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.

This essay illuminates a little-known chapter in the history of English Catholicism by examining the controversies among the English Benedictine convent at Brussels between 1620 and 1623. The disputes began as a simple clash of personalities between Abbess Mary Percy and the house’s ordinary confessor Robert Chambers, and they culminated in allegations by pro-Jesuit nuns and confessors that Francis Ward, a second ordinary confessor, was attempting to seduce one of his penitents. These early clashes illustrate the cultural and gender politics of the Continental convents established for Englishwomen during the seventeenth century. By nature a female-oriented institution, the cloister encouraged women to attain monastic versions of stereotypical feminine virtues. Gender consequently provided a convenient means of understanding, evaluating, and politicizing monastic piety. As this paper will show, individuals who held little to no official power at Brussels used gender stereotypes to legitimize their interventions in the convent’s affairs. Nuns, confessors, and anonymous outsiders attempted to diminish the spiritual authority of Percy and Ward by raising the spectre of traditionally feminine vices. Within the woman-centred space of the Brussels convent, gender thus became an essential means of claiming moral authority and addressing larger concerns over monastic order and spiritual direction.1