English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood (The New Middle Ages) [1st ed. 2022] 9783031009167, 9783031009174, 3031009169

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700 New Kingdoms of Womanhood Alexandra Verini

The New Middle Ages Series Editor Bonnie Wheeler English and Medieval Studies Southern Methodist University Dallas, TX, USA

The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections. More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14239

Alexandra Verini

English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700 New Kingdoms of Womanhood

Alexandra Verini Ashoka University Sonipat, Haryana, India

ISSN 2945-5936     ISSN 2945-5944 (electronic) The New Middle Ages ISBN 978-3-031-00916-7    ISBN 978-3-031-00917-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Historic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of nearly ten years of thinking, reading, writing, and talking. There are, therefore, many people to thank. My dissertation advisors at UCLA, Chris Chism and Lowell Gallagher, along with my committee members Sarah Kareem, Eleanor Kaufman, and Charlene Villaseñor Black, provided invaluable support as I worked on the ideas that would turn into this book. I especially want to thank Chris for our many discussions about medieval friendship and for her careful reading and revision of my prose. I want to thank Lowell for suggesting much of the critical theory that undergirds this book and for introducing me to Mary Ward, who remains central to my understanding of spiritual utopia. During my time at UCLA, my research was supported by the Dickson Fellowship from the Art History Department and by grants from the English Department, which enabled me to conduct essential archival research. For the opportunity to conduct this research, I am also deeply indebted to archivists at Exeter University, particularly Annie Price, for their hospitality and permission to read manuscripts from Syon Abbey. I would equally like to thank the archivists at Arundel Castle for welcoming me during my visit to view the Syon manuscript and for giving me permission to reproduce some images from this manuscript. I am grateful to the sisters of the Congregatio Jesu in Augsburg for their generosity in allowing me to view Mary Ward’s Painted Life and their permission to reproduce images from the Painted Life. The final shaping of this book was completed during the first year of the pandemic. I want to thank Clara Feldmanstern, my best friend of 20 years, for phone calls that lifted my spirits during that time and for her v

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painstaking copy editing. My dear friends “at the end of the mind,” Nick Morgan and Peter Murray, helped me stay sane with daily WhatsApp messages and provided valuable feedback on sections of this book. Boyda Johnstone, my sister medievalist, has always cheered me on and offered vibrant intellectual companionship. Yashaswini Chanda’s intellectual generosity and humor not only saw me through the last two years of this project but also inspired me to think it might be possible to write again. My friends, Gillian Adler, Angelina del Balzo, and Crescent Rainwater were vital pillars of academic and emotional support for this project. My colleagues in the junior faculty writing group at Ashoka have provided insightful feedback and encouragement. I especially want to thank Alex Phillips and Mali Skotheim for their comments on my revisions. Many thanks are also due to my department chair, Gil Harris, for his mentorship throughout my time at Ashoka. Appreciation goes to my research assistant Shatakshi Whorra, who has helped with numerous research and proofing aspects of this book. During these last two years of writing, Sarah Moran and Terry Prendergast have offered motivation and advice from the other side of the world. Deep gratitude is due to Allie Troyanos and Bonnie Wheeler for taking this book onboard and for overseeing a series that imagines a more expansive Middle Ages. I also want to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided me with insightful feedback on the manuscript. My mother, who introduced me to the wonders of the Middle Ages, has been endlessly supportive of my eccentric academic journey. For this and much more, I am truly grateful. Finally, Aagman Baury has been with me through the last stages of this book, cheering me on with early morning discussions about utopia and late-night episodes of Poirot. I give him all my love and thanks.

Praise for English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700 “In English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700 Alexandra Verini brings feminist theory to the study of utopianism, charting a wholly new trajectory of utopian thought from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century. Her book boldly argues for a new archive of utopian texts, and she boldly argues for the centrality of women and gender thinking to the history of utopian thought. Her book alters not only the history of utopianism as it is currently conceived, but if charts exciting new directions for future study—directions that install a consideration of women and gender at their center.” —Karma Lochrie, Indiana University “English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700 deftly unites feminist, theological, material, and utopian theoretical approaches to the study of English women’s lives and literature within and beyond medieval and early modern convents. Verini successfully argues for a ‘rhizomatic rather than linear genealogical’ approach to understanding convents as ‘space[s] of utopian possibility’ for their inhabitants, and clearly demonstrates how these institutions and their writing influenced secular women’s writing and creation of all-female communities.” —Victoria Van Hyning, University of Maryland

Contents

1 Introduction: Cities of Women–A New History of Utopia  1 2 Mirrors of Our Lady: Utopia in the Medieval Convent 33 3 These  Most Afflicted Sisters: Old and New Futures in Early Modern English Convents 69 4 Not  Yet: Aspirational Women’s Communities Beyond the Convent115 5 Convents of Pleasure: English Women’s Literary Utopias151 Works Cited191 Index219

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Abbreviations

EETS ELH MED PMLA SEL

Early English Text Society. EETS volumes are designated as o.s. (original series), e.s. (extra series), or s.s. (supplementary series). English Literary History Middle English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Studies in English Literature

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

The Myroure of Oure Lady (STC 17542), Frontispiece, Printed by Richard Fawkes, London 1530, published with the permission of The British Library A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Pilgrimage, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Expelled from London, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Prayer for His Majesty, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library Little Gidding Houghton Concordance, p. 80, seq. 116, Harvard University Library, Public domain The Painted Life, image 9, Congregatio Jesu, Augsburg, published with the permission of the Zentrum Maria Ward

50 87 96 100 129 136

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Cities of Women–A New History of Utopia

At the opening of Margaret Cavendish’s (1623–1673) closet drama The Convent of Pleasure (1668), the protagonist Lady Happy boldly declares: I will take so many Noble Persons of my own Sex as my Estate will plentifully maintain, such whose Births are greater than their Fortunes, and are resolv’d to live a single life, and vow Virginity. With these I mean to live incloister’d with all the delights and pleasures that are allowable and lawful; My Cloister shall not be a Cloister of restraint but a place for freedom, not to vex the Senses but to please them. (220)1

Lady Happy here frames her cloister as a utopian retreat for women seeking to avoid the marriage market using pairs of synonyms—“single life”/“virginity”; “delights”/“pleasures”; “allowable”/“lawful.” These pairings of near but not exact synonyms recall the clerical doublets of Christine de Pizan’s utopian work Le livre de la cité des dames (1405), which Margaret Ferguson reads as introducing “conceptual alternatives” that create an “area of ambiguity” between two terms.2 In Lady Happy’s declaration, such doublets proliferate the infinite possibilities and pleasures to be found in the convent. At the same time, these pairings open up a space of productive ambiguity: Do we read the terms as describing one quality or two? Might a woman, for instance, lead a single life without being a virgin? Might some acts be allowable but not lawful? These linguistic alternatives signal the conceptual alternatives that convent life © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4_1

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could offer its inhabitants, since enclosure gave women access to possibilities outside patriarchal society. The beginning of The Convent of Pleasure thus presents a women’s separatist utopia that challenges the status quo. And yet, this utopia is also a precarious one. The uncertain future of this convent is conveyed in Lady Happy’s subsequent pairing of antonyms. In the final sentence of her opening speech, she describes her convent not as a place of “restraint” but a site of “freedom” that will serve “not to vex the Senses but to please them.” While this contrast between restraint and freedom emphasizes the liberation that Lady Happy’s cloister will offer its inhabitants, it also raises the possibility that a cloister might restrain women and vex the senses. This prefacing of the convents’ pleasures with their opposites wedges a note of discord into the ideal vision, suggesting how easily an idea might turn into its inverse, how easily it might fail. Indeed, the end of the play, as the cloister closes and Lady Happy abandons her single life to marry a prince (who came to the convent disguised as a princess), follows through on this possibility of failure. Lady Happy’s description of her future cloister, therefore, previews both the potential of convent life to liberate women and the precarious nature of such a space.3 As this book will argue, both of these dimensions—abundant possibility and potential failure—were present in real-world medieval and early modern convents. These spaces generated a utopianism that was characterized by the desire for an uncertain future and that influenced the earliest women writers of fictional utopias. Convents had an automatic link to utopia because they were the only spaces in the medieval and early modern world in which women mostly  ruled themselves, offering unprecedented possibilities for female governance at a time when women were not afforded political power. While the Church’s requirement that nuns be enclosed was delimiting, removal from the world also enabled many nuns in convents to operate outside gender norms, performing the kinds of conceptual alternatives, such as avoidance of marriage, that we find in Lady Happy’s speech. While the women in these protected spaces were expected to conform to conventions of spiritual femininity, such as chastity, meekness, and obedience, in reality, they also often transgressed such norms and unsettled the expectation that women were to be subservient to men. In this way, cloistered communities operated as utopias within ideology: they resided within the patriarchal structure of the Church, but they could also evade patriarchy by offering women independent spiritual authority. As recent scholarship has shown, women in these enclosed spaces actively intervened in external

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affairs, defying the traditional relegation of women to the private sphere. Lady Happy’s image of the cloister as a space in which women exercised unusual forms of freedom was, therefore, not unique but rather continuous with the history of real-world convents. This book draws on the etymological definition of utopia as a “good place that is nowhere,” based on Thomas More’s (1478–1535) neologism (formed from ou [“no”] and topos [“place”] and punning on eu [“good”]), as well as on more recent theoretical understandings of utopia as a means of thinking otherwise. I find that medieval and early modern women’s writings and visual culture emerging from and inspired by convents produced a parallel utopian way of thinking that, different from traditional views of utopia, attends to and reshapes the past. Such a notion of utopia is continuous with Renaissance fictional narratives of travel to unknown islands—like More’s island Utopia, convents were set off from the world. However, these real-world women’s communities also differed from the largely male-authored fictional utopias of their day: in their use of religious life as a vehicle for the contemplation of worldly futures, they deviated from utopia’s conventional association with the secular and the modern. Moreover, because of their religious orientation, medieval and early modern women’s religious communities and the fictions based on them were invested in reworking rather than jettisoning tradition and were also more directed toward the future than the static fictional worlds of their male contemporaries. Women’s religious communities produced a form of thought that, in its assemblage of disparate traditions from the past that often work at cross purposes, embraced its own potential for failure while also reveling in the intersubjective possibilities of desire. By drawing from a textual and ideological heritage that actively discouraged female agency, religious women and the women authors who followed them mobilized a model of utopia that embraced contradiction and often held in balance competing desires rather than aspiring toward uniform perfection. While convent communities across Europe might be read as utopian since they enabled women to defy patriarchal programs, after the Reformation, utopianism became vital for English Catholic women in particular. After Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, the English convents that gradually established themselves on the Continent served as repositories of nostalgia for Catholicism and as models of female political agency.4 Such spaces were not only oriented toward a future in heaven, as is often assumed of religious communities, but were also directed toward a worldly future since they sought to revive England’s Catholic past. Given

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this historical context, English convents and the English women’s communities that emulated convent life, such as Little Gidding and Mary Ward’s Society, became particularly rich sites of utopian thought and are the focus of this book. Following the removal of convents from English soil, early modern Protestant English women writers were apt to see the convent as “a good place that is nowhere” and drew on memories of the medieval convent to imagine their own utopias. In the sections of this introduction that follow, I situate this book’s argument within trans-­ historical scholarly conversations surrounding utopia to demonstrate how pairing women’s spiritual communities with utopia both sheds light on the aspirations of these communities and offers a broader understanding of utopia.

The History of Utopia In arguing for the vital contributions of medieval and early modern women’s spiritual communities to utopian thought, this book at once builds on and unsettles existing histories of utopia, which largely find their origins in More’s Utopia and extend to other fictional texts that drew on the trope of a traveler who arrives in an ideal society. More’s idea of utopia as a perfect but unlocatable place was, to some degree, a product of its time. During the English Renaissance, the power of the Church was receding, allowing writers the freedom to imagine an ideal place on earth rather than in heaven. At the same time, global explorations were stirring the imaginations of Europeans. Such circumstances doubtlessly influenced More’s depictions of the well-governed island that is discovered by the fictional character Hythloday, who was, according to the narrative, part of Amerigo Vespucci’s voyages to the New World. In the literary genre that More established, utopia is an ideal place removed from the real world that also contains a sense of paradox pointing to its impossibility. Literary histories of the utopia genre by Robert Applebaum, Amy Boesky, Chris Ferns, and Marina Leslie, as well as surveys of utopian writing like Frank and Fritzie Manuels’ Utopian Thought in the Western World, tend to focus on the most canonical works of the early modern period and to see utopia as a relatively narrow genre, which consists of representations of seemingly perfect worlds that idealize organization.5 While More’s Utopia was influenced by the cultural currents of the Renaissance, the idea of a good and unattainable place existed long before the sixteenth century in all parts of the globe. Imagined societies that improve upon the present-day world appear in works such as Plato’s

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Republic and Augustine’s The City of God, in the Garden of Eden in the Bible, in Ravidas’s Begumpura, and in the mythical Tibetan idea of Shambhala. Such classical and medieval examples of utopia do not contain the satire of More’s Utopia, but they anticipate his sense of a place that corrects the flaws of the present-day world. As Karma Lochrie writes of medieval utopias such as The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Piers Plowman, utopia, when understood in this broader sense, is a “heuristic device that opposes our habits of thinking and ideologies with the intimation of the possibility that things could be different.”6 The present book’s recovery of utopianism within women’s religious communities is, therefore, continuous both with traditional understandings of utopia as an ideal fictional space that improves upon the outside world and with more expansive notions of a utopia that exists beyond the literary. My approach is distinctive, however, since I locate utopia within women’s religious communities. To further this more expansive sense of utopia, I draw on critical theories of utopia, particularly those of Ernst Bloch, Louis Marin, Ruth Levitas, Fredric Jameson, and José Esteban Muñoz, to define utopia as oriented toward a future—rather than as a blueprint for a perfect society or a specific literary genre—that defamiliarizes the present. Much of this more capacious thinking about utopia has been inspired by Bloch, a Marxist scholar who deviated from Marx and Engel’s dismissal of utopianism and coined the term “utopian function” to characterize a desire for “future possibilities of being different and better,” which is present in everything from literature to architecture and the circus.7 Turning away from exclusive associations of utopia with a literary genre or even with planned communities, Bloch includes practices like alchemy, art, and especially music within the purview of utopia. Limiting utopia to a literary genre is for him “like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed.”8 In his writing on utopia, he frequently refers to the “not yet,” by which he means a search or desire for something better. His utopianism resists the teleological closure of an apocalyptic or utopian ideal in favor of an unfinished, aspirational present. Following Bloch’s work, utopia studies has become an expansive field, spanning the disciplines of literary studies, political theory, urban planning, and sociology. Such growth has led to increasingly nuanced and conceptual ideas of utopia that exceed the genre. The sociologist Levitas, for instance, sees utopia as defined by the desire for something different, while science fiction scholar Tom Moylan understands utopia as grounded in estrangement and defamiliarization of

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values that we take for granted.9 For Muñoz, utopia consists of queer worldmaking that rejects the here and now and insists on the “potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”10 Such scholars understand utopia not as a product but as a process, a way of working toward a different world. Medieval and early modern women’s spiritual utopias are aligned with these more recent theories that view utopia as the desire for a different future. Indeed, they radiate a sense of futurity that only appears in fictional utopias in the nineteenth century. The utopianism that emerges from within women’s spiritual communities, however, also differs from the commonplace association of utopia with newness; instead, early women’s utopian practices and visions often work within existing paradigms, reshaping rather than entirely rejecting the past to forge new futures. This understanding of utopia as a framework that challenges the status quo rather than as a specific place or genre allows me to locate utopian thought both in real-world women’s communities and in women’s fiction that might not obviously be categorized as utopian.

Convents, Women, and Utopia Despite many references to convents in women’s fictional utopias, from Cavendish’s The Convent Pleasure (1668) and Sarah Scott’s (1720–1795) A Description of Millenium Hall (1762) to Toni Morrison’s (1931–2019) Paradise (1997), women’s religious communities have largely not been read as utopias. In fact, if anything, works like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale align women’s collective spiritual life with the dystopian oppression of women’s agency. If the modern view of the convent is one of repressed sexuality, many late medieval and early modern commentators labeled female monasteries as sites of debauchery and lasciviousness. The prioress from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) shows signs of sexual promiscuity while the anonymous fifteenth-century satirical poem “Why Can’t I Be a Nun” portrays an imagined convent as a place full of discord, where nuns personify the sins of Pride, Hypocrisy, and Sloth. Thomas Robinson’s polemical pamphlet on Lisbon’s Syon Abbey describes the sisters as “silly seduced women” “whose unchaste practices…should make the Christian Reader blush,” and Thomas Goad’s The Friars’ Chronicle (1623) portrays nunneries as places where “a Gentlewoman taken in Adulterie, and so divorced” might go.11 From past to present, convents have often been seen as dystopian spaces for women.12

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The omission of convents from histories of utopia stems not only from their frequent association with dystopia but also from the more general absence of women in canonical utopias.13 Although utopia became a vital genre for feminist thought starting in the eighteenth century, early modern fictional utopias were largely dependent on a binary between a male adventurer and a penetrable feminized land. As Lee Cullen Khanna observes, More’s Utopia is feminized by its crescent shape “like to the new moon,” associating it with Artemis, the Greek goddess of virginity and of the moon. The island is overshadowed by a phallic rock and a man-made tower rising above.14 Voyagers who wish to attain the island must penetrate the horns of the crescent. This portrayal of a feminized island susceptible to penetration also appears in subsequent canonical literary utopias: in Sir Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626), Bensalem is “a good haven, being the port of a fair city.”15 This haven is guarded against penetration by phallic weapons: “we saw divers of the people, with bastons in their hands (as it were) forbidding us to land.”16 Women have little status within such worlds. Male sovereigns rule More’s Utopia, whereas wives are “ministers to their husbands.”17 Solomon’s House in New Atlantis contains no women at all. In traditional literary history, therefore, utopian lands are feminized, but women are neither creators nor inhabitants. Jean Baudrillard sums up this dichotomy when he writes, “It is that naïve creature, man, who exudes utopias, one of these being precisely woman. The latter, being a living utopia, has no need to produce any.”18 This absence of women in canonical early modern utopias is echoed by scholarship. No women authors are discussed in the Manuels’ survey nor in Miriam Eliav-Feldon’s Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance, 1516–1630.19 Cavendish is the only female author discussed in Amy Boesky’s Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England and in Marina Leslie’s Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History and the only pre-eighteenth-century author cited in Jane Donawerth’s edited volume Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference. Medieval and early modern women’s utopias, therefore, have collectively occupied a “no place” within utopia studies. In recent decades, however, scholars of the English early modern period, such as Kate Lilley, Nicole Pohl, and Oddvar Holmesland, have begun to consider women’s active roles in utopian thought before the eighteenth century.20 They have shown how writers like Cavendish, Aphra Behn (1640–1689), Katherine Philips (1632–1664), and Aemelia Lanyer (1569–1645) imagined alternative spaces that challenged classical models

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of utopia. My book contributes to and extends such revelations by tracing a history of women’s utopian thought that dates back to medieval real-­ world convents and percolates outward to fictional texts. By showing how convents served as real and imaginary spaces in which to project desires for the future, I further unsettle the assumption that women had “no need” to create utopias. Indeed, I argue that given their marginalized situation within medieval and early modern society, women had all the more need to imagine different and better ways of being.

Religion and Utopia The fact that the early modern literary genre of utopia excluded women, particularly nuns, is one factor behind the exclusion of convents from histories of utopia; the marginalization of religious thought within the utopian discourse is another. Aside from a passing mention of monastic life in the Manuels’ Utopian Thought in the Western World, most theorists consider religion to be antithetical to utopia’s mission to create a better world. Religion is presumed to be preoccupied with the next world rather than this one.21 Kumar Krishna exemplifies this expectation when he argues that there is a fundamental contradiction between the notions of paradise in religious thought and utopia: “Religion typically has an other-worldly concern; utopia’s interest is in this world.”22 In her study of medieval utopias, Lochrie does not include apocalyptic and religious mysticism because “those sites represent what we usually consider to be the stranded back formations of early modern utopianism—stranded because of their failure to imagine utopia in this world.”23 Because so many records by or about medieval and early women concern religious life—monasteries being one of the primary places in which women were able to write—women’s experiences are often excluded from histories of utopia. And yet, religious life was integral to utopia. Jameson has identified More’s own early experiences in a monastery as evidence of his enthusiasm for the  religious form of life that was soon to be destroyed by Henry VIII.24 Indeed, More’s utopia bears a close resemblance to monasticism with its collective meals, common property, and dedication to virtue.25 More’s utopia may also have been influenced by Augustine’s City of God. Just as Augustine’s civitas terrena stands in parodic and mimetic relation to the civitas dei, utopia, with its puns and wordplay, is at once a parody of an ideal and an attempt to imagine that ideal.26 Religion continued to influence the utopia genre after More, often in real-world rather than fictional settings. Puritan utopias, for instance, envisioned the displaced

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populations of early modern Europe and North America as “the raw materials for an act of millennial poiesis.”27 Planned utopian communities such as Brook Farm in nineteenth-century Massachusetts were organized around religious philosophies.28 Octavia Butler’s Earthseed, a fictional religion based on the belief that “God is Change” in The Parable of the Sower (1993) and The Parable of the Talents (1998), draws from real-world religious tradition. Far from antithetical to utopia, religion proves to be one of its main catalysts, even if it often remains hidden within theoretical discourse. In this book, I make explicit the understated presence of medieval religious life in utopian thought by arguing that female monasticism was a vibrant site for utopia. This association emerges not because women’s communities are utopian in any essentialist way, but because the social circumstances of their lives within the Catholic Church forced them to chart alternative possibilities: being barred from positions of clerical authority, women religious had all the more motivation to imagine different paths to self-fulfillment and agency. As Janice Raymond writes, with the advent of Christianity’s marginalization of women, the convent “became the refuge of many women who still craved this power and independence. It offered opportunities undreamed of and unactualized by most women during these times.”29 Eileen Power, one of  the earliest scholars to chart a history of English women’s monasticism, showed how convents used their capacity as refuges to access education that would otherwise be denied to women.30 These spaces served as bastions of women’s learning and self-governance at a time when women were otherwise denied such rights. A further instrumental factor in monastic women’s aptitude for imagining utopia was enclosure. Unlike monks, who worked in the world, nuns were required to remain within their cloister. This expectation, though not always followed in practice, was enforced by the Bull Periculoso of 1298 and later by the Council of Trent. The notion (even if not actuality—as scholars have shown medieval nuns frequently defied enclosure) of the convent as a space removed from the world anticipates the physical and conceptual situation of utopia, which was most often represented as an unlocatable island in early modern fictional texts.31 In More’s Utopia, for instance, Utopus conquers a piece of land and separates it from the continent by digging a trench to make an island; in Bacon’s New Atlantis Bensalem is a mythical island discovered by a European ship crew; in Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668), castaways are shipwrecked on an island in the southern hemisphere. The form of the island mirrors the concept of

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utopia itself: it is a “good place that is nowhere.” Cut off from the world, utopia does not readily admit outsiders, who might corrupt its ideals. Similar types of removal from the world are apparent in more recent planned utopias such as India’s experimental town Auroville. Isolation is, therefore, key to utopian programs. Medieval and early modern convents duplicate this isolation: their walls separated them from the world, just as the seas separated utopian islands from the mainland. While this separation was intended to allow nuns to remain virtuous and chaste, it also had the effect of allowing these women to live in ways that challenged the norms of the outside world. Just as utopians unsettled assumptions about how systems like property and religion should work, nuns inherently defamiliarized traditional associations of women with the domestic and instead charted paths toward women’s independent authority. Convents were, of course, still ruled by misogyny and often not idyllic places, but neither are utopias necessarily or even usually harmonious. Medieval and early modern convents, along with the writings inspired by these spaces, were utopian not because they were perfect but because they imagined alternatives to the present by privileging women’s bonds at a time when the culture was primarily invested in relationships between men. As Raymond observes, the convent was “a primary locus for the long-term institutionalization of female friendship under the aegis of sisterhood, a situation in which women spent their lives primarily with women, gave to women the largesse of their energy and attention, and formed powerful affective ties with each other.”32 The visualization of such relationships in the records of convents enabled a series of utopian practices and visions that influenced early secular feminist writers. While it is often assumed that religious communities exclusively contemplate the attainment of heaven, the chapters of this book demonstrate that Catholic religious women were actively engaged in running institutions and intervened in the politics of their own times, especially when Catholicism in England was suppressed. Hence, these communities, contrary to popular belief, were very much invested in this world in addition to the next. As the records from convents as well as from convent-inspired communities like the Anglican Little Gidding and Mary Ward’s Society demonstrate, religious women asserted their collective agency in myriad forms, and they made this agency central to the worldly futures towards which they aspired. Thus, because of their marginalized position, religious women were able to imagine alternatives to passive femininity and to take action to establish such alternative worlds through their writings.

