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Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur 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 aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
/55, fos 48–50, quoted in Miller, After the Civil Wars, p. 183. 13 CSPD 1660–1, pp. 538–9. 14 Pepys, Diary, iv, p. 163, and iii, pp. 166–8. 15 Exact Collection, p. 367; Hancock, Pastor’s Last Legacy, sig. [A3v]; Jenkyn, Burning Yet Un-consumed Bush, preface. 16 Master Edmund Calamy’s Leading Case, p. 12. 17 Third Volume, p. 18. 18 Compleat Collection, sig. [Aav]. 19 Bremer and Rydell, ‘Performance art?’, p. 52; J. Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 175–6. 20 Lye, Fixed Saint, pp. 1–2. 21 Evelyn quoted in Spurr
University welcomed sixty-three speakers in 2013 with its Sensing the Sacred: Religion and the Senses, 1300–1800. In 2014, Lisbon University held a conference on Making Sense of Religion: Performance, Art and Experience. For publications, see Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (eds), Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper (eds), The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 6
. 136–7, 139. 163 Black Bartholomew’s Day 8 Pepys, Diary, iii, pp. 166–8; Bates, Peace-Maker, pp. 9–10, 18. 9 DWL MSS I.l.35, fos 27v–30r. 10 Porter, Life of Mr John Hieron, p. 14. 11 Baxter in Exact Collection, p. 160; Fairclough, Pastor’s Legacy, p. 116; Bull, in Third Volume, pp. 54, 70, 71; Bladon, in England’s Remembrancer, p. 306. 12 Third Volume, p. 71. 13 Newcombe, Diary, pp. 120, 126. 14 Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, p. 42; Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, pp. 74, 83, 90. 15 Quoted in Bremer and Rydell, ‘Performance art?’, p. 51. 16 Pepys, Diary, p. 168