Early Modern English Nuns

This session will explore the building of common narratives through the study of the texts of the English convents exiled on the Continent; whilst they sought to publicize the shared values and opinions of religious Catholic communities, conventual founding texts such as autobiographies, biographies...

From Exile to Exile? An examination of the personal correspondence and narratives of five communities of English Benedictine nuns who sought refuge in England 1794–5 Today, EMEN is glad to present a blog post by Scholastica Jacob (PhD candidate in Theology and Religion at Durham University). In this...

Today, our blog is honoured to host a post by Dr Cormac Begadon, Assistant Professor and Sepulchrine Fellow in the History of Catholicism in the Department of Theology and Religion of Durham University. Cormac is currently editing the Mother Joseph Smith migration narrative, which will be published...

On 17 December 2020, and as part of its project entitled A Material World - Portable Devotion, the Warburg Institute aired a wonderful lecture by Anna Forrest, presenting the incredible finds made by the National Trust at Oxburgh Hall, the family home of the Bedingfelds. Anna Forrest shows fragments...

We are delighted to announce the publication of three #nuntastic articles in RECONSTRUCTING EARLY-MODERN RELIGIOUS LIVES: THE EXEMPLARY AND THE MUNDANE co-edited by Anne Dunan-Page, Laurence Lux-Sterritt and Tessa Whitehouse in the latest issue of E-rea 18.1 (2020), https://journals.openedition.org/...

Today I would like to take a closer look at the subject of religious emotions through the prism of performativity and religious rituals. One of the striking aspects of early modern conventual archives is the large proportion of prescriptive documents that have survived and testify to the extent to w...

Like all other academic groups, our early modern programme is struggling to plan ahead under current circumstances. We do, however, have a few open events scheduled. Further news will be posted in due course.  One postponed session from last year's cycle on 'Progress' Monday 12 October 2020, 16.30 –...

The documents of early modern English nuns testified that many felt attracted to what they perceived as the strictest Order, which implied punctilious conformity with the Decrees of Trent and an uncompromising adherence to the all-important rules of monastic life, especially regarding austerity and...

Third in its exciting series on pilgrimage, @IMEMSDurham invited Dr James Kelly to speak about the English convent in exile. You can listen to the talk and see the slideshow by clicking here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3105050019592792

The beginnings of the English Sepulchrine convent at Liege were rather tumultuous. Initially, the town was chosen because there was an English College of the Society of Jesus there, to whom the nuns could resort both for material help and spiritual comfort. The very early steps of the foundation wer...

So, we are all pretty much in lockdown. After an initial phase of anxiety and numbness, simply trying to digest the extend of what is currently happening to the world as we know it, we have had to face up to some difficult decisions. It has become obvious that, in the interest of everyone's safety,...

Claire Schiano (PhD candidate at Aix-Marseille Université) shares her experience in the conventual archives of the Much Birch community of Poor Clare religious. Planning my research trip Before starting my primary sources research project, I spent the first months of my doctoral studies reading seco...

On Monday 8 April 2019, the early modern seminar of the LERMA (Aix-Marseille Université) held a session on 'The Lived Religion of English Catholics'. Our guests were Liesbeth Corens and Emilie Murphy, who spoke to faculty and postgraduate and doctoral students about the various ways of living one's...

Caroline Bowden, pioneer of the study of early modern English convents in Exile, has always been most productive. You will find here an article posted in the news of Queen Mary University of London on 11 October 2017; it contains a few words on her edition of the manuscripts of the Nazareth convent...

Our next session, on Progress and Literary Genres : Redefinition and Evolution of the Novel, will be held on Monday 25 March, from 5 to 7 pm, room 2.44 of the maison de la recherche. We are delighted to welcome: Baudouin Millet (Université de Lyon 2), 'Progress and stasis: the poetics of digression...

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1RDC3d9juuaYFnSgWAEk9QB51nLbSsp4I&ll=21.18794979554151%2C46.83792003952067&z=4 I have made this wee map (see link above) to show how close together some of the convents were; each Order is represented by a different colour.

A story from # nuntastic archives, and a hilarious miracle From the notice on Mother Mary Wiseman’s parentage, we learn that her mother, Jane Wiseman (née Vaughan), had been active in relieving priests, and was taken into custody by the dreaded Richard Topcliffe in 1598. Since she refused to plead a...

  Stories from the archives of the English convents in exile The English Dominican nuns of the second Order were founded by Cardinal Philip Howard at Vilvorde (near Brussel) in 1661; in 1669, they settled in what was to be their long-term house, locally known as the Spellikens, in Brussels. On 7 Apr...

Listen to this fabulous programme on Religious Divisions, Puppet Shows and Politics, featuring Lucy Underwood, Caroline Bowden and Alison Shell on early modern English Catholicism. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0000xvn  The section starts at 15'14. Thank you to these wonderful academics for get...

Durham Early Modern Studies Conference, 22 --24 July 2019 Durham University, Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies An interdisciplinary conference on the early modern period is well established at Durham, first as a biennial conference on The Seventeenth-Century, and more recently as a broa...

  Landscapes & the Environment H-WRBI Annual Conference will take place at in London at the Institute of Historical Research on Thursday 6 June to Saturday 8 June 2019. More details for CFP and themes will be coming shortly.

Medieval and Early Modern Spaces and Places: Experiencing the Court, 3 -- 4 April 2019 ... This year the Open University’s Spaces & Places conference will address the theme of ‘Experiencing the Court’ by exploring the senses and the lived experiences of courtly life, whether based in a particular re...

The Who Were the Nuns? database has now been complemented by a fabulous volume: English Catholic Nuns in Exile, 1600-- 1800. A Biographical Register, edited by K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Prosopographia & Genealogica Occasional Publications volume 15, 2017. This includes 93 pages of introductory material,...

In June 2014, Victoria Van Hyning wrote a piece contextualising some of the twenty new biographies of early modern English nuns added to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in May of that year. https://blog.oup.com/2014/06/english-convent-lives-exile-odnb/

Emilie Murphy wrote several splendid pieces for the RECIRC, using the Benedictine convent at Brussels as an enlightening case study to examine issues of authority in English convent in exile.  In a log dated 19 February 2016, Emilie Murphy discussed 'How to be understood in an English convent abroad...