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By framing women’s religious communities as prescient sites of utopianism, this book not only revises standard accounts of utopia as a genre but also nuances more recent accounts of women’s utopia, which are predominantly secular. Such histories often begin with Cavendish and trace the genre from women’s pedagogical utopias such as Mary Astell’s (1666–1731) Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Clara Reeve’s (1729–1807) Plans of Education (1792) to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s (1689–1762) portrayal of the hammam as a utopian female space in Turkish Embassy Letters (1763) and Scott’s bluestocking manifesto, Millenium Hall.33 Such standard histories of women’s utopia also include Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–1853), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860–1935) Herland (1905) as well as more recent science fiction writings by Octavia Butler (1947–2006), Marge Piercy (1936–), and Ursula K.  Le Guin (1929–2018). This genealogy of secular writers omits convents, which were the first separatist women’s communities in the western world. New Kingdoms not only recovers a missing chapter in the history of women’s utopianism but, by identifying female devotional community as a locus of utopia, revises conventional assumptions about the secularity of this intellectual tradition.

Bricolage Futures The utopianism that women’s religious communities mobilized was at once continuous and at odds with utopias produced in other settings. Convents and the women’s writings influenced by them resonate with other utopias in their visions of ideal futures that challenge present-day realities. Such futures range from the sheer possibility that women could wield independent authority to visions of a future return of Catholicism to England. However, given that women had historically been excluded from literary, religious, and intellectual discourses, these communities often found themselves drawing on misogynistic source material—religious rules, historical documents, literary genres, and theological ideas—to imagine futures that would include women. Operating within the patriarchal structure of the Catholic Church, they reused a past that had rejected them to imagine the future. Early women’s utopias thus offer urgent and self-conscious examples of utopia’s need to rework the past; they chart a utopianism that works within the limits of what is possible to imagine futures that also explodes those limits. To capture the way in which women’s spiritual communities and the literary utopias that they inspired both absorbed and reformed pre-­existing

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ideas, I draw on the notion of bricolage developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss refers to bricolage as the creation of mythical thought “by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited.”34 The “bricoleur,” whom Lévi-Strauss approximates to “the savage mind,” is “someone who works with his [sic] hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman.”35 A bricoleur “uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him,” putting pre-existing materials together to create something new.36 This process, in Lévi-Strauss’s view, is what constructs mythological narratives and is opposed to the work of the engineer, who approximates the “scientific mind” and who constructs the totality of a discourse from “raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.”37 In Jacques Derrida’s summation, bricolage is “the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined.”38 The elements that the bricoleur employs, therefore, “are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on their freedom of maneuver.”39 For a material instantiation of this practice, we might think about collage, a work created from clippings borrowed from elsewhere and assembled to create a “whole” picture. In such a process, if, for instance, an image of a pencil is repurposed to create a mouth, it nonetheless retains its previous identity as a pencil. So too, in more conceptual forms of bricolage, old ideas retain their previous meanings even as they come to signify in new contexts.40 Though emerging from the anthropological study of myth in tribal cultures, Lévi-Strauss’s work makes the broader point that signs may be used for purposes for which they were not intended, a process that results in discourses that may contain competing or contradicting ideas. This quality may, in fact, be true of any discourse. Derrida argues that the engineer is, in fact, a myth created by the bricoleur and that “every discourse is bricoleur.”41 As it emerges from the conversation between Lévi-Strauss and Derrida, the idea of bricolage generates a new way of thinking about systems and structures without falling into the trap of trying to build a new stable system out of the ruins of a deconstructed one. It offers a way to think without establishing a new center and makes possible alternative methods of putting ideas together within the limits of what is possible. Though bricolage has been deployed in many contexts, it has a particularly illuminating and largely unrecognized role within utopian thought. Utopias often present themselves as the products of engineering: they

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seem to be entirely new constructs that break with the past.42 However, the past has, in fact, always been vital to utopia. More’s Utopia itself was far from sui generis drawing as it did from earlier works like Plato’s Republic and Augustine’s City of God. As Jameson observes, “even a no-place must be put together out of already existing representations.”43 Constance Furey, one of very few scholars to link bricolage with a woman’s utopian vision, builds on Jameson’s point in her discussion of Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, which Furey identifies as a bricolage of “the biblical past and desire for a transcendent deity, for God and Christ.”44 As such a reading makes clear, despite its claims of novelty, utopia has a debt to the past. Bloch also understood the vital link between the past and utopia when he described a past that offers “figural traces of the future.”45 His work inspired Muñoz’s study of queer utopias, which calls for the use of “the past and the future as armaments to combat the devastating logic of the world of the here and now.”46 Muñoz’s theory of queer futurity draws on the past to critique the present, mobilizing this past to utopian ends.47 Lochrie, in her study of medieval utopia, is also inspired by queer theory’s recourse to the past, and she cites Elizabeth Grosz’s argument that the past acts as a “resource for overcoming the present” by enabling a “critique of the present” that allows a different future to emerge.48 In this line of thinking, utopia becomes a form of bricolage recycling: it is not as a completely new way of thinking but rather a reworking of what already exists.49 Muñoz’s reading of Frank O’Hara’s 1960 poem “Having a Coke with You” is an example of this dimension of utopia. In this poem, Muñoz wrote that the consumerist act of drinking coke is transformed into “a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality…Though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely the past and in its queer relationality promises a future.”50 Such a reading shows how utopia joins present, past, and future through intersubjectivity, drawing on different moments in time and putting together diverse discourses to create new ways of thinking— in this case, consumerism is reframed as queer relationality. While utopia draws on the past, it does not simply repeat the past; instead, it bricolates what has come before to forge a vision at once continuous and dissonant with that past. Louis Marin calls this process neutralization. For Marin, a utopia is a place between contraries: “It is the ‘zero degree’ of the dialectical synthesis of contraries. It edges its way in between the contraries and thus is the discursive expression of the neutral (defined as ‘neither one, nor the other’ of the contraries).”51 The contraries to which

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Marin is referring emerge from utopia’s liminal status between the old and the new: “More’s Utopia is neither England nor America, neither the Old nor the New World; it is the in-between of the contradiction at the beginning of the sixteenth century of the Old and New Worlds.”52 For Marin, a utopian text produces an image of another world by bringing together oppositional fields. As Phillip Wegner observes, this process equates to what scholars such as Darko Suvin have called the critical “estranging” work performed by utopias.53 Through this “neutralization,” which is itself a kind of bricolage, utopia “stages—sets in full view—an imaginary (or fictional) solution to the contradiction. It is the simulacrum of the synthesis.”54 But the utopic, a term Marin uses to refer to the idea of utopia before it becomes solidified in the utopian text, also retains contradictions: “Lighteninglike, before coming to a hard and fixed image in the utopic figure and ‘ideal’ representation, the other appears: limitless contradiction.”55 Neutralization then describes “the way the utopian text produces its image of ‘another world’ through a careful working up on the raw materials of the historical situation from which it emerges.”56 Due to this piecemeal process of creation, utopia does not constitute a totalizing project; rather, it “names the limits, the gap between two frontiers or two continents, the old and new worlds.”57 Rather than describing an already perfect world, utopia presents a history-in-formation that deconstructs the ideological parameters of one social situation in order to open up the space for something new.58 Lévi-Strauss’s notion of bricolage, though not generally paired with utopia, serves as a useful descriptor for this process: it helps conceptualize how utopia operates within and draws from existing discourses to create a vision that transcends those very discourses. Utopia, because of this bricolage formation, exists both within and without ideology, binding contradictory impulses. This embrace of contradiction has been noted by previous scholars of early modern literary utopias. Appelbaum writes that “the utopian visions of seventeenth-­ century writers both liberate and repress, both reconcile and alienate: …they try to articulate systems through which individuals may be more united with one another, but they do so by imagining totalities where stratification is all the more rigidly encoded.”59 In this reading, utopia reveals “through its textual structure the ideological organization by which it is itself caught.”60 Understanding utopia’s construction as a form of bricolage helps explain utopia’s capacity to contain oppositional impulses. In my study of convent-based utopias, I observe that these communities both reveal the ideological structures in which they are entrapped

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but also, unlike the literary utopias of which Appelbaum writes, take steps to move beyond these structures, imagining and enacting futures in which women play an active part. Women had a particularly urgent need for bricolage in building their utopias. Indeed, women had a need for utopia full stop. As Frances Bartkowski writes, “Thinking the not-yet is of particular importance for feminists, as it is here that freedom and necessity meet;…the narrative not-­ yet can rewrite views of the past and present even as it projects possible futures.”61 Feminist fiction and feminist theory are themselves utopian because they look toward the not-yet of gender equality.62 According to Anne Mellor, “Those seeking a viable model of a non-sexist society must … look to the future; their model must be constructed first as a utopia.”63 Because women occupied a no-place within traditional theories of identity, authorship, friendship, and community, they were driven to use whatever was at hand—in this case, patriarchal constructs—to construct feminist not-yets. The religious women in this book had also to contend with the patriarchal Catholic Church, whose very structures were built on the exclusion of women. Nuns and women inspired by them engaged in a bricolage of a past that had largely worked to marginalize them.64 Rather than claiming to emerge ex-novo, as utopias often do, women’s spiritual utopias self-consciously relied on tradition: convents depended on scripture and on religious rules written by men. Women in religious communities that were unenclosed but emulated monastic life were engaged in reworking the idea of the convent itself, and secular English women writers then repurposed the idea of the convent to depict autonomous women’s communities. In these acts, women enacted what Marin describes as utopia’s propensity to combine the old and the new. Given the misogyny inherent in the tradition they had to work with, women’s utopias had perhaps to use an even greater degree of bricolage than male-­ authored literary utopias. The proto-feminist agendas  that this book traces, for instance, are often situated within projects that insist on women’s passivity. As they emerge from a polytropic process, women’s utopias are heterogeneous rather than enforcing a singular vision. These utopias of the past might not always equate to the radical feminist approaches of the present, but they did their own revolutionary work as they operated within the limits of what was possible to imagine. Perhaps because of the overt bricolage used to construct them, medieval and early modern women’s spiritual utopias are more future-oriented than canonical literary utopias. Early modern utopias such as More’s are

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set in static no-lands, which were inspired by Europe’s explorations in the New World. The now-commonplace association of utopia with the future did not emerge in a literary context until the nineteenth century when works like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888) began to portray ideal worlds situated in a distant future. Women’s religious utopias, however, focused on the future long before this turn in the literary genre. These communities were invested not just in better futures in the next world but also in this one, as nuns vied for political change and women like Mary Ward imagined new spiritual paths for women that included missionary and pedagogical work. Such women wrote proposals, petitions, and prayers that drew on the biblical past to project futures in which women asserted their own authority. The literary writers who drew on convents for inspiration also retained a focus on future change that has been largely unnoted in the scholarship. Tracing a body of thought about women’s spiritual utopias thus reveals a prescient site for utopian thinking about the future.

Utopian Failure While utopia offers the empowering possibility of imagining the world differently, it is also definitionally bound to fail. The etymology of the word itself—“a good place that is nowhere”—frames utopia as impossible. A sense of utopia’s impossibility is also manifest in the name of More’s speaker, Raphael Hythloday, whose surname means “distributor of nonsense” in Greek. Based on these linguistic clues, the ideal world that Hythloday describes to More and Peter Gilles emerges as less than credible. The island itself is also rife with contradictions that point to its implausibility and impossibility—everyone is equal, but there are slaves; the society is peaceful but engages in war. Such contradictions persist in later utopian fictions by Bacon (New Atlantis), Tommaso Campanella (The City of the Sun, 1602), and Francis Goodwin (The Man in the Moon, 1638). The paradoxes within these works suggest that utopia itself is not fully possible. It remains, as More wrote at the end of his book, a society that he would “rather wish for than hope after.”65 The implication within all these contradictions and hints at non-existence is that utopia is bound to fail. And yet, utopian failure does not mean that the project of utopia itself is useless. Utopia’s failure is also what imbues it with generative possibility. As Jameson writes, the “deepest vocation” of the Utopian text “is to bring

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home, in local and determinate ways, and with a fullness of concrete detail, our constitutional inability to imagine Utopia itself, and this, not owing to any individual failure of imagination but as the result of the systemic, cultural, and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.”66 Utopia’s failure is productive as it “disclose[s] the limits of our own imagination of the future.”67 Utopia forces us to think about the failures of our present and so, perhaps, motivates us to amend them. As Bloch put it, “Utopia succeeds through its very failure to imagine a better future, or rather, through its demonstration of our imprisonment in a non-utopian present.”68 Utopias then make us aware of the limits of what can be thought within the present and thus to become conscious of the constraints under which the present exists.69 The specter of failure haunts any utopia, but for the utopias of early women thinkers and writers, failure was particularly palpable. Within patriarchal society, women’s utopias never stood a chance of fully succeeding. Abbesses may have been in charge of their convents, but they were ultimately subject to the clerical authorities of the Church. The separatist female communities imagined by writers like Cavendish, Philips, and Lanyer were often overshadowed by the presence of husbands. The practice through which women reworked discourses that had excluded them to articulate dreams for the future meant that they often had to incorporate elements of misogyny. By juxtaposing ideas that undo each other— democratic aims alongside totalitarian ones, patriarchal gender norms alongside proto-feminist ideals— these communities, real and literary, forecast their impossibility. Women’s utopias were thus not only bound to fail but actively courted the means of their own failure. Rather than negating the utopianism of their visions, however, this failure enhances their utopian potential: women’s spiritual communities and the literary works based on them are utopian because they imagined forms of female agency that could not exist in the real world. In this, convents and the authors influenced by them traced the limits of what was and is possible for women and pushed their audiences to think beyond these limits. In England, the Reformation not only facilitated utopianism, as mentioned above, but also increased the possibility of failure. The English women’s Catholic communities that re-established themselves on the Continent were haunted by a sense of loss as they looked back at a cultural inheritance that had been “ruined.” In mobilizing the vestiges of their national religious heritage to project the future, nuns and Catholic women like Mary Ward and even Anglican women at Little Gidding witnessed the

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failure of their dreams. Catholicism never fully returned to England, at least not in the way English nuns had envisioned. Ward’s Society was suppressed. In Protestant women’s literary utopias, which used the memory of the convent as a framework to imagine separatist women’s communities, the failure of feminist projects is portrayed through unstable female friendships. Lady Happy’s convent in The Convent of Pleasure, for instance, is dissolved when the apparent friendship between Happy and the Prince/ Princess turns into a heterosexual marriage. The friendship between Lanyer and the Duchess of Cumberland breaks apart due to class differences. By staging the failure of separatist women’s societies, these authors activated critiques of a present that dismissed women’s bonds and communities and so, perhaps, moved their readers toward future feminist activism.

Utopian Friendship and Desire Even while utopia narrates the impossibility of fully achieving a better world, it also forcefully expresses a desire for that world. The nineteenth-­ century writer William Morris, the author of News from Nowhere (1890), argued that utopia’s core subject is the education of desire.70 Levitas draws on Morris to define utopia as “the desire for a better way of being.”71 She rejects the essentialist notion of an innate universal utopian impulse and instead argues that utopia is “a socially constructed response to an equally constructed gap between the needs and wants generated by a particular society and the satisfactions available to and distributed by it.”72 In Levitas’s study, utopia does not voice idle desire: “under certain conditions it also contains the hope that these desires may be met in reality, rather than merely in fantasy.”73 Furey puts Levitas’s theoretical observations about utopia and desire into practice in an essay on Lanyer’s poetry, arguing that both More’s Utopia and scholars of the utopia genre like Jameson overlook desire in their focus on egalitarian social and political structures. The inhabitants of More’s Utopia, for instance, do not desire anything superfluous since they have everything they need.74 In reading Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Furey finds a utopian desire that is intersubjective rather than narcissistic. This intersubjectivity is staged between the poet and Christ as well as between other women. As Furey points out, all utopias are to an extent intersubjective, but some like More’s seek to rein in desire and hence to dampen the complexities of human relationships whereas Lanyer’s idyllic country estate embraces them.

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In my own examination of women’s religious utopias, I find that desire plays an integral role in early women’s utopian communities as these communities hinged on intersubjective relationships. Medieval and early modern women desired better ways of being, but they also desired each other’s company and viewed collective living both as a vehicle to a desired future and as an already immanent embodiment of that ideal. Indeed, communal rather than individual life is central to all the communities that this book examines. These communities, in turn, remembered and commemorated women’s communities from the past, specifically those described in the Bible and in saints’ lives. Desire thus courses through the female religious communities that this book examines, and the intersubjectivity of these utopian desires comes even further to the fore in women’s literary utopias inspired by convents by writers like Christine de Pizan, Cavendish, and Lanyer. These authors situated utopian desire within same-sex female friendships that were erotically charged and, at times, also  contentious. They thus reflected on the fruitful and destructive aspects of human desire, channeling these to imagine worlds that, unlike More’s static island, are always in motion. Desire teams with utopian failure as a defining feature of medieval and early modern women’s spiritual utopias.

