress where she worked with a team to design and launch the crowdsourcing transcription project By the People (crowd.loc.gov). Previously, she worked with Zooniverse.org in Oxford as a Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow (2014-2015) and Humanities PI (2015-2018), leading the development of several humanities projects including AnnoTate, Shakespeare’s World, and Science Gossip.

From Exile to Exile?

From Exile to Exile? An examination of the personal correspondence and narratives of five communities of English Benedictine nuns who sought refuge in England 1794–5

Today, EMEN is glad to present a blog post by Scholastica Jacob (PhD candidate in Theology and Religion at Durham University). In this, Scholastica examines the personal correspondence and narratives of the English Benedictine communities which left the Continent in the wake of the French Revolution to ‘return’ to a homeland they had, in fact, never known, and in which, she argues, the topos of exile remained very much relevant. 

This blog follows on from a recent post by Cormac Begadon on Migration Narratives and the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre. He discusses the engagement of various orders of English nuns with the French Revolution and their articulation of this experience – most especially through the ‘migration narratives’ they wrote. Cormac has highlighted the importance of these narratives to historians of the Revolutionary period. But they can also be used as a starting point for the study of post-Revolutionary religious life. My current PhD research takes the story forward from the moment of the nuns’ arrival in England, 1794–5, and examines the re-establishment of contemplative life through the lens of exile and identity. My thesis is built on the argument that the sense of exile the English religious felt did not end with their expulsion from the Continent. In fact, it was exacerbated by the experience of being considered aliens in their native country and refugees from the wider transnational Church.
The contemporary personal accounts and correspondence from the five Benedictine communities who made the journey as refugees from France and the Low Countries support this argument: they all express the experience in terms of loss, exile and even martyrdom, and reveal that they viewed their relocation not as a triumphant home-coming but as a second exile.
Heritage preservation is an important part of the exile experience and the Benedictines engaged fully in this process; both as a cathartic exercise and as a memorial for future generations of their community.
There were five convents of English Benedictines founded on the Continent, at Brussels, Cambrai, Ghent, Paris and Dunkirk, and they all left some narrative of their collective experience.
The nuns From Cambrai – who were imprisoned for eighteen months in a ‘common gaol’ during which time four of their number died – left two first-hand sources. The most extensive is that of Dame Ann Teresa Partington who wrote her Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray immediately on arrival in England.[1]

 

 

The archives at Stanbrook Abbey also contain a collection of family letters: ‘The Knight Letters’ which span the years 1761 to 1802, and again give first-hand experience of the period.
Letter Ann(e) Joseph(a) Knight to Alexander Knight, May 1795. Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire.

 

In addition, petitions prepared by the community to retrieve property in France describe life before and during the Revolution in some detail.First page of Dame Lucy Blyde’s ‘Memorial and Statement of Property’ Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire.
Two survivor accounts were written by the nuns from Paris: by M Theresa Joseph Johnson and Mother Teresa Catherine Macdonald.[2] These provide factual accounts intermingled with personal responses and have the benefit for historians of confirming each other’s memory.[3] The nuns were placed under house arrest in 1793 and transferred to prison until 1795. One died and all experienced near starvation. The Ghent Nuns’ account comes mostly from their annals which were compiled from a mixture of memory, contemporary letters and documents which survived from Ghent. They were edited and privately published in 1894 and contain full, first-hand details of the expulsion and migration.[4] Copies of letters, ‘The Tempest Letters’, are preserved at Douai Abbey and give an account of the last days in Ghent and arrival in England.[5]  The manuscript annals from the nuns of Dunkirk relied heavily on first-hand accounts culled largely from the memory of lay-sister Winifred Tobin.[6] They too suffered imprisonment between 1793–5, with four sisters dying during the period. The Benedictines from Brussels provide the least detailed personal records: no single voice speaks directly of the experience. The primary source is the Annals which were written up from memories of the survivors.[7] The community escaped to England in 1794 in face of the arriving Revolutionary forces.
These accounts tell us, not only about the experiences in the Revolution but also of the long-term impact of it on the nuns after re-settlement in England. Firstly, they provide an interweaving of personal suffering and recording of factual events. While largely maintaining an objective tone in the official records, personal voices resound through all accounts: a note to the Tempest letters records that Dame Mary Anselm Tempest ‘escaped to England […] with hardly a rag to her tail’.[8]

 

Postscript to The Tempest Letters, Douai Abbey Archives (BO IV A Box 7)

