Philip Sidney in the Cloister: The Reading Habits of English Nuns in Seventeenth-Century Antwerp

The relationship between interiority, privacy, and somatic selfhood has long intrigued literary and cultural historians writing about early modern Europe. It has been commonplace to connect assertions of nascent individuality with changes in architecture and physical space that took place during the period. Most claims have been made without reference to convents despite the fact that they were the living spaces of many thousands of English women in exile in continental Europe. Manuscripts written by Carmelite nuns in and near Antwerp cast light on their reading practices and their understanding of the "closet" as a space for personal withdrawal. By reviewing the nuns' papers we can understand the ways in which they conceptualized space and appreciate how they made use of particular convent areas for reading and for writing. We can then distinguish connections and disparities between domestic and devotional habitus, and adduce a politics of place affecting nuns' religious reading.