Overview of the Book The chapters in this book move from convents to communities beyond the cloister that drew on the convent for inspiration and, finally, to secular women’s literary utopias. By tracing a chronological trajectory from the convent to the literary page, New Kingdoms demonstrates that women’s real-world Catholic communities were vibrant sites of utopianism and that such communities inspired the first Englishwomen’s fictional utopias. By ending rather than beginning with secular authors like Cavendish and Astell, I narrate a story that differs substantially from accounts of utopia that begin with More as the progeniture of the genre. Instead, I reveal that women’s communities, even when separated from the world, were actively engaged in imagining worldly futures. In working within the period 1400–1700, this book aligns itself with scholars such as James Simpson, Jennifer Summit, and David Wallace who have troubled a neat divide between the medieval and the early modern.75 Instead of being confined by such periodization, this book shows how the medieval phenomenon of female monasticism reached forward in time to shape early modern women’s utopian visions. In making an argument for a

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transtemporal dialogue between medieval women’s convents and early modern women’s spiritual communities and writings, this book not only charts a new history for women’s utopian writing, it also offers new avenues for thinking about utopia as a bricolage method of working within the limits of the old to create something new. Across the chapters of this book, I identify several different modes of bricolage that women used to construct utopia and, based on these different modes, a range of advantages that such utopias offered women’s communities. In the medieval convent, we find practice-based forms of utopia in the liturgy that subverted gender ideology for religious women. Exiled early modern English convents, on the other hand, forged visions of utopia to claim religious and political importance for nuns that often remained in a theoretical realm. Religious communities outside the cloister merged utopian practice and vision to claim a middle ground between heaven and the world, while women’s fictional utopias created visions of feminist futures that were rooted in the memory of convent practices. As this outline suggests, utopia surfaces in women’s communities both as an idea and as a lived practice, and it had both spiritual and political uses. Women’s collective spiritual living thus generated a web of different modes and applications of utopian thought. I track these across the remaining four chapters of this book. The second chapter lays a foundation for a utopian discourse within English convents by examining the medieval abbeys Syon, Barking, and Wilton. I argue that although little writing definitively by English medieval nuns survives, a sense of their collective identities emerges in religious rules and liturgy written for them by male clerics. Produced through various processes of translation and adaptation, these texts were performed daily by women. Hence, they enacted a practice-based form of utopia that offered glimpses of female agency from the past that could be projected into the future through nuns’ ongoing performances. The chapter is divided into two main sections. The first examines religious rules ranging from vernacular translations of the Benedictine Rule for women to Middle English adaptations of Bridget of Sweden’s rule and office. By engaging in the bricolage practice of translating and reworking pre-existing texts to regulate women’s monastic lives, clerical authors retained traces of documents that had foregrounded the spiritual importance of their readers (monks in the case of the Benedictine Rule and women in the case of Bridget’s rule) even while trying to repress female agency. The second section of the chapter shows how liturgical texts— biblical plays from Barking and Wilton Abbeys and processionals from

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Syon Abbey—positioned female spiritual communities as utopian mediators between a spiritual past and future. The liturgy, scripts that allowed for improvisation by their performers, empowered nuns as spiritual actors and as the authors of their own devotion. By involving nuns in collective displays of spirituality, this liturgy stages a practice-based utopianism that foregrounds women’s potential as spiritual agents. The third chapter traces how the utopian outlook forged within the practices of the medieval cloister enabled the future-oriented visions of early modern English nuns who were exiled after the dissolution of the monasteries. While this chapter draws on examples from numerous English convents in France and Flanders, it uses Syon Abbey as a primary example of such utopianism since this was the only English convent to survive continuously after the dissolution. Examining a biography of the Syon nun Mary Champney, letters by another Syon nun Elizabeth Sander, and the illuminated Arundel manuscript, which was produced by the English Bridgettines in Lisbon, this chapter reveals how early modern English nuns engaged in a bricolage process similar to that of their medieval counterparts but deployed to different ends. Like the clerical translators of religious rules for women, English nuns at Syon as well as at Poor Clare and Benedictine convents mobilized the past to project the future, but this future was a specifically national one since early modern nuns framed their communities as vehicles of a once and future English Catholicism. In putting themselves at the center of a desired return of Catholicism to England, exiled English nuns simultaneously mobilized two approaches to the future, one that used biblical typology to imagine a desired outcome and another that recognized the importance of human action in working toward utopian futures. In this double-edged enterprise, nuns portrayed their communities as essential to the survival of English Catholicism, but they also anticipated the failure of their own endeavors by acknowledging their dependence on secular powers. English women religious in exile thus modeled utopian visions that relied on a historical mode of bricolage in order to claim political as well as spiritual importance for women. The fourth chapter moves beyond the cloister to examine unenclosed communities that emulated monastic life. Such communities merged the practice-based bricolage utopianism of the medieval convent with the utopian visions of early modern convents to chart a utopianism for women outside the cloister that was both idealistic and self-aware. Such communities—the mix-gendered readers of the medieval allegory The

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Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the seventeenth-century Anglican community at Little Gidding, and the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary established by Ward—preserved certain convent ideals, such as devotion to religious life, but combined these with the priorities of the world to engineer a meeting of religious and lay values. They hence performed a bricolage process akin to that of convents by using the memory of the convent itself. This joining of religious life with the world created a new instantiation of what Augustine called the saeculum, a common ground between the profane and the spiritual. In my reading of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, I show how the use of the convent as an allegory enabled readers to visualize a utopian middle ground between professed and lay life. I then argue that the Anglican community at Little Gidding combined the memory of convent life with an Anglican emphasis on personal study of scripture to model a spirituality that melded the old with the new. Finally, I turn to the apostolic life imagined by recusant Catholic Mary Ward and her followers to demonstrate how the middle state that Ward envisioned, as she founded schools for girls across Europe, at once advanced a radical feminist vision and looked forward to Europe’s imperialist project. This final section of the chapter reflects on utopia’s intermingling of exclusive and oppressive agendas alongside more inclusive ones and so reveals the limitations of even the most expansive of utopian visions. This mix of lived utopian practices and utopian visions thus produces a self-conscious mode of utopianism. Chapter Five concludes the book by revealing the overlooked influence of Catholic women’s spiritual utopias on Protestant English women’s literary utopias. Here, I argue that utopian visions by early modern English women writers—Philips’s poems, Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666), and The Convent of Pleasure, as well as Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies—drew, in different ways, on the idea of the convent to shape their visions of ideal worlds for women. In doing so, they reproduced the convent’s emphasis on a bricolage joining of dichotomous elements along with its anticipation of the failure. However, these literary utopias also offered an alternative to failure by stressing interpersonal desire. These writers frame female friendship as an already immanent utopia, and in doing so foreground the importance of desire within utopian visions. Rather than reading women’s fictional utopias simply as responses to authors like More and Bacon, this chapter foregrounds an alternative genealogy through which secular English women invoked the memory of the cloister. By tracking the

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percolation of women’s utopianism from the convent to fictional visions of utopia, these four chapters together reveal a dimension of women’s political thought that challenges the traditional divide between the secular and the religious and opens fresh avenues for feminist research. These utopias share the common approach of reworking the past to project the future but in heterogeneous ways—from liturgical performance to intertextuality—and to different ends. While the medieval convent’s utopianism was focused on women’s spiritual agency, subsequent utopias coupled this agency with political goals. Women’s spiritual utopias then deviate from the homogeneity of conventional utopias. Instead, these women’s communities and texts embrace heterogeneity and celebrate many types of futures. In the trajectory that it outlines, this book enacts a feminist approach to literary history. In some cases, the works and authors I examine would have been aware of each other—Cavendish, for example, may have read Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies and would have visited real-world convents. Such connections are, however, incidental to my larger argument: whether they knew of each other or not, these women participated in a shared utopian tradition that fashioned alternatives to current social, religious, and political systems. Hence, in place of masculinist histories that largely view the canon as formed through dialogue or debate between male literary and artistic giants, this book uncovers an alternative intellectual lineage, based not on any essentialist view of femininity but on women’s common modes of resistance to shared forms of oppression. This rhizomatic rather than genealogical approach to literary history echoes the feminist methodology present, for instance, in Liz Herbert McAvoy’s recent work on Mechthild of Magdeburg, which uses the metaphor of haunting to describe how the German mystic’s writings shaped the English canon despite lack of evidence for direct influence.76 Aligning itself with this tradition of feminist scholarship, my book performs a mode of reading intellectual history that renders visible women’s shared practices of dissent and creative thought. In revealing the overlooked influence of English women’s convent culture on the subgenre of women’s utopian writing, New Kingdoms, therefore, aims not only to chart a new history of utopia but also to model a non-genealogical mode of reading that might be used in studies of other subjects whose stories appear more faintly in historical records and whose connections must be reformed to create new futures.

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Notes 1. This play appears in Margaret Cavendish, Plays, never before printed written by the thrice noble, illustrious and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: Printed by A. Maxwell, 1668). My citations are from “The Convent of Pleasure” and Other Plays, ed. Anne Shaver (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 2. Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 185–86. 3. Several scholars have also read Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure as a utopia. See Erin Lang Bonin, “Margaret Cavendish’s Dramatic Utopias and the Politics of Gender,” SEL 40.2 (Spring 2000): 339–54 and Horacio Sierra, “Convents as Feminist Utopias: Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure and The Potential of Closeted Dramas and Communities,” Women’s Studies 38.6 (2009): 647–69. On the politics of women’s separatist retreat in the play, see also Hero Chalmers, “The Politics of Feminine Retreat in Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy and The Convent of Pleasure,” Women’s Writing 6.1 (1999): 81–94 and Rebeca D’Monté, “Mirroring Female Power: Separatist Spaces in the Plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle,” in Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Reality, ed.  Rebeca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl (Houndmille: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 93–110. 4. On the place that convents occupied within England’s cultural memory after the Reformation, see “Sanctified Subversives” chapter 1. Mami Adachi, “Nuns and nunneries in the cultural memory of early modern English drama” PhD diss., (University of Birmingham, 2016). 5. Robert Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Amy Boesky, Founding Fictions: Utopias in Early Modern England (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996); Christopher S.  Ferns, Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999); Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). See also Krishan Kumar’s Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-­Blackwell, 1987.) 6. Karma Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 17. 7. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 144. 8. Ibid., 15. 9. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010); Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (London: Methuen Publishing, 1986).

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10. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 1. 11. Thomas Robinson, The Anatomy of the English Nunnery (London: Printed by George Purslowe, for Robert Mylbourne, and Philemon Stephens, 1622), 15, 17. 12. For studies of the representation of Catholics in the Anglican imagination during the Reformation, see Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Peter Lake, “Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), 72–106; Peter Lake and Michael C. Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002); Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan 1999); Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1600–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (London: Royal Historical Society, 1993; repr. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1999). 13. In a 2006 edition of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies devoted to utopia, only one article focuses on a woman writer: Constance M. Furey, “Utopia of Desire: The Real and Ideal in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 36.3 (2006): 561–84. 14. Thomas More, Utopia in New Atlantis in Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 49. Lee Cullen Khanna, “Utopian Exchanges: Negotiating Difference in Utopia,” in Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing, ed. Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2007), 17–38, 19. 15. Frances Bacon, New Atlantis in Three Early Modern Utopias, 152. 16. Ibid. 17. More, Utopia, 63. 18. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II, 1987–1990, trans. Chris Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), 26.

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19. Frank Edward and Fritzie Prigohzy Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press), 1979. Miriam Eliav-­ Feldon, Realistic Utopias: The Ideal Imaginary Societies of the Renaissance, 1516–1630 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 20. Kate Lilley, “Blazing Worlds: Seventeenth-Century Women’s Utopian Writing,” in Women, Texts, and Histories, 1575–1760, ed. Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss (London: Routledge, 1992), 102-133; Nicole Pohl, Women, Space and Utopia 1600–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); Oddvar Holmesland, Utopian Negotiation: Aphra Behn and Margaret Cavendish (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2013). 21. Manuel Utopian Thought, 48–51. 22. Kumar, Utopia, 10–11. 23. Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, 6. 24. Fredric Jameson, “Morus: The Generic Window,” New Literary History 34.3 (2003): 431–51, 435–6. For the connection between monasticism and utopia, see Jean Séguy, “A Sociology of Imagined Societies: Monasticism and Utopia,” Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion 5 (2014): 284–319. 25. Manuel makes this point in Utopian Thought, 50. 26. See Martin N. Raitiere, “More’s Utopia and The City of God,” Studies in the Renaissance 20 (1973): 144–68, 149. 27. James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-­ Century England and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 3. 28. See Sterling F. Delano, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). 29. Janice G. Raymond, A Passion for Friends: Toward a Philosophy of Female (North Geelong, Victoria: Spinifex Press, 2002), 74. 30. Eileen Power, “The Position of Women,” in The Legacy of the Middle Ages, ed. C.G Crump and E.F.  Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), 403–33. 31. As Eileen Power notes, the fact that mandates for enclosure had to be reinstated between the Bull Periculoso and the Council of Trent suggests that they were not being followed (Medieval English Nunneries [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922], 345). Power cites an example of nuns’ defiance against enclosure: when Bishop Dalderby of Lincoln visited Markyate in 1298 to explain the Periculoso, he was ushered out of the house by the abbess and several nuns, who “‘hurled the said statute at his back and over his head…following the bishop to the outer gate of the house and declaring unanimously that they were not content in any way to

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observe such a statute’” (“Dalderby’s Register” cited in Medieval English Nunneries, 351). Paul Lee notes that numerous bishoprics’ registers from medieval England record incidents of nuns breaking enclosure “by attending funerals, weddings, and feastings, going on pilgrimages, becoming godmothers and attending baptisms, visiting family and friends, helping out at busy times on home farms, and slipping out to take walks” (Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2001], 91). 32. Raymond, Passion for Friends, 78. 33. A few critics such as Bettina Roß instead begin their accounts of women’s utopia with Christine de Pizan. Bettina Roß, Politische Utopien von Frauen: Von Christine de Pizan bis Karin Boye (Dortmund: Edition Ebersbach, 1998). Women’s utopian writing in the eighteenth century in particular has become a rich field of inquiry. See, for instance, Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 34. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 17. 35. Ibid., 16–7. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. This is Jacques Derrida’s summary of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 285. 39. Ibid., 19. 40. While Lévi-Strauss introduced bricolage in an anthropological context, it has since appeared in a vast range of fields. To list just a few examples, Gérard Genette applied bricolage to literary criticism in “Structuralisme et critique littéraire” L’Arc 26 (1965): 37–49. Gerald Garvey used “bricolage” to refer to an interpretation of American constitutional development in  Constitutional Bricolage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971). Bricolage has been used in urban planning by Farah Jihad and Teller Jacques, “Bricolage Planning: Understanding Planning in a Fragmented City” in Serafeim Polyzos ed., Urban Development (UK: IntechOpen 2012), l. Medieval art historians have used bricolage to describe the reuse of antique subjects or fragments of antique artifacts. See Jane Hawkes, “The Rothbury Cross: An Iconographic Bricolage,” Gesta 35 (1996): 77–94. Claire Sponsler has discussed bricolage as a cultural process of appropriation in “In Transit: Theorizing Cultural Appropriation in Medieval Europe,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 32 (2002): 17–39. The term has also been applied to contemporary art. Bruce

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Ferguson wrote that Kalus vom Bruch uses “the techniques of the bricoleur” in a video combining documentary footage of World War II with images of himself (“Video? Art? History?” in Kunstlerischer Austausch. Artistic Exchange, ed. Thomas W.  Gaehtgets, vol 3 [Berlin: Akademie, 1993], 213–22). Bricolage has also been used within the sciences of molecular biology and evolutionary theory. See Christopher Johnson, “Bricoleur and Bricolage: From Metaphor to Universal Concept,” Paragraph 35.3 (November 2012): 355–72. It has been used as a metaphor for qualitative research by Norman K.  Denzin, “Romancing the Text: The Qualitative Researcher-Writer-as-Bricoleur,” Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education 122, Qualitative Methodologies in Music Education Research Conference (Fall, 1994): 15–30; and “Describing the Bricolage: Conceptualizing a New Rigor in Qualitative Research,” Qualitative Inquiry 7.6 (2001): 679–92. Bricolage has been associated with postmodernity. See Martin Roberts and Michel Tournier, Bricolage and Cultural Mythology (Stanford French and Italian Studies 79) (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1994). It has been used in sociological theory by Deena Weinstein and Michael A. Weinstein, “Georg Simmel: Sociological Flâneur Bricoleur,” Theory, Culture and Society 8 (1991): 151–68 and in theories of entrepreneurship  by Greg Fisher  in “Effectuation, Causation, and Bricolage: A Behavioral Comparison of Emerging Theories in Entrepreneurship Research,” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 36, no. 5 (2012): 1019–51. It has been used to theorize teaching by Elizabeth Hatton in “Lévi-Strauss’s Bricolage and Theorizing Teachers’ Work,” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 20.2 (1989): 74–96. Michel de Certeau used the verb bricoler to describe common activities, including shopping, walking, or cooking (L’invention du quotidien, ed. Luce Girard [Paris: Gallimard, 1990], xxxvii). Several of these references are compiled in Myth, Montage and Visuality in Late Medieval Manuscript Culture: Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, Marilynn Desmond and Pamela Sheingorn, eds. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006) n. 24, 245–8. 41. Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 360. 42. In art practices, bricolage and utopia have sometimes been opposed to each other. Nicolas Bourriaud posited a crucial distinction between 1960s practices and a 1990s “relational aesthetics” that “no longer seeks to present utopias” (Esthétique relationnelle [Dijon: Presses du réel, 1998], 48). However, Anna Dezeuze argues that 1960s works by Richard Filliou and Hélio Oiticica undermine an opposition between utopia and bricolage practices. See Anna Dezeuze, “Assemblage, Bricolage, and the Practice of Everyday Life,” Art Journal 67 (2008): 31–37, 34.

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43. While in this comment Jameson acknowledges the necessarily bricolage nature of utopia, at other moments he equates utopia with singularity as when he writes that utopia is “one of a kind” (Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions [London: Verso, 2005], 211). Jameson also alludes to bricolage in relation to More’s Utopia in passing in “Morus: the Generic Window,” 443. 44. Furey, “Utopia of Desire,” 561–84. 45. This is Martin Jay’s phrasing in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 238. 46. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 12. 47. Ibid., 18. 48. Lochrie, Nowhere in the Middle Ages, 2, citing Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 257. 49. This type of bricolage was apparent in the medieval world as much as in later periods in which it is often identified. See, for instance, the work on medieval recycling in Recreating the Medieval Globe: Acts of Recycling, Revision, and Relocation, Joseph Shack and Hannah Weaver, eds. (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities Press, 2020). The classical idea of spolia also dovetails with the notion of bricolage. See Dale Kinney, “The Concept of Spolia,” in A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, ed. Conrad Rudolph (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2019), 331–56. 50. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 6. 51. Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A.  Vollrath (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), xiii. 52. Ibid. 53. Phillip Wegner, “Here or Nowhere: Utopia, Modernity, and Totality,” in Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini (Peter Lang, 2007), 113–29, 115. 54. Marin, Utopics, xiii. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. Wegner provides this paraphrase of Marin’s theory in “Here or Nowhere,” 115. 57. Louis Marin, “Frontiers of Utopia: Past and Present,” Critical Inquiry 19.3 (1993): 397–420, n. 46, 411. See also Eugene Hill, “The Place of the Future: Louis Marin and His ‘Utopiques,’” Science Fiction Studies 2.9 (1982): 167–79.

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58. Scholarly consideration of utopia includes contradiction as well as synthesis. As Wegner describes, “Jameson’s treatment of the problematic of Utopia is a deeply dialectical one: on the one hand, taking the form of an early well nigh ‘negative dialectic,’ that maintains Utopia is as impossible as it is indispensable; and, on the other hand, re-emerging as a pedagogical and transformative dialectic.” See Phillip Wegner, “Horizons, Figures, and Machines: The Dialectic of Utopia in the Work of Fredric Jameson” Utopian Studies 9.2 (1998): 58–77. 59. Appelbaum, Literature and Utopian Politics, 10. 60. Ibid., 18. 61. Frances Bartkowski, Feminist Utopias (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 10. 62. While some feminists have proposed “post-utopian approaches to feminist thought” that favor realism (see Sally Kitch, Higher Ground: From Utopianism to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000], 12, 176), others like Seyla Benhabib argue for feminists’ need for utopianism. See Seyla Benhabib, “Feminism and Postmodernism: An Uneasy Alliance,” Feminist Contentions (London: Routledge, 1995), 17–34, 30. 63. Anne Mellor, “On Feminist Utopias,” Women’s Studies 9 (1982): 241–62, 243. 64. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 119–20. 65. More, Utopia, 123. 66. Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9.2 (1982): 147–58. Jameson makes a similar point in the concluding paragraphs of his review essay of Louis Marin’s Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (1973), reiterating the failure of the utopian text: “Utopia’s deepest subject, and the source of all that is most vibrantly political about it, is precisely our inability to conceive it, our incapacity to produce it as a vision, our failure to project the Other of what is, a failure that, as with fireworks dissolving back into the night sky, must once again leave us alone with this history” (“Of Islands and Trenches,” 101). 67. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso Books: New  York, 2009), 413. 68. Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A.  Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 69. This link between utopia and failure is also present in a range of other theories of utopia. Terry Eagleton, for instance, observes, “The only authentic image of the future is, in the end, the failure of the present” (“Utopia and Its Opposites,” Social Register 36 [2000]: 31–40, 36).

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70. William Morris, News From Nowhere, or An Epic of Rest: Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, ed. David Leopold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (Oakland CA: PM Press, 2011), 791. See also Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 119–25. 71. Ibid., 199. 72. Ibid., 182. 73. Ibid., 191. 74. Furey, “Utopia of Desire,” 563. 75. As Simpson writes, “wherever we draw the line, we are already falling victim to the logic of the revolutionary moment…the wholeness of the world demarcated by that line is already informed by inevitable consciousness of what’s on the other side.” See James Simpson, “Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17–30, 26–7. 76. Liz Herbert McAvoy, “Mechthild of Magdeburg.” Speaking Internationally, edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Sue Niebrzydowski (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, forthcoming).

