Building on this exploration of monastic book culture, Chapter 3 shows how nuns’ devotional reading and writing functioned as a form of active political participation in post-Reformation religious conflicts. Members of the English Benedictine convents in Cambrai and Paris interrogated the status of women’s political and religious obedience during a particularly fraught period of approximately thirty years—from the beginning of Charles I’s reign to the aftermath of the English Civil War—when both Catholics and Puritans confronted the competing claims of temporal and spiritual authorities. Writers during this period drew on century-old debates over Henry VIII’s royal supremacy, including nuns who modified earlier writings on the limits of political authority in reflections on their own religious practice. Most striking is Dame Gertrude More, one of the founding members at Cambrai and the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Thomas More, whose The Spiritual Exercises invoked her famous ancestor and his martyrdom in order to emphasize the link between a long tradition of English Catholic political resistance and her own community in exile. Gertrude More’s defense of spiritual independence reveals that clerical authority did not produce unthinking obedience on the part of female monastics and that nuns remained central to the concept, the practice, and the subversion of obedience long after the Reformation. My analysis of More’s devotional writing not only further undermines the limited representations of Catholic femininity created by authors such as Webster and Thomas Robinson, it also helps reveal the limits of allegory in the most overtly political play of the early seventeenth century, Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess. The symbiotic relationship between Protestant propaganda and the English stage outlined in my previous chapter also fueled Middleton’s drama, a political allegory staged after marriage negotiations between Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria of Spain collapsed. Middleton borrowed extensively from Robinson, and yet the play’s only nun—the Black Queen’s Pawn—is a figure of surprising political efficacy who undermines both plot and allegory. In his pawns’ plot, Middleton imagined what an autonomous nun might look like: a religious woman alienated from Catholic hierarchies and uninfluenced by conventional alliances. By reading More’s theory of obedience alongside Middleton’s play, I demonstrate how the concept of obedience offered a rich literary resource to both nuns and their political adversaries, provoking reflections on political authority and religious faith that ultimately collapse rigid doctrinal distinctions and the conventions associated with certain genres and literary forms.
Convention and poetic tradition are more directly explored and upended in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, which incorporates both the pejorative and the celebratory strains of literature focused on female monasticism, and in the literary practice of a recusant Catholic community scattered throughout England and continental Europe. In my final chapter, I show how the manuscript poems and letters of the Aston, Fowler, and Thimelby families reveal the limits of Cavendish’s depiction of female community as the impetus for intellectually engaged and generically heterogeneous literary production. Through these poems and letters, which draw upon the theory and practice of devotional verse expounded by Catholic poet and martyr Robert Southwell, as well as the secular poetry of John Donne, a more ambiguous poetic predecessor for committed recusants, I explore the particularities of English Catholic poetic practice in the mid-seventeenth century, when networks of readers and writers mixed strictly religious poetry and prose with a broad range of written materials, from pastoral poetry to love letters. Repositioning Catholic women at the center of the literary communities to which they were so essential reveals a more capacious literary history and helps to uncover the poetic interventions that contributed to the formation of our relatively narrow canon of early modern literature, including Andrew Marvell’s striking dispossession of female monasticism in Upon Appleton House. While Marvell acknowledges that communities associated with the convent offered a space for literary production, he supplants a history of female community with the promise of exceptional Protestant individualism in his concluding portrait of the young Maria Fairfax and her future marriage. Cavendish’s representation of the convent as a space for cultural production offers a more current vision of female community but it too is quite limited when compared to the prolific writings of her Catholic female contemporaries, whose texts reveal the remarkable generic and formal complexity of recusant literary culture. Nonetheless, even as Cavendish’s utopian vision of convent life falls short of the dynamic devotional and literary practice of seventeenth-century English nuns and recusant women, The Convent of Pleasure demonstrates that Catholic women’s literary engagements remained vital to the imaginative landscape of early modern England.
Yet the vibrant literary practices of Catholic women in post-Reformation England have largely disappeared from narratives of English literary history. My Epilogue explores this oversight through a brief survey of seventeenth-century Passion poems, which reveal a moment at which a broader understanding of that history was still possible. Through brief readings of perspective and subjectivity in the work of poets of different religious aesthetics and political affiliations, I analyze the formal strategies that contributed to a critical discourse in which Catholic women were exiled from English literature as supposedly foreign intrusions into post-Reformation Protestant poetics. To read Catholic women out of this tradition is, I argue, to create an English literary history much like John Milton’s “The Passion”: unsatisfying and incomplete. Catholic women’s manuscripts and printed books necessitate a fresh look at early modern religious and literary culture, and this book demonstrates how their politically incendiary and rhetorically powerful lyrics, prayers, polemics, and hagiographical lives can reshape our understanding of both the canonical and noncanonical literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.
CHAPTER 1
Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity
Nuns and vowed virgins appear with surprising frequency in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, but they are nonetheless outnumbered by their Protestant counterparts—virgins whose narratives are structured around the expectation of marriage. The slow process of sixteenth-century religious reform stimulated a parallel reconfiguration of the imagery and ideology associated with Catholicism, and female chastity has long been the most visible and contested site in this competition for representation.1 From the virgin warriors, virgin queens, fleeing virgins, and virgin shepherdesses of the Arcadia and The Faerie Queene to the chaste young women on their way to the altar (or, in the case of certain star-crossed lovers, the grave) in early modern drama, a marital telos informs and motivates literary representation. In the decades after the Elizabethan settlement, it became increasingly unusual to find women like Hero of Hero and Leander and Isabella of Measure for Measure, who conceptualize virginity as an earnest religious vow rather than a transitional phase that must culminate in marriage. These nuns—one a votaress of Venus, the other a future Catholic Poor Clare—demonstrate that the devotional markers associated with female virginity could never be completely subsumed under a Protestant ideology that repositioned chastity not within the female community of the convent but within a marital relationship. Yet both are lured away from their religious positions, into negotiations with men who urge them to abandon their vows and participate in a social system in which patriarchal control takes precedence over faith. These virgin characters thus simultaneously profess a devotional practice associated with the convent and occupy a political space reminiscent of the married recusant women who refused to participate in church services and drew increased government scrutiny in late sixteenth-century England.
Hero and Isabella have inspired endless critical consternation, in part because they do not fit neatly into Protestant England, ancient Sestos, or Catholic Vienna. Together with Queen Elizabeth, that most famous of perpetual virgins