‘A pattern how to dye’

Medieval and early modern nuns and anchoresses, upon entering their enclosures, became metaphorically ‘dead to the world’ in order to join in a spiritual marriage with Christ that would (hopefully) lead them to heaven. Yet this death or exile rarely marked a complete departure from the world. It is within this context that the loving letters written to her family by Winefrid Thimelby (Prioress of St Monica’s from 1668 to 1690) are examined. This chapter argues that Thimelby was anxious to promote religiosity and right living among her family members in order for them all to unite in heaven. The letters reveal how nuns, even when limited to writing one or two letters per year, could articulate a clear selfhood, a clear convent identity, and a clear sense of familial identity without diminishing any of these identities for the sake of the others. Thimelby’s decades-long engagement with the theme of longing for death—‘that gate of lyfe’, in her words—is crucial to our understanding of the language of love and longing at the heart of her identity.

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

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.

Conclusion

The Conclusion briefly summarizes the preceding chapters, drawing continuities between early modern English convent autobiography and other arenas of early modern religious practice. It points the way for future comparative studies, and suggests how the concepts of subsumed and anonymous autobiography might be extended to other disciplines and areas of enquiry. It concludes with an analysis of the continuities between anonymous convent authorship and online anonymity, arguing that both contexts demonstrate that the passion for autobiographical expression exists alongside what Philippe Lejeune called the ‘passion for anonymity’. Convent literature and our ever-evolving online behaviours reveal a passion for anonymous autobiography, for the need to speak without being named.

Introduction

The Introduction maps the landscape of the early modern English convents in exile, and situates the literature of the nuns of St Monica’s and Nazareth within a broader history of monastic literature and culture, medieval to modern, with emphasis on the period shortly after the Reformation, through to the late eighteenth century. The case studies at the heart of the subsequent five chapters are briefly outlined, and reveal a broad range of literary styles and motifs spanning epistolary, chorographical, confessional, and devotional expression, by anonymous as well as named authors. This section introduces the concepts of anonymous and subsumed autobiography, which trouble the still well established, if deeply contested, definitions of autobiography propounded by Philippe Lejeune. These new genres are informed by scholarship of the late twentieth and twenty-first century, devoted to the subjects of women’s writing, and autobiography, self- or life-writing.

Accounting, Chronicling, and Subsumed Autobiography

This chapter attends to the complex interplay between a convent’s financial and spiritual health, arguing that the sustained emphasis and anxieties about convent finances within the first anonymous stint of the ‘Chronicles of Nazareth’ stem from the author’s complex fiduciary responsibilities. Using a combined analysis of prosopographical, manuscript, and textual data, this chapter argues that Grace Constable, long-term financial officer and Subprioress of Nazareth, was the first chronicler of the convent and that her financial responsibilities, the convent’s precarious beginning, and her learning a proper form of accounting directly resulted in her creation of the chronicle. Constable’s stint is a radically different example of subsumed autobiography from that presented in the previous chapter, concerning the ‘Chronicle of St Monica’s’. The legacy of her historical, financial, and spiritual accounting practices trickles down through the centuries of the ‘Chronicles of Nazareth’, as subsequent generations attempted to account for their convent’s fortunes and hardships.

The Morean Legacy at St Monica’s

This chapter investigates the importance of women’s education and Latinity to the first chronicler of St Monica’s, who composed anonymously, but whom I have identified as Mary Copley, a descendant of Sir Thomas More. Copley was well-educated, and descended from a long line of well-educated men and women whose learning, she believed, was critical to the survival and flourishing of English Catholicism after the Reformation. Copley’s attention to More’s legacy at St Monica’s is more sustained than would have been possible had she written under her own name. Writing anonymously, she subsumes her concerns into the stories and voices of the other women and their family members who are represented in this significant early modern chronicle. Copley’s is the first of four detailed case studies of what I call ‘subsumed autobiography’: when an anonymous author, through the very vehicle of her anonymity, shapes a text around her own experiences, politics, theology or ideology to such a degree that the work can be read as an expression and exploration of the author’s selfhood. The case of Copley’s authorship rests on combined analyses of prosopographical, manuscript, and textual data, and provides a methodology for identifying anonymous authors.

The Prioresses’ Tales

This chapter examines how Prioresses could tightly control chronicle and governance literature in their lifetime, subjugating history to their own views, and yet how vulnerable these strategies were after their death. Prioress Lucy Herbert is the most versatile and prolific author studied here, and the most controversial. Through a combination of wealth, status, acumen, treachery, and determination, Herbert acquired property, extended the convent and school, transformed the nuns’ garments and sung Office, changed the school governance literature, and consolidated the power of the Prioress. Her voluminous anonymous manuscript output includes governance literature and a long stint in the ‘Chronicles of Nazareth’, all of which attest to her focus on benefactors, the convent’s reputation, and strengthening the power of the Prioress. Herbert’s focus on benefaction, and her printed works, can be partly credited with the convent’s survival in Bruges to this day. Case studies of Herbert’s successors, Prioresses Mary Olivia Darell and Mary Augustina More, explore how Herbert’s exploitation of anonymous subsumed autobiography in the chronicle and governance literature, her printed works, and cultivation of benefactors had lasting consequences for chronicling and governance practices at Nazareth. Darell and More’s responses to Herbert’s legacy expose the limits of anonymous and subsumed autobiography.