CHAPTER 2

Mirrors of Our Lady: Utopia in the Medieval Convent

In the fifteenth-century satirical Middle English poem “Why I Can’t Be a Nun,” Kateryne, a young woman who longs to join monastic life, has a foreboding dream about a nunnery filled with sisters who personify the deadly sins.1 To her dismay she meets nuns with names like Dame Pride, Dame Envy, and Dame Lust and finds that they “setten not by obedience” (l. 288) but instead are ruled by “selfe wylle…[t]he whyche causethe dyscorde and debate” (ll. 196–97). On waking, Kateryne fervently declares, “nun wold I nevere be none” (l. 330), a homophonic linking of “nun” and “none” that emphasizes the moral vacuity of the women she has encountered. In characterizing convents as spaces of unruliness and lasciviousness, this anonymous poem rehearses the late medieval commonplace that convents were sites of corruption. The late medieval imagination represented in this poem anticipates the appearance of convent-like spaces in much later feminist dystopian writing: in the totalitarian Gilead of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for instance, “Time…is measured by bells, as once in nunneries.”2 “Why I Can’t Be a Nun” does not, however, wholly reject women’s religious life. It begins with the girl’s longing to be a nun and her tears and despair when her father prevents her from joining a convent, and it ends with her wish that she might one day see the nunnery with its faults corrected. Furthermore, the poem concludes with a celebration of holy women from the past: “beholde the gode conversacion/Of gode women © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4_2

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here before,/ Fulle holy vyrgynes many a store” (ll. 372–77). Among these “gode women” are Saints Claire, Edith, Scholastica, Bridget, Radegund, “and many mo/ That weren professed in nunnes habyte” (ll. 380–1). “Conversacion” in Middle English means “manner of living” (MED 1), but it also denotes “association or communication; company” (MED 2a). The narrator’s use of this term to describe “gode women here before” foregrounds these women as a community, one that provides an alternative model to the corrupt female collective of Kateryne’s dream. Thus, while critiquing unruly nuns in the present, the poem looks nostalgically back in time to a lost ideal of female spirituality that might, the exhortation to “beholde” suggests, be used as a model for the future. As a whole, “Why I Can’t Be a Nun” contains opposing views of professed women as self-willed actors in the present day and as models of obedience in the past and the future. These apparently divergent notions of the convent—as a site of present-­ day self-will and past/future exemplarity—converged productively in real-­ world medieval convents. These too were spaces in which the past served as a model for future behavior and in which women’s “selfe wylle” was evident. Unlike the satirical poem, however, which turns nuns’ self-­ determination into a source of ridicule, the records of real-world convents reveal more earnest forms of female agency. This authority is rooted in a past not of purely obedient women but of female forebears whose examples had the capacity to inspire nuns in the present and future. In place of the enforced passivity that works like “Why I Can’t Be a Nun” and The Handmaid’s Tale seem to associate with nunneries, medieval women’s monastic life served as a prescient site of utopian thought. This chapter argues that the textual records of medieval convents established a utopianism that was both spatial and temporal as they framed women’s religious communities as counter-spaces to the present and as sites of women’s future agency. The spatial dimension of convent utopianism accords to some degree with the later early modern genre of utopia. In the genre’s early stages, utopia was an ideal that critiqued the status quo by establishing an alternative in a cotemporaneous space rather than in a future time as more modern utopias do. Convents formed counter-spaces akin to the islands of early modern utopias. From the orthodox standpoint of the Church, these enclosed communities were to protect women from the world’s corruption. The first legislation requiring the enclosure of religious women appeared in a legatine decree by Cardinal Ottobuono de’ Fieschi, the papal legate to England from 1265 to 1268, who later became Pope Adrian V. Canon 52 of the Legatine Council of St. Paul’s, London

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(April 1268), and declared, “Quod moniales certa loca non exeant” [“That nuns should not leave certain places”].3 From this point on, although nuns did not necessarily adhere to such mandates, enclosure of nuns in English monasticism was strictly emphasized.4 Rather like the utopian island that bars visitors, these spaces were seen as protected sites of female virtue and virginity. At the same time, by affording women authority that they did not possess in the outside world—the authority to rule themselves and to live free of marriage— such spaces also disrupted patriarchy. As nuns made their own decisions about spiritual and worldly matters, their enclosed dwellings became counter-sites in a feminist sense. In this, convents encapsulated what Ruth Levitas describes as utopia’s capacity for “estrangement and defamiliarisation, rendering the taken-for-­ granted world problematic, and calling into question the actually existing state of affairs….”5 Simultaneous to serving as alternative spaces, convents envisioned alternative futures. Monasteries were oriented toward heaven and thus inherently concerned with the future in the afterlife, but convents were also preoccupied with another kind of future. Convent liturgical texts, which offered scripts for nuns to enact biblical scenes and mark religious occasions, contained idealized forms of women’s future spiritual authority rooted in the past. Through the futurity that these documents encode, convents adumbrated ideal futures that anticipate a turn to the future that would not occur in the literary genre of utopia until the nineteenth century. Convent utopianism, which relies on a bricolage textual and performative repurposing of the past, is thus both aligned with the earliest literary utopias and exceeds their imaginative scope. In this chapter, I unpack the textual and performative practices through which English medieval convents positioned themselves as spatial and temporal utopias. First, I show how religious rules, including the Benedictine Rule for English nuns, the Isabella Rule for the Poor Clares in London, and the Ancrene Wisse (a religious rule that was not written for a convent but that does imagine women’s spiritual community), used what I identify as textual bricolage—the translation, reworking, and revision of texts from the past—to constrain female authority, framing women’s religious communities as passive utopias from a patriarchal perspective.6 At the same time, the importance that such rules afford to female communities gestures to the ways that these spaces may also have acted as countersites to that patriarchal view. The chapter’s second section looks more closely at Syon Abbey, finding that despite efforts by clerics to expunge

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traces of female spiritual authority from the order’s foundational texts, enough of Bridget of Sweden’s vision of collective life for women persisted. The documents from England’s Syon Abbey, therefore, bear witness to a faint but still vital current of women’s spirituality that challenged the patriarchal monopoly on religion. The third section shifts from space to time as it examines the future-oriented utopianism of convent liturgy. Drawing on examples from Wilton, Barking, and Syon Abbeys, I argue that convents enacted alternative futures for women through their liturgical performances, which foregrounded women’s active and embodied participation in Christian devotion. Given the bricolage nature of liturgical performance texts, which at once commemorated Christian tradition and laid out scripts for future performances, the liturgy of medieval nuns outlined ideal futures based in the past. Convent liturgical texts held within them a future of women’s spiritual authority that did not yet exist in the Church. By showing how medieval nuns would have enacted, on a daily basis, alternative presents and futures, this chapter makes a case for the inclusion of medieval women religious within histories of utopia.

Convents as Utopias and as Heterotopias in Religious Rules In his account of utopia, which he later opposed to the more fluid and capacious heterotopia, Michel Foucault wrote, “The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror.”7 Through this mirror metaphor, utopia is presented as an unreal, virtual space that enables the viewer to see herself where she is not. Utopias “present society itself in perfected form” rather like the medieval mirror for princes genre holds up unreal ideals to which viewers must conform themselves.8 Religious rules operate in a similar fashion to Foucault’s mirror utopia.9 They establish models in comparison to which readers or hearers are always lacking. Hence, they prompt their audiences to change their behavior. This shaping of self around a textual ideal was true for both nuns and monks, but it had special force for the former, whose rules during the Middle Ages reflected a clerical desire to delimit their agency. As clerics

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translated and revised rules originally for monks to suit female monastic communities, they included more emphasis on obedience. At the same time, the very fact of writing these rules for women portrays women’s religious lives as significant, and the rules themselves contain moments that license nuns as spiritual agents. The bricolage process of creating these rules thus created openings, however narrow, for women’s agency. At a time when little writing definitively authored by English nuns survives, these rules give us insight both into how religious women were constructed as patriarchal utopias and the ways in which their communities might also have forged more radical utopias akin to what Foucault called heterotopia. Clerical efforts to establish nuns as exemplars of piety and obedience are plentiful in vernacular translations of religious rules for women. Nancy Bradley Warren comments on the insertion of Saint Benedict into Middle English translations of the Benedictine Rule for nuns as a means of compelling obedience. Bishop Richard Fox’s sixteenth-century translation for nuns in Winchester contains phrases like “Be holde susters (sayth seint Benet),” which hold up a male saintly figure for apparently passive female beholders.10 Another example of increased control in the Benedictine Rule for women appears in London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian A. 25, which applies the requirement of silence more strictly to women than to men: Sapiens in paucis verbis expedit— He þat is wise in word & dede, His wark with fone wordes wil he spede. And naymly women nyght & day Aw to vse fune wordes alway. (ll. 1081–84)11

By beginning with the Latinate and hence masculinized instruction “Sapiens in paucis verbis expedit” [“wisdom comes in few words”], this passage associates wisdom with men. While men are advised to use few words to advance their work in the world, women, who appear only in the latter half of the passage, are mandated “to vse fune words alway.” The passage thus frames men as spiritual actors and women as silent backdrops. Similar efforts to regulate women religious are apparent in the fifteenth-­ century English version of the Isabella Rule, which is contained in Oxford, MS Bodleian 585 and translates a French version of a Latin rule for the Poor Clares at the Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare without Aldgate.

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Designed for women from its inception rather than adapted from a rule for men, the minoresses’ rule also emphasizes feminine meekness. This rule is addressed “to alle þe hende maydenis of Ihesu criste þis worlde forsakinge & doinge professioun in owre monestre whoche ys enfayrid of so noble name of þe mekenesse of blessid marie” (82).12 Mirroring the Virgin Mary’s meekness, the Poor Clare nun is to “Lyue alle dayes in obediens, & chastite, wiþowte properte, And for to dwelle alle dayes of her life enclosid as a tresoure kepte to þe souereyne kynge” (83). This likening of the ideal nun to an enclosed treasure objectifies these women who were to be kept away from the world by enclosure. While meekness, chastity, and obedience are integral to any monastic order, in the medieval rule for Franciscans, the male counterparts to the Poor Clares, obedience to God is stressed. By contrast, the nuns are commanded to obey a worldly male figure as they are ordered to “be obedientis to þe Minister general of þe ordre of frere Menoures & to þe Minister prouincial of þe same prouince, in þe whiche þe same Abbey is sette” (96). Thus, this women’s rule asserts male clerical oversight where it did not exist for religious men. As such examples indicate, medieval convents were constructed as islands of female virtue and obedience, utopias from a patriarchal perspective. However, mirrors do more than represent an unachievable ideal. Following his description of the mirror as a utopia, Foucault wrote, “But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror, I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there.”13 In this reading, the mirror unsettles the viewer’s own position, becoming a heterotopia. Heterotopias, in Foucault’s view, are places that operate “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all of the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.”14 Examples of such spaces include hammams, ships, cemeteries, and prisons. Foucault does not identify women’s religious enclosures as forms of heterotopia, but cloisters share spatial and ideological characteristics with heterotopias, which “always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”15 As Foucault explained, “the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public space . . . To get in one must have a certain permission.”16 Similarly, convents were enclosed but allowed outsiders to enter both as novices and as visitors. Like a prison or a cemetery, the convent was at once inside and outside the dominant culture and so simultaneously served

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to represent and contest patriarchy. Whereas Foucault neatly separated the counter-space of heterotopia from utopia, in my reading, heterotopia’s critique of the status quo is already part of many utopias. Certainly, it is a crucial component of convent-based utopianism. We can see how rules, even as they hold up an unattainable mirror of ideal feminine behavior, also act as counter-spaces to the dominant culture. That is, even as they idealize female obedience, rules foreground women’s spiritual autonomy. As Warren argues in reference to Benedictine rules, the very translation of women’s rules into English indicated women’s ability to read for themselves.17 Wogan-Browne et  al. observe that Richard Fox’s translation of the Benedictine Rule imagines reading taking place in an all-female group without clerical supervision.18 The spiritual authority that such rules afforded to nuns is also evident in passages that emphasize the power of women’s piety and prayer. For instance, the rule for the London minoresses counters its early emphasis on enclosure with an image of liberation at the end: “as mochel þat þey been enclosid, allemihti god schal ȝeue to hem of his fayre þinges & þat is fayre paradise, bi cause þat þey haue louid him in vertuouse seruise” (98). Here, enclosure is causally connected to the “fayre paradise” that the sisters will receive. Their “vertuouse seruise” becomes a path of freedom rather than one of servitude. Moreover, this rule’s conclusion portrays the sisters as intercessors with the divine: “Now prey we þis gode ladies þat þey preyen for oure sowles þat we may come & haue þe Joye of heuyn bi his blessid grace perpetuelly for to endure” (98). Reflecting a medieval theological belief that the prayers of virgins were especially effective, this request that the nuns pray for “oure sowles”—presumably those of clerics like the narrator and perhaps those of the laity as well—invests the women with spiritual power.19 Restraint as a form of liberation for religious women emerges even more powerfully in the Ancrene Wisse (1225–40), a rule written for three anchoresses. Although they did not live within a convent, these women would have lived enclosed ascetic lives that resembled those of nuns, and their rule adapts the strictures of convent life for the anchoress’s solitary situation. It thus seems worth examining this rule in the context of a religious women’s utopianism. The Ancrene Wisse is replete with prohibitions against everything from meat to decorative clothing, forbidding, above all, any contact with the outside world. The dangers of such contact with the world were especially associated with women, whose bodies were seen as permeable and, therefore, subject to corruption.20 While the heavy

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restrictions on the anchoress aimed to rein in female unruliness, they also afforded her a special status. By taming her own “ful-itohe flesch” [“undisciplined flesh”], the anchoress would be able to “yeoven strengthe othre, ant uphalden ham, thet ha ne fallen i the dunge of sunne” (part 3, ll. 259–62) [“give strength to others and uphold them so that they do not fall into the dung of sin” (101)].21 She was thus portrayed as an example for others. As Shari Horner writes, “the very insistence on enclosure in such texts necessitates the possibility of release.”22 The Ancrene Wisse articulates this possibility through comparisons of the anchoress with birds.23 In one particularly vibrant passage, the rule relates, “the niht-fuhel flith bi niht ant biyet i theosternesse his fode. Alswa schal ancre fleon with contemplation” (part 3, ll. 276–77) [“the night–bird flies by night and gathers food in darkness. In the same way an anchoress must fly by night toward heaven with contemplation” (101)]. This comparison to a night bird suggests that the anchoress’s physical containment will enable her to soar spiritually to a realm beyond what even the male clerical narrator can perceive.24 While anchoresses lived solitary lives, the Ancrene Wisse envisions a shared reading community. Through this vision, for all its efforts to separate and isolate women from each other, this rule envisioned a virtual female community spreading across England: Ye beoth the ancren of Englond, swa feole togederes, twenti nuthe other ma. Godd i god ow multi, thet meast grith is among, meast an-nesse ant an-rednesse ant somet-readnesse of an-red lif efter a riwle, swa thet alle teoth an, alle i-turnt anes–weis, ant nan frommard other, efter thet word is…This nu thenne—thet ye beoth alle as an cuvent—is ower hehe fame. This is Godd i-cweme. This is nunan wide cuth. (916–92) [You are the anchoresses of England, so many together, twenty now or more. May God multiply you in good, among whom there is the greatest peace, the greatest unity and single-mindedness and concord in your common life according to one rule, so that all pull as one, all are turned one way, and none away from the other, according to what I have heard…Now then, this is your high fame: that you are all as if you were in one convent. This is pleasing to God. This is widely known already so that your convent begins to spread to the end of England]. (4.916–29)

In this vision of the multiplication of anchoresses across England, ascetic women in different cells join together as one virtual convent through their adherence to a common rule. The narrator’s description formally enacts

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this multiplication of feminine piety by proliferating phrases with similar meanings: peace and unity, single-mindedness and concord; all pull as one, all are turned one way, and none away from each other. In this descriptive multiplicity, we get the sense of an ever-growing female community taking root throughout England. This rule, which seems so intent on restraining women, thus also visualizes unprecedented freedom. Although it was written for solitary women, rather than for a community, the Ancrene Wisse nonetheless connects women in a utopian fashion that is similar to what we find in convent rules. A utopian outlook becomes visible in such texts not because they required feminized perfection but because they offered glimpses of women’s collectivities that subtly exceeded the grasp of the authorities who sought to control them. These rules, therefore, offer insight into how enclosed women’s spiritual communities could have served as heterotopian counter-spaces to the patriarchal status quo of the medieval Christian faith.

A Woman’s Rule at Syon Abbey The utopian/heterotopian role of women’s religious community that Middle English religious rules highlight through processes of translation and revision was especially prominent at the Bridgettine Syon Abbey. Established by Saint Bridget of Sweden, the Bridgettine Order had from its beginnings emphasized women’s access to the divine.25 According to the revelations that Bridget received at the Cistercian monastery of Alvastra, she founded a religious order consisting of 60 women and 25 men (thirteen priests, four deacons, and eight lay brothers), who lived but were co-governed by an abbess and a confessor. The women were afforded special status through their connection to the Virgin Mary. In Chapter 1 of The Rule of the Savior, which claims to have been dictated to Bridget by God, Christ declares, “I want to establish this Order first and foremost for women in honor of my beloved Mother. I will explain its constitution and statutes fully with my very mouth” (126).26 This privileging of women in the order is also apparent in Christ’s instruction that the abbess “should be the head and leader, for the Virgin, whom the abbess represents, was the head and queen of my apostles and disciples after my ascension into heaven.”27 According to Bridget’s divinely imparted rule, the abbess was to elect the male confessor and supersede him in authority: “apart from decisions affecting the brothers and the keeping of the Rule, the confessor should do nothing at all without the advice of the abbess, because she is

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the head of the abbey and must be consulted in regard to arranging the affairs and goods of the abbey.”28 From its earliest conception, the Bridgettine Order was founded on a vision of female sovereignty that extended from the Virgin Mary to Bridget and to the Bridgettine abbess along with her nuns. And yet, from the beginning, male clerics tried to undermine Bridget’s authority.29 The Papal Bull of 1378, which confirmed the rule’s legitimacy, removed references to its revelatory nature and sidelined Bridget.30 Julia Mortimer has observed that while in the original rule Christ had revealed the structure of the order to Bridget in a first-person voice, the revised version was written in the third person, eliminating Bridget’s direct contact with God and decreasing her importance as foundress.31 Editorial efforts also contrived to limit the authority originally afforded to the abbess.32 While Bridget’s rule had envisioned that the abbess should govern both brothers and sisters, Pope Urban V required that the document be revised to omit the dominance of a woman over men.33 From its earliest history, then, the Bridgettine Order was beset by efforts to minimize female authority, as clerics, in a manner that we have already seen in other convents, sought to cast nuns as obedient handmaidens of God. Such efforts to quell nuns’ independence persisted when a branch of the order was established in England. Founded by King Henry V in 1415 in Twickenham and quickly relocated to Islesworth, Syon was the product of utopian aspirations.34 Bridget’s revelation about an English king whose marriage to a French princess would bring peace to Europe inspired Henry’s foundation. The high hopes for this new Bridgettine foundation are encapsulated in its name, Syon, which is a synonym for Jerusalem. The abbey had its own utopian ambitions as it was established as a “strictly enclosed house” designed for devout women who “sought a stricter observance” than that practiced in many other monastic houses.35 Syon’s public image reflected this emphasis on virtue as John Audelay’s Salutacio Sancte Birgitte (c. 1426) declares that there “was neuer a holeer order preueleged in no plas,” and Charles Wriothesley’s A Chronicle of England During the Reign of the Tudors describes Syon as a “vertues howse of religion” among all others.36 This abbey has further ties to utopianism as Thomas More was said to have visited in the early sixteenth century.37 Externally, as these descriptions suggest, Syon was constructed as an ideal space of female obedience, a utopian mirror from a patriarchal perspective. Internally, the efforts of clerics to silence Syon’s sisters may have had specific historical roots.38 Diverging from the revisions made under Pope

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Urban V, Syon’s foundational charter of 1415 reverted to Bridget’s initial rule and declared the abbess head of both spiritual and temporal matters. This charter enabled Syon’s first abbess, Matilda Newton, to demand obedience from the general confessor and the brothers of the abbey.39 The sisters supported Matilda, but, in 1416, after a meeting arranged by Henry V and a council of clerics, she was removed from the abbey. Given this unwelcome assertion of female authority early on in Syon’s history, the Middle English translations of the Bridgettine rule and office that followed a few years later may well have been shaped by a clerical desire to suppress future claims by nuns for independence. The desire to restrain female authority at the abbey is apparent in the two texts that structured the sisters’ lives. The first of these, The Myroure of Oure Ladye, is an early fifteenth-century translation and commentary, possibly by Thomas Fishbourne, on Bridget’s fourteenth-century Sermo Angelicus, which consisted of Latin readings for the nuns’ service.40 The second is the Middle English Additions, which was composed in around 1425 to supplement Saint Bridget’s Regular Salvatoris (Rule of Saint Savior) and adapt it to the English foundation.41 These guides enacted a textual form of bricolage as they translated Bridget’s original texts and combined these with the words of English male clerics along with extracts from other religious sources. As its title and prologue suggest, The Myroure of Oure Ladye’s reworked Bridget’s revelations into an extended lesson on mirroring the Virgin Mary.42 The prologue instructs, “And for as muche as ye may se in this boke as in a myrroure, the praysynges and worthines of our moste excellente lady therfore I name it. Oure ladyes myroure. Not that oure lady shulde se herselfe therin, but that ye shulde se her therin as in a myroure…” (40). While this connection between the sisters and the Virgin highlights a spiritual lineage that foregrounds women’s religious importance, the male narrator immediately inserts his own presence as an agent—“I name it”— designating the women as imitative lookers. Moreover, as he later states that the goal of looking into the mirror is “to knowe where ye fayle in her [the Virgin’s] praysinges, and to amende” (40), he assumes that the sisters will inevitably fall short of the perfection he prescribes. The text anticipates Foucault’s mirror utopia as it offers an image of nuns as perfect models of obedience, an ideal to which the real nuns of Syon could doubtless never measure up. The Additions equally portrays idealized obedience to which it adds perfect uniformity as a value. Describing the nuns’ daily worship, the text

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states, “In the quyer, all schall be as angels, enclynge togyder, rysynge togyder, knelying togyder, stondynge, turnynge and syttng togyder, all after oo forme, goynge and comynge togyder” (102). The repetition of continuous verbs foregrounds the homogenous identity that the rule seeks to instill; reading this we imagine the nuns moving “togyder” robotically to the same beat. Such uniform obedience is visualized in the descriptions that the Myroure added to Bridget’s office of the sisters as wax impressions identically “reformed to the lykenesse of god” and as pennies that are “impressed” with the “the image of the kynge” (98). While obedience and uniformity were part of any religious order—The Rule of Saint Benedict devotes a chapter to the subject (Chapter 5: “Concerning Obedience”) — in the Myroure and the Additions, these qualities are heightened in a way that foregrounds male clerical dominance over the women.43 Clerics at Syon Abbey, like those at other female orders, revised Saint Bridget of Sweden’s original documents for women to emphasize stricter obedience. The Additions, which was written specifically for the nuns, warns against speech of any kind, threatening punishment for any nuns who break the vow of silence. This strict directive contrasts with chapter 6 of Bridget’s original rule, which outlined when speech was not allowed but also when it was: “Permission is granted to speak in the designated areas about spiritual matters…When grace after the midday meal has been said in the church, the sisters may speak amongst themselves until the start of vespers” (128). Chapter 11 of Bridget’s text makes a further allowance: “The abbess may speak briefly with workmen in the abbey when repairs have to be made or anything new has to be constructed” (237). The Additions’ emphasis on silence thus distorts Bridget’s vision for her nuns, which had allowed them to speak both for practical and spiritual purposes. The Additions further enforces female obedience by requiring the abbess to defer not to her own counsel but to that of the male confessor, divesting her of the power Bridget had imagined for her as head of the Bridgettines. For instance, on the subject of whether a nun may receive visitors, the text it instructs that “the abbes take counsell of the general confessour and know by hym whan she schal open þe wyndowe…” to a friend from outside the abbey (75). This mandate contrasts with chapter 8 of Bridget’s rule, which left the choice of whether or not to receive visitors up to the sisters themselves: “If she wishes to be seen by relatives or close and virtuous friends, she may open the window. However, if she does not open the window, a more plentiful reward is promised to her in the life to

