Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (review)

Not since Peter Guilday's magisterial The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (London, 1914), has a scholar attempted a sustained analysis of post-Reformation English nuns' experiences in Continental exile. Claire Walker's important book fills that gap and enhances our understanding of Catholic Englishwomen in religious life by focusing on the activities of the contemplatives rather than on the redoubtable, and much-studied, Mary Ward. Walker makes excellent use of the rich historiography on convents in early modern Italy, Germany, Spain, and France in order to contextualize the English nuns' story within the history of women religious in Europe. Drawing from conventual and archdiocesan archives in England, France, and Belgium, as well as from other ecclesiastical and governmental records, Walker studies 1,109 Englishwomen professed in France and the southern Netherlands from 1591 to 1710. She concentrates her attention on a cross section of ten cloisters out of the total twenty-two English Tridentine foundations. In chapters on vocations, the familial metaphor in convent life, the spiritual and economic labors of cloistered women, nuns' political activities as both recipients and purveyors of patronage, and contemplation, Walker explores how the nuns confronted the unique challenges and opportunities of exile.

The elite, stalwartly English, women who populated the convents struggled mightily to cope with the difficulties that their exiled status posed. Although remarkably no English foundations for women failed in the early modern era, they consistently teetered on the edge of economic disaster, vulnerable both to the vagaries of the Catholic experience in England (chronic financial sufferings of nuns' families through recusancy fines, the possibility of martyrdom, the Civil War) and to the vicissitudes of life on the Continent (war, periodic outbreaks of epidemic disease, tensions with local ecclesiastical officials). Walker makes clear the complexities that the Council of Trent's imposition of strict enclosure presented for these nuns, who were rendered deeply dependent on stewards and clergy—of varying degrees of trustworthiness—for recruiting new members, secretly transporting them to the cloisters (in violation of English law), and securing their crucial dowries. Clausura and the nuns' linguistic and cultural differences from their Continental neighbors isolated them. Yet they coped creatively with these restrictions, and Walker is at pains not to overemphasize their liminality. Rather, she sees the nuns as "vital link[s] between the English Catholic nonconformist tradition and the Continental Church" (p. 6) who "ignored, opposed, assimilated, or modified" clausura (p. 45). She argues that convent walls were "fluid" and that nuns maintained intense spiritual, economic, social, and political connections to their natal families and ecclesiastical and governmental officials. In extreme circumstances, the sophisticated communications and patronage networks fostered by women like Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the Ghent Benedictines could even abet the cause of political conspiracy by assisting the exiled Stuarts. Walker's fascinating analysis of such episodes breaks new ground in the study of early modern women and politics.

Although the nuns did not achieve their goal of converting their homeland—by prayer and any other means necessary—they did "preserve the [English] monastic tradition for women" (p. 129) after its sixty-year hiatus, another of their central concerns. Ultimately amid the depredations of the French Revolution, many of these religious communities settled in England, a homecoming which the nuns never had doubted would occur. Walker's thorough study redresses the scholarly neglect to which the English nuns have been subject and is a fine contribution to the historiography on Recusancy, early modern Catholicism, and European women and religion.