English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth century

Living spirituality

Laurence Lux-Sterritt

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781526110022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526110053
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

This study of English Benedictine nuns is based upon a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns' own collections of notes. It highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns' personal experiences, illustrating the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. It shows how Benedictine convents were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home, but also proposes a different approach to the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns' personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.

1

The contemplative ideal of dying to the world

[A]s you seem to bid adue to the world for ever (& to your selfe; in outward apearance) soe likewise, inwardly in your hart wholy turn & aply your selfe to the Love of God, Dying to your selfe, and to all worldly Loves & fears.¹

In her address to chapter in Paris, Prioress Justina Gascoigne voiced one of the universal precepts of early modern cloistered life: becoming a contemplative nun was to be dead to the world, to others and to oneself, to embrace life in the spiritual pursuit of God only. This ideal was shared by all contemplative Orders, who wished to dissociate themselves from the values of the secular world and build an altogether different frame of mind in which humility was valued over pride, obedience prized over self-reliance, poverty honoured over ostentatious affluence and chastity treasured over all sensuous delights. The desired separation from worldly values was such that it was often presented as a form of death of the nun’s old self. In the 1631 constitutions of the Sepulchrine Order, candidates were advised that they ‘must die to the world and to everything in order to live in God; they must bury their life in the life of Jesus Christ crucified, dead and buried’.² The Order had originally been founded to take care of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Their vocation and their charism were therefore closely linked to the idea of death, as they aspired to live a life which was buried in Christ’s own sacrifice and burial. But the image of the convent as a tomb was present in other contemplative Orders too, and the Benedictines endorsed it fully.

Upon becoming an enclosed Benedictine, a woman accepted the fact that she would neither dine with her friends and relatives, nor attend a dance, nor walk the city streets ever again. She would no longer look upon her own reflection in a mirror as she combed her long hair, nor delight in her beautiful clothes. She would become a stranger to friendships, to fashion, to entertainment, to sociability and to anything which was not of value to her spiritual advancement. This transformation was to be physical and public and also, most importantly, private, for without the necessary inward conversion of manners, there could be no benefit in outward displays of holiness.

Entering religion implied total commitment; it was a choice which, in theory, could not be reversed. Yet we shall see in this chapter that this perfect paradigm posed many challenges.³ Not all individuals enjoyed sufficient spiritual gifts to become so abstracted from human society; many remained in close contact with their families and friends. Enclosure was rarely so tight as to effect a perfectly hermetic separation between the convent and the world outside. Friendships could be maintained at the grate, that liminal space where information seeped into the monastery, and also leaked out. Regular epistolary exchanges breached the seal of enclosure and allowed ‘crumbs of news’ to be conveyed in and out of the convent.⁴ The early modern ideal of social death demanded great efforts of the women who were willing to die to the world, to others and to themselves in order to be alive in Christ only.

Dying to the world

Becoming a nun was a long process, the stages of which were meant to ensure the postulant’s aptitude for contemplative life. The observance of religious duties was highly demanding and took its toll even on the most zealous women; physical health and fitness were amongst the considerations which decided upon the suitability of a candidate. Selection was of the highest importance, and although this was true of all convents, it was felt even more keenly in English houses, since postulants undertook a perilous and expensive voyage and exposed their families to great risks in order to travel to the Continent. Given the particular conditions of English Catholicism and the exile of the convents, some sort of selection process must be undertaken before postulants travelled. At Brussels, Mary Francis Gawen complained that this situation made it more difficult to refuse new entrants into English convents than into Continental ones. She explained that, since postulants had demonstrated their desire to commit by braving both the perils of the journey across the Channel and the brunt of the law, Christian charity tended to urge the Sisters to take them in, although they might not be entirely suited to the contemplative ideal.⁵ For instance, the ability of novice Francis Parker was the object of much discussion amongst the nuns; some defended her as a suitable candidate, while others bemoaned her levity but also her infirmity which, they argued, impeded the perfection of her religious observance and would be a heavy burden upon the other Sisters. Upon the community’s request, the archbishop sent a representative to examine Parker and test her vocation; eventually she became a professed nun at Brussels, after the chapter had taken a vote on the matter.

Parker was not the only novice to cause problems. Margery Cotton was a similar case, also at Brussels. The votes cast by the choir nuns show that although most agreed to Cotton, some only timidly ‘inclined’ towards her admission, whilst others confessed to ‘difficulties’ in accepting the novice. They tentatively suggested that her constancy and suitability should be tested further. Some opposed her most categorically, arguing that a prospective nun had to be equal to the task spiritually, morally and physically, which they did not believe she was.⁶ Additional factors complicated the debate. As mistress of the novices, Ursula Hewick wrote in October 1624 to inform the archbishop that Cotton had told her she liked neither the abbess nor the convent, and that she prayed God not to be accepted. Although there is no record of any initial reluctance, she had come to conceive a strong dislike for the religious life, which Hewick feared would be the cause of much trouble if her profession went ahead as planned, on 10 November 1624.⁷ The novice was therefore put on probation, but by February 1625, Hewick still portrayed her as a troublesome novice who displayed neither obedience nor humility. She warned that such a young woman would be a ‘very irksome’ element of the community.⁸ In March 1625, the new mistress of novices, Martha Colford, wrote that she found Cotton much improved outwardly, although she doubted the sincerity of her apparent reform of manners.⁹ Anne Ingleby wrote to the archbishop and requested that Cotton be ‘verie searously examined before she bee permitted to make her Holy vowes and profession among us’.¹⁰ She feared Cotton’s uncharitable attitude would bring turmoil to the community; worse still, she suspected that she might be dabbling in the dark arts. Cotton eventually improved and several Sisters reported upon her efforts to adjust her attitude to the standards expected of a dutiful nun, but she nonetheless left the convent before her profession.