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come” (130). As these examples show, the Additions repeatedly revised Bridget’s original rule to model perfect obedience for Syon’s sisters. In their bricolage of Bridget’s text, English clerics created a utopia from a patriarchal perspective, a space devoid of female agency. This process resulted not just in the diminishment of the nuns’ power but in the erasure of Bridget from her own materials. The Sermo Angelicus had highlighted Bridget’s personal relationship with Christ, who tells the saint, “I will send my angel to you who will reveal to you the lections in honour of my Mother, the Virgin, which should be read by the nuns at Matins in your monastery. He will dictate them to you; you will write down exactly what he tells you.”44 In contrast to this direct communication from the angel, the Myroure narrator highlights the role of the saint’s confessor as intermediary: “the holy gost endited the rewle hymselfe by his holy mouthe to saynt Birgit so the same god endited your legende by an angel, & your seruyce by an holy man. Thys holy man was saint Birgittes confessoure & her master, for he taught her grammer & songe, & gouerned her & her housholde whose name was master Peter” (17).45 This suggestion that Peter rather than Bridget copied the Bridgettine service is expanded upon when the narrator states, “For whan saint Byrgytte had wryten the Legende of the Aungells mouthe in her owne tongue; then the aungell bad her take yt to master Peter for to drawe yt in to latyn” (19–20). The Myroure thus acknowledges Bridget’s role as the recipient of divine words but emphasizes Peter’s scribal role in transforming her vernacular legend into Latin. The narrator later connects Peter’s efforts with his own by using the same verb “draw” to characterize his work in translating the Sermo into English for the nuns: “to the gostly comforte and profyte of youre soules I haue drawen youre legende and all youre seruyce in to Englyshe” (2). Here, the verb “draw” highlights masculine clerical agency and casts women as the passive recipients of his words. Despite these efforts to estrange Bridget from her foundational documents, Syon’s texts nonetheless, perhaps unwillingly, retain a sense of female spiritual authority. Translating a passage from Bridget’s Sermo, the Myroure narrator relates Christ’s words about the collaboration of his mother in the salvation of humankind: “my mother & I haue saued man, as yt had be with one hart” (25). He later preserves a passage that states that just as Mary “carried and bare god and man in one persone, in her wombe, and in her blessyd arms, she caryeth synners frome synne to grace” (110).46 These descriptions, retained from Bridget’s original text, portray Mary as a primary vehicle of human salvation. Her maternal body

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becomes a participant in Christ’s birth and resurrection, and she too is capable of transforming sinners. The Myroure’s bricolage of Bridget’s Sermo thus preserves a powerful vision of woman’s connection to the sacred. Furthermore, Mary’s prominence in the Bridgettine office would have been empowering for the Syon nuns, who were to symbolize Mary’s spiritual authority over Creation.47 As Laura Roberts writes, “The model of Marian devotion contained in The Myroure of Oure Ladye and the Rule of Saint Saviour not only augmented the piety and devotion of the sisters of Syon but also gave them a potent feminine model of spiritual dedication at a time when most other religious women lacked such a powerful example.”48 Their powerful connection to Bridget and to Mary was evident in the special role given to nuns at Syon. According to the Rule of the Savior, the Bridgettine brothers were expected to provide the sacramental context for the order, to embody its commitment to the pursuit of wisdom through study, and to represent the order to the outside world.49 The sisters, on the other hand, were portrayed in chapter 7 of the rule as the bearers of tradition and so were to be protected from the world: “Apart from an occasion or request arising out of necessity, no layperson, man or woman, and no other priests or members of other religious orders may enter the cloister of the nuns” (129). As Revelaciones Extravantes 18 describes, the brothers are those “who speak and sing words of the divine wisdom which has enflamed them” while the nuns are “those who offer a pure heart, removed from all love of the world.”50 This characterization underscores the enclosure of the women as opposed to the men at the abbey, but it also affords women a special status. The nuns’ significant role within the Bridgettine Order was emphasized by the fact that they sang their own office, written for them by their foundress, whereas the brothers recited the office according to diocesan use.51 The sisters’ privileged status would have been spatially signified by the placement of their choir above the nave of the Church.52 The nuns would likely have entered the church from their convent through a door in the upper part of the north wall, reaching the choir by crossing a bridge over the north aisle.53 Rather like the islands of literary utopias written a century later, the sisters’ choir was protected and enclosed. While this desire to seal women religious off from the world reflects a paternalistic belief that women are more susceptible to the evils of the world, it also places the nuns in a position of authority, as exemplars for the brothers of the order as well as for Christians more broadly. For all

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his efforts to quell the sisters’ independence, the Myroure narrator could not eliminate the status that Bridget had given to her nuns. Indeed, several texts suggest the ways in which the Bridgettine nuns were to act as examples for others rather than merely as passive mirrors. For instance, in the Additions’ description of the ceremonial cutting of lay brother candidates’ hair, the sisters are instructed to accompany the abbess to the grate and look onto the brothers’ section of the monastery, whereby the brothers are to “be edyfyed by ther [the sisters’] religious behauynge” (90). Here, the sisters, although behind a grate, serve as spiritual examples to the men. The Myroure narrator further frames the sisters as examples for the larger world, writing that the nuns’ devotion “edyfyeth most all other” (56) and describing them as models for “all chryseten soulles” (1).54 This exemplary status imbued the sisters’ prayers with authority as is evident in The Orcherd of Syon, a Middle English translation of the Dialogues of St Catherine of Siena for the Syon nuns, in which the narrator requests that the sisters pray for him: “recommend me in your spiritual exercise to our blessed Lady. And greet her in my name with devout Aves” (16).55 Even as this narrator commands the sisters with the imperatives “recommend” and “greet,” he acknowledges their special connection with Mary, one that is superior to his own. Amid efforts to cast the Syon nuns as passive entities, a utopia from a masculinist point of view, these women religious emerge as a utopian body in a more subversive sense, one that challenges clerical control of spirituality. The challenge that Syon’s female community posed to clerical authority appears more starkly in passages from the Myroure that equate women’s devotion with traditionally masculine work. For instance, the narrator recounts the words of the angel who dictated the office to Bridget: “lo he sayth I haue shapen a cote to the quiene of heuen the mother of God. Therfore sowe ye yt together as y may” (19). The narrator then applies this lesson to the sisters: “O how glad ought ye to be for to sowe on this heuenly cote, how dylygente and deuoute oughte ye to be to rede, and to here this holy legend” (19).56 These words re-signify the traditionally feminized craft of sewing into a form of spiritual work, portraying the nuns as active creators of their devotion and thus casting them in a role ordinarily played by clerics. The sisters’ devotion is further masculinized in a passage that the narrator adds to the Latin office: “we ar closed in thys holy Monastery as knyghtes in a castell where we ar beseged wyth greate multytude of fendes that nyght and daye laboure to gette entre and pocessyon in oure soules…” (72). The nuns’ singing, he suggests, will act as a “longe

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spere of feruente desyre of oure hartes stryeng vp to god” to draw out “the sharpe swerde of the worde of god” (72). Possibly inspired by Bridget’s Revelations “About a Besieged Castle” and “On the Arming of Spiritual Knights,” this passage contrasts with the Myroure’s descriptions of the sisters as identical pennies or wax impressions and instead foregrounds their collective strength, framing them as protectors of the abbey.57 In instances like this one, the Myroure calls for active devotion rather than passive homogeneity, echoing Sarah Beckwith’s characterization of the mirror in the lives of women mystics as “a site of a complex play and interchange of roles—far from being the site of a dissolution of subjectivity, it is the place where a new subjectivity is evolved.”58 At Syon, this “new subjectivity” is a sense of an empowered female collective that is not, in fact, new but rather a reanimation of authority wielded by women from the past, Bridget and the Virgin Mary. If textual remnants of Bridget’s office and rule were retained in Middle English translations, Bridget herself also remained an embodied presence through her biography, which was attached to the Myroure and possibly composed by the same author. The Life of Saint Bridget translates Bridget’s Latin vita, which was prepared by her confessors for her canonization, and interpolates this vita with episodes from the life of her daughter Katherine, which was possibly written by Johannes Johannis Kalmarnenensis and then sent to Syon Abbey.59 Both texts foreground women’s intimacy as a site of spiritual transformation. The vitality of women’s community is apparent both during Bridget’s life as various holy women appear to her and after her death when her body offers miraculous cures to female devotees who visit her shrine. For instance, a woman from Rome named Agnes, who “fro hyr burthe had a greate grosse throte moche foule & dyfformyd,” is cured when she touches Bridget’s hand with a girdle that she then binds around her own neck (lvi).60 In an episode that would have particularly resonated with Syon’s female monastic community, a nun from Saint Lawrence, who is “famylyer” with Bridget, is cured from “febleness and great sykenes that she had in her stomake” after she prays to the saint “that she myght with hyr Susters be at deuyne seruyce and that she myght when nede shulde requyre goo aboute the moanstery withoute helpe” (lvii). As this nun’s desire to join her sisters becomes the catalyst for a healing miracle, this episode asserts the transformative capacity of female community. The co-presence of Bridget’s life with that of her daughter Katherine in the Myroure manuscript reinforces the importance of relationships between women, not just within the biological family but also in the spiritual one.61

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Female community becomes particularly important in Katherine’s relationships with a group of women devotees in Rome, as the Life says that Katherine gives an “example of good lyving [such that] the most honest woman of Rome loued to be in hir company” (l). This affection between women becomes the site of a miracle when Katherine walks outside the walls of Rome with her women followers. When she reaches to pick some grapes, her arms appear as though they “had been apperelled with shyng cloth of golde” (1). This miraculous appearance of gold in the presence of a group of women frames female community as a site of divine manifestation, a miracle that must have been especially meaningful for women readers at the convent, who would have used the accompanying manuscript as a guide for their daily office. Bridget’s Life foregrounds collectivity between women as a vehicle of connection with the divine that exceeded male clerical intermediaries. If Syon’s medieval guides revealed the nuns’ community as a real-world counter-space that retained traces of pre-­ existing women’s collective authority, this Life articulates the transformative nature of such solidarities. The woodcut frontispiece in the 1530 printed edition of the Myroure (Fig. 2.1) affirms the importance of female spiritual authority at Syon for a wider lay audience. Bridget sits at the center copying her office with an angel who is in the process of dictating her office over her shoulder. Her confessor is nowhere in sight, but the Virgin Mary prays above the saint’s head, while the Christ child and God the Father with a crucified Christ hover over the scene. A Bridgettine brother kneels to the saint’s left, and a nun kneels in front of the saint. While the brother is beyond Bridget’s sightline, the nun faces the saint, the women’s faces connecting at a diagonal as if to emphasize their intimate bond. If our eye continues along this diagonal, it reaches the Virgin Mary at the upper right of the image. This positioning, as well as the nun’s habit, which mimics Bridget’s own, emphasizes the nun’s mirroring of her foundress and, in turn, of the Virgin Mary. This composition frames the sister as the fulfillment of a lineage of women’s spirituality, descending down from the Virgin Mary to Bridget to Syon’s medieval nuns. The very documents that insist on the absence of women’s authority at Syon reveal its lingering presence. In this, they resemble Foucault’s mirror, which is “a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent.”62 As Foucault’s mirror-­ gazing self observes, “from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct

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Fig. 2.1  The Myroure of Oure Lady (STC 17542), Frontispiece, Printed by Richard Fawkes, London 1530, published with the permission of The British Library

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my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am.”63 Like the mirror, then, these documents restore the sisters as an empowered collective. By harking back to the past of their order, which had been established by a powerful woman, Syon’s medieval female community served as a utopian counter-space to present-day patriarchy. By presenting nuns in this light, these works echo Jameson’s argument that hegemonic culture and ideology are utopian “not in spite of their instrumental function to secure and perpetuate class privilege and power, but rather precisely because that function is also in and of itself the affirmation of collective solidarity.”64 At Syon, the documents that aimed to constrain the sisters nonetheless retained traces of a vision of an empowered female collective.

Performing Future Utopias in Convent Liturgy If religious rules reveal how medieval convents were framed as patriarchal utopian spaces but could also serve as feminist counter-spaces, convent liturgy shows how these communities were also oriented toward utopian futures. As Levitas, summarizing Bloch’s The Principle of Hope, writes, “the future is indeterminate and therefore…the future constitutes a realm of possibility.”65 While this realm of possibility is perhaps most readily associated with science fiction, liturgy is another site at which humans have staged future potentialities. Written to commemorate church traditions, the liturgy reenacts the past, but it is also oriented toward the future as it aspires to catalyze spiritual transformation. As Míċeál F. Vaughan explains, Christian liturgy “reenacts the past in the present for the purpose of future (and eternal) salvation. Liturgy exists as a timeless time which repeatedly incarnates the eternal Reality in human reality, and the past becomes the promise to the present of what the future holds.”66 The liturgy thus brings the past into the present “so that the members of the cultic community, although separated from the past event by time and space, can enter into it and apply its soteriological benefits to themselves.”67 The performative dimension of such spiritual scripts, moreover, means that while the liturgy commemorates the past, it also always envisions new performances. As Rebecca Schneider writes, in the liturgy, as in drama, “repetition is both reiteration of precedent and the performance of something occurring ‘again for the first time.’”68 Liturgy is thus a site at which devotees reenact the past in order to produce new futures.

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Within medieval convents, the promise of future salvation contained in liturgical performance was accompanied by another, more earthly future: that of women’s spiritual authority. Liturgical scripts staged such a future as they foregrounded women’s active participation in their own devotion. As Ann M. Hutchison argues, “In their engagement with the liturgy, [the sisters] are developing their own text…they are participating in a continuous dialogue with the divine, a ‘conversation’ which demands that they de-construct, interrogate, and repeat an infinite number of times.”69 As performance scripts, liturgical texts allowed for improvisation and adjustment, which meant that nuns could actively engage in decisions around their own performances. While rules written by men governed the lives of women religious, their liturgy offered them what Anne Bagnall Yardley calls “a fertile ground for creative engagement.”70 Lévi-Strauss understood ritual as a type of bricolage, as it was an amalgamation of different pre-existing elements.71 Similarly, liturgical performance is at once constrained by pre-existing scripts and made new by different performers and their different choices. In liturgical performance, religious sisters engaged in a bricolage process of their own: as they sang and performed the scripts written for them, nuns created new performances with pre-existing material. The liturgy of convents, therefore, implicated women’s religious communities in utopian futures in two ways: it offered a site of spiritual transformation, and it served as an anticipatory record of female creative authority. The utopian potential of nuns’ liturgy is glimpsed in a range of convent texts, including those of Barking, Wilton, and Syon. Like Syon Abbey, Barking and Wilton claimed illustrious female foundresses and patrons. The Benedictine abbey Wilton based its foundation on the life of royal Saint Edith (961–984), whose hagiography was written by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin.72 Barking Abbey was a very early foundation that claimed the Virgin Mary as its patron, and it was claimed in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica that the abbey was founded by Erkenwald, bishop of London, for his sister Ethelburg. Lisa Weston describes how the abbess Hildelith constructed Ethelburg as a saint to establish Barking as site of spiritual authority.73 Like Syon’s claim to Bridget as its foundress, both these foundations created for themselves women-centered origin stories, establishing pasts whose authority was to carry forward into the present and future. The late medieval nuns at all of these foundations assumed this authority in their liturgical performances. Liturgical dramas that acted out episodes from the Bible offer one important site at which women performed

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roles that were central to sacred history and thus assumed authority normally afforded to clerics. For instance, in Barking Abbey’s liturgical drama Descensus (Descent [into hell])/Elevatio, which enacts Christ’s descent into Hell and raising from the tomb, stage directions say, “priorissa et toto conuentu sicut sunt priores” [“The prioress and the whole community are like priors”].74 By comparing the prioress and her community to “priores,” these instructions invested the nuns who acted out this religious drama with authority equivalent to that of religious men. In another drama from Barking, the Visitatio sepulchri (Visitation at the Tomb), nuns are not only assigned to play the three Marys who visited Christ’s empty tomb but are also described as comparable to clerics or priests (sacerdotes). The play concludes by instructing, “Hijs itaque peractis solenniter decantetur a sacerdote incipiente ymnus Te deum laudamus. Et interim predicte sacerdotes in capellam proprijs vestibus reinduentes cum candelabris per chorum transeuntes orandi gracia sepulcrum adeant, et ibi brevem oracionem faciant” [“When they finish, the hymn O God we praise thee should be solemnly sung and the priest should begin it. Meanwhile, the aforementioned ‘priests’ should put back on their own garments in the chapel; and, passing through the choir with candelabra, they should move toward the tomb in order to pray”].75 The “priests” here refer not to actual priests but nuns who would have played the roles of priests in the drama. This visitation drama thereby not only remembers women’s vital roles in the Resurrection but invests women with clerical authority. This same association of nuns with priestly power occurs in Wilton’s Visitatio, in which the sisters performing as the three Marys were instructed to hold thuribles with incense (“turibula cum incensu”) in their hands. Thuribles were liturgical items generally reserved for priests and would not habitually have been held by nuns. So here again, through the liturgical drama, women enter into a potential future moment in time where they could wield a greater degree of religious authority than they were permitted in the present day.76 The power invested in women during such ceremonies is further emphasized by instructions that indicate that the abbess of Barking would have carried a staff during festival processions, casting her in a role akin to that of bishop, as the leader of the house.77 As Jill Stevenson writes, such performance “brings a notion of legitimate female authority and divine access into concrete existence for both nunenactors and spectators.”78 Through these performances, medieval nuns would have both embodied the pivotal role that women played in the resurrection and inhabited the positions of clerics. These dramas are thus

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utopian in the sense that they rendered tangible a not-yet available future of women’s spiritual power. Such authoritative roles afforded to nuns through their liturgy were not confined to biblical dramas. As they performed their unique daily liturgy, Bridgettine nuns would also have asserted their spiritual significance. This authority would have been visually confirmed by the fact that during these processions, the Syon nuns carried the cross, candles, and images, which were props ordinarily carried by men: “And in al hygh and principal festes the sextayn, or another suster at here assygnement, schal bere an ymage of our lady after the crosse and two torches schal be borne on euery syde a lytle before the ymage” (Additions’ description “Of Processions,” 128). The Syon Breviary also describes nuns carrying images: “a suster bering an ymage of our lady…to gidder and to gidder and so forth of all in ther ordir of profession.”79 Through such authorizing instructions, these scripts offered alternatives to present-day restrictions on the nuns given in the Additions and the Myroure and instead reach backwards to a past in which their foundress had endowed nuns with heightened importance, drawing on this past to gesture forward to a future in which that power might be restored. At Wilton Abbey, the processions of Rogationtide, a period of prayer and fasting before the Feast of the Ascension, offered another site at which women’s community was empowered, in this case by transgressing the bounds of enclosure itself. In these processions, the sisters commemorated their abbey’s history and extended this legacy into the present and future. Preserved in a nineteenth-century copy and in 37 leaves scattered across North American collections, which Alison Altstatt has recently identified as the original manuscript and dated to about 1280, Wilton’s processions presented an occasion for nuns to defy the restrictions usually imposed upon them.80 In leaving their abbey during the Rogationtide procession, the sisters would have visually (and aurally through their chants) announced their abbey’s influence within the local diocese. This abbey, in fact, had a good deal of temporal power: it collected tithes from numerous manors and hosted a royal eyre (an itinerant court of law). The abbess had the right to parish tithes and rental income and the capacity to appoint the parish priests, subject to the confirmation of the king. On a daily basis, this power was curtailed by the fact that the Wilton liturgy, like that of all female religious communities, demanded that a male clergy member administer the sacraments and offer prayers. Equally, the thirteenth-century legislation that had resulted in increased enclosure meant, Alstatt

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hypothesizes, that the convent became more dependent on its priests in practical matters. Rogationtide offered an annual opportunity for the nuns to reassert their active presence in the local landscape. The processions were not only geared toward asserting the abbey’s prominence in the present but also portrayed the nuns as vehicles of future salvation, both for themselves and local populations. This latter message is emphasized by the chant De Ierusalem, which the nuns would have sung as they left the abbey church, likely bearing the golden reliquary of their patron saint Edith: “De Ierusalem exeunt reliquie et salvatio de monte Syon propter ea protectio erit huic civitati et salvabitur propter David famulum eius alleluia” [“From Jerusalem the relics go forth, and salvation from Mount Sion will protect this city and it will be saved on account of David his servant alleluia”]. As the nuns would have been carrying relics, these words liken the abbey to a new Jerusalem and so frame the nuns themselves as vehicles of salvation.81 In this display of public prominence, Wilton’s sisters commemorated an institutional past that was intertwined with women’s temporal and spiritual authority. From its ninth-century foundation to its dissolution in 1539, Wilton had educated girls from English noble and royal families, including Edith, the daughter of Edgar the Peaceful (r. 959–75), who later became the abbey’s patron saint. This connection to Edith was visible in the procession as the nuns carried the saint’s relics beyond the abbey’s walls. Over the course of their procession, Wilton’s nuns sang multiple antiphons in honor of their patron saint. When they stopped to pray at a spot that was associated with Edith, they sang O sancta Edytha, which was unique to Wilton: “O sancta Edytha super astraceli virgo e ffulgens veneranda Xristi ipsum tonantem iugiter pro nostra ora salute” [“O holy Edith, shining above the stars of heaven, Venerable virgin of Christ, with resounding voice, ceaselessly pray to him for our salvation”].82 Alstatt, in her analysis of the procession’s antiphons, describes how this antiphon has a high range and “an unusual scalar passage that ascends through B-flat to high E,” which emphasizes the “resounding voice.”83 For listeners, such sonic effects would have intensified the sensation of soaring that the words imply and heightened the glorious association between the nuns and the saint. Edith’s past glory was associated with the nuns’ present and future when the sisters reentered the abbey church at the end of their procession. At this point, they sang the antiphon Styrps regalis: “Styrps regalis dignitatis gemma iubar Anglie flos Edytha castitatis forma purdici cie spernana

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luxam navigates almodocta flamine nubis regi maiestatis sacro sub velamimine [“Royal stem of worthiness, shining gem of England, Edith, flower of chastity, model of modesty, Spurning luxury, you navigate, led by the nurturing wind,/ You wed the king of majesty beneath the sacred veil”].84 Given that the virtues of chastity and modesty, as well as the ideals of spurning luxury and taking the sacred veil, are qualities associated with nuns, this final antiphon extends Edith’s sainthood to the sisters who sing in her honor, framing them before a clerical and lay public as the present and future legatees of Edith’s sanctity. Such moments in the liturgical procession memorialized the abbey’s patron while also laying out a framework for a future in which nuns would continue to enact Edith’s virtues. In addition to affording religious women agency that they often did not possess in the medieval present, the liturgy offered nuns a site at which to shape their own devotion. While relatively simple in comparison to the elaborate dramas of Barking and Wilton, Syon’s liturgy provides compelling evidence of nuns’ collective authorship of their own religious ceremonies, enabling us to read these liturgical texts as containing a future of female authorship. Signs of this authorship are visible both in the instructions of the liturgical texts themselves and in gaps within these instructions. For instance, on the day of a novice’s profession, the Additions instructs that “all schal go to the chapter, procession wyse, the ȝongest before, and the abbes after, with the newe professed sustres folowyng her, the chauntres assygnyng them where they schall knele before the abbes in myddes of the chapter” (92). Despite the dogmatism of this opening, which mandates the order in which the sisters are to process to the chapter house, the second part indicates the chantress’s determining role in the ceremony since she was free to assign where the sisters should kneel. The abbess and chantress not only had the liberty to choose where the sisters’ bodies should be placed, but they could also select the chants for various ceremonies. As Yardley writes, it was the chantress’s role “to oversee the liturgical life of the nunnery, working in concert with the abbess, the sacristan, and others within the community. This task places her at the center of monastic life and gives her immense authority to shape communal spirituality.”85 This creative freedom, available to both the abbess and the chantress, is clear in the instruction for the feast of Saint Mark: “The thryd antem schal be what the abbes, or chauntres in her abcense, wylle…And when the seyd antems or responses be ended, two sustres schal synge one of the letanyes, stondyng in ther processionalles, in order, as they be assygned” (chapter 40, 140).

