Particularly from 1638 to 1653, John Milton was deeply engaged in Ireland, although his relationship with Ireland is less well known than Edmund Spenser’s. The 1641 Ulster Rising in Ireland informs Milton’s political development, culminating in his service to Cromwell’s republican government. As the Introduction details, the 1641 Rising follows decades of strife in Ireland, following on the 1541 acceptance of Henry VIII as king of Ireland, Counter-Reformation changes in the Roman Catholic Church, and successive English plantation attempts at reforming Ireland, including the Ulster Plantation (which started the year after Milton was born).

In late medieval Europe, most people accepted the Catholic Church’s teachings, but a significant minority called for reforms. In the 1520s, reformers came to include Martin Luther, a professor of theology in Germany. Luther’s ideas turned into a movement, in part through the new technology of the printing press. He and other reformers worked with political authorities, and much of central Europe and Scandinavia broke with the Catholic Church and established independent Protestant Churches. In England, King Henry VIII’s desire for a male heir led him to establish a separate English Church. In the late 1530s, the Catholic Church began to respond more vigorously to Protestant challenges and began carrying out internal reforms, led by the papacy and new religious orders such as the Jesuits. At the same time, the ideas of John Calvin inspired a second wave of Protestant reform, in which order, piety, and discipline were viewed as marks of divine favor. Protestant and Catholic political authorities thought that their territories should have one official state Church, and sought to purge ideas, objects, and people considered religiously alien. The Reformation led to religious persecution, individual and group migration, and more than a century of religious war.

This chapter considers the financial management of the English convents in Catholic Europe. It places the convents’ economic dealings in the context of their overall history, underlining just how vital this aspect of convent life was to their very survival and function. This chapter starts by briefly considering the nuns’ devotion to poverty, before exploring some of the necessary expenses accrued by the foundations. The different economic income strands exploited by the English convents is then outlined, before some of the problems they experienced in their finances are explored. The chapter finishes with a consideration of whether the convents were ever able to separate completely from their English roots as far as finances were concerned. Though the English convents adopted similar approaches to financial management as their continental equivalents and were frequently the model of Tridentine economic behaviour, they did face additional problems as a result of their nationality. Ultimately, the English convents existed in a precarious economic zone that could easily fall prey to both domestic and international fluctuations in more than just the economic environment.

The introduction opens by detailing the development of the conventual movement, giving an overview of the two-hundred-year lifespan of this exile initiative. The chapter then discusses archival survival rates, as well as recent historiographical trends that have seen the English convents in exile become a major area of interest. This literature is explored with the intention of contextualising the English convents in Catholic Europe, opening up wider themes relating to religious and national identity in the convents. As well as providing the context for the chapters of the monograph, the nuns’ adherence to the edicts of Trent are also placed in the broader context of the Catholic Reformation and Catholic Europe. Each chapter is then summarised, with an explanation that, rather than a linear, chronological approach to the convents, the book explores the English convents in exile thematically. The chapters have been ordered to take the reader through the experience of a nun, from entry into the convent to life in enclosure, from what the nuns’ surroundings looked like to how the whole enterprise was funded, from what nuns did all day to their wider place within the Catholic world.

The second chapter considers the exile English convents’ commitment to a core tenet of the Council of Trent’s teaching on female religious life: the implementation and maintenance of full enclosure. It opens by detailing the convents’ initiation rites, through the ceremonies of clothing and profession of vows. This chapter considers the relationship between English women religious and enclosure as a touchstone indicator of commitment to the initiatives of the Catholic Reformation. In their dedication to such a major Catholic identifier, it is argued that the English convents did not just match their continental equivalents but even outstripped them, gaining a reputation for their full commitment to this aspect of religious identity. In short, English nuns were committed to the tenets of the Council of Trent, especially those surrounding enclosure. This dedication allowed the nuns to place themselves in the vanguard of new Catholic Reformation initiatives, though this in itself reveals a paradox: for all that they embraced enclosure, the communities were not cut off from the wider world or its perceptions but remained involved with it.