They interweave national events with personal touches: the Ghent nuns describe how, as the French advanced into the city, they viewed the battle from their windows: Canon balls flow over their roof and one landed in the garden narrowly missing the portress.[9]  The Dunkirk nuns also experienced fighting outside their church, and shots penetrated through the windows.[10] In October 1793 they witnessed the Siege of Dunkirk, their monastery was occupied and property sequestered. The community was taken to Gravelines and describe the journey by canal during which they overheard their captors discuss whether to sink the barge in order to be ‘saved all further trouble’. In prison the nuns were taken by their jailors to view the guillotine and believed: ‘Their chance of escaping that terrible death was at one time slight indeed; for after the death of Robespierre it was discovered that he had done them the honour of inscribing all their names in his pocketbook.’[11]
The Paris accounts too, dwell on the constant fear of death: ‘It is impossible to convey the Idea to those who have not Experienced it [the imprisonment], the Victims we saw carried to death and the uncertainty we were in of our own lot made things indifferent to us which in other circumstances would have been more sensible…’[12]
Dame Ann Teresa Partington in her description of the journey in open carts from Cambrai to Compiègne, writes ‘They thought Death would soon have followed and expected every moment to see the fatal guillotine.’ [13]

 

Dame Ann Teresa Partington’s Brief Narrative page 22. Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire

Throughout the accounts the Tropes of desecration and religious fortitude are held in counter-point. The Dunkirk account of their capture is graphic: ‘… a terrible trail [came] to our community. Their church, the home of the Most Blessed Sacrament, where they had made their vows to God, […] was taken from them to be used by the Jacobins for their meetings. […] here was destruction, exile and death […] and there seemed no side on which to turn for comfort […] neither insult, the want of the necessaries of life, nor even the sight of the ghastly guillotine, still reeking with the blood of its last victims, could shake the courage and confidence in God of the faithful little band. The nuns bore all, not only with unmurmuring serenity, but with greatest fortitude, cheerfulness and resignation.’[14]
This faith upheld them in the early years of their new exile in England as did the qualities of resistance and self-agency which the narratives reveal. Teresa Joseph Johnson’s recollections speak of the resistance the nuns put up against their oppressors and the steps they took to preserve what was most precious.[15] The church silver was walled up and breviaries hidden so they could continue to say the Daily Office. Maintaining normal routine was a big part of resistance: recreations went on as usual in prison for the Dunkirk nuns and ‘Dame Benedict Sheldon would even play the violin’. This determination to maintain a monastic routine underpinned the challenges in England too.
Negotiation and the ability to engage with ‘Persons of all Classes from the highest to the lowest Rank, men, women and children’ was to help their survival too and this can be seen most clearly in the Paris accounts. The nuns retained empowerment as far as possible – even in the reluctant decision to seek refuge in England they show determination to retain their own agency: ‘Seeing no prospect of an end to the miseries of the unhappy country in which we were confined […] we at last resolved to apply to Paris for passports to return to our native country.[16]
These accounts reveal how the nuns struggled with migration to England, questioning their identity as English women and Catholics and their allegiance to Crown and Church. Most significantly they hold in contradistinction ideas of both exile and return.
The language of new exile pervades all the narratives. Writing in the Chronicles the anonymous author from Brussels muses: ‘Two centuries had elapsed, since driven by persecution and penal laws, the first mothers […] sought refuge and protection in Catholic Flanders. After having enjoyed during these two hundred years a peaceful home and asylum in Brussels, their successors now found themselves obliged to fly, and seek in their own country the protection and liberty which they could no longer expect on the continent.’[17]
While recognising the hand of ‘Providence in this return of monastic life to England’ they used the rhetoric of exile to describe the process: ‘If this task was a glorious one, it was only to be accomplished by the Cross, and the passing through a Red Sea of suffering and combat.  As long as it was possible our nuns held back, hoping and praying for peace, and dreading to leave the dear enclosure of the Monastery, which had so long sheltered and protected them.’[18]
The Ghent nuns articulated a similar response: ‘They soon realised that the breaking up of their old home was only a question of time […] and determined them once more to seek their native country, as soon as they should be expelled from the home which had sheltered them for 170 years.’[19]

 

Dame Ann Teresa Partington’s Brief Narrative page 60. Stanbrook Abbey, Wass, North Yorkshire.

The nuns expressed the humiliation of arriving as refugees in their native land, describing their appearance as ludicrous in the extreme, and clothed in garments of various shapes, textures and hue, bed curtains forming the principal feature in the material of which they were made. The prospects for picking up life in England were not good. And after outlining the grim future awaiting them in England Ann Josepha Knight concluded: ‘at least our heads are safe, but I really think it has ruined our Constitutions or at least hurt them very much and I for my part am an old woman[20]
The traumatic events the accounts chronicle inevitably took their toll on the survivors’ mental and physical health which were to have long-lasting effects. In England they were greeted with some sympathy but also suspicion in a country where nuns had never been seen. They arrived in poverty without immediate access to suitable accommodation, with much anti-Catholic legislation and prejudice still in force, and with little religious infrastructure in place. These conditions were to shape the next thirty years of their history making repatriation and resettlement of monastic life in England a second exile for the Benedictine nuns.
For too long historiography has viewed the arrival of the nuns in England from 1794 as a long-awaited home-coming; a considered reading of the migration narratives written by the English nuns forced to repatriate reveals a different story. The re-establishment of the convents on English soil must be viewed through the lens of rupture and understood in the context of a renewed exile experience. The migration narratives, read as refugee-migration accounts, are essential to an understanding of the rebuilding of the monastic life in nineteenth-century England.

