Review of 'English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century'

When an English nun entered a convent in exile in the 17th century, she was expected to leave behind once and for all ‘the world, the flesh, the divill’. Until recently, that enclosure was one of the excuses for the banishment of nuns from historical research, reducing them to a faceless, agentless mass. The two other heads of the ‘three-headed Cerberus’ guarding the entrance into historiography, as Laurence Lux-Sterritt points out in English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century (p. 252), are exile and sex. Though both exile and sex have long been an important topic for historians of the early modern period – see, for example, Nicholas Terpstra’s Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World , the edited volume Religious Diaspora in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile and Merry Wiesner-Hanks’ Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (1) – it is the combination of the three ‘heads’ that has warranted historiographical amnesia concerning English nuns in exile. Gabriel Glickman omits the English convents entirely in The English Catholic Community, 1689–1745. Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge, 2009).(2) Brian C. Lockey’s Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans (3), for example, examines British Catholic and royalist exiles as cosmopolitans, while studies like Katy Gibbons’ English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (4) have paved the way for a history of English Catholic exiles in particular.