Convent Autobiography

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Van Hyning
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Running Away ◽  
The World ◽  
Sir Thomas More

Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women articulated their senses of self through genres such as letters, chronicles, accounts, guidance and devotional manuals, and conversion narratives. The book explores writings by early modern English women who elected a double self-exile from home and ‘from the world’, undertakings that shaped and informed so much of their self-writing. These nuns sometimes composed under their own names, but many composed anonymously. Using a combination of close reading, palaeography, manuscript evidence and other data, this book reveals the identities of half a dozen women, including descendants of Sir Thomas More, whose contributions to English literature and history were hitherto unknown. Although anonymous composition was in keeping with monastic norms of humility, Convent Autobiography argues anonymity offered paradoxical freedoms, such as enabling an author to write extensively about her own family, and herself, or to present institutional narratives through the lens of her own experiences. Three case studies devoted to anonymous chronicling reveal the complexity of authorial strategies of self and communal representation. On the basis of these, two new genres of autobiography are proposed: anonymous and subsumed autobiography. These definitions have wider application beyond convent and early modern literature. The book includes a complete edition of the vibrant conversion narrative, lists, and prayers of Catherine Holland, who defied her Protestant father by running away to join the convent of Nazareth where she could practise Catholicism and ‘escape the slavery of marriage’.

scholarly journals Zentrifugen des Wissens – Zur Enzyklopädik des Barockromans

2013 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas B. Kilcher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Centrifugal Dispersion

AbstractEarly modern literature has high epistemological claims. In particular, the novel as the most innovative genre of the 16th and 17th centuries was expected to negotiate and transmit knowledge about the world in an extensive way. This epistemological optimism must be understood against the background of contemporary encyclopaedic models, which offered new possibilities of reaching out for universal and total knowledge. Two variants of encyclopaedic writing are most efficient for the novel: the logic of Lullism and the miscellaneous knowledge production of Polyhistorism. Both techniques were used in baroque novels of the 17th century: Polyhistorism produced a centrifugal dispersion of knowledge throughout the texts, whereas Lullism aimed at recollecting and ordering it. This interplay is evidently present in Daniel Casper von Lohenstein’s highly digressive 3,000 page novel „Arminius“ (1689/90), with its paratextual framework of prefaces, annotations, and indices. Moreover, the reception of „Arminius“ in 18th and 19th centuries is pertinent for the subsequent critique of encyclopaedic knowledge.

Poeta in Vinculis I

2019 ◽  
pp. 109-170
Author(s):  
Monika Fludernik
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The World ◽  
Psychological Coping

Chapter 2 contrasts the writings of Thomas More and John Bunyan. The chapter foregrounds these authors’ strategies of imaginative and psychological coping, considering how their texts reflect the traumatic experience of incarceration in the imaginative re-enactment of their fiction. The chapter introduces a number of prison tropes besides the WORLD AS PRISON/PRISON AS WORLD metaphor, most prominently in Bunyan the SIN AS PRISON trope. A major focus of the chapter concerns the difficult relationship between fact, fiction, and allegory in the work of the two authors and their contemporaries. A final section of the chapter links Bunyan’s poetry to the tradition of late medieval and early modern prison verse.

Traducing the Soul: Donne's Second Anniversarie

PMLA ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 121 (5) ◽  
pp. 1493-1508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramie Targoff
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
Marked Contrast ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Relationship

Readers have long acknowledged John Donne's lament for the decay of the world in the two Anniversarie poems commemorating Elizabeth Drury. What has not been acknowledged is the extent to which the second of these poems stages the reluctance of the soul to depart from the carcass of the earth so vividly depicted in the first. In The Second Anniversarie, Donne does something unprecedented in early modern literature: he gives voice to a soul that cannot bear to leave its earthly body behind. This essay argues that Donne represents a mutual longing between soul and body that stands in marked contrast to conventional Protestant depictions of the relationship between the two parts of the self. His explanation for such mutual longing, I contend, derives from his belief in the corporeal origins of the soul. (RT)

Tunstal—Trimmer or Martyr?

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morley Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Close Friend ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The World ◽  
Sir Thomas More

Was Cuthbert Tunstal a ‘trimmer’—that is, one primarily concerned with his own advantage—rather than a partisan in the religious revolution initiated by Henry VIII? We might have expected the latter contingency after reading the glowing tribute paid to him by Sir Thomas More: ‘… the incomparable Cuthbert Tunstal, who, to everyone's satisfaction, has recently been appointed Master of the Rolls. I will not try to praise him, not simply because the world would discount such praise from a close friend, but because his fine qualities and learning defy description. His fame is so widespread, that praising him would be, as they say, like lighting up the sun with a candle’. Yet the historiographical neglect of Tunstal seems to indicate that historians have preferred the pejorative judgement of Foxe, who says that he ‘dissembled’ in taking the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII. All the conservative bishops who took the oath ‘turned cat-in-the-pan’ in Mary's reign, but when they took it in 1535 they were, according to Foxe, ‘right Lutherans’. He, unquestionably, thought Tunstal was a ‘trimmer’.

In Pursuit of Liberty of Conscience: A Seventeenth-Century Response to Augustine’s Confessions

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-128
Author(s):  
Victoria Van Hyning
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
English Civil War ◽  
Literary Response ◽  
Conversion Narrative ◽  
Conversion Narratives ◽  
Teachers And Students ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
Civil War Era ◽  
John Holland

This chapter unpacks a highly significant and unusual example of a post-English Civil War era Catholic woman’s conversion narrative. Catherine Holland was the daughter of Sir John Holland, a moderate Protestant parliamentary politician, and Alathea Sandys, a Catholic. During her teens and twenties Holland began to feel drawn to Catholic doctrine and practice, and at the age of twenty-five she ran away from home to join the Nazareth convent where she soon after authored a conversion narrative modelled on Augustine’s Confessions. The unique manuscript of ‘How I Came to Change My Religion’ also contains prayers and lists, all of which have been provided in their entirety as an appendix to this volume. This chapter charts Holland’s literary response to Confessions and developments in her self-fashioning through this literature as well as translations written during more than five decades at the convent. This chapter and edition provide unprecedented access to a significant early modern writer who was willing to defy parents, Protestant bishops, and reluctant Jesuits in order to achieve ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘escape the slavery of marriage’. The edition may be particularly valuable to teachers and students studying conversion narratives, women’s writing, gender, and Confessions.

Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More

2002 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 476-509 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL QUESTIER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Family Networks ◽  
The Public ◽  
Religious Issues ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Sir Thomas More ◽  
Group A ◽  
Lord Chancellor

Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post-Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism's political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.

Reading Early Modern literature through OED3

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-39
Author(s):  
Giles Goodland
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
Oxford English Dictionary ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Loan Word ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Selection Of

We may think we know what a neologism is, but it is hard to isolate the nature of the moment in which neologizing occurs. In literature sometimes this moment is enacted for effects that may not belong to the discourses of normal communication, and these effects are compounded when it is a loan-neologism. The Early Modern period was one of increasing contact between the languages of Europe, and literature responded to this in a variety of ways. This paper looks at neologistic borrowings into English literature, using a selection of canonical authors as refracted through the Oxford English Dictionary, to see if they can tell us something about the porousness of literary language in this period. Keywords: Oxford English Dictionary; Shakespeare; Jonson; Dryden; Skelton; loan word; neologism

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