[1] Scholastica Jacob (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray and Two Hairs and a Dish of Tortoise, from the writings of Dame Ann Teresa Partington (Stanbrook, 2016).

[2] See Caroline Bowden (general ed.), Convents in Exile, volume 6 (London, 2012), pp. 297–349.

[3] See also Robert Eaton, The Benedictines of Colwich 1829–1929 (London, 1929).

[4] Anon, Annals of the English Benedictines of Ghent (Oulton, 1894).

[5] Douai Abbey Archives, BO Box IV, pp 70–90.

[6] Anon, History of the Benedictine Nuns of Dunkirk (London, 1957).

[7] Anon, Chronicle of the First Monastery Founded at Brussels for English Benedictine Nuns (Bergholt, 1898).

[8] Douai Abbey Archives, BO IV A Box 7.

[9] Anon, History of the Benedictine Nuns of Dunkirk, p. 80.

[10] Ibid p. 112.

[11] Ibid p. 126.

[12] Bowden (ed.) Convents in Exile, 6, p. 313.

[13] Scholastica Jacob (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray and Two Hairs and a Dish of Tortoise, from the writings of Dame Ann Teresa Partington (Stanbrook, 2016), p.22.

[14] Anon, History, pp. 118, 124–7.

[15] See Carmen Mangion, ‘Avoiding “Rash and Imprudent Measures”: English Nuns in Revolutionary France 1789–1801’, in Caroline Bowden and James E Kelly (eds), English Convents in Exile, 1600­–1800 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 247–63.

[16] Bowden (ed.), Convents in Exile, 6, p. 329.

[17] Chronicles, p. 229.

[18] Ibid p. 229–30.

[19] Annals p. 79.

[20] Stanbrook Abbey, Knight letters, Ann(e) Joseph(a) Knight to her cousin, Mary Knight in London 20 August 1795

Remembering Revolution: Migration Narratives and the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre

Today, our blog is honoured to host a post by Dr Cormac Begadon, Assistant Professor and Sepulchrine Fellow in the History of Catholicism in the Department of Theology and Religion of Durham University. Cormac is currently editing the Mother Joseph Smith migration narrative, which will be published later this year.

Narratives recalling the experiences of English communities of female religious during the years of the French Revolution and their subsequent migrations to England are reasonably common. No doubt many readers will be familiar with these migration accounts, which played such an important part in the collective memories of generations of religious and their supporters. One of the better known examples is the account of the Cambrai Benedictines, who were imprisoned for well over a year in 179394, alongside the would-be Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne, which is perhaps the most poignant, and indicative of the very real dangers that the English nuns faced during this most perilous period of their histories.[1] Yet the purpose of these accounts (many of which were written some years after the events discussed) extended beyond simply the retelling of events though, offering a much-needed cathartic element to communities who had endured trauma, not only during the Revolution and the migrations, but also during the often-long period of itinerancy in England, before permanent homes were eventually secured. Some of these have been published in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, Part II, vol. 6 (2013), some as part of the Catholic Record Society series, and others individually.

These accounts were undoubtedly written with the intention of being consumed by members of the respective houses, and therefore have an unsurprising particular flavour that reflects their intended readership. Yet in spite of this bent they are especially useful but under-utilised sources to historians whose own interests are not limited by congregational loyalties or restricted to the cloister. Communities such as the Bruges Augustinians compiled lengthy and revealing accounts, whilst the Antwerp Carmelites, the Paris Augustinians and the Rouen Poor Clares left their own shorter versions. The English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at Liège (more familiar to many of us as the Sepulchrines) have their own such account too. Or to be more accurate, they have in fact three accounts.[2] The earliest account was written by Mother Joseph Smith[3] entitled ‘A Short Account of some Particulars which happen’d during the Revolutions at Liege and of our Journey from thence to England’, which was subsequently revised and amended in 1817 by Mother Aloysia Austin Clifford.[4] There later appeared a shortened account by Mother Agatha Laurenson,[5] whose brother, Rev John Laurenson, SJ, wrote yet another account for the English Jesuit Province. The Sepulchrines’ story is vivid and moving, and at points even comical, illustrating in great detail the perils that this group of women faced as they abandoned their home of almost 150 years and embarked on an arduous and protracted journey to their native land. The story of the migration is one of continuous struggles and disappointments, the community beginning their journey from Liège to Maastricht by what the account calls a ‘filthy coal boat covered with a few boards’.[6] From there they departed for the town of Roermond, where they had intended to stay only for a few nights. Arriving at the house that had been rented for them, they found that they were ‘soon swarmed with Fleas’, the quantity which they caught they said was ‘hardly credible.’[7] At Dordrecht, their next stopping point, they became a source of curiosity for the Protestant townspeople, who were said not to have seen nuns in habits for ‘200 years’. In fact, the narrative says such was ‘the Curiosity of the People of the Town’ that ‘numbers of them came out in pleasure boats, and sailed several times round us to stare at us’.[8] And so their journey continued in this vein, seemingly one mishap or tribulation following another before their eventual landing in Greenwich on 18 August 1794.

