Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay

since priests and Jesuits were outlawed and, when caught, subject to potential torture and execution, women hid priests, facilitated mass, and took responsibility for the religious education of their children, servants, and neighbors.⁴⁶ Parliament, meanwhile, had difficulty addressing the threat posed by Catholic women who managed to evade the anti-Catholic statutes because of their positions as wives: under coverture, married women could not control property and were difficult to penalize economically, and the state hesitated to punish husbands (many of whom were at least nominally Protestant) for their wives’ crimes. Thus, contrary to the tenacious notion that Protestantism liberated women from the strictures of a hierarchical and oppressive church—releasing them from the prison of the convent into loving, companionate marriages—the politically subversive choice to be Catholic in England after the Reformation could provide women with opportunities for political, religious, and literary expression that were not necessarily available to their Protestant counterparts or their coreligionists in other countries. As a result, I argue that the traditional literary critical focus on Protestant women, whether conformist or sectarian, should be supplemented with an equivalent acknowledgment of the wide variety of Catholic women who were significant to the literary culture of early modern England.

      At the same time that recusant women drew political attention at home, English convents were flourishing abroad. The early seventeenth century saw the establishment of dozens of monastic communities for English women on the continent, including both enclosed, contemplative cloisters and unenclosed orders modeled on the Jesuits.⁴⁷ Starting in 1598, with the first new English foundation in Brussels, a renewed interest in female monasticism prompted a surge in professions—an uptick that was evident elsewhere in the post-Tridentine church as well, but is all the more remarkable given England’s restrictions on travel beyond the seas and the financial and emotional difficulties involved in enduring exile for one’s faith.⁴⁸ These two aspects of the practice and perception of female Catholicism in England—on the one hand, the importance of female recusancy to maintaining the faith and, on the other, the popularity and surprising visibility of the English cloisters—provide the central orientation for this book. I thus focus primarily on the 1590s until the 1660s: decades during which women associated with Catholic devotional practice outside the traditional corridors of religious and political power were nonetheless influential in the imaginative construction of English literature.⁴⁹

      In order to demonstrate Catholic women’s significance to early modern literary history, the following chapters cumulatively address three perspectives on the making of English literature. First, my Introduction and Chapter 1 explore Catholic women as objects of representation or erasure. I analyze texts written about nuns and recusant women, such as Mary Champney and Margaret Clitherow, and canonical works that express or repress figurations of Catholic femininity in order to show how writing about Catholic women not only reveals literary historical erasures but also demonstrates that even as Catholic women’s interventions were written out of the canon, their significance was registered formally in the fabric of canonical literary texts. Second, Chapters 2 and 3 explore nuns as authors, revealing their literary and political interventions through detailed close readings that show how their texts demonstrate a rigorous engagement with the very issues and questions that canonical texts represent as preventing their contributions. The monastic writings I analyze here are complex texts that do more than demonstrate nuns’ political engagement or offer clarifying context for well-known plays, and I show how reading them (rather than simply recovering them) offers fresh insights for scholars of early modern literature. Finally, in Chapter 4 and the Epilogue, I trace an alternative genealogy of English literary history, asking what we might discover if Catholic women were positioned at the center of the tradition rather than on the margins. How, for example, does reading certain strands of seventeenth-century poetry—first focusing on a particular family’s recusant and monastic literary community and then on a particular genre—help reveal both the possibility of a more flexible and fluid canon and also the literary interventions that helped to solidify the canon as we know it, erasing Catholic women’s contributions and their significance as literary agents?

      Chapter 1 explores the relationship between virgin bodies and narrative insufficiency in the final decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander to William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The twinned threats of female recusancy and revivified monasticism resulted in a crisis of representation centered on female virginity: in Spenser’s and Marlowe’s unfinished poems of the 1590s, female virginity is simultaneously already lost and not yet relinquished, consummation is ambiguous or preordained, and marriage or death is always just over the horizon of the poem’s narrative telos. Bringing together materialist feminist criticism and formalist literary readings, I reveal the suggestive relationship between incomplete narrative structures and vows of virginity. While many scholars have interrogated discourses of chastity in relationship to Elizabeth, I show how Spenser’s conflicted representations of virginity and marriage in The Faerie Queene demonstrate formal ruptures that point to a broader crisis of representation, which suggests that Elizabeth’s use of her virgin status as a sign of royal power did not simply supplant virginity’s close association with Catholic religious devotion. Instead, the increasing social and political importance of recusant women in the wake of Margaret Clitherow’s 1586 execution offered a bridge between monastic vowed virginity and the burgeoning post-Reformation ideal of married chastity. These heterogeneous materials—on the one hand, literary texts in which female virgins occasion textual disruptions and stalled narrative closure and, on the other, historical and legal accounts of recusant women’s political status—ground my reading of the notoriously difficult Isabella of Measure for Measure. The rhetorically powerful female virgins of The Faerie Queene, Hero and Leander, and Measure for Measure locate their social status in vows under near constant attack, whether on the battlefield, in the bedchamber, or at court. These literary depictions of virginity-in-crisis offer oblique responses to the political implications of female recusancy, and I conclude by demonstrating how Shakespeare’s account of incomplete political reform and unresolved marital status in Measure for Measure exhibits formal effects that reveal the extent to which Catholic women were recognized actors on an international stage.

      My first chapter traces the discourses associated with Catholic femininity that entered and shaped canonical English literature; Chapter 2 turns to physical objects associated with religious controversy and transformation, such as books and ruins, which Protestant playwrights and pamphleteers invoked in order to obscure Catholic women’s contributions to literary culture. John Webster’s portrait of women seduced and destroyed by the Catholic clerical hierarchy in The Duchess of Malfi is one of many English revenge tragedies that builds upon the language and imagery of anti-Catholic polemic in its portrait of a corrupt religious and political hierarchy. Yet I argue that The Duchess of Malfi not only evokes the standard imagery of Protestant propaganda; it also anticipates the specific textual concerns of pamphleteers writing in the ensuing decade, as the proposed Spanish Match prompted scrutiny of the English convents in exile. Webster’s attention to the spiritual traces of the past and the material dangers of the present gives vivid life to the tenacious idea that Catholic women—and especially nuns—were at the mercy of priests and their poisonous books. Fears of a corrupt monastic book culture influenced pamphleteers such as Thomas Robinson, whose influential exposé of Syon Abbey, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, imagined textual control at the root of sexual depravity. The Anatomy was one of the best known anti-Catholic pamphlets in early modern England, and it remains a popular resource for both historians and literary critics. This chapter thus addresses the persistence of pejorative representations of Catholic women and the book, despite the fact that the nuns of Syon participated in both print and manuscript culture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I identify how Robinson’s rhetorical and representational strategies work to efface