Chapter 3 explores the material world of the nuns as part of the intense rebuilding and architectural remodelling programmes embarked upon in mainland Europe after the Council of Trent. Again, the English convents sought to engage with the wider secular world, in this instance using the decoration of their public churches, as well as the vessels and fabrics used in the celebration of the liturgy, to convey how they wished to be viewed by the surrounding populace. Though they used their outward liturgical faces to support their national identity, far more stress was placed on their strong identification with their Order, emphasising their role as part of the universal Church. Material culture in each institution was aimed at developing the nuns’ spiritual lives in adherence with Tridentine rules on behaviour and management. The second half of the chapter focuses on the more private spaces in which the enclosed inhabitants lived their daily lives, yet, as was the case in other early modern European convents, the secular permeated enclosure through various material reminders. It is argued that exile did not mean poverty of material culture.

Chapter 1 examines recruitment, looking at questions surrounding a postulant’s choice of convent and how they managed to travel there. The very foundation of each exile convent was based on national identity: these were, after all, English convents. Yet this insistence on Englishness did not only emanate from the women religious themselves but was fundamental to their gaining permission to establish convents in the first place. Nevertheless, it is argued that particular religious identities affected the process of joining a convent. It takes as its case study convent recruitment from the county of Essex to argue that women chose particular convents based on an interplay between home and abroad, as well as clerical and familial patronage. It highlights the effect of one clerical movement – the Jesuits – on convent recruitment patterns, yet these issues of competing spiritualities were not, despite first appearances, solely products of particular national contexts but part of wider developments in Catholic Europe. They show the formation of the English convents as part of the European – and even global – Catholic Reformation rather than presenting them as isolated national enclaves.

This chapter examines the liturgical and spiritual life of the convents. It opens by outlining the daily routine within enclosure, exploring the devotional life of the women religious. This is followed by consideration of the spiritual ethos of different convents before focusing at greater length on the nuns’ attitudes towards relics and martyrdom, which was an especially strong devotional strain within the convents. The English convents considered themselves very much part of the English mission, and were committed to eventually replanting female religious life in their homeland, something very much central to the missionary impulse of early modern Catholicism. As such, though they had a natural interest in the fate of their persecuted fellow Catholics back home, the nuns in no way neglected the significance of martyrs from further afield, or relics more indicative of the wider Church, underlining their relationship with mainland European religious and spiritual trends.

The conclusion asks whether the exile women religious were English women who happened to be Catholic, or were they Catholic women who happened to be English? It argues that there is a far stronger case for the latter interpretation. Yes, they kept an English element of identity but this was as part of the transnational Church. It challenges a historiographical approach to the English convents and women religious that prioritises their position as communities of women or interprets them through a lens of nationality, considering them simply as communities of English. It stresses that there is a need to reorientate our understanding of the convents towards Catholic Europe and its centres, with Rome predominant but also acknowledging the importance of Spanish and French religious trends. The English convents were self-consciously Catholic communities, not isolated but fully committed parts of the universal Catholic Church and this is the core identifier that underlined their very existence.

The book’s sixth chapter focuses on the convents’ role within the wider English and Catholic Mission. It considers the convents’ contact with other exile institutions from the western peripheries of Catholic Europe. This chapter asks whether the exile convents and colleges were concentrated only on their own survival or were male and female expressions of the Catholic Reformation bound by national interest? It is argued that the English convents were fully part of the English Catholic endeavour, the nuns overcoming traditional gender boundaries to act as committed partners in the exile enterprise; they were not isolated institutions defined by insularity. The final part of this chapter examines whether Catholic identity trumped national interests. It asks whether archipelagic Catholic identities were formed in the Catholic diaspora through the relationship of the English convents with the continental Irish and Scottish colleges. It is evident that national allegiances won out. In this, the English convents were not behaving any differently to the rest of Catholic Europe: this national approach to mission and Catholic renewal was part of Catholic Reformation methodology.