 

 

Elizabeth (Mary Regis) Gerard 1771-1843, who became prioress of the Sepulchrines from 1816 to 1843 but had lived through the Revolution at Liège and had been part of the community’s migration. 

 

 

Having fled Liège in May 1794, the community spent almost five years on the move, before finally finding a permanent home at New Hall, on the outskirts of Chelmsford in 1799. And while the Canonesses’ accounts say much about the arduous migration and lengthy itinerancy, like the other narratives they also shed a great deal of light on the experiences of the community before their departure from Liège, and the ways in which they interacted with often hostile secular, military and even Church bodies. The account begins in August 1789, when a French-inspired revolt, known as the Liège Revolution, broke out, which lead to the declaration of the Republic of Liège in that same month. For the nuns this began a four-year long period of engaging in delicate negotiation and accommodation with revolutionary and counter-revolutionary groups alike.

The short-lived Liège Republic existed from August 1789 until January 1791, when the prince-bishopric was restored thanks to the military successes of the combined Austrian-Prussian armies. During this period the Canonesses were forced to negotiate, and at times accommodate the demands of the new regime. The convent was not exempt from physical incursions too, which came quick and fast following the August Revolution. Upon its outbreak, we are told that a patrol was billeted in the convent’s speakhouse for two or three nights, but was thereafter ordered to leave. Subsequently, more material demands were placed upon the community. For example, they were asked to supply ‘12 Quarts of Beer, a pound and a half of Butter, a Loaf and a half or 2 loaves of Bread and a bottle of Gin, so that we were at above 30 pounds expense.’[9] The community complied without too much regret, we are told, ‘to keep them quiet, and prevent them from being troublesome to us’.[10] Here the account echoes the experiences and sentiments of many other English communities during this period. Even at this relatively early stage of the Revolution, many religious communities viewed events unfolding as a real threat to their future liberty, the chronicler suggesting that the revolutionaries’ ‘chief aim seemed to be against Ecclesiastics and Religious persons.’[11]

In recent years there has been a welcome re-appraisal by historians into the history of female religious during the Revolution. Carmen Mangion’s essay, ‘Avoiding “Rash and Imprudent Measures”: English Nuns in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1801’, threw much-needed light on the experiences of English nuns in Paris (Augustinians, Benedictines and Conceptionists) during the Revolution, and the tactics they employed to safeguard their future existence.[12] Carmen called these actions ‘selective compromise’, a process of accommodation and engagement in the political act of petitioning.[13] Similarly, Olwen Hufton, Mita Choudhury and more recently Gemma Betros’ work has re-examined the complex and often misrepresented and much simplified history of female religious during this period.[14] The Sepulchrines’ own account illustrates that they too were willing and combative opponents in this game of cat and mouse for much of this four-year-long hiatus.

Ironically, just as it had played such a symbolic role in events in France, it was the matter of bread that forced the nuns to cut their teeth in the art of petitioning. The account mentions that in 1791 the community was in fear ‘as we had heard that the Poor meant to attack us about the Bread which we were obliged to give them every week.’[15] We read that the deputies of the parish of St Christopher (to which the convent belonged) examined the convent’s foundation documents, which stated an obligation on behalf of the nuns to provide the poor with rye or bread on a weekly basis. The deputies argued that this obligation was to the poor of St Christopher’s parish; the nuns disagreed, arguing that whilst they accepted this obligation, and had faithfully continued to distribute alms, they were in fact free to choose the recipients, and were not constrained by parish boundaries. Thereafter the issue was referred to the Magistrates, who obliged the community to send their foundation papers and registers to be examined. Yet as was the case with the Parisian convents, the Canonesses proved to be worthy adversaries, counteracting by composing their own supplique ‘to petition them to appoint one or more of their Council to come to our Convent and examine them, which they very graciously granted.’[16] The account describes the delegation’s visit: a lawyer, the parish deputies, along with a scribe, whom the report says ‘tried to be as troublesome as he could, and made several efforts to do us mischief, and to bring us into Difficulties’.[17] Evidently well-organised and familiar with their foundation documents and obligations, the nuns in return presented a copy of the bull of dissolution of the Coquins (the male religious community which had inhabited the Canonesses’ convent on rue Saint-Gilles up to 1655), along with their own foundation documents and ‘a Copy of the Prince’s permission for leaving off serving the Hospital, dated in the year 1711.’[18] The discussion of the provenance and inherited charitable obligations is in fact one of the surprising gems of the account. Readers get the sense that all sides were well-informed, and their arguments and defences were grounded in a familiarity with the sources and obligations.

