This essay addresses the education of religious women, figured in terms of horizontal and vertical learning, in England at the end of the Middle Ages. It highlights connections between women rather than the more widely discussed relationships between women and their male spiritual advisors. From an examination of the texts obtained by women leaders of the late medieval womenߣs houses, including the English Bridgettine abbey of Syon, it is evident that superiors acquired works relating to the religious rule of life and other devotional texts, and aimed to enable their communities to understand their life and governance. Erler shows that such works were shared via the vertical learning of refectory and other communal readings. Alongside this, more traditional horizontal learning or hierarchical instruction also took place in womenߣs houses: nuns were expected to emulate their elders, and the elders to offer guidance, including in relation to their reading, to which the exchange of books between nuns was central practice. Finally, there is evidence of more formal convent instruction, framed in compassionate and supportive terms.

This study of medieval nuns and abbesses as scribes focuses on manuscript evidence from post-Conquest England, especially in relation to changing institutional ownership. Looking initially at an early-twelfth-century legal manuscript from St Paulߣs London (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383), the essay draws our attention to short texts that were subsequently added to it by one ߢMatildaߣ for the benefit of a female audience. Similar additions are made to another manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv) which contains homilies and saintsߣ lives, this time by an ߢancillaߣ or nun, who inserted prayers that she had authored herself sometime in the late twelfth century. These findings are important because there is very little proof of womenߣs scribal activity in medieval England: hitherto scholars have assumed that manuscripts are written and glossed by men.

If one considers the Kantian cosmopolitan to be the result of political and cultural forces specific to Western European societies, then it is no more than a situated form of local knowledge. There were other forms of local globalism that were as situated as the Kantian cosmopolitan. The difference is that the forms of Catholic local globalism that I discuss here never became normative and universal. Moreover, the forms of local globalism explored in this essay never acquired the geopolitical epistemological authority to cast Kant as a parochial Prussian whose ideas were no more than one version of local globalism. In an unexpected turn, the Enlightenment notion of the cosmopolitan acquires the epistemological authority to cast the Black, nuns, and Indigenous intellectuals explored in this piece as parochial and local. This essay offers an alternative to early-modern forms of the local “cosmopolitan,” namely, individuals who often did travel physically more than Kant, with the exception of a few nuns who, like our Prussian, imagined the globe as a whole by firmly staying in one place.

The final chapter considers the fixed, devotional brainwork that early modern writers attributed to Catholic English girls in particular who were training to serve God. By turning their body-minds toward a life of perpetual virginity, these girls might retain the cognitive gifts of adolescence indefinitely. In this way, they challenged early modern ideas about cold, mentally inert female adulthood as well as Protestant-inflected trajectories of female development that culminated in marriage. The chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century life writings and paintings that chronicle the teenage years of Mary Ward, the Catholic Englishwoman who founded over a dozen, unenclosed religious houses on the Continent based on the Jesuit’s apostolic mission, which included educating England’s recusant daughters — a process that included teaching them theatrical skills necessary for defending their faith back home. In her writings, written during her 30s, Ward is keenly aware of her adolescent mind’s ability to turn toward God with intention. Through her memorial reconstructions, she explicitly figures herself as occupying and owning the stage of girlhood that extended from puberty to marriage — using it to enact a particular kind of cultural memory about English Catholicism while projecting hopes for its future.

This chapter explores the competing memories about the transmission of Sir Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the penitential garment he wore beneath his clothing for most of his adult life – the object’s significance to More’s descendants, and its devotional and memorial function within the religious communities they founded or patronised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the hair-shirt story are two Margarets: his blood daughter, Margaret Roper (1505–44), and his adopted ward, Margaret Giggs (1508–70). Different historical accounts claim each Margaret as uniquely aware of More’s asceticism, and that they each received the hair-shirt from him when he died. These claims suggest each woman had a superlative connection to More’s spirituality and beliefs. The hair-shirt symbolises More’s deep commitment to God throughout his political career and service to Henry VIII, a commitment that would cost him his life. More’s state execution both literally and figuratively exposed the hair-shirt and his largely private devotional practices. The hair-shirt became a new surface on which memories of the Reformation, and the construction of English Catholic identity have been formed from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Women as well as men from western Europe were drawn to the religious life in the Holy Land, and convents for women were an important feature of the Latin monastic landscape. The largest, St Anne’s and St Mary the Great in Jerusalem and Bethany, near Jerusalem, owned substantial landed property throughout the Christendom, and their abbesses could wield important political influence. St Anne’s and Bethany in particular had close associations with the Latin ruling dynasty of Jerusalem. This chapter examines the history of the women’s convents in the Crusader States and their fate after the loss of territory in the thirteenth century.

This contribution assesses the legal struggle of Juana Godínez to enforce the last will and testament of her owner that she remain within the cloisters of La Encarnación (a cloister for wealthy Limeña doncellas in the seventeenth century) as a free person. Juana had to fight to remain within La Encarnación as free. According to the terms of the will, if she were to leave the convent, she would have to pay 400 pesos for her freedom. Did her owner’s testament in fact grant Juana autonomy to choose how she would live her life after her death, or did the testament give her an option to remain within the cloister (the only home she had ever known) as a freedwoman? The fact that Juana “chose” to remain within the cloister while litigating her case, and that she refused the option of self- purchase prompts us to think of what freedom meant to enslaved women who belonged to religious communities. Juana’s case—and her alleged choices afford us an opportunity to think through freedom in the early modern slaveholding world.

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 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.

Turns to living holy people, with an emphasis of black women in convents in Peru, Mexico, and Spain, and the gender of holiness for black women