Manchester University Press English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality: 2 (Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies)

This book focuses on the Catholic women who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life, within England or across the Continent. It uncovers previously unknown details about English conventual life and highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns' personal experiences. The study makes use of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions and texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns' own collections of notes. The first four chapters of this volume adopt a traditional historical approach, to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being ‘dead to the world’. It offers a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile and shows how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next four chapters propose a different point of entry into 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 aspects of a lived spirituality when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience. This monograph will appeal to scholars in the academic fields of early modern British history and literature, religion, Catholicism, and early modern women. It will also hold interest for academics studying emotions and the senses.