In this latest post, Joanne E. Myers (Gettysburg College) discusses the idiosyncrasies of archival experiences in religious communities, scribal work and care work.
In recent years, as my scholarship has focused on the work of early modern English nuns, I’ve visited a fair number of archives. I’ve become familiar with the protocols of “special collections”: I bring my passport, I leave my pens in the locker, I watch the training videos. I diligently use cradles and weights to support the old, sometimes fragile books I’m handling—even if, to the surprise of almost everyone I know, I’ve never put on gloves, having learned early on that they make turning the pages of books tricky and actually increase your chance of doing damage.
A year ago, though, I had a novel archival experience: for the first time, I arranged a visit to see some books in a cloistered religious community. I was working on an archive that the order had deposited at a university library and wanted to consult some volumes they had retained in their community. My email exchange with the archivist were brief but cordial: come soon, she said, because the books they had kept were about to be transferred to the university archive and would likely not reappear from cataloguing until after I’d left the UK. A week later, on a crisp autumn morning, a bus dropped me off at the side of a road in rural England at a stop labelled simply “Convent.” Before me, a high hedge rose up, blocking the monastery buildings from view. Next door, a wide field was scattered with low, brightly colored plastic fences and gates: a dog training center, the sign told me. I made my way to the convent front door and rang the bell.
I’ve been taught by religious sisters and have worked and lived alongside them as well, so I didn’t have too much trepidation about the kind of welcome I would receive. It was, as I had suspected it would be, equal parts generous and business-like. I was ushered first into the parlour, then almost immediately upstairs to the archive—a room tucked under the eaves of the convent’s top floor that was crowded with bookcases and, on one table, an empty monstrance and a Jacob’s Cream Crackers tin. The books that the nuns had kept filled a cabinet: the archivist threw open its doors and, listening to me describe why I wanted to see the works, started pulling books off the shelf. Maybe this would be good? And this one? And this one? A growing stack teetered on the edge of her desk, which she proceeded freely to cede to me. We looked through some of the books and compared our understanding of the different scribal hands in the collection. After a few minutes, she waved her hand at what remained on the shelf and invited me to have a look to see if there were anything else that would help me—and then she left, promising to retrieve me at lunchtime.
So there I was: alone. With the books. No cradles, no book weights, no need to request books one by one. I could move back and forth between books, compare copies of the same text, browse. I sat, taking in the possibilities. From elsewhere on the floor came the sound of vacuuming. Cool air drifted through one of the vellux windows the archivist had warned me to close if a shower blew over. I picked up a late-seventeenth century book I was interested in, of which the order had owned more than a dozen copies. The archivist told me she had one in her room that she had used since her time in the novitiate. I paged through this copy. After the printed text, extra leaves had been bound in, and I came to a page where a hand-coloured image of the Virgin Mary dressed in a religious habit had been pasted in and given an elaborate floral border. A prayer had been handwritten on the facing leaf. From outside, I could hear birds in the trees and barks from the dog training centre. I settled to work.
I have spent many happy hours in archives, but those I spent in that small attic room were special. I had been met at the convent door with no questions about my qualifications and ushered upstairs without inquiries into my expertise. There was no need to ‘earn’ admission. The working assumption seemed to be that I cared about the books—about who had written them, the community in which they had been made, and the way they made a bridge between past and present. Later that morning, the archivist dropped by to see how I was doing and, unrolling a large piece of paper, showed me a hand-written “family tree” of the order illustrating how the remaining convents had descended from those founded during the exile period. Encountering the books in their community, “at home,” was very different from encountering them in a university library. I could see how the making of manuscripts was also a making of community, and how much it might mean to a woman pursuing a difficult vocation far from home to have these books to sustain her. Scholarly work, though privileged and rewarding, can also sometimes be lonely; my days at the university archive were usually spent working on my own and in silence. Nestled under the eaves, an icon from the convent in which the books were originally written propped before me, the silence was the same, but I felt welcomed, and felt the particular kind of intellectual freedom that being welcomed and treated graciously can bring. When lunchtime arrived, I was brought to the visitors’ parlour and, worried about creating extra work for someone, reluctantly admitted to being a vegetarian; after a pause, a hot omelet, freshly-cooked, was brought in to me. Used to inhaling my lunch on a bench outside the archive whatever the weather, I ate slowly and gratefully. I had come because I cared about the books, and in turn I was treated with care.
As it happened, the work I did at the convent archive was also about care. Seeing those books solidified an intuition I had had when trying to think through the form of creativity that registers in the pages of hand-copied books. Scribes transcribed and reproduced texts; they rarely wrote them. Still, I couldn’t ignore the labour that went into making manuscript books, especially long after the need to do so had passed. Why not think of scribal work as a form of care? I wondered. Care is everywhere on the manuscript page: in the well-formed letters that create pages of highly legible text, the unostentatious use of mise-en-page to guide the reader’s eye, even in some cases the use of decorative elements and images – an early version of ‘graphic design’ – to shape and elevate the reading experience. Though it can seem like scribal work is “anonymous,” it is nonetheless implicitly relational: one person’s labour is placed openly on the page for the reader to see but also take up, and care is written into every line.
Like all researchers, I respect and benefit immensely from the work of professional archivists and special collections librarians. I know that book rests and weights and tutorials about how to handle older materials are necessary for preserving old and often fragile items—that we have a responsibility to exercise as much care as possible when working with them. Being able to think more broadly about the forms of care woven into the archives and into scholarly work more broadly, though, was a special gift. Especially at a time when the work we undertake as scholars feels shadowed by negativity and the pressure of instrumentalizing forces, it is powerful to remember that as scholars, our care for our work is a great exercise of freedom.
My work came full circle this past summer, when I presented some of my work at the Conference on the History of Women Religious hosted by Notre Dame University in Indiana in the US. After my talk, a religious sister who I had noticed nodding off during my talk approached me. “Thank you for paying attention to us,” she said warmly, taking my hand; she belonged to a tertiary community related to the order whose archive I was researching. The finer points of my claims about modern authorship mattered little; what mattered was her gracious reception of my work, another form of solitary labor understood and received as an act of care.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Laurence Lux-Sterritt (November 17, 2025). Scribal Work as Care Work. Early Modern English Nuns in Exile. Retrieved April 23, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/155n8