Yet whilst the party were satisfied with the nuns’ defence, the ‘Poor of the Parish’ were, if we are to believe the account, left much disappointed, and the community’s lawyer, M. Pacquo suggested  ‘to satisfy the Poor of the Parish who were much disposed to Riots’ they ‘had better in future give the Charity to them, either in Bread or Corn’.[19] There then followed what appears to have been a long drawn-out battle between both sides, which never seems to have been definitively settled, and which was only brought to a halt by the victory of the Austrian-Prussian alliance over the Republic in January 1791. Unsurprisingly, the account paints a mostly positive picture of the liberating Imperial troops, who stemmed, it says, an ever-growing torrent of rioting and pillaging. Nonetheless, this so-called liberation did not mean an end to incursions on the convent space, but in actual fact, meant increased intrusions, albeit under a different guise. Upon their arrival in the city, an officer and man and maid servants arrived at the convent, and were lodged in the out quarters. Displeased by the arrival of these uninvited visitors, the account states that the nuns ‘had immediate recourse to one of the Chief officers to get them removed,’ and accordingly they were ordered away the next day.[20] The following week, the much-displeased officer was said to have sent twenty soldiers to be lodged at the convent. Once again, the nuns were forced to have recourse to the Magistrates, who this time sided with the captain, and the soldiers were permitted to remain at the convent, but for one night only though. The account tells us that thereafter the community met with the Bourg Master and the Council to discuss the matter of billeted soldiers, securing a dispensation, ‘on account of our being Strangers and rendering great service to the Town and Country’.[21]

As well as frequent mentions of the cat-and-mouse games that the community was forced to engage in, the account also details more joyous events, such as liturgical feasts and anniversaries. One of these relates to the return of the prince-bishop to Liège in February 1791 after a period of exile in German lands. Unsurprisingly his return was greeted with joy by the community, and the event was duly marked. Adopting wonderfully descriptive and evocative language, we are told about the public rejoicings, which took place in the city for three days, and that the convent prepared its own illuminations to mark the event, which ‘consisted of 17 Pyramids, each of which contained 50 little tin Lamps’.[22] The lamps ‘were fixed against the Wall, between the Windows, from the first Church Window, to the end of the School, and 50 more were nailed round the Image of our Bd. Lady over the grate Portal Door.’[23] The following October, however, an event of even greater significance to the community was marked, with the celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the community’s foundation in Liège. We are told that they ‘borrowed a great deal of Church plate’ and that the ‘Church was most handsomely dressed. We had a Salut on the eve, and a very fine Music Mass and Salut upon the Day, which our singing Master, Mr. Le Clerq made us a present of. We had the Recreation and a very handsome treat in the Refectory.’[24]

In November 1792, the political realities shifted in Liège once again; at the Battle of Jemappes, French forces under the command of General Dumouriez defeated the Austrian Army. The account says that this was the nuns’ ‘first serious cause of alarm’, the victory being ‘so decisive that it was before any effectual resistance was again made to the progress of the French.’[25] As the French approached Liège, troops loyal to the Imperial Army were mustered for a final stand, with the nuns watching events unfold from the convent windows. ‘About noon a Cannon from the Citadel was fired as a signal to the Imperial troops still in the town to join their Companions in arms’, the account says, and they ‘saw with awe these troops defiling along the ramparts near our College in order and silence, and not long after a tremendous Cannonade announced that the battle had begun’.[26] Heightening the sense of drama, the writer comments that the nuns ‘could see from the windows of our Dormitories, the reflected flash of every gun that was fired; but we were screened from danger by the high grounds which lay between us and the enemy’.[27]

The following day the victorious French entered the city, and soon a delegation had made its way to the convent: ‘60 of them came with an order to be lodged at our Convent; their Captain was furious, and insisted upon a Lodging immediately given them, saying otherwise they would force open the Convent Doors.’[28] Once again the nuns lodged a petition to have the troops withdrawn, this time with General Dumouriez. The troops remained three nights before being withdrawn, only to be replaced by a ‘Sauve Garde’ of ‘4 Men and a Corporal’.[29] These men remained in the convent on rotating shifts for nearly a month, yet the writer conceded that their behaviour was exemplary: ‘none of them ever took to the value of a Farthing out of our Quarter, and they all behaved very civilly to us.’[30]

From November 1792 until May 1794, life continued with relative normality: private and communal spiritual observances continued, and so did teaching in the school, whilst new members were accepted into the community. Yet as the political reality became ever bleaker, like many of the English houses in exile, the community was forced to prepare for evacuation. This eventually took place on 29 May 1794, after Mass for the feast of the Ascension had been celebrated in the convent’s chapel. The very large group – made up of thirty-five choir nuns, fourteen lay sisters, two priests, three boarders, two servants and ten pensioners – must have made quite a sight as they made their way through the city, their destination being a number of coal barges which would take them to Maastricht, their first stopping point on what would be an eventful and protracted journey to England.

A substantial document, the Mother Smith edition extends to just under 150 hand-written pages and chronicles the history of the Sepulchrines from the beginning of the revolution in Liège in August 1789 up to 1800, with the community settling in at their new home at New Hall. As mentioned in the introduction, these narratives were written by religious (often some years later), with the intention of being consumed by religious, a fact that should always be borne in mind. Yet by employing the proper exegesis, migration narratives, when used in tandem with other sources, are a most useful tool for historians, not just offering insights into the history of religious themselves during this period, but also presenting a wonderfully rare perspective on the history of the Revolution from a foreign and female perspective.

