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By losing an “s” and shifting from legal depositions to manuscript life, Mary Champneys transforms into Mary Champney,25 who “professed at Messaghen not farre from Antwerpe” with the English Bridgettine nuns of Syon in 1569, at twenty-one.26 Such a transformation—impregnated and abandoned woman turned bride of Christ—may seem unlikely, yet The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, an anonymous manuscript focused on Mary Champney’s life as a nun, reveals a number of striking parallels between the two young women.27 Both hold the position of “waytinge gentlewoman” and “goe over the sea” to Antwerp (2v). Champney is soon “tempted with a marveilous longinge desire to returne again into Englande, thinkinge every daye a yeare, untill shee might so doe” (2v)—a feeling akin to Champneys’s “grete misery” at being left on the continent. Their chronologies offer similar overlaps: Champneys’s pregnancy occurred sometime after September 1564,28 and her trip could have taken place in either 1565/1566 or 1567.29 Champney spent enough time in the Antwerp area prior to her profession in 1569 to seek counsel from the Jesuits and participate “in further conference of with some of the good Nunnes about Antwerpe” (3r).30 These two women also had employers with Catholic tendencies: there is evidence to suggest that Lady Windsor was a Catholic, including the “copes, vestments, mass books, and other religious contraband” found in the home she shared with Puttenham in 1569.31 While this would not necessarily determine the doctrinal allegiance of her waiting woman, the home was a powerful devotional space for nonconformists, and Catholic women worked to maintain and expand their faith through the religious education of children and servants. Mary Champneys, who resisted Puttenham with “a verie godly mynde disposed” thus may have had a formative experience like that of Mary Champney, who served “one of good worshippe” and was drawn from a young age to the religious life (2v).32
The circumstances connecting Mary Champneys to Mary Champney may not have an “actual … place in literary history,” yet allowing for the possibility that they are the same woman does offer a fresh perspective on that history. The Life and Good End of Sister Marie reveals that the literary culture constructed by Puttenham in The Art was contested in the lived practice of early modern nuns, for whom literary forms and figures did not serve as signs of royal or patriarchal authority but instead structured modes of political resistance and patterns of devotion. The rhetorical and literary skill that Puttenham located at the heart of the Elizabethan court was just as much in evidence in the nomadic book cultures supported by the English convents in exile, and, when read in relationship to The Art, texts like Champney’s manuscript life compellingly critique a poetic culture predicated on female silence.
Champney is the dynamic and articulate literary subject at the center of a text that draws heavily on hagiography and romance in its rejection of the ascendancy of a heroic narrative of English Protestantism. She was one of a number of Bridgettines to travel back into England when war in the Low Countries threatened the convent in the late 1570s. A group of young nuns left the dangers of life on the continent only to face a difficult journey across the channel and possible imprisonment in England, where they worked to secure patronage for the convent and support the Catholic cause through missionary activities.33 Champney died in England in 1580, and The Life was written in the same year. It details her calling to the Bridgettine order, the perils of her travels, and her good death. Mary Champney’s life, according to the anonymous author of the manuscript, was “well worthie to be written for the memorye of so rare a virgin, raysed upp of god in the middest of a stiff-necked nation” (2r). To a modern reader, this virgin does seem like a rarity: a pious yet outspoken early modern English nun who leaves her monastic enclosure, narrowly avoids the seduction of an English captain in the Low Countries, and inspires her countrymen in England through “the light of her good example” (2r). But the manuscript also makes clear that Champney was not alone: she was one of many women whose “good examples of their virtue since their coming over had donne more good to their Cowntrye by gods sweete disposinge, then ever their tarryinge in Machlin had bene able” (15r).34 As scholars such as Ann M. Hutchison and Claire Walker have argued, the individual circumstances of Champney’s death in an English recusant household exemplified and advanced the collective work of these early modern nuns: her deathbed demeanor inspired one of her countrymen to provide the order with printed devotional books and money for the profession of new sisters, and the account of her life was likely written in order to garner additional material and political support for the English convents in exile.35
To achieve these pragmatic ends, The Life and Good End of Sister Marie adapts a hagiographical pattern to post-Reformation Catholicism in order to offer a model for other English Catholics.36 Yet the text’s didacticism does not foreclose attention to questions of form. Instead, its didactic purpose depends upon narrative structures that undercut linear progressions—from birth to death, virgin to wife, Catholic to Protestant.37 While the manuscript begins with a brief reference to Champney’s birth and life before the convent, it turns almost immediately to the visions that anticipated her profession, along with a description of her eventual entrance into the convent and adjustment to religious life. Champney’s vows serve as the true beginning of the narrative, but the author self-consciously disrupts the expected linear progression with a first-person interjection: “Well I must yet retire backe agayne from entringe into discription of her deathe: to declare first a little more of some poyntes of her life: But first I will compare the manner of her extraordinarye callinge … unto the like callinge of an other sister of the same house, which died also in England since their cominge over” (5r). In other words, the central focus of the narrative is nominally Champney’s death, and yet the author repeatedly jumps forward and backward in time, anticipating and sometimes describing deathbed scenes in juxtaposition with details drawn from Champney’s life. This fragmented structure is further disrupted by a brief narrative of the life and death of a second nun, Anne Stapleton. Stapleton’s “like callinge” appears immediately after the story of Champney’s initial profession, and it echoes both the beginning and ending of the latter’s life, though not the narrative structure of The Life. Like Champney, Stapleton has a prophetic dream in which God prompts her to lead a religious life, and she eventually dies “also in Englande verie blessedlie” (5v). This brief interjection, which shows precisely how unremarkable Champney is, precedes a catalogue of her remarkable qualities and the incidents that exemplify them: “meeknes in spirit,” “devocyon in gods service,” “workes of penance,” and “abstinence of diett” (6r–7r). And yet even these vignettes from Champney’s life in the convent, ostensibly offered as evidence of her incomparable devotion, are in fact examples of “straighte keepinge of her rule” (6v). Champney thus demonstrates the commonalities of those women who endured exile for their faith even as she is singled out for her individual expression of communal characteristics.
Stapleton’s story is one of a number of narrative discontinuities in The Life that together underscore the tensions in writing the life of a young woman who does not actually seem all that unusual: Champney’s life in the convent is echoed in the obituaries of countless other early modern nuns.38 Even her trip to England is distinguished primarily by her death, in contrast to the varied experiences of some of her companions. Elizabeth Sander, for example, endured imprisonment by English authorities and eventually found her way back to the Syon community, where she recorded her own narrative in a letter that eventually appeared in multiple printed editions.39 To make Champney’s story seem exceptional, the author of the manuscript life borrows not simply the tropes of hagiography (visions, a calling to monastic