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In addition to affording the abbess and chantress authorial roles, Syon’s liturgy also gave the nun-actors opportunities for adaptation and improvisation. This is especially apparent in their processionals, which were manuscripts for elaborate processions on feast days.86 St John’s College MS 139, which contains English red rubrics to clarify the Latin script for the sisters, instructs:87 Uppon ester day at procession too sustris the two chauntresses or too othir that the cheef chauntresse allignyth shal in the myddes of the quere bygynne this procession. Salue festa dies. And ther stondyng ful shal synge the said use unto the ende whiche use the quere than first goynge forthe and not afor shal repete the two sustres that bygan goynge in the myddis of the processions and then too aloon shal synge euery vuse of the processsion and rest at eu[er]y use eeude and the quere shal at eu[ery] use cende [sic]. Shal repete the first use. Salue festa dies. And this forme is to be kept. (My transcription)

On the one hand, this passage gives authoritarian directions with its frequent repetition of the modal verb “shall” and the final command “this forme is to be kept,” an insistence on obedience reminiscent of the Myroure and Additions. At the same time, the text opens up endless possibilities for the manner in which the procession could proceed: the sisters who began could be either the chantresses or other sisters whom the chief chantress appointed. Moreover, omissions in the instructions permit variations in the performance. Where would the abbess stand? How far apart from each other could the sisters walk? How would the sisters after the first two selected process? By age? Or by seniority? Such choices would likely have been left up to the nuns themselves. In such scripts, nuns’ authorship of their own performances was rooted in a textual past that honored Bridget’s original vision for her nuns. At the same time, as Schneider observes about performance scripts, each procession was a new performance. There would have been differences in the speed at which the sisters walked, how they stood, and how they sang. These liturgical texts thus operated like microcosmic utopias as they held with them a past of women’s authorship (Bridget’s) that was always about to be actualized in the future by her female followers. If religious rules translated by men at Syon used a textual bricolage to try to excise women’s authority, nuns’ liturgy offers glimpses into a performative bricolage enacted by women themselves. Their performances were bricolage in the

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sense that they were based on a pre-existing script but necessarily combined this script with the nuns’ own bodies and voices, which would have been specific to the present moment of the performance. The records of medieval English convents show how the idealizing and transgressive elements of nunneries present in the poem “Why I Can’t Be a Nun” joined to render real-world monastic women’s communities sites of utopianism. Clerics may have translated and reshaped religious rules to mandate idealized obedience, but in doing so they revealed an undercurrent of female agency that superseded male clerical dominance. While convent rules offer glimpses of how women’s spiritual communities might have served as counter-spaces to misogyny, their liturgy summoned forth the past to perform women’s future collective empowerment. Through the polyvocal quality of their documents and their liturgical performances, medieval convents anticipated the emergence of the word “utopia” in 1516, as well as the future-oriented utopias that appeared centuries later. These convents gave birth to a particular type of utopia, which had by necessity to use the past as a resource to imagine the future. Because nuns had to both work within pre-existing structures and dismantle them in order to reclaim the authority that their foremothers had bequeathed to them, bricolage became the signature of their utopianism. This reworking of the past to chart feminist futures would take on more overtly political dimensions after the Reformation, when, exiled from their homeland, English nuns repurposed Biblical and national pasts to imagine Catholic futures for women and for England.

Notes 1. The poem is found in a single manuscript, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.ix, 177a–182b, 190a–190b, which is in James M.  Dean, ed. Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 227–46 and in Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Poems and Lives of Saints (Berlin: Asher, 1862), 138–48. My references are to Dean’s edition. For discussions of “Why I Can’t Be a Nun” in terms of late medieval anti-monasticism, see Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 545–49 and V.J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London: Blandford, 1971), 235–36. Catherine Annette Grisé also discusses the poem as an example of anti-­monastic rhetoric against which Syon Abbey specifically positioned itself in “‘In the Blessid Vyne3erd of Oure Holy Saueour’: Female Readers in The Myroure of Oure Ladye and The Orcherd of Syon” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter

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Symposium VI, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1999), 193–211. 2. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: McClelland and Stuart, 1985), 8. 3. Cited in Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1997), 38. 4. For scholarship on enclosure outside of England, see Katherine Gill, “Scandala: Controversies Concerning Clausura and Women’s Religious Communities in Late Medieval Italy,” in Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. S.L.  Waugh and P.D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 177–203. 5. Ruth Levitas, “For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in late Capitalist Society,” in Philosophy of Utopia, ed. Barbara Goodwin (New York: Routledge, 2001), 39. 6. What I have identified as textual bricolage is somewhat similar to intertextuality, which Julia Kristeva defined as “a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.” Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in Desire in Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 85. However, I use bricolage in this book because I am referring to the collaging of ideas rather than just pieces of texts. 7. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiece, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7, 24. 8. Ibid. 9. Tekla Bude also links Syon to Foucault’s notion of the mirror in her analysis of Thomas Robinson’s seventeenth-century attack on the abbey in “Voices in Exile: Syon Abbey and Visual Affects in the Seventeenth Century,” South African Journal of Medieval & Renaissance Studies 24 (2015): 1–22. Tonya Moutray McArthur reads the early modern English convent in general as a heterotopia, “a space that creates an alternative way of seeing the outside, and yet allows the outside limited access to the interior” in “Through the Grate; Or, English Convents and the Transmission and Preservation of Female Catholic Recusant History,” in The Catholic Church and Unruly Women Writers, ed. Jeana DelRosso, Leigh Eicke, and Ana Kothe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 105–22, 106; see also 115–19. 10. Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 35 citing “Here begynneth the Rule of seynt Benet: Richard Fox’s Translation of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517” in Female Monastic Life in Early Tudor England: With an Edition of Richard Fox’s Translation

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of the Benedictine Rule for Women, 1517, ed. Barry Collett (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 83. 11. Warren makes this point in Chapter 2 of Spiritual Economies. The Northern Prose Version of the Benedictine Rule for women appears in MS BL Lansdowne 378, which dates from the beginning of the fifteenth century. See Ernst A. Kock, Three Middle-­English Versions of the Rule of St. Benet and Two Contemporary Rituals for the Ordination of Nuns, EETS o.s. 120 (1902; reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1987), and John E.  Crean, Jr., “Voces Benedictinae: A Comparative Study of Three Manuscripts of the Rule of St. Benedict for Women,” Vox Benedictina 10 (1993): 169. 12. This rule is edited in Walter W. Seton, ed., The Rewle of Sustris Menouresses Enclosid, A Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book and Two Franciscan Rules, EETS, o.s. 148 (London: Kegan Paul, 1914). Citations are given by page number within the text. 13. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid, 26. 16. Ibid. 17. Warren, Spiritual Economies, 30–54 and “Saving the Market: Textual Strategies and Cultural Transformations in Fifteenth-Century Translations of the Benedictine Rule for Women,” Disputatio 3 (1998): 34–50. Charlotte D’Evelyn, “Instructions for Religious,” in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, 1050–1500, vol. 2, ed. J.B. Severs (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1970), 458–81 provides an overview of manuscripts of women’s rules. See also Jeanne Krochalis, “The Benedictine Rule for Nuns: Library of Congress MS 4,” Manuscripta 30 (1986): 21–34. 18. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 11–7. 19. On this belief, see Gisela Muschiol, “Time and Space: Liturgy and Rite in Female Monasteries of the Middle Ages,” in Crown and Veil: Female Monasticism from the Fifth to the Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Susan Marti, trans. Dietlinde Hamburger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 195. 20. For a discussion on views of women’s bodies in the Middle Ages, see Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. L.  Lomparis and S.  Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142–67. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and

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Religious Practice in the Later Middle Age,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 181–238. 21. Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, with Glossary and Additional Notes by Richard Dance, 2 vols. EETS, o.s. 325–326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005–6). Translations are from Anchoritic Spirituality and Associated Works, ed. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press, 1991). 22. Shari Horner, Discourse of Enclosure: Representing Women in Old English Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001), 181. 23. Mary Agnes Edsall examines images of birds and flight as metaphors for contemplative experiences in the Ancrene Wisse in “True Anchoresses are Called Birds: Asceticism as Ascent and the Purgative Mysticism of the ‘Ancrene Wisse,’” Viator 34 (2003): 157–86. 24. For feminist work on regulation of the body in the Ancrene Wisse, see Sarah Beckwith, “Passionate Regulation: Enclosure, Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary,” South Atlantic Quarterly 93.4 (Fall 1994): 807–14; Jocelyn Price, “Inner and Outer: Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum,” in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G.  H. Russell, ed. Gregory James and James Simpson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 192–208; Elizabeth Robertson, “The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse,” in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings: Essays in Feminist Contextual Criticism, ed. Janet E. Halley and Sheila Fisher (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 109–34. 25. For Bridget’s life and legacy, see Bridget Morris, St Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999). See also Claire L.  Sahlin, Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2001). 26. Denis Searby, trans. and ed., The Rule of the Savior in The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 4: The Heavenly Emperor’s Book to Kings, The Rule, and Minor Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Quotations from this translation will be cited by page number within the text. English copies of Bridget’s Revelations, which may have arrived in England as early as 1370, survive in 16 Latin manuscripts of English provenance and in seven Middle English copies. See W. P. Cumming, ed., The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, EETS o.s. 178 (London, 1929), xxix. For an edition of one of these, see Cumming and Roger Ellis, ed., The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden: The Middle English Version in British Library

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MS Claudius B 1, Together with a Life of the Saint from the Same Manuscript, EETS o.s. 291 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 27. On the Election of the Abbess and General Confessor Chapter 14, 136  in Searby, The Rule of the Savior, 136. 28. Ibid. 29. Julia Mortimer, “Reflections in the Myroure of Oure Ladye: The Translation of a Desiring Body,” Mystics Quarterly 27.2 (2001): 58–76. 30. Ibid., 61. On this subject, see also M.B. Tait, “The Brigittine Monastery of Syon (Middlesex) with Special Reference to its Monastic Uses,” PhD diss., (Oxford University, 1975), 101–7. Tait points out that after repeated submission and revision of the revealed rule, the Papal Bull of 1378, which finally confirmed its legitimacy, substantially limited its content. Cnattingius points out that editorial efforts contrived to control the authority of women inscribed in the original rule, while Tait notes that the excision also served to remove all reference to the revelatory nature of the rule. 31. Mortimer, “Reflections,” 61. 32. Hans Cnattingius, Studies in the Order of St Bridget of Sweden 1: The Crisis in the 1420s, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in History 7 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wisk, 1963), 22–25. 33. Rewyll fol. 56r–56v cited in Warren, Spiritual Economies, 11. 34. Syon’s foundation was likely suggested to King Henry V by Henry Fitzhugh, 3rd baron Fitzhugh, who learned about the Bridgettines during a trip with Philippa, the daughter of Henry IV, to Sweden for her marriage to Eric XIII in 1406. The main reference for Syon’s history is still G.J. Aungier, The History and Antiquities of Syon Monastery, the Parish of Isleworth and the Cheapelry of Hounslow (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1840). See also John Rory Fletcher, The Story of the English Bridgettines of Syon Abbey (South Brent, Devon: Syon Abbey, 1933); F.  R. Johnston, “Religious Houses: House of Bridgettines: Syon Abbey,” Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex (Oxford: Oxford University Press [for the Institute of Historical Research] 1969), 182–91; G.W.  Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and the Remaking of the English Church (London: Yale University Press, 2005), 167; James G. Clark, “The religious orders in pre-Reformation England,” in The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England, ed. James G. Clark (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2002), 3–33, 19; David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948–59), 159, 219, 460; Kathleen Cooke, “The English Nuns and the Dissolution,” in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, John Blair and Brian Golding, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 291; and the essays in Syon Abbey and Its

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Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, C.1400–1700, ed. E.A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). 35. Paul Lee, Nunneries, Learning, and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2001), 91. 36. Audelay’s poem is in Oxford Bodleian MS Douce 302, ff. 25r–26r. It also appears in the introduction to W.P. Cumming, ed. The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, EETS. o.s. 178 (London, 1929), xxxi–xxxvii. Grisé discusses the poem in “‘In the Blessid Vyne3erd of Oure Holy Saueour,’” 196–97. Wriothesley’s description of Syon appears in Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559, ed. W.  D. Hamilton (London: Camden Society, 1875), 109. Hutchison notes that Wriothesley’s remark about Syon’s virtue stands out among his entries about other religious institutions (“Syon Preserved,” in Syon Abbey and Its Books, 228–30). 37. See Ann M.  Hutchison, “Syon Abbey: Dissolution, No Decline,” Birgittiana 2 (1996): 245–59. 38. Yardley cites various injunctions condemning nuns for everything from sleeping through divine service and speaking and sewing during service to staying up in revelry and drinking after compline. Anne Bagnall Yardley, Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 84–7. 39. See Warren’s discussion of this historical moment in Spiritual Economies, 11. As a reference, Warren cites: Margaret Deanesley, ed., The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole (Manchester: Manchester University Press; London: Pearson Longman, 1915), 110–11. 40. No complete manuscript of the Myroure survives: it is split between MS Aberdeen University W.P.R.4.18 and Oxford Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 941, which are composed in a hand from the late fifteenth century or early sixteenth century (though the composition of the text is generally dated to 1420–1450). The edition is based on the printed text (STC 17542, Fawkes, 1530), which is The Myroure of oure Ladye, containing a Devotional Treatise on Divine Service. With a Translation of the Offices used by the Sisters of the Brigittine Monastery of Syon, at Isleworth, during the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. John Henry Blunt. EETS, e.s. 19 (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1873). Seven other partial manuscript copies exist, only three of which include the third part. Blunt tentatively attributed this work to Thomas Gascoigne, Chancellor of Oxford (1442–5), but this attribution has since been discredited since Gascoigne was not a professed member of the Brigittine Order and probably could not have acquired the knowledge displayed throughout the book at Oxford. The Myroure is now associated with Thomas Fishbourne (d.1428), the first

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confessor-general of Syon and the most likely candidate; Symon Wynter (d.1448), Fishbourne’s contemporary in the order; or deacon Clement Maydeston. Ann M. Hutchison dates the Myroure to either late in the first quarter or before the end of the second quarter of the fifteenth century and so suggests Fishbourne as author. See Ann M. Hutchison, “What the Nuns Read: Literary Evidence from the English Bridgettine House, Syon Abbey,” Mediaeval Studies 57 (1995): 205–22, 209. For an overview of the manuscript and its contents, see Ann M.  Hutchison, “Devotional Reading in the Monastery and the Medieval Household,” in De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. M.G.  Sargent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 215–27. 41. Bridget had specified that new additions be drawn up for each new foundation. Syon’s additions have been edited by James Hogg, The Rewyll of Seynt Sauioure, vol. 4 The Syon Additions for the Sisters from the British Library MS Arundel 146 (Salzburg, Austria: The Institut Für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universitat Salzburg, 1980). This edition is cited by page number within the text. 42. On the trope of the mirror during the Middle Ages, see Ritamary Bradley, “The Speculum Image in Medieval Mystical Writers,” in Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium III, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 9–27; Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); James I. Wimsatt, Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970). 43. Other scholarship on Syon also highlights the sisters’ representation as a unified whole. Notably, Rebecca Krug writes, “the aim of Bridgettine communal reading was to establish a collective, visual identity, but that identity was in singular presence before God.” Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 182. Elizabeth Schirmer makes a similar point in “Reading Lessons at Syon Abbey: The Myoure of Oure Ladye and the Mandates of Vernacular Theology,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olsen and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), esp. 355. 44. John E.  Halborg trans. The Word of the Angel (Toronto: Peregrina Publishing, 1996) 13. 45. For a more detailed discussion of Peter’s prominence in the Myroure, see Mortimer, “Reflections,” 68.

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46. Laura Roberts points out the Myroure’s emphasis on Mary’s salvific role in “The Spiritual Singularity of Syon Abbey and its Sisters,” Ezra’s Archives 65, 79. 47. Christopher de Hamel, introduction to Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns and Their Peregrinations After the Reformation (Otley, UK: Roxburghe Club, 1991), 52. 48. Roberts, “The Spiritual Singularity,” 82. 49. Chapter 15 of the Rule of the Savior outlines the Brother-Priests’ duties in prayer and preaching. Searby, Rule of the Savior, 136. 50. From Lennart Hollman, ed., Den heliga Birgittas Revelaciones extravagantes, vol. 5 of Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet (Uppsala: Almqvist, 1956), 247, translated in Roger Ellis, Viderunt Eam Filie Syon: The Spirituality of the English House of a Medieval Contemplative Order from Its Beginnings to the Present Day (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1984), 33. 51. This difference between the brothers’ and nuns’ offices is elaborated in the Rule of the Savior chapter 12: “they should have priests who celebrate every day the mass of the season and the divine office as it is done in the cathedral of the place where each abbey is located” (Searby, The Revelations, 134). 52. This is in accordance with Bridget’s rule: “The choir of the sisters will be upstairs under the ceiling but in such a way that they can see the sacraments and hear the office” (Searby, The Revelations, 134). 53. For a description of the sisters’ chapel at Syon, see A.  Jefferies Collins, Bridgettine Breviary of Syon Abbey: From the Ms. With English Rubrics F.4.ii. at Magdalene College Cambridge (London: Henry Bradshaw Society, 1969), xiii. 54. References to the sisters as models also appear at other points in the text. See Myroure 81, 93, 171. 55. The Orcherd of Syon (1420–1440, printed by Wykyn de Worde in 1519). For an edited version of the prologue, see The Idea of the Vernacular, eds. Wogan-Browne et al., 235–38. Three manuscript copies of this text survive: London, British Library MS Harley MS 3432; Cambridge, St John’s College MS C 25; and New York, Morgan Library MS 162. 56. Grisé has noted the importance of this passage, observing, “the Office becomes a coat worn by the Virgin Mary, adorned and lovingly crafted by the Syon nuns” (“‘In the Blessid Vyne3erd,’” 201). 57. The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden Volume I: Liber Caelestis, Books I– III, trans. Denis Searby, introduction and notes, Bridget Morris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 5, 60. The use of the castle as a metaphor for the soul or for the Virgin Mary also appears in other medieval devotional texts such as in Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century Anglo-

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Norman poem “Le Chasteau d’Amour.” See Abigail Wheatley, The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (York: York Medieval Press, 2004) and James F. Doubleday, “The Allegory of the Soul as Fortress in Old English Poetry,” Anglis 8.8 (1970): 503–8. 58. Sarah Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Literature: History, Criticism and Ideology, ed. David Aers (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986), 41. Beckwith argues that a similar dialectic of alienation and identification is present in Lacan’s mirror stage in which the recognition of difference creates the desire for unity in the subject. Beckwith is drawing on Toril Moi’s reading of Luce Irigaray in Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Metheun, 1985), 135–7. 59. Bridget’s Latin vita is edited in Birger Gregersson, Vita S.  Birgittae in Scriptores rerum svecicarum medii aevi 3 (Uppsala: Edvardus Berling, 1876). A version of Bridget’s life also appears in Acta Sanctorum, Oct. 4, 50:377. A translation of the Latin vita is available in Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Revelations, ed. Marguerite Tjader Harris and trans. Albert Kyle Kezel (New York: Paulist Press, 1990). Early sources attribute Bridget’s Middle English life to Thomas Gascoigne based on a marginal note in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 172B, fol. 27 in which Gascoigne mentions compiling the life of Saint Birgitta (Dictionary of National Biography vol. 21, ed. Leslie Stephen [New York: Macmillan and Co., 1890], 43). However, as the Myroure has since been attributed to Thomas Fishbourne, Bridget’s life may be by him as well. Bridget’s Middle English life also bears resemblance to a document in the Florentine State Archives from the Paradiso monastery written by Johannes Johannis in Vadstena and dated to 1397: Florence, Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Monastero di Santa Brigida detto del Paradiso 79. See Julia Bolton Holloway, “A Bridgettine Document from the Florentine Paradiso written at Vadstena, 1397, and its Context: Un documento brigidino del monastero ‘Paradiso’ di Firenze scritto in Vadstena nel 1397 ed il suo contest,” in Santa Brigida profeta dei tempi nuovi: Saint Bridget prophetess of new ages (Rome: Casa Generalizia Suore Santa Brigida, 1991), 860–900. I am grateful to Dr. Holloway, who alerted me to this essay in an email correspondence. 60. Citations from this life come from The Myroure of oure Ladye, ed. Blunt. 61. Katherine’s life is contained in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 172B. 62. Foucault, “Other Spaces,” 24. 63. Ibid. 64. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 281. 65. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, 87. 66. Míċeál F.  Vaughan, “The Three Advents in the Secunda Pastorum,” Speculum 55.3 (July, 1980): 499.

