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Who Were the Nuns? English Nuns in Exile from 1600-1800
At the Conference of the History of Women Religious today I attended a presentation by Dr. Carmen Mangion of the University of London. She presented the project of her colleage Dr. Caroline Bowden. The project is called Who Were the Nuns? and it is a prosopographical study of the English convents in exile in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Scene from the Painted Life of Mary Ward. Mary Ward and some of the first seven Companions setting sail for Flanders.
Who Were the Nuns? project is “a comprehensive study of the membership of the English convents in exile. That is, the period between the opening of the first English convent in Brussels to the nuns’ return to England as a result of the French Revolution and associated violence. Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely.
Why did the nuns have to go into exile? Well, Catholic nuns, monks, and clergy were not exactly welcome in England at the time. In fact monasteries and convents were forcibly disbanded, and it was illegal to establish any new ones. (See Wikipedia on Dissolution of the Monasteries for more information).
As a result, “vast numbers of Catholics left their home country for the continent including many men and women religious and men and women with a religious vocation. Some of them found a new haven in Spain, Portugal, Italy or Bavaria, but northern France and the Southern Netherlands were particularly appealing to these Catholics in exile. The English Carthusians were the first to settle themselves on the continent in 1559, later followed by many other religious communities of men and women. Forty years later the first ‘English convent’ for English nuns was founded in Brussels. About a dozen others were to follow in the next fifty years, most of them enclosed and contemplative, but often hosting prestigious boarding schools for children of the English Catholic elite.” (source)
Dr. Bowden found that “twenty two convents were founded on the continent and around 4000 women were professed. The convents became significant cultural centres, fostering the education of Catholic girls, making collections of books, commissioning works of art and maintaining substantial buildings.” The sisters, and their legacy, survived despite exile, wars, and natural disasters.
It is a fascinating study and project and I hope to learn more about it. I encourage you to check out Who Were the Nuns? project website.
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{ 1 comment }
Wow, it’s so interesting that nuns are such a hot topic in academia right now… The professor who was my major adviser when I was an undergraduate focuses his research on womens’ religious orders in medieval Italy, conducting similar prosprographic research on a couple of cloistered communities that thrived in Venice during that time. And he mentioned that nuns were currently of great interest in the disciplines of religious studies and history, and that a lot of historians seemed to be interested in approaching religious history through the accounts and experiences of nun chronicles. And it’s true… Ever since he pointed that out, I seem to encounter nun scholarship everywhere. Now I’m at a different school, and the people at Yale are also doing a lot of work on religious life – though this is focusing more on the very early ascetic holy women in the high Egyptian desert.
Anyways, the website’s discussion of how these English nuns, though enclosed, “were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely” seems very much in line with what I know of Italian convents at the time. It’s amazing how much these theoretically “closed” communities were aware of the political and economic goings-on of the broader world. Wow, I imagine that it must have been so difficult to be a Catholic sister when religious politics were so convoluted in England and abroad. I always think of that phrase from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets – the one about the “bare, ruined choirs,” and I can only imagine some aching sense of devastation and loss in the wake of England’s persecution of religious and gutting of the monasteries because so much had changed so fast.