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The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
The conclusion summarises the main findings of this Dutch Discalced Carmelite case study for the use of scholars of the female religious life more widely. It makes eight points: victim spirituality was central to the history of modern women religious and there are non-reductionist ways of analysing this; the public performance of the cloistered life involved an enduring paradox that marked many of its aspects; the conciliar and post-conciliar renewal of the religious life was a project mainly promoted by the clergy; contemplative nuns appropriated renewal and attempted to steer it into ways that reflected their own priorities; reformism and traditionalism, as responses to the challenge of renewal, should be historicised as competing but not dissimilar manifestations of a new, ‘expressive’ concept of the religious life; there was a degree of continuity in the religious life of Carmelites that defied the turn to self and the notion of expressive religion; historical analysis of prayer must be alert to its polysemic nature; and prayer can and must be historicised as performance of self.
This chapter explores the outcome of renewal: the construction of a new identity as contemplatives in an expressive culture. Human values such as community spirit and spontaneity were highly esteemed, and the new concept of spirituality was discursive rather than ritual or devotional, requiring narrative expression of experiences and feelings. Life as a Carmelite required the performance of a new persona: that of the mature, free but conscientious religious. The new Carmelite identity pivoted around prayer, and, although many sisters experimented with novel, extemporaneous forms, mental prayer according to a now non-dolorist reading of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross remained core. Discourse about Carmelite prayer focused particularly on an apophatic interpretation of John’s dark night of the soul. This also shows the limits of the turn to self and the expressive revolution for Carmelite life: new acquaintance with John of the Cross gave the sisters a sense of the inadequacy of experience. The reinvention of Carmelite identity and spirituality entailed shifts in memory, as dolorism and victim spirituality were expunged from the new narrative, in line with the ‘othering’ of the traditional in media representations. But legacies of the past continued to obtrude on the present, particularly around the beatification and canonisation of Edith Stein in the 1980s and 1990s. The chapter also looks at the evolving Carmelite presence in society amid the closure of convents, and addresses heritagisation, post-Christian nostalgia and oblivion.
Chapter 1 sets the stage for the analysis of discourses of spirituality and identity in the subsequent chapters. It does this, under ‘convents’, by providing an event-based historical overview of Carmelite history, particularly of the foundations of Carmelite convents in the Netherlands from early modern times to the 1950s, and of the complicated process of merging and closing convents from the 1970s onwards as the population of sisters declined. This section gives readers a sense of the geographical spread and chronological waxing and waning of the Carmelite presence in the Netherlands. It also discusses the motives for foundations, including the culture wars as they occurred in Germany and France, and the church politics involved in the order’s slow retreat, from 1970 to 2020. Under ‘sisters’, it looks at the composition of the population itself, with particular regard to nationality and social background, recruitment strategies, vocation narratives and internal stratification between choir nuns, lay sisters and extern sisters. Finally, under ‘power’, it addresses power relations within convents and between the communities, external authorities and other parties. Gender roles are discussed, as well as the models that were proposed to justify or contest power relations. This chapter gives readers all the context they need to understand the rest of the book.
The Catholic female religious life burgeoned in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, including the contemplative life. There is a great deal of scholarship on this phenomenon, and the Introduction provides a survey, with particular attention to non-anglophone historiography. The inner, spiritual lives of nuns have been somewhat neglected in the literature, however, despite the centrality of spirituality in sisters’ own experience of the religious life. The Introduction explains why a spiritual history of modern contemplative women is necessary, why Dutch Discalced Carmelite sisters are a good case study for this, and the methodology that has been used for this book, and the sources – including convent chronicles, obituaries (or circulaires) and oral history. Modern Carmelite nuns defined their contemplative identity in different ways over time, shaping their spirituality to adapt to their evolving context.
Therese of Lisieux’s ‘little way’ greatly influenced the spiritual lives of Dutch Carmelites after the First World War. Therese was regarded as a powerful miracle worker, but trust in God’s loving mercy and the spiritual childhood she personified were the greater part of the attraction. She provided Carmelite nuns with a new sense of their gendered role as ‘love in the heart of the church’. But the teachings of the Little Flower did not herald the end of the old way: victim spirituality. On the contrary, the rise of totalitarian ideologies, the destructive world wars and the Cold War gave it new depth and purchase. As the chapter shows, victim spirituality seemed a sensible and attractive proposition to twentieth-century Carmelites well into the 1950s, including to intellectually accomplished women such as Edith Stein, who had particular reasons of her own to embrace it. The new interest during the interwar years in Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross offered the prospect of a new way: a supposedly ‘truly Carmelite’ spirituality beyond dolorism. This came to the fore particularly in the 1950s, when discourse about identity began to concentrate on the Carmelites as contemplatives and the focus shifted from pain and penance to prayer. The chapter also looks at media representations of contemplative nuns and the influence that press coverage had on these changes.
Of the many traditions from which the Carmelite sisters could draw, dolorism, the spirituality of suffering, was dominant in this period. Asceticism was the common heritage of most religious institutes, and it inspired a thousand and one precepts in the Carmelite books of rules and customs, the most striking of which was strict enclosure. But dolorist spirituality went beyond asceticism and the usual practices of fasting and self-abnegation. The accompanying discourse that can be reconstructed from normative sources as well as from sisters’ egodocuments emphasised the meritorious nature of accepting illness and adversity, of voluntary humiliation and the deliberate infliction of pain through mortification of the body. This spirituality of vicarious suffering or victim spirituality interpreted suffering as a sacrifice that was efficacious before God, and that therefore constituted a valuable spiritual good that could be used as a weapon in the culture war. Many sources testify to the appeal that the gendered appropriation of this spiritual tradition had for sisters, an appeal that was differently inflected for sisters of different national backgrounds. The chapter also addresses the paradoxes of the dolorist performance of the cloistered life, as well as the presence of alternative constructions of spirituality, such as mental prayer and various devotions, although these were often themselves infused by dolorism.