Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Book Culture

FAIN: FT-59631-12

Jenna Duggan Lay
Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA 18015-3027)

Beyond the Cloister establishes the influence--both actual and imaginative--of Catholic women on the development of English literary history. Readings of texts by authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne reveal how Catholic women's interventions into literary and political culture have been overshadowed by misperceptions fostered in Protestant pamphlets and perpetuated in literary criticism. I offer a corrective to this tendency by investigating the relationship between canonical literature and the books and manuscripts written by nuns and recusant women, thereby challenging narratives that treat early modern English literature as the product of a distinctively Protestant sensibility. In demonstrating how female Catholicism shaped English culture after the Reformation, Beyond the Cloister suggests that literary forms and practices are essential to understanding the interplay of gender, religion, and politics in a range of historical periods and humanities disciplines.

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Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture (Book)
Title: Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture
Author: Jenna Lay
Abstract: Representations of Catholic women appear with surprising frequency in the literature of post-Reformation England. Playwrights and poets from William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell invoke the figure of the nun to powerful and often perplexing effect, and works that never directly address female Catholicism, such as Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, share a discourse with contemporary debates regarding the status of recusant women. Catholic Englishwomen, whether living in convents on the European continent or as recusants in their own country, contributed to these debates, but even as their writings addressed the central religious and political issues of their time, their contributions were effaced and now are largely forgotten. Exploring the writings of Catholic women in conversation with those of Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe, Donne, and other canonical authors, Beyond the Cloister shows that nuns and recusants were centrally important to the development of English literature. The defining narratives of early modern England cast nuns as the relics of an unenlightened past and equated Catholic femininity with the dangerous charms of the Whore of Babylon. With careful attention to literary figurations of Catholic femininity and to the vibrant manuscript culture in the English convents, Jenna Lay reveals a far more complex reality. Through their use of tropes, figures, generic patterns, and literary allusions, Catholic women produced politically incendiary and rhetorically powerful lyrics, prayers, polemics, and hagiographies. Drawing on the insights of religious studies, historical formalism, and feminist criticism, Beyond the Cloister offers a reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15580.html
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-0-8122-483

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