[1] See Scholastica Jacob (ed.), A Brief Narrative of the Seizure of the Benedictine Dames of Cambray (Stanbrook, 2016).

[2] Joseph Smith’s account is housed in the archives of the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, Colchester. The Clifford and Laurenson accounts are housed in Palace Green Library, Durham University.

[3] Who Were the Nuns database, ID LS205(https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/) [hereafter WWTN].

[4] WWTN, ID LS041

[5] WWTN, ID LS131.

[6] History of the New Hall Community of Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre (Brugge, 1997), p. 99.

[7] Ibid., p. 102.

[8] Ibid., p. 104.

[9] Ibid., p. 86.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Carmen Mangion, ‘Avoiding “Rash and Imprudent Measures”: English Nuns in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1801’, in Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds), The English Convents in Exile,1600–1800 (Farnham, 2013), pp. 247–263.

[13] Ibid., p. 247.

[14] Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992); Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and Culture (Ithaca, 2004); Gemma Betros, ‘Liberty, Citizenship and the Suppression of Female Religious Communities in France, 1789–90’, Women’s History Review, 18 (2009), pp. 311–36.

[15] History of the New Hall Community of Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre, p. 87.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid. For further reading on the Coquins, see Laurence-Lux Sterritt, ‘The English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at Liege, or cuckoos in the Coquins’ nest?’ (https://emen.hypotheses.org/1090).

[19] History of the New Hall Community of Canonesses Regular of the Holy Sepulchre, p. 88.

[20] Ibid., p. 89.

[21] Ibid., p. 90.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid. The ‘Salut’ mentioned here is probably the O salutaris hostia, a Eucharistic hymn, often associated with the feast of Corpus Christi.

[25] Ibid., p. 91.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p. 92.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Ibid.

Private devotion at Oxburgh Hall

On 17 December 2020, and as part of its project entitled A Material World – Portable Devotion, the Warburg Institute aired a wonderful lecture by Anna Forrest, presenting the incredible finds made by the National Trust at Oxburgh Hall, the family home of the Bedingfelds. Anna Forrest shows fragments of manuscript books and music, testifying to the lived devotion of this family, whose extended kin remained staunch recusants and plentiful providers of nuns over the years (as can be seen on the Who Were the Nuns? database).  You can view the video here.

If you do not have time, this article sums up some of the crucial facts, with very nice photography to illustrate some of the finds.

Read three new #nuntastic articles online

We are delighted to announce the publication of three #nuntastic articles in

RECONSTRUCTING EARLY-MODERN RELIGIOUS LIVES: THE EXEMPLARY AND THE MUNDANE
co-edited by Anne Dunan-Page, Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Tessa Whitehouse in the latest issue of E-rea 18.1 (2020), https://journals.openedition.org/erea/10058

 

Articles by Carline Bowden, Lived Religion in English Convents in Exile, 1600 – 1800: Accommodating the Ordinary and the Exceptional within the Rule’,

Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Dieu ou les hommes ? Vivre l’obéissance dans les couvents anglais en exil (1598-1688)”

and Claire Schiano-Locurcio, Entre Réforme Catholique et impératifs de survie : vie religieuse et activisme féminin chez les clarisses anglaises du XVIIème siècle exilées sur le continent”

How to feel God in an English convent? Religious emotions, rituals and performative methods.

Today I would like to take a closer look at the subject of religious emotions through the prism of performativity and religious rituals. One of the striking aspects of early modern conventual archives is the large proportion of prescriptive documents that have survived and testify to the extent to which every aspect of conventual was, in theory, regulated, including emotions. What were nuns supposed to feel in early modern convents? And more especially, how were they supposed to feel God?

Emotions and public rituals: a delicate subject

The rites of the Catholic Church were one of the major elements which distinguished it from the Church of England. Historians have commented on the importance of its ritual practices, ranging from a gastronomic calendar to public rites of penance such as the creeping to the cross, or purification rituals such as the “churching” of women.[1] Protestant pamphleteers denounced those practices: they them, Roman customs ignored the very essence of the Holy Word and emphasized actions and objects. 

To Samuel Harsnett, for instance, sacramentals were nothing more than ‘trinkets and toys’ and Catholicism was ‘the only religion to catch fools, children and women, by reason it is naught else, save a conceit pageant of puppets’.[2] Others debunked demonstrations of piety which merely hid a lack of true spirituality. For example, Thomas Becon wrote about the absurdity Roman liturgy, whose collective and public rites, he claimed, were pure superstitions; rosaries, Agnus Dei, candles, bells or incense were all described as so many customs which served to camouflage an interior life devoid of any sincere emotion. They were the rags donned by hypocrisy to hide its ugly face. [3] For Becon, acts of godliness were of no value unless accompanied by genuine movement of the soul.