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67. Clifford Flanigan, “The Roman Rite and the Origins of the Liturgical Drama,” University of Toronto Quarterly 43:3 (Spring 1974): 263–84, 265. 68. Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 90. Flanigan comes to a similar conclusion when he writes that “ritual is a reactualization or a rendering present of the moment when the archetype was revealed for the first time” (“The Roman Rite,” 265). 69. Ann M.  Hutchison, “The Myroure of oure Ladye: A Medieval Guide for Contemplatives,” in Studies in St. Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, vol 2, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1993), 226. 70. Anne Bagnall Yardley suggests that some liturgy, at least in the case of Barking, may have been written by the sisters themselves (“Liturgy as the Site of Creative Engagement: Contribution of the Nuns of Barking,” in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N.  Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell [York: York Medieval Press, 2012], 277). 71. Lévi-Strauss, Savage Mind, esp. 30–3. 72. Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis, with W. R. Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar, and Michael Wright (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004). For a discussion of the importance of this life for Wilton, see Catherine Sanok, New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), chapter 2. 73. Lisa M.  C. Weston, “The Saint-Maker and the Saint: Hildelith Creates Ethelburg,” in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, Jennifer N.  Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell, eds. (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), 56–72. 74. J.B.L. Tolhurst, ed., The Ordinale and Customary of the Benedictine Nuns of Barking Abbey, Henry Bradshaw Society, vols. 65–6 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1927), 108 cited in Yardley, Performing Piety, 146. 75. “The Liturgical Dramas for Holy Week at Barking Abbey,” ed. and trans. Anne Bagnall Yardley and Jesse D.  Mann, Medieval Feminist Forum, Subsidia Series no. 3. Medieval Texts in Translation 1. (2014), ll. 203–7, 30. 76. Olivia Robinson, et al., “Drama, Performance and Touch in the Medieval Convent,” in Touching, Devotional Practices, and Visionary Experience in the Late Middle Ages, ed. David Carrillo-Rangel, Delfi I. Nieto-Isabel, and Pablo Acosta-Garcia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 57. For an edition of the Wilton Visitation, see Susan Rankin, “A New English source of the Visitatio Sepulchri,” Journal of Plainsong and Mediaeval Music Society 4 (1981): 1–10. 77. Yardley, “Liturgy as the Site of Creative Engagement,” 270.

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78. Jill Stevenson, “Rhythmic Liturgy, Embodiment and Female Authority in Barking’s Easter Plays,” in Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (York: York Medieval Press, 2012), 264. 79. The Bridgettine Breviary, ed. Collins, 138. 80. This date is attributed to a personal conversation with Christopher de Hamel and Scott Gwara cited in note 30 by Alison N.  Altstatt, “The Rogationtide Processions of Wilton Abbey,” Yale Journal of Music & Religion 2.2 (2016): 11–48. On the discovery of the processional, see Alison Altstatt, “Re-membering the Wilton Processional,” Notes: The Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association 72.4 (June 2016): 690–732. 81. This antiphon is quoted in Alstatt, “The Rogationtide Processions,” 22. I have provided the translation. 82. Ibid., 34. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 47. 85. Yardley, Performing Piety, 58. 86. These include Cambridge, Cambridge University Library Additional MS 8885; Diurnale of Syon, Cambridge, Magdalene College MS F.4.1; Cambridge, St John’s College MS 139; and Exeter, University of Exeter Special Collections EUL MS 262/1 Processionale Book. For a table of Syon’s liturgical manuscripts, see Yardley, Performing Piety, 208. 87. This manuscript may be in the hand of Thomas Raille according to Christopher De Hamel in “The Medieval Manuscripts of Syon Abbey and their Dispersal” in Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns, 85.

CHAPTER 3

These Most Afflicted Sisters: Old and New Futures in Early Modern English Convents

In the Arundel manuscript (c. 1620), an illuminated book dedicated to the Spanish Princess Marià Anna (1606–1646) on the occasion of her proposed marriage to England’s Charles I (1600–1649), the nuns of Syon Abbey, having recently relocated to Lisbon, cited the words that the biblical Mordecai had spoken to Esther: “quien sabe si por esta cauza llegaste a ser Reyna deste Reyno, y en este tiempo a Dios orenada para neustro amparo, y proteccion” [“who knows whether you came to be Queen of this Kingdom at such a time as this ordained by God for our shelter and protection”] (Esther 4:14, 12, 24).1 The sisters went on to describe how “las quales grandes palabras del Mardocheo tan efficasmente tocaron, y mouieron el pecho de la zelosa Rejna Hester que ella luego se resolvio de ponwer su estado, y uida en riesgo por el amparo y defençion del dicho pueblo de Dios” [“these great words of Mordecai so effectively touched and moved the heart of the zealous Queen Esther that she at once resolved to risk her state and life to help and defend the people of God”] (12, 24). In a book produced to gain the support of the Spanish royal family for the English Bridgettines, this account of Mordecai’s persuasive appeal to Esther to save her people had immediate significance as it voiced the nuns’ hope that their own words would similarly incite the Spanish princess to help their community return to England.2 Syon’s use of the Old Testament to advocate for future action exemplifies the approach that English nuns in exile used during the early modern period. With Catholicism banished from their homeland in the sixteenth © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4_3

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century, English Catholic women had initially flocked to convents already established abroad, but later, between 1591 and 1710, 22 English convents were founded on the Continent.3 These foundations served as memory banks for a lost English Catholic tradition, preserved through nuns’ writing of chronicles, obituaries, letters, and family histories.4 These acts of preservation were not only nostalgic, they were also oriented toward the future since these nuns hoped to reanimate their past in a future return to England. As English nuns faced the new challenge of conserving their faith on foreign soil, they continued the utopianism of medieval convents by asserting their authority as spiritual agents.5 At the same time, in this new situation of exile, their actions had more political implications as they aimed to secure the future of English Catholicism. In these circumstances, utopia emerges not only as an idealized proto-feminist society but as an imagined future return to an English Catholic past. While in the medieval period, evidence from women’s communities survives largely in texts written by men, in this new era, an increasing number of works by women give insight into a particularly English Catholic form of spiritual utopia. Across documents ranging from institutional histories to petitions, English nuns implicated themselves within an imagined utopia by using two different approaches to the future. Both of these perspectives are evident in the above passage from the Arundel manuscript. On the one hand, the parallel between Mordecai’s appeal to Esther and the nuns’ petition to the Infanta establishes a typological connection between the Israelites and the Bridgettines, thus suggesting that the nuns were, like the Israelites, predestined to reach their promised land (England). However, the passage also emphasizes the risk that Esther undertakes and the uncertainty of her success, envisioning an unpredictable future that is dependent on human action. This sense of risk applies not just to the Infanta but also to the English nuns, who undertook great personal risk in defying their state and entering foreign lands. The story of Mordecai and Esther thus juxtaposes two competing pathways to a utopian future, one that views worldly events as divinely ensured and another that sees them as dependent on uncertain human effort. This chapter argues that early modern English nuns in exile bridged these two approaches to the future in order to ensure their positions within the political present by framing themselves as vehicles of English Catholic utopia.6 In doing so, early modern English nuns engaged in a bricolage assemblage of a past that had marginalized women to foreground women’s future potential.

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This chapter begins by presenting the theological and historical contexts for the two approaches to the future that early modern nuns presented to their audiences, who consisted of both those inside the cloister and religious and political authorities outside. Next, drawing on hortatory, historical, and biographical works produced within English convents, I demonstrate that nuns depicted a view of the future as foreseen through their rhetorical use of typology. This tactic allowed them to rework perceived feminine vulnerability into a mode of spiritual strength and to portray themselves as figures for the English Catholic condition and as symbols of English Catholic tradition in order make a case for political support. The chapter’s third section juxtaposes this view of a predetermined future with portions of these same writings that portray a future dependent on the hazardous interventions of English sisters. In juxtaposing these oppositional approaches to the future, these nuns articulated visions of utopia that, like those of their medieval counterparts, relied on a multi-layered process of bricolage: they joined Old Testament sources with their own present-day experiences to assert a view of the future as predestined. At the same time, they reworked pre-existing notions of feminine weakness that emphasized the importance of their own actions. Through these multiple reworkings of the past, English nuns portrayed female monastic community as uniquely capable of navigating the changing tides of post-Reformation Europe and renewing the Catholic faith. However, in this merging of the spiritual with the political, nuns also unwittingly predicted their own failure. As this chapter’s final section explores, the utopian aspirations of women’s religious communities did not come to fruition; English nuns failed to bring about the ends that they desired as Catholicism never returned to England in the way they had hoped. Yet, through their failure, these women produced valuable reflections on the limitations of women’s futures within patriarchal frameworks, hence critiquing the system in which they found themselves. By revealing this current of utopian thought within early modern English convents—a utopianism that builds on future-oriented female spiritual authority established by their medieval foremothers but in a more textual and rhetorically based way—this chapter contributes to a recent surge of interest in exiled early modern English nuns, but it also extends accounts of these women by engaging them in a transhistorical discourse of utopia from which they have, until now, been absent.7

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Two Futures Two different approaches to the future appear both in the longstanding Christian debate about free will and in a shift to more secular modes of thinking during the early modern period. In the first approach, Augustine famously asserted that evil exists in the world not due to God but as the result of human free will. In this view, humans are given the choice to do good but are also free to stray. Later in his life, however, Augustine also began to use the term “predestination” to describe God’s foreknowledge of events. In De gratia et libero arbitrio, he united these seemingly contradictory notions of the future by citing and explaining the words of Paul (1 Cor 15:10) about his own conversion: … after saying, ‘His grace within me was not in vain, but I have laboured more abundantly than they all,’ [Paul] immediately added the qualifying clause, ‘Yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me.’ In other words, not I alone, but the grace of God with me. And thus, neither was it the grace of God alone, nor was it he himself alone, but it was the grace of God with him.8

In this line of thought, free will and God’s grace are intertwined, and faith requires both. Humans are free to choose evil, but the choice of the good relies on God’s plan.9 Thomas Aquinas later upheld the existence of free will, and the post-Tridentine Church confirmed it in the face of the Reformation’s teaching on predestination.10 Long before the early modern period, therefore, the Catholic Church had developed a nuanced stance regarding the future, balancing a notion of predestination and a certain degree of free will. Starting in the sixteenth century, the increasing importance of political rulers and secular life led to an even more human-centered notion of the future than that envisioned by Augustine. As Reinhart Kosseleck argued, during the Middle Ages, the present looked toward the inevitable End of the World; the future was foreseen by prophecy or typology such that “events are merely symbols of that which is already known” and thus always already contained within the present.11 In later centuries, this notion of a predetermined future was gradually replaced by a belief in an uncertain future that could be calculated by rational prognosis and determined by human action. The future became an increasingly hypothetical “domain of finite possibilities, arranged according to their greater or lesser

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probability.”12 Through this shift in perspective, the future was perceived as separate from the past and present in a way that it had never been before. This more human-centric view of the future may have been anticipated by Thomas Aquinas in his theory of future contingents; however, while for Aquinas, “God knows things that are contingent on the future,” this new future could not be known but only predicted through “rational prognosis.”13 It is no coincidence that the genre of utopia emerged at this very historical moment, since, as a literary form, utopia imagines worlds created not by God but by humans.14 Such worlds are defined by precarity and risk of failure. Utopia is thus a logical by-product of a shift in European views of the future. Finding themselves unexpectedly implicated in politics through their exile since they had to negotiate with royal patrons in order to survive, early modern English nuns mobilized both these views of the future, the old and the new, to project themselves as vehicles of an English Catholic future. On the one hand, they portrayed their communities as guarantors of a future that was already contained within the past through their use of typology. A modern coinage that derives from the Greek noun “typos,” typology means a “blow, impression, or stamp,” as in the mark left by the imprint of a seal.15 Though the term is new, the practice of reading events from the past as figures for those in the present is longstanding. In the New Testament, Christ repeatedly declares that he is the fulfillment of prophecy, and Paul refers to Adam as “a type of the one who was to come” (i.e., Christ) (Romans 5:14). Early Christians pursued this mode of interpreting the New Testament as the fulfillment of events from the Old Testament in their own exegesis, developing what Frances Young terms “Christian mimesis.”16 Within typology, even as events in the past are viewed as already containing the future, they are also part of God’s plan, which is always already present.17 Augustine exemplified this view when he wrote, “all future time is the consequence of the past, and all past and future are created and set on their course by that which is always present.”18 Typology is thus not only the present as the fulfillment of the past, it also posits a bond between past and future, portraying the latter as always already contained within the past.19 While typological interpretation has often been reduced to correspondences between Old and New Testament events, it has a wider function as a means of thinking comparatively about narrative episodes.20 In the early modern period, for instance, English Catholics used the imagery of Exodus to make sense of their own struggles.21 Comparing themselves to

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the Israelites, a particularly common trope, gave them the comforting hope that they too would one day return home. As part of the English Catholic diaspora, English nuns also aligned themselves with an Old Testament past, but they mobilized this past to both feminist and patriot ends as they connected themselves to biblical figures like Abraham and the exiled Hebrews in order to depict a future in which Catholic women’s religious communities were vital to the return of Catholicism to England. As a mode of thinking typology has close ties to utopia, which similarly knits together past and future, universal and particular, eternal and historical, to create meaning for the present. The link between these two frameworks for understanding time becomes clearer through a juxtaposition of Erich Auerbach’s characterization of figural prophecy and Fredric Jameson’s reading of utopia. In his reading of Augustine, Auerbach wrote, “Figural prophecy implies the interpretation of one worldly event through another; the first signifies the second, the second fulfils the first. Both remain historical events; yet both looked at in this way, have something provisional and incomplete about them; they point to one another and both point to something in the future, something still to come, which will be the real, and definitive event.”22 Jameson describes utopia in a strikingly similar way, as a site at which “existential experience (in which questions of memory predominate) and historical time with its urgent interrogations of the future” become “seamlessly united as existential time is taken up into historical time, which is paradoxically also the end of time, the end of history.”23 Both typology and utopia, then, look forward to a transcendent or speculative order of reality that recurrently penetrates and interrupts historical life. Both view the future as unfolding within historical time but also as always already existing within existential time. Equally, both have a strong interventionist character as they provide a specter of a future that the present is charged with fulfilling. Although utopia is not always understood as having a connection to the past, the task of imagining the future, in fact, always involves a concomitant rejection and selective retrieval of the past. In this way, typology, a form associated with an older religious way of thinking, and utopia, a genre and mode tied to newer, secular ways of life, are in fact two sides of the same coin; both imagine a desired future that will complete the promise of the past. One might even argue that typology is a theological precursor to utopia, with the difference that the former understands the future as determined by divine forces whereas the latter foregrounds a future forged through collective human action.

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English nuns drew on both typology’s evocation of a divine plan and utopia’s call for human intervention in order to portray their own desired future. On the one hand, they used typology as a rhetorical tool to portray themselves as present-day fulfillment of a sacred past that was predestined to repeat itself in the return of Catholicism to England. On the other, their documents register the need for active intervention in the future. Rather than passively waiting for an ideal future, early modern English nuns were engaged in negotiating with Catholic royalty, writing letters to gain economic security, participating in patronage networks, running correspondence networks for English Catholics, and, later, providing the exiled Charles II (1630–1685) with funds and hospitality. Many of these women returned to England at various points to advance the Catholic cause and raise money for their orders. In fact, precisely because nuns were presumed to be shut off from the world, they were able to engage in covert political activities that subverted the English Protestant state.24 At a precarious time for their faith, English nuns imagined a future that was dependent on risky human interventions.25 As they harnessed both spiritual and political approaches to the future, these women positioned themselves as unique purveyors of a once and future English Catholicism, echoing the utopian practices of their medieval foremothers but also producing a more textual and narrative utopian vision with more immediate political implications.

Nuns’ Typology and an English Utopian Future The language of many English Catholics in the years after the Reformation conveyed the belief that Catholicism would one day return to English soil. Monasteries in particular were positioned as embodiments of the future of an English Catholic past. Anglo-Dutch publisher Richard Verstegan (c. 1550–1640) addressed Joanna Berkeley, the abbess of the first English Benedictine convent in Brussels as “the first Abbesse of your holy order revyved in our nation, whose posteritie by the divine providence may come to brighten our country with their shyning sanctitie as your predecessors heretofore have donne….”26 In this reference to the order’s “posteritie,” Verstegan was referring to the fact that the Benedictines were the first monastic order in England. By saying that divine providence would enable the order to be “revyved” “to brighten our country” (the Netherlands), he imbued this historical order with a predestined capacity for regeneration and renewal. Verstegan imagined the revival of the order’s

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previous glory in Flanders, but for English nuns themselves, the ultimate goal was to return to England. Indeed, a prophecy was made at Berkeley’s profession that she would return monasticism to England.27 At the Bridgettine convent in Lisbon postulants conveyed this sense of an impending future return when they promised at their clothing ceremony to obey the rules and ordinance in exile “and when yt shall please god to call us home into Syon agayne, then and theyr to observe the sayd Rule.”28 Early modern nuns thus contributed to the belief that their own communities were vital to an English Catholic revival, indeed to the future of Catholicism itself, and hence deserving of support. They often made this case through a rhetorical use of typology. While many orders used typology to figure nuns as vehicles of a utopian future, Syon Abbey was particularly notable in this regard. As the community declared in a petition written on behalf of the exiled community in Rouen circulated between 1587 and 1594, Syon was “ye only religiouse convent remaynge” from England.29 Unlike other English orders, Syon had remained continuously intact after a group of the abbey’s nuns left England in 1539 and took refuge in a Bridgettine house in Flanders.30 Barring a short return during the reign of Queen Mary (1516–1558), the community spent decades in exile, first in Flanders and then in France. In 1594, Syon settled more permanently in Lisbon, remaining there until the nineteenth century when the small number of remaining English Bridgettine nuns finally returned to England. The abbey’s identity as the only continuously surviving English convent was symbolized by its retention of the keys to its former English foundation, and the English Bridgettines produced a number of texts that announced the goal of preserving an English Catholic past for the future.31 Syon thus offers a particularly capacious view into the utopian identity that many early modern English nuns constructed for themselves. Hence, while I draw on examples from several other English convents, much of my analysis in this chapter is based on Syon. A particularly rich example of the Syon nuns’ use of typology to align themselves with the biblical past and to frame themselves as capable of bearing that past into the future is The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, which narrates the life of the Syon nun Mary Champney (1547–1580), who left England in 1569 to join the Bridgettines in Spanish Flanders. Written in the style of a hagiography, this biography traces Champney’s spiritual journey from her early spiritual visions as a child to her entry into the Bridgettine order and subsequent return to England to raise funds,

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followed by her death from tuberculosis at the age of 33.32 Likely “intended for circulation among, and the edification of, English Catholics,” the anonymous biography displays a high degree of familiarity with the Bridgettines.33 While not necessarily written by a nun of the order, the Life champions the nuns in a way that must surely have reflected the hopes and desires of the Syon community. The biography opens with an epigraph from Zachariah about God’s promise of salvation to the Israelites: “Quid enim bonum est, et quid pulchrum eius, nisi frumentum electorem, et vinum germinans virgines” (Zachariah 9:17) [“Yea, how good and fair it shall be! Grain shall make the young man flourish and new wine the maidens”].34 For a reader connected to Syon, this passage about how new wine would make the Israelite maidens flourish might have recalled God’s words about Bridget’s capacity to act as the vine for a new monastic vineyard.35 While men appear in the quotation, as they did in Syon’s mixed-­ gender order, the women are privileged to drink the wine that typologically symbolizes Christ’s blood. The Israelite women are further connected to the Syon nuns through their identity as “virgines.” Set at the beginning of a biography about an exiled nun, this biblical epigraph asserts parity between Syon’s sisters and the Old Testament maidens. Moreover, the present active participle “germinans” (sprouting) conveys a futurity that would have echoed Syon’s nuns’ anticipation that its own maidens would one day flourish through the renewal of their faith in England. The biography itself frequently uses passages from the Old Testament to compare Champney’s suffering as a Bridgettine nun with the hardships of the Israelites. For instance, when Syon’s Flemish chapel is sacked, the narrator describes how “the good virgin [Champney] satt all in desolacion as it were vpon the fluddes of Babilon morninge and sobbinge,” a reference to Psalm 137’s well-known line: “Upon the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept: when we remembered Sion” (58–59). This allusion to the biblical Sion would have reminded readers of the origins of Syon Abbey’s name and connected the devastation of Syon’s chapel to the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians. The passage further links the Israelites’ yearning for Jerusalem to the sorrow of Syon’s nuns at the loss of their community, thus integrating Syon’s loss into biblical history. Syon was not unique in its use of the biblical past to integrate women religious in a larger spiritual narrative. Other English convents that were established on the Continent later on also recast their suffering as a reiteration of Old Testament exile. For instance, the English Poor Clares, an

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order based on the thirteenth-century rule of Saint Clare of Assisi and founded in 1607 in Gravelines in the Spanish Netherlands by Mary Ward, faced a great deal of upheaval as dependent communities of the original English Poor Clares were later founded in Aire-sur-la-Lys (1629), in Rouen (1644), and in Dunkirk (1652), each time forcing groups of nuns to uproot themselves and begin anew.36 The women made sense of these travails by casting their own hardships as types of earlier adversity. In the chronicle of the Poor Clares, the abbess Mary Taylor (d. 1658) wrote about her community’s migration to the new foundation in Rouen, calling the story a “relation of our poor peregrination & banishment from our thrice happy home.”37 She further described her nuns as “poor exiled pilgrims,” an allusion to Exodus.38 Such comparisons of themselves with the exiles of Exodus served not only to elevate the sisters’ hardships within the present but also to imply that the nuns, like their spiritual antecedents, would one day find a way home. English nuns’ practice of textual bricolage consisted not only of drawing passages and narratives from the Old Testament and using them to establish histories for the new English convents but also of reworking the very idea of feminine weakness into a source of future promise. This rhetorical use of perceived feminine weakness to craft positions of strength did not originate with early modern English nuns but rather is part of a much earlier tradition of women’s spiritual practice. Barbara Newman has argued that the eleventh-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) reconciled her religious authority with her gender by playing on her perceived feminine frailty: “because the power of God is perfect in weakness, because the humblest shall be the most exalted, human impotence could become the sign and prelude of divine empowerment.”39 Claire Sahlin has shown how Saint Bridget of Sweden, who appears in the first and second chapters of this book, revised traditional notions of Mary’s motherhood to justify her own authoritative speech.40 Alison Weber has revealed how Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) strategically adopted linguistic features associated with women — affectivity, spontaneity, and colloquialism — in order to gain access to the realm of power associated with men.41 Weber argues that the self-depreciation that Teresa exhibited across her writings was rhetorical: “Rather than ‘writing like a woman,’ perhaps Teresa wrote as she believed women were perceived to speak.”42 This rhetorical stance allowed Teresa to claim closeness to God and thus to proclaim her own spiritual authority. For early modern nuns, the evocation of feminized vulnerability enabled them to connect themselves to biblical

