Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
The Oxford History of Life-Writing: Volume2. Early Modern explores life-writing in England between 1500 and 1700, and argues that this was a period which saw remarkable innovations in biography, autobiography, and diary-keeping that laid the foundations for our modern life-writing. The challenges wrought by the upheavals and the sixteenth-century English Reformation and seventeenth-century Civil Wars moulded British and early American life-writing in unique and lasting ways. While classical and medieval models continued to exercise considerable influence, new forms began to challenge them. The English Reformation banished the saints' lives that dominated the writings of medieval Catholicism, only to replace them with new lives of Protestant martyrs. Novel forms of self-accounting came into existence: from the daily moral self-accounting dictated by strands of Calvinism, to the daily financial self-accounting modelled on the new double-entry book-keeping. This volume shows how the most ostensibly private journals were circulated to build godly communities; how women found new modes of recording and understanding their disrupted lives; how men started to compartmentalize their lives for public and private consumption. The volume doesn't intend to present a strict chronological progression from the medieval to the modern, nor to suggest the triumphant rise of the fact-based historical biography. Instead, it portrays early modern England as a site of multiple, sometimes conflicting possibilities for life-writing, all of which have something to teach us about how the period understood both the concept of a 'life' and what it mean to 'write' a life.
This study of English Benedictine nuns is based upon a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns' own collections of notes. It highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns' personal experiences, illustrating the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. It shows how Benedictine convents were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home, but also proposes a different approach to the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns' personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
The second volume of The Oxford History of British & Irish Catholicism traces the fortunes of Catholic communities in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland across a period of great uncertainty and change. From the outset of the Civil Wars in 1641 to the Jacobite rising of 1745, Catholics in the three kingdoms were varied in their responses to tumultuous events and tantalising opportunities. The competing forces of dynamism and conservatism within these communities saw them constantly seeking to re-situate or re-imagine themselves as their relationship to the state, to Protestantism, to continental Europe, as well as the wider world beyond, changed and evolved. Consciously transnational, the volume moves away from insular conceptualisations of Catholicism and instead stresses connections with the European continent and beyond. Early chapters give broad overviews of the experience of Catholics in the period, tracking key events and important developments from 1641 to 1745. Chapters then address specific aspects of Catholicism, including empire and overseas missions, missionary activity, devotion, spirituality, trade, material culture, music, and architecture, among others, revealing a complex, rich and varied history of Catholicism in the period.
