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‘Low & plain stile’: poetry and piety in English Benedictine convents, 1600–1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2019

Jaime Goodrich
Jaime Goodrich*
Affiliation:
English Department, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA. Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article examines the functional nature of English Benedictine poetry in order to understand the bespoke literary systems that flourished within convent settings. Even as form has emerged as a primary concern within scholarship on early modern women writers, so too are literary critics starting to show interest in the early modern convent as a site of literary production. Uniting these two scholarly strands, this article explores the formal implications of texts written by and for the six English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the early modern period. This analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Benedictine poetics reveals that English cloisters on the Continent actively cultivated alternative approaches to textual production, developing monastic modes at odds with the secular literary system of the time. Poetry provides an ideal case study for this discussion of convent style due to its relatively high status among literary forms. By considering Benedictine theories of speech as well as the formal qualities of the verse that nuns read and wrote, this essay will outline how the English Benedictine convents on the Continent developed a distinctive literary system that rejected secular modes in favour of a poetics aligned with monastic humility.

Keywords

BenedictineconventformIgnatianpoetry
Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 599 - 618
Copyright
© Trustees of the Catholic Record Society 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to acknowledge the support of a US-UK Fulbright Scholar Award in funding the research for this article.

References

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9 Rule, 38–39; ‘cum loquitur monachus, leniter et sine risu, humiliter cum gravitate vel pauca verba et rationabilia loquatur, et non sit clamosus in voce, sicut scriptum est: Sapiens verbis innotescit paucis’: Regula, 7.60.

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23 Margaret Truran notes several passages throughout the Constitutions that similarly parallel Baker’s other writings, arguing that he had a hand in the composition of the Cambrai constitutions: ‘Did Father Baker Compile the First Constitutions of the English Benedictine Nuns at Cambrai?’, in Geoffrey Scott ed., Dom Augustine Baker 1575–1641 (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2012), 31–42. Baker similarly warned the Cambrai nuns about the dangers of letterwriting: ‘The soul is to give over all vain correspondence with the world by letters or conversation. Let her not write letters without meer necessity, or as discretion shall force her unto it’: Augustine Baker, A Spirituall Alphabet for the Use of Beginners in Alphabet and Order, ed. John Clark (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2001), 36.

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