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figures and so to assure themselves and their audiences that they were destined, like those before them, to find redemption from suffering.43 In The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, for instance, having returned to England with a group of Bridgettine nuns, Champney responds to news that Syon’s residence at Mechelen has been pillaged by Calvinists with a quotation from the Book of Lamentations: “‘Mulieres in Syon humiliaverunt, et virgines in ciuitatibus Iuda’” (72) [“they oppressed the women in Syon and the virgins in the cities of Juda”].44 This quotation foregrounds the suffering of women in particular during times of cultural loss. The choice of a passage that uses Syon as a synonym for Jerusalem further connects the women and virgins of Judah to the early modern English Bridgettines, drawing a connection across time between different women’s suffering. Similar allusions to feminine weakness are apparent in The history of the angelicall virgin glorious S. Clare, which was written in Douai in 1635 by Elizabeth Evelinge (religious name, Sister Catherine Magdalen) (1596/7–1668). In this history, Saint Clare and those in her order are presented as overcoming their perceived weaker feminine nature. Evelinge, for instance, wrote that God made his power manifest “for to enrolle under the service of Iesou Christ the weake feminine sex (by nature timerous, and fearfull) who now with a manly, and generous courage, doe proclaimed most bloudie and implacable warre against the powers of darknes” (A2).45 Throughout the work, virtues associated with femininity such as weakness and obedience are stressed. However, these feminized virtues—obedience (Ch. XIX) and zeale for poverty (Ch. XX)—also align Clare with Saint Francis, thus linking her order to this holy man. Here, stereotypically feminine virtues become a kind of spiritual line of credit that links the early modern Poor Clares to their past and thus envisions a sanctified future. The gendered suffering of the nuns connected them not only to Old Testament exiles but to Christ himself. An obituary notice from the Poor Clare convent at Gravelines describes Abbess Clare Mary Anna Tildesley (d. 1654), who expanded and accrued new prestige for the order, as having persevered despite hardship: she was endued with a Singular Fortitude and Constancy of Mind with a perseverant Confidence in the Divine Providence amidst many Afllictions and heavy Crosses, which she sustained during the term of so long a government, being Mother of all Cloisters of our holy Order, as well Irish as English, haveing received more than a Hundred to the Holy Profession. She

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was endued with great Piety & Devotion, with Guifts of Tears and Suffred many long & painfull Sicknesses & Infirmaty with Singular Patience and Conformity to the Divine Will….46

As Caroline Bowden notes, these references to “many Afllictions and heavy Crosses” allude to the abbess’s struggles for power with friars who attempted to impose their authority over the convent. However, these afflictions and crosses also serve typologically to link Tildesley and hence her community to Christ. Moreover, her “Guifts of Tears,” “painfull Sicknesses & Infirmaty” are tropes associated with feminine embodiment that bear witness to Clare’s imitation of Christ and conformity to divine will. Feminized suffering here connects the nuns to Christ and thus to future redemption. English nuns drew on their feminized vulnerability and hardships to make themselves symbols not just of the past but also of the present English Catholic condition. The Life and Good End of Sister Marie announces this metonymic connection in several ways. First, it uses hagiographic tropes to generalize Champney’s experience, avoiding particular names for places and characters, and thus making its narrative more broadly applicable. Second, the biography’s use of typology connects not only Syon but also all English Catholics to the Old Testament. When, for instance, the narrator explains that having followed her vocation to Flanders, Champney waited to become a nun “vntill she had longer weyned herselfe from her olde longinge homewarde into Egipte againe” (38–39), this “longinge homewarde” not only recalls the Israelites’ exile from Egypt but also conjures Champney’s longing for her own homeland. Such a yearning would have been recognizable by all English Catholics. Indeed, this comparison echoes the words of Catholic biblical scholar Richard Bristow (1538–1581), who likened the English refugees to the Israelites in Babylon: “we must bitterly weepe, sobbe, and sigh, to remember Sio[n] and the Temple of our Mother Jerusalem.”47 The biography’s use of typology then serves not only to link Syon to biblical forebearers but also to implicate English Catholics within this connection, making the nuns symbols for this larger community. This use of typology delicately interweaves the exiled Hebrews, the exiled English nuns, and English Catholics as a whole to suggest that the nuns who bridge this association are integral to ensuring an English Catholic future. Part and parcel of English nuns’ self-fashioning as symbols of a spiritual past that was destined to be revived in the future was their textual

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production. By both preserving and creating spiritual textual traditions, these women memorialized and preserved the past in order to assert national identity and political agency. One of the many ways in which they did this was through their communal reading of exemplary lives and obituaries of former members. As Bowden describes, such readings reminded Catholic nuns in exile of the roots of their foundations and served to form corporate identity and collective memory.48 As these lives and obituaries, many of which celebrate the holy lives led by their dedicatees, were read out loud within the community, they would have drawn on these models to derive templates for future behavior, thus forming a communal identity rooted in collective memory. This active recourse and reworking of the past in order to establish a model for the future is also apparent in nuns’ translations of their foundational texts, which asserted continuity between past and future.49 A sense of history’s inevitable extension into the present and future was emphasized in English Poor Clares’ commemoration of their foundress. Between 1621 and 1622, the Gravelines Poor Clare community translated Clare’s thirteenth-century Rule and Saint Collette’s fifteenth-century reform of the constitutions into English, a statement of their own embodiment of their foundress’s rule.50 This English-language version of the rule was accompanied by another female-authored and convent-produced text, The history of the angelicall virgin glorious S.  Clare, as it reshaped François Hendricq’s Vie admirable de des Pauvres Clairesses (Saint-Omer, 1631), which was, in turn, largely a translation of Irish Franciscan Luke Wadding’s Annales ordinis minorum. As Marie-Louise Coolahan argues, the author Evelinge reworked her source to serve the exiled English order.51 The text asserts the continuation of Franciscan tradition and its expression in the early modern English nuns. Indeed, it proclaims the sisters’ right to Franciscan identity in its very title: “The history of the angelicall vigin Glorious Ste Clare, Matchlesse Patterne of Religious Discipline. and Foundresse of the Poore Dames vulgarly styled the Poore Clares.” As the history traces a lineage that begins with St Francis, followed by the Freer minors, Clare’s mother Lady Hortulana, Clare herself, then her sister Agnes, and finally the Poor Clares, it creates a of chain of spiritual ancestors. This sense of lineage is emphasized by the use of botanical metaphors: Clare is described as “the little plant of S Francis” (chapter XVI), and the narrator states that “Sainte Clare by her example and renowne hath drawne many daughters after her” (Chapter XV). Thus, both the processes of preserving historical texts and the use of typology within

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these documents framed English nuns as the guardians of a Catholic past and announced them as the fulfillments of a past that promised to carry forth into the future. While Clare’s Life was the story of a woman from Assisi, the communal memory preserved by these convents was often specifically linked to English identity. For instance, the Chronicle of St Monica’s, an English Augustinian convent founded in Louvain in 1609, claimed descent from two pillars of English Catholicism.52 Margaret Clement (1539–1612) had served as Prioress of St. Ursula’s before a group of English nuns left in 1609 to found Saint Monica’s Convent. The nuns of Saint Monica’s thus saw Clement as a spiritual foremother. Because her mother, Margaret Giggs (1508–1570), was the adopted daughter of Thomas More, Clement provided the abbey with a link to the most famous English Catholic martyr.53 Moreover, the abbey also claimed Anne Clitherow, the daughter of England’s most famous female Catholic martyr Margaret Clitherow (1556–1586), as a forebearer; she was professed at St Ursula’s in 1598.54 She did not join Saint Monica’s due to a lack of funds, but she did support the convent’s foundation through her networks. By emphasizing its ties to these revered English Catholics, the new English foundation at Louvain was able to legitimize itself as a bastion of English Catholic faith. The nuns also emphasized continuity with an English Catholic past in their daily devotions. English saints were the focus of the liturgy in many of these convents: the Augustinians sang the Litany of the Saints for the return of England to its ancient faith on the Feasts of Saint Gregory the Great and Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The Benedictines at Cambrai celebrated the feasts of Saint Eadburga, Saint Augustine of Canterbury, and Saint Benedict Biscop.55 In 1662, two Bridgettine brothers at Lisbon copied and translated into English the hagiographical work “English Saintes of Kinges & Bishopps in the primitive times of the Catholique Church when our Countrie of England was governed by Heptarchie of seaven Kinges.”56 The Bridgettines further emphasized their connection to an English past by commissioning a set of paintings of early Christian English kings and queens from the Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco for display in the convent.57 At Cambrai, Father Augustine Baker, the spiritual director between 1624 and 1633, aimed to preserve English traditions of contemplative prayer, encouraging the nuns to study medieval English mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Walter Hilton, and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing. Using the example of the English Benedictine Dame Barbara Constable (1617–1684) of Cambrai, who collected, transcribed, and disseminated Baker’s writings, Heather

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Wolfe argues that nuns provided English Catholics with institutional memory.58 Through a process of textual bricolage, Constable also gathered and framed other spiritual material for the Cambrai nuns to use in their prayer and meditation. In her dedication to Abbess Catherine Gascoigne, Constable explains that she has “drawne these collections from amonge many other things which perhaps hindred them from beinge so well observed even by those they most concerned; as now they may beinge drawne apart from them and united together.”59 In these and other acts of textual assemblage, Constable preserved pieces of the past for the English Catholic present and future.60 By preserving examples of ancient English Christianity, English convents abroad framed themselves as the guardians of an English Catholic past until such time as, predestined by God, they could return home. While some of these typological reconfigurations of the past were internal, designed to reassure the convents’ inhabitants or, slightly further afield, hearten English Catholic audiences, typology also had immediate political use. The Arundel manuscript, whose production the Abbess Barbara Wiseman likely supervised, links Syon to biblical exiles in order to assert the order’s deservingness of royal favor.61 Heavily revising a history of their order written by Father Robert Persons, SJ (1546–1610), “Preface to the History of the Wanderings of Syon” (1595), which had portrayed the “heavy disconsolate nuns of Sion” (101–102) led by a capable Seth Foster, Arundel presents a history that makes rhetorical use of the hardships of “these most afflicted Sisters” (31).62 The nuns conveyed a sense of a preordained future in their petition to the king, likening their foundress to the Old Testament Abraham: “Es evidente que la S’ta. Iglesia quiere jnsinuar y significar que se puede juntar y igualar esta nuestra S’ta peregrina con el dicho grande patriarca Abrahan” [“It is evident that Holy Church wishes to intimate and signify that this our holy pilgrim can be compared and held in equal estimation with the great patriarch Abraham”] (15, 27). In fact, the nuns went so far as to suggest that Bridget’s journey exceeded that of the Old Testament patriarch since he merely traveled to the nearby land of Canaan whereas Bridget journeyed all the way from Sweden to Rome and Jerusalem. They declared, therefore, “q’los hijos de Abrahan se preçiaron mucho de su dicho grande Patriarcha y ser hijos del, con quanto mayor Razon nosotras las verdaderas Religiosas hijas desta gloriosa S’ta. nos Podemos holgar y preçiarnos de Nuestra tan grande y sanctissima madre” [“If the children of Abraham highly esteemed their great patriarch as their father with how much greater reason are we, true religious daughters of this glorious saint are able to delight in and esteem

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our great and most holy mother”] (16, 28). Through their foundress’s intercession, the sisters continue, “creemos y temenos por çierot averse hecho q’este solo convento sobre todos los otros monasteries de su orden mas ymite aesta heroica obra de su peregrinaçion y q’ mucho mas insiste en los Trabajosos passos y sudores de quella su dichosa salida de su tierra y parnetesco por tantas y tan varias tierras y provinçias” [“we believe and know that we have made this convent alone, above all the other convents of her Order, approximate more exactly to the heroic labour of her pilgrimage and more closely exemplify the painful steps and toil of her auspicious departure from her native land and family for so many different foreign countries and provinces”] (16, 28). The exiled sisters thus created a typological chain in which historical events unfold to reveal an overarching divine plan: Bridget was a fulfilled version of Abraham, and the sisters themselves were fulfillments of their foundress’s pilgrimage. Such typological logic served the political use of persuading the Spanish royal family that the Bridgettines were a cause worth supporting. Texts produced in English convents created lineages not only with holy predecessors but also with contemporary political powers, particularly female ones. The history of the angelicall virgin glorious S.  Clare, for instance, is dedicated to “the Most High and Mighty Princesse Mary Henrietta Queene of Great Britaine.” The dedication inserts the Poor Clares within Henrietta Maria’s royal lineage: the “progenie of France, from whence your Maiestie is extracted, it seemeth a thing proper if not hereditary to that Princely familie to be addicted to the children of our Seraphical Father, S.  Francis to whom God communicated Abriham’s priviledge” (2). In this opening, the nuns deftly linked themselves to both St Francis and the Old Testament Abraham in order to add themselves to the French “Princely familie.” They further equated their foundress, Clare, to royalty: “our holy Mother S. Clare: we shall find that she by singular Prerogatiue of Evangelicall Pouertie, both in proper and in common…merited to be in that eminent degree to espoused to her Lord Christ Iesus though Poore yet a King, that she must needs consequently also be (as we may to say) a Princesse and Queen” (The history of the angelicall virgin 4). Through this work, which would have been printed and so garnered an audience beyond the enclosure of the convent, the Aire Poor Clare community proclaimed its national identity in its dedication to Charles I’s Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria. As Coolahan notes, by drawing attention to the queen’s French lineage and religion, they also conveyed their hopes for a future English Catholic dynasty.63 This

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manuscript then served as more than an internal declaration of national and spiritual fealty. By declaring typological links between their community and the queen, it proclaimed to a larger audience a belief that the Poor Clares were destined for royal favor. Syon also used typology to align itself with female rulers in the Arundel manuscript’s petition to the Infanta, whom the nuns proleptically address as “her royal highness Princess of Wales.” By promising that their account will reveal “la extraordinaria virtud, y dignidad de nuestra gloriosa madre sancta Brigida, y de sus devotissimas peregrinaçiones, y las semejantes pergrinaçiones, y destierros destas sus Religiosas hijas” [“the extraordinary virtue and dignity of our glorious mother, St Bridget, and her most devout peregrinations, and the similar wanderings and exiles of her religious daughters”] (11, 23), the sisters link Bridget’s pilgrimages to their own state of exile. The petition then draws the princess herself into this imitative relationship, as it explains that the book is “Dedicada al honor de nuestra Senora Maria Madre de Dios, y Reyna de los cielos, que assy despues sea favoreçida y conservada por estas otras Reynas Maria” [“dedicated to the honour of Our lady, Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, so that the Order might be favoured and protected by these other Queen Marys”] (12, 24). This description links several different Marys— the Virgin Mary, as well as Queens named Mary who supported the nuns, including Mary of England, Marià, the Infanta’s grandmother, and now, hopefully, the Infanta Marià herself. This feminine spiritual typology is extended further back in time when the petition subsequently likens the young princess both to the Old Testament Susanna and to “neustra Reyna Hester ordenada ne nuestro señor para livrarnos, y poner fin a este nuestro destierro, y reduzirnos al feliçe y mui deseado descanço en nuestra antiga Syon” [“our Queen Esther ordained by our lord to set us free and lead us back to happy and greatly desired rest in our former home, Syon”] (13, 25). By casting the Infanta as the successor of biblical heroines, of her own ancestors, and of the Virgin Mary, the sisters projected hope for a future that was already latent within the deeds of women from the past. Indeed, they claimed that their future protection by the Princess was ensured since it was “muy conforme a la divina Instituiçion desta nuestra sagrada orden de sancta Bridgida, que por la palabras de Christo contendidas en el primer capitulo de la regla escrito en neustra Señora Maria Madre de Dios” [“wholly in accordance with the divine institution of this our sacred Order of Saint Bridget, which through the words of Christ contained in the first chapter of the rule written in the books of her revelations, was commended

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and dedicated to the honour of Our Lady, Mary Mother of God”] (12, 24). In this petition, Syon’s nuns projected a utopian future foreseen by a divine plan centered on women, and they mobilized this vision to craft a plea for economic and political support. This feminized typology is illustrated and expanded upon in the Arundel manuscript’s opening miniature (Fig.  3.1) titled “Peregrinacion” [“Pilgrimage”], which shows Bridget preparing to undertake the pilgrimage to Rome that would secure the future of her order.64 The saint stands in front of a cluster of nuns, who could represent her original followers in Sweden as well as the present-day nuns in Lisbon. The image’s caption below narrates, “Esta gloriosa Sta como S.  Joseph el sposo de nuestra Snora y como el patriarcha Abraham foyanisada de Dies deauer des sex perigrina” [“this glorious Saint, like St. Joseph, the spouse of Our Lady and, like the patriarch Abraham, was instructed by God to become a pilgrim”], followed by a quotation from Chronicles: “enim sumus coram te [et advenae] secut omnes patres nostri” [“For we are sojourners before thee, and strangers as were all our fathers (Douay-Rheims)”]. These allusions to Joseph and Abraham root Bridget within a typology that spans the Old and New Testaments. The citation from the Chronicles shifts the voice from third person to first person plural, imaginatively asserting the nuns into a transhistorical dialogue about pilgrimage and exile. Within the image itself, the appearance of Mary, Joseph, and the Christ child on the lower left associates the Bridgettine exile with the holy family’s flight out of Egypt. Mary’s body in particular is highlighted here, and her blue dress, which resembles a habit, associates her with the saint and nuns at the center, conceptually linking the birth of the son of God to Bridget’s birthing of a new religious order. While the holy family moves forward, Bridget and the nuns turn back as if toward the past looking up at an angel holding the saint’s Book of Revelations, which portray the saint’s glorious future as already written. This image and caption’s bricolage of four layers of time— the days of Abraham, the flight of Mary and Joseph, Bridget’s journey to Rome, and the present plight of Syon’s sisters—figures the nuns’ exile as a reenactment of a long spiritual history centered around holy women. It thus promises a future for those lost nuns on the right that will match the glory of their predecessors. In the context of a manuscript produced to cultivate royal favor, the miniature frames the Bridgettine nuns as worth investing in. By inserting themselves into a glorious future that was already written, early modern English nuns cast themselves in central roles within national

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Fig. 3.1  A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Pilgrimage, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library

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and religious histories. A typological view of a predestined future allowed them to validate their own communities, to rework perceived feminine weakness as a source of strength, to frame themselves as figures for the English Catholic plight and as memory capsules of English Catholic tradition, and to make a case for political support. In these new circumstances of exile, nuns modeled a utopian future that, like the liturgy in medieval convents, re-enacted the past to foreground future female agency but to immediate political ends. By figuring themselves as central to Catholic hopes, English nuns aimed to persuade their audiences, both internal and external, that the future was preordained to favor women religious. Hence, they asserted, protecting the communities of English Catholic women was an investment in the future.

Nuns’ Actions and Contingent Futures Even as early modern nuns confidently projected a glorious future foreseen by God, which included both their return to England and the recognition of their efforts as religious women, they did not wait idly in their cloisters for such a future to arrive. Instead, English nuns were active participants in the politics around them, articulating a view of the future that differs significantly from the notion of destiny put forth in their documents.65 Historical records reveal that English convents supported the English royalty during the interregnum. Mary Knatchbull (1610–1696), the abbess of the Convent of the Immaculate Conception in Ghent, for instance, aided Charles II while he was in exile. As Walker has shown, English nuns were able to run correspondence networks because intelligence services did not consider their mail significant enough to surveil.66 Knatchbull arranged the transport of the royalist mail to and from England, as well as between different locations in Flanders and France. She also gathered news of English political events from her many correspondents across the Channel.67 Other convents such as Syon and the Poor Clares, as we have seen, maintained correspondence with royal patrons. Later in the seventeenth century, several convents corresponded with Mary of Modena, the second wife of James II, whom they hoped would influence her husband to end their exile.68 The foundress of the Brussels Benedictine convent, Mary Percy (1570–1642), cultivated the support of Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella at Brussels. She used these contacts to negotiate tax concessions. She and other abbesses and prioresses drew on the support of lay and ecclesiastical authorities to obtain legal documents

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necessary to establish their convents.69 Convents also sought to shape the future in more indirect ways. For instance, many foundations educated girls, training them either as potential members of the order or as future mothers of good English Catholics. Other communities provided accommodation for expatriate lay Catholics.70 Such activities convey a more human-centered and, therefore, unpredictable notion of the future, one that required the interventions of women religious in addition to trust in God. From this viewpoint, the future became far more precarious than typology predicted. One of the principal ways in which these English nuns asserted their belief in the power of their own interventions was when they requested funds and support. Such petitions were, of course, a necessity for orders that were in many cases destitute. However, what is interesting is the language that the nuns used to characterize their situation, for, even though in some cases they drew on typology to justify their claims, they also sought to insert their lives within more worldly narratives. This was the case at the Abbey of the Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Lady, which was founded in 1624 as the result of a dispute between some nuns with the Brussels Benedictine abbess Mary Percy. In the 1650s, Knatchbull appealed to the citizens of Ghent for the “releife of a community of virgins exiled and fallen into poverty for the only cause of Religion.”71 In this plea, she connected her own community’s financial destitution to the affairs of her nation: Being humbly to expose unto the charity