Beyond the Cloister
BEYOND THE CLOISTER
CATHOLIC ENGLISHWOMEN AND EARLY MODERN LITERARY CULTURE
JENNA LAY
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-8122-4838-8
In memory of my grandmother,Edna Livingston Duggan
CONTENTS
Note on Spelling and Punctuation
Introduction. Gender, Religion, and English Literary History
Chapter 1. Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity
Chapter 2. To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile
Chapter 3. A Game of Her Own: The Reformation of Obedience
Chapter 4. Cloisters and Country Houses: Women’s Literary Communities
Epilogue. Failures of Literary History
NOTE ON SPELLING AND PUNCTUATION
When my analysis depends upon early printed texts or manuscript materials, I have preserved original spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, with the exception of i/j, u/v, and long s. I have silently expanded obsolete abbreviations and contractions.
Introduction. Gender, Religion, and English Literary History
Tell all the truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
— Emily Dickinson
This book traces a circuitous path through English literary history and the process of canon formation—a path by which Shakespeare’s sister takes a detour en route to the suicide Virginia Woolf depicted as her likely fate, converts to Catholicism, travels beyond the seas, joins a convent, and writes devotional poems that imaginatively rebuild her brother’s bare ruined choirs. But we needn’t create our own fictions to glimpse how it would be possible to read literary history differently by recognizing Catholic women’s ongoing participation in it, as both subjects and objects of literary representation. Their stories are woven into the fabric of early modern literature and poetic theory, and we find them in both the texts that exclude them and those that foreground their authority and agency. Recent scholarly work has demonstrated that nuns and other Catholic women wrote in a range of genres and for multiple audiences;1 I show how their writings offer a fresh perspective on English literary history, enhancing our understanding of the available contexts for canonical literature and the conversations of which that literature was a part. By excavating conflicted engagements with Catholic femininity in early modern poems and plays, the following chapters enable a more nuanced interpretation of how confessional and gender identities are woven into the poetics of erasure undergirding the English literary canon.2
The exceptional work of feminist literary critics over the last three decades has done much to draw attention to the significance of female authorship in the early modern period, and the writings of Protestant women of a wide range of social positions and sectarian affiliations have been the subject of multiple monographs.3 But Catholic women’s influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court has yet to receive such sustained attention.4 To create a more complete picture of English literary history, we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to England’s courtly life shaped its literary culture. I demonstrate that these female authors, whom we might imagine to be marginal figures because of their gender, religion, and social position, are centrally important to an enriched analysis of how literature works in the early modern period and how our own critical perspectives have been shaped by the texts at the heart of our canon that have rendered a more expansive literary history illegible. Rather than taking either conformist Protestant ideology or pamphlet literature at its word, I query the formal effects of Catholic women evident in a wide range of literary texts, thereby illuminating the fraught relationship of gender and religious change to canon formation.
By reading the revelatory works of Catholic women alongside well-known authors who were both formally and thematically engaged with similar literary, religious, and political issues, this book proposes a reassessment of the relationship between canonical literature and its intertexts. Building on the foundational work of scholars of both early modern English Catholicism and women’s writing, I show how the literary strategies of men and women of various and shifting confessional identities contributed to the exclusion of Catholic women from the main narratives of English literary history. While the monastic associations of characters like Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and William Shakespeare’s Isabella demonstrate that contemporary authors were aware of the continued relevance of nuns and recusants, such representations do not directly respond to the texts produced by those women. As a result, it is easy to imagine them writing only for themselves and one another: images of nuns quietly confined to their monastic cells and rendered inconsequential through exile spring to mind. But it is the contention of this book that the writings of post-Reformation Catholic Englishwomen profoundly engage with early modern literature. Through their incursions into contemporary literary culture, Catholic women offered alternatives not only to their country’s religious settlement but also to the forms and genres that helped to define and support that settlement. The exclusion of nuns and recusant women from literary history thus results not from an absence but from their contemporaries’ routine denials of both their presence and their relevance. In writing, compiling, and authorizing manuscripts and printed books that rejected limited or pejorative representations of their religious practices and identities, Catholic