English Convents In Catholic Europe C 1600 1800

Re-orientates our understanding of English convents in exile towards Catholic Europe, contextualizing the convents within the transnational Church.

In 1598, the first English convent to be founded since the dissolution of the monasteries was established in Brussels, followed by a further twenty-one foundations, which all self-identified as English institutions in Catholic Europe. Around four thousand women entered these religious houses over the following two centuries. This book highlights the significance of the English convents as part of, and contributors to, national and European Catholic culture. Covering the whole exile period and making extensive use of rarely consulted archive material, James E. Kelly situates the English Catholic experience within the wider context of the Catholic Reformation and Catholic Europe. He thus transforms our understanding of the convents, stressing that they were not isolated but were, in fact, an integral part of the transnational Church which transcended national boundaries. The original and immersive structure takes the reader through the experience of being a nun, from entry into the convent, to day-to-day life in enclosure, how the enterprise was funded, as well as their wider place within the Catholic world.

In 1598, the first English convent to be founded since the dissolution of the monasteries was established in Brussels, followed by a further twenty-one foundations, which all self-identified as English institutions in Catholic Europe. Around four thousand women entered these religious houses over the following two centuries. This book highlights the significance of the English convents as part of, and contributors to, national and European Catholic culture. Covering the whole exile period and making extensive use of rarely consulted archive material, James E. Kelly situates the English Catholic experience within the wider context of the Catholic Reformation and Catholic Europe. He thus transforms our understanding of the convents, stressing that they were not isolated but were, in fact, an integral part of the transnational Church which transcended national boundaries. The original and immersive structure takes the reader through the experience of being a nun, from entry into the convent, to day-to-day life in enclosure, how the enterprise was funded, as well as their wider place within the Catholic world.

Revised and extended print edition of online database Who Were The Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in Exile 1600-1800 (https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk), covering around 4100 nuns. During this period Catholics were prevented by law from practising their faith in England. In response, 21 convents were founded in northern France and southern Flanders by and for English women, who saw it as their mission to preserve English Catholicism, predominantly through education in their schools, and by example. The book contains an Appendix on CD containing 303 annotated genealogical charts detailing the family connections between the women, much of which is based on new research using Wills as a source not only for correct genealogy but also to show how their families supported both their daughters and their sons in their often perilous religious lives.

Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange between England and Mainland Europe, c. 1580–1789: ‘The World is our House’? gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the Jesuit English Mission’s wider impact within the Society and early modern European Catholicism.

In her ground-breaking new study, Katie Bugyis offers a new history of communities of Benedictine nuns in England from 900 to 1225. By applying innovative paleographical, codicological, and textual analyses to their surviving liturgical books, Bugyis recovers a treasure trove of unexamined evidence for understanding these women's lives and the liturgical and pastoral ministries they performed. She examines the duties and responsibilities of their chief monastic officers--abbesses, prioresses, cantors, and sacristans--highlighting three of the ministries vital to their practice-liturgically reading the gospel, hearing confessions, and offering intercessory prayers for others. Where previous scholarship has argued that the various reforms of the central Middle Ages effectively relegated nuns to complete dependency on the sacramental ministrations of priests, Bugyis shows that, in fact, these women continued to exercise primary control over their spiritual care. Essential to this argument is the discovery that the production of the liturgical books used in these communities was carried out by female scribes, copyists, correctors, and creators of texts, attesting to the agency and creativity that nuns exercised in the care they extended to themselves and those who sought their hospitality, counsel, instruction, healing, forgiveness, and intercession.

To understand Calvin’s Reformed theology one must see his early context. Eleven scholars have joined in this volume to explore the people, movements, politics, education and controversies that shaped the young man Calvin into the reformer he would become.