When the process ran smoothly, the prospective religious spent a period of trial as a postulant; her entry was to be approved by the vote of the choir nuns, who alone had a voice in chapter. If she was accepted, the clothing ceremony bestowed the white veil upon the postulant, who then became a novice. After a minimum of one year, if she was deemed suited to the vocation, she then proceeded to profession and received the black veil she would wear for the rest of her life. The clothing ceremony, which marked the passage of a postulant from her secular status to her new religious status as a novice, was the first symbolic step towards her social death to the world. The ceremonial book of the Paris Benedictines shows that, after her trial period, the postulant was physically handed back to secular life by the novice mistress, the prioress and her two assistants, who returned her to her parents at the cloister gate. The prioress said to them: ‘I give you back your daughter, she is free to remain in the world or to embrace Holy Religion.’ The postulant then walked through the city streets to the main entrance of the church; this was the last time she would be seen outside with her relatives, and the last time she entered her church through its main doors. Once given away to the officiant, she was transferred into the care of the prioress. During the ceremony, she was stripped of the secular garments of an ‘honest and modest demoiselle’, to be given her new religious habit, her scapular, her belt and the white veil of a novice.¹¹ She also received a breviary, a rosary and a crucifix.

The ceremonial of the Pontoise community shows how, during this public ceremony, the postulant went through a symbolic transformation, shedding her lay attributes to don the new appearance of a nun, thereby signalling her changed nature. After the blessing of the religious habit, and before the postulant was allowed to put it on, the priest likened the secular state to ignoble slavery and prayed to God: ‘O God Almighty and eternal, be kind towards our sins and purify your servant from the slavery of the secular dress; may she eternally enjoy your grace.’ He then addressed the postulant, urging her to abandon her secular self: ‘May the Lord strip you of the old man born from the flesh, and of his actions, so that you may take on a new spirit.’¹² When she received the crucifix symbolising Christ’s death for her salvation, the new novice was required to undertake a spiritual imitatio Christi and be ‘crucified to the world’, in order to overcome its vanities.¹³ At the end of the clothing ceremony, the novice left the church through the convent grille; accompanied by a procession of her new Sisters in religion, she entered the cloister, never to leave again.¹⁴ Her social death was finalised during her profession, when she received the black veil as ‘a mark of holy mortification’.¹⁵

But even the most ardent zeal could dampen if the individual found herself surrounded by a tepid or even slack community. In order to achieve collective detachment from the world and its pleasures, religious women were helped by a vast corpus of clerical writings providing guidance and support. In such prescriptive literature, secular preoccupations were usually depicted as so many traps for the virtuous soul. The Cambrai community heard a sermon ‘On the vanity and dangers of the World’, painting the world in the darkest colours, as:

an abode of corruption and darkness where Jesus Christ is not known, [...] where his laws are violated with impunity, where the contagious air which is breathed carries corruption with it even to the inmost recesses of the heart [...] where virtue finds only contradictions or snares, where in a word, there is nothing according to the expression of Scripture, but malice, corruption, concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, and luxury of life.¹⁶

The sermon resonated with the nuns’ preoccupations, and they decided to keep a copy of it for their own use. The theme of ‘corruption’ was strong, and the word was repeated three times in a short paragraph. Worldly values were associated with decay; like the poisonous fumes emanating from a rotting corpse, they contaminated the very air. The text continued in the same vein, showing lay society as a place of perdition which women with a religious vocation should leave at the earliest opportunity, for their own good: ‘the world is an abode of perpetual agitation, a school of vanity, a labyrinth of lies and errors, and land barren in sweetness and consolations, an ocean of bitterness and tears’. In this description, spiritual pursuits and worldly preoccupations appeared as incompatible. The author implied that individuals had to make a choice, since it was impossible ‘to serve at the same time two masters’. Spiritual fulfilment was to be found only in separation from the world; those who chose to remain in it ‘must absolutely renounce the love of God’. Conversely, when a woman entered religious life,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on transcription and translation
• List of nuns cited
• Brief notes on Benedictine convents in exile
• Brief notes on the main archives used
• Introduction
• 1 The contemplative ideal of dying to the world
• 2 When spiritual and secular families overlap
• 3 The secular concerns of contemplatives
• 4 The missionary spirit of enclosed nuns
• 5 Taming worldly emotions and appetites
• 6 Divine love, an emotional panacea?
• 7 What place for the senses in contemplative life?
• 8 Illness, death and beyond: the body as witness
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index