However, the relationship between rite and sincerity is problematic, since the ritual exists in and for itself.[4]  It is not a mere means of expressing what might otherwise be accomplished in other ways. Its acts are precise, they follow a predetermined sequence. When performed correctly, those codes add an additional dimension to what is being done and become effective in themselves. Epistemologically, ritual does not impose ‘special interior arrangements’ and need not be accompanied by spiritual emotions.[5]

Nuns were familiar with the problem of the sincerity of performative acts in the daily practice of their devotion. Documents of spiritual instructions guided nuns in their spiritual exercises; they displayed some of the exactness and sequencing (to use a computer term) typical of ritual. Indeed, like rituals, these devotions existed for themselves; the act of following them created a bridge between the individual and the divine. Yet, on the model proposed by Piroska Nagy in her study on gift of tears, I would argue that these are ‘interior’ and intimate rites,[6] and that they (unlike those on public rites) are filled with emotion.

Intimate ritual, or how to feel the divine

As a rule, human emotions were perceived as disorders in early modern religious literature. Nothing very original in this negative representation of humours since, as emanations of the body, they were the gateway to disordered passions, which of course were detrimental to contemplative life. In 1683, Mother Victoria Ayray advised her community of Sepulchrines how to undertake their ten-day spiritual exercises; she recommended setting one full day aside to examine the sincerity of their actions.[7] She also exhorted her Sisters to castigate their natural tendencies by asking ‘what viollent and strange aflictions do I experience for the present? What are those thoughts that most frequently hinder me in my duty and inward recollection? […]’[8] Steven Robinson, confessor of the Carmelites, expressed the same idea:

[…] because one cannot possibly apply himself to a true solid Christian perfection, unless before he extirpats from the bottom of his heart all the Roots, I mean, the causes, and matches of Sin, as ordinarily are the bad habits, the old inclinations to Evil, and the Violence of the passions, hence you must use all your diligence, and care, to deliver yourself of them all.[9]

This Augustinian perspective, in which spiritual individuals struggled to control their senses, was a common trope in the writings of the English communities in exile. Earthly love was clearly differentiated from the love of God; one was sensual and gratified only human appetites, while the other was spiritual and nourished the soul. The spiritual quest was a crusade against mundane feelings and the soul that sought to unite with God through its own will alone was condemned to remain dissatisfied:

O my divine Jesus, I find not what I seek […]. I seek pure love, & find myself ensnar’d with the love of my self . […] my hart burns with desire to see & possess you & the mortall flesh with which I am envision’d is as a thick veile which steales your divine face from my sight, & as violent weight which hinders my flight toward heaven […][10]

In this context, the performativity of the intimate ritual brought precious help to the penitent since it erased her will in favour of the correct execution of the exercise. She was required to fulfill, almost mechanically, her duties. From the introduction of his ‘advice’, Steven Robinson insisted on method, foregrounding the performative aspect of the ritual before turning to its spiritual content.

[…] in order you may the better comply with all these duties, and with more advantage, before you begin this lecture, you must 1st kneel down, and recite devoutly a short prayer to obtain the Grace of doing it well: such as the Veni Sancte Spiritus; or any other. 2dly If you meet with some difficulty in the lecture, you must mark it down in a paper, which must serve to no other use, than this; and after words, you must beg of your Confessor the explication of it. 3dly You must firmly purpose to exactly practise all the good advices, this lecture will furnish you with. 4thly As soon as you have finish’d your lecture, kneel down again, and instantly beg of God the Grace of executing faithfully all your good resolutions. 5thly As soon as you see the directour, lay open to him all your doubts, and difficulties.[11]

This ‘true method of doing it well’ was systematized and itemized, it was rife with impertives and modals such as ‘must’ and ‘shall’ (the text continues in the same vein, item 9: ‘you must begin those excercises…’ item 10 ‘you shall practice’, item 11 ‘you must endeavor’, item 12 ‘your time must be employed’). Empty of any thought other than the correct performance of the rite, the nun purged her mind and body; she achieved a serenity that left her empty of emotion. Only then could she, like a holy receptacle, be penetrated by the divine.

Divine love and spiritual emotions

In his treatises on the love of God, Father Rigolene explained that mystical union involved three stages of love: affective, effective and passive: ‘Affective are the inward affections which the soul produces towards the adorable person of Jesus Christ. Effectual are the proofs or effects which evidence the sincerity and solidity of our affections. Passive are the operations of Jesus Christ in a soul well disposed.’[12] The nun would experience emotional love through an evocation of the Passion of Christ which would move her to suffer with her Savior, out of empathy. She would methodically evoke the Stations of the Cross to experience His suffering in sequence.[13] Here, asceticism appeared less as an exercise of punishment of a potentially impure body, than as a desire for order. The discipline followed systematic models which allowed the nun to manipulate her own body in a positive way to make herself available to God.[14] To detach themselves from their carnal prison and turn their souls towards God, penitents found a precious help in ritualized exercises.[15]

After this ‘affective’ experience of the love of God, the nun could hope for its ‘effective’ experience, in which the love that she now felt would produce manifest effects in her, transforming her into an entirely spiritual being uniting with God to finally share His divine nature:

The practise of this [effective] love is to assimilate the soul to the word incarnate as far as this life is capable of assimilation. […] we make ourselves like unto the first source of our being in grace, which is the adorable Person of our Lord, so that as he is the living image of God his Fat., so we become his living images, expressing in our selves all the tracks of his states, Mysteries, Vertues.[16]

The consequence of this state was that the nun was now a stranger to herself. The assimilation of the Incarnate Word molded her soul in the image of God, free from human emotions. The nun could now reject the world and its shortcomings, not by choice or by will, but simply through the transformative power of this ‘effective’ love.[17] Her ‘interior’ became the image of ‘the interior’ of her Savior, and her carnal envelope was thus transcended.

Then, when divine love invested the entire soul, when it annihilated all other emotions, it could finally attain its purest expression, in the so-called ‘passive’ form of mystical union. It was then as if the nun were dying to herself, entering a trance hermetic to all earthly sensations: ‘Liberty of spirit conformes our interiour to the interiour of Jesus Christ.’[18]

Of course, each person involved in a predefined rite may experience different emotions during its performance. However, the purpose of the written instructions for performing the spiritual exercises was to enable the soul to take flight into the sacred. Thanks to the exercises prescribed by her confessor, the assiduous nun would be able to leave behind her sins, her will, her emotions, and finally her carnal body. Through the meticulous performance of the exercises, she became an actor in a transformative ritual, the goal of which is to substitute spiritual love for any other emotion.

The intimate rituals of devotion and the desire for the love of God therefore had a direct impact on the emotional lives of contemplative nuns. They allowed the regularity and order which defined monastic life to govern not only the modus vivendi of the community or its public ceremonies but also the spiritual life of each individual. Thus, while community daily life was punctuated by the duties of the canonical hours, and the liturgy and public ceremonies were strictly regulated in their smallest details, the intimate spirituality of the nuns also was ordered by the spiritual exercises which attempted to distance her from the disorder of human passions. Serenity was far from easy in the monastic communities of the 17th and 18th centuries. If manuscripts documenting periods of tension within certain institutions are relatively rare, their reading reveals that conflicts generally arose when the ambitions of some collided with the pride of others, and when emotions flared and individuals felt envy, anger, hatred towards others; moreover, carnal love, be it inappropriate affection for a confessor or the so-called ‘particular’ friendships between nuns, excess of joviality or despair in one or two nuns were enough to endanger the harmony of an entire convent, even its survival even if the scandal reached the ears of the bishop or his ordinary. In this very particular context, it seems to me that we could go so far as to say that the quest for divine love therefore had a crucial function in the governance (spiritual and pragmatic) of the convent, since it made it possible to control passions and ensure the sustainability of communities.

[1] See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992).

[2] Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures to With-draw the Harts of her Maiesties Subjects from their Allegeance and from the Truth of Christian Religion Professed in England, under the Pretence of Casting out Devils (London, 1603), pp. 125 and 20.

[3] Thomas Becon, The Displaying of the Popish Masse (London, 1637).

[4] Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’, Repesentations 60 (1997): 49-69, p. 57.

[5] Alois Hahn, « Rite et liturgie », Hermès 43 (2005) : 49-58, p. 50.

[6] Piroska Nagy, « Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West », dans Don Handelman (ed.), Ritual in its Own Right (New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), pp. 119-37.

[7] Sepulchrines, livre manuscript de soeur Victoria Ayray (1683), section intitulée : Considerations on the 10 dayes exercise, f. 104 : « What esteeme doe I make of […] the meanes of my salvation, of holy Mass, confession, comuion[sic], prayer, meditation […] With what diligence and industry doe I make my 400 examins of confession? doe I performe my duty heerein out of custome onely, or with life and spirit ».

[8] Sepulchrines, Victoria Ayray, Considerations, ff. 102-103.

[9] Carmelites of Hoogstraten, Baltimore, box 5, Steven Robinson, SJ, A most profitable, and necessary advertisement for all such, who shall make the spiritual exercise (1747), item 13.

[10] Poor Clares, The sighs of a soul who desires to leave the world to go & unite herself to God in heaven, item 5.

[11] Carmelites, Steven Robinson, SJ, A most profitable, and necessary advertisement, items 5-9.

[12] Carmelites of Hoogstraten, Baltimore, Box 5, Father John Rigolene, smal treatises of devotion set forth by Father Peter Champion of the same Society, ‘First Treatise, The Amiable Jesus or The Practise of love towards our Lord Jesus Christ’», f. 3.

[13] Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption. Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), pp. 72-73.

[14] Carmelites, Father John Rigolene, smal treatises of devotion, ‘First Treatise’, on affective love, f. 4: ‘Herein the true lover exerts his utmost efforts and emplois all his faculties to promote and desire his bliss and glories with such ardencies, transports, and extatical affections what can’t well be comprehended. […]’

[15] Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of Prayer. Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’, Representations 60 (1997): 49-69, p. 60.

[16] Carmelites, Father John Rigolene, smal treatises of devotion, ‘First Treatise’ », f. 11, on effectual love.

[17] Ibid., f. 12.

[18] Ibid, f. 16.