The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700

Chapter Three

Chapter Three Embodyingthe“OldReligion” andTransformingtheBodyPolitic The Brigittine Nuns of Syon, Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, and Exiled Women Religious during the English Civil War Augustine Baker, Gertrude More, and the Politics of Martyrdom Withinadecadeofitsfoundation,thecommunityofEnglishBenedictine nuns of Cambrai found itself in conflict with figures of patriarchal authorityoverdistinctiveaspectsoftheirspiritualityandtheirtextualpro duction , a state of affairs that would have been quite familiar to St. Birgitta of Sweden and St. Catherine of Siena. English Benedictine officials objected to Augustine Baker’s method of spiritual instruction and the nuns’useoftextsassociatedwithit.Thefirstflare-upoftroubleoccurred in the early 1630s and culminated with Baker’s removal from Cambrai as the nuns’ spiritual director in 1633. In the same year, the Benedictine authoritiesalsothreatenedtoconfiscatethenuns’manuscriptsassociated 97 with Baker; however, “the manuscripts were examined and deemed to be free of any heretical tendency,” and the nuns were permitted to retain them.1 This was not the end of the matter, though. In 1655 conflict erupted again,and“when...FatherClaudeWhitedemandedtheimmediatesurrender of all the Baker manuscripts, the nuns unanimously signed and forwarded a petition requesting that any examination be deferred until the forthcoming chapter. As a result, Father White arrived in person on Saturday, February 27, 1655, determined to enforce his demand.”2 The strength with which the nuns resisted White’s efforts suggests they had taken to heart Baker’s advice concerning the value of books in a documententitled “ConcerningtheLibraryofthisHowse.”Bakerdeclaresthat “bookes in their own natures” are “more noble and more of worth then other goodds of fortun.” He continues, “The time will come (said Thaulerus , as it were propheticallie) that soules will desire and seeke to have spirituall guids and directors, and will be able to find none, and it maie provetobethecaseofthishowseaswellasofotherhowses,andhowusefullwillgoodbookesbethen ?Andhowwilltheythendowithoutthem?”3 In spite of the great controversy that ensued in the wake of the nuns’ resistance to Father White, the women religious ultimately retained possession of their manuscripts.4 In the nuns’ texts produced in this environment of conflict, we see incarnational political visions emerge. The Benedictine authorities’ threattothenuns’distinctivemonasticandtextualculturesbecomesfor the nuns a joint suffering of the corporate body and the written corpus . Such suffering advances the nuns’ processes of union with the divine , with each other, and, crucially, with their “evynn cristene” of the English past. The community’s resistance to a Benedictine hierarchy that would alter their distinctive devotional traditions and the textual manifestations of that devotion merges with their opposition to the EnglishProtestantnation .Thenuns’individualbodies,thoseoftheirbooks, and the corporate body of their monastic community all stand in for, and have the potential to resurrect through their sufferings, a Catholic England. Gertrude More’s “exposition of the contemplative life as taught by FatherBaker,”publishedinParisin1658underthetitleTheSpiritualEx98 The Embodied Word ercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More, highlights the breaking down of boundaries separating individual bodies, communal bodies, Christ’s body, and a textual corpus in ways as crucial to shaping the English Benedictine nuns’ political vision as to forming their religious identity.5 Much as Julian of Norwich relives Christ’s suffering (his very pains) in her own body and in her text, and as Margaret Gascoigne re-embodies Christ’s and Julian’s pain in her life and text, this volume sets up a chain of explicitly English reincarnations of Christ’s suffering in which those who successively re-embody Christ’s passion also reexperience the sufferings of their English Catholic forebears.6 PlacedbeforethededicatoryepistletoBrigitMore(GertrudeMore’s biological sister and one of the scribes who copied Margaret Gascoigne’s devotional writings) in The Spiritual Exercises is a likeness of Gertrude More by the French engraver René Lochon. On the page facing the engraving is a poem perhaps written, Geoffrey Scott asserts, by Dom Leander Normanton.7 The poem begins with an apostrophe to Gertrude’s ancestor St. Thomas More and transitions into praise for Gertrude: Renowned More whose bloody Fate England neer yet could expiate, Such was thy constant Faith, so much Thy Hope, thy Charity was such, As made thee twice a Martyr proue; Of Faith in Death, in Life of Loue View heer thy Grandchilds broken Hart. ByinvokingMore’smartyrdom,thepoembeginsbyaligninghissuffering , like that of all the martyrs, with that of the crucified Christ. The poet then instructs More to view his grandchild’s suffering (as we perhapsaretoviewitintheimageonthefacingpage ?);her“brokenHart”is positioned as a response to, even a reenactment of, More’s “bloody Fate” at England’s hands. Her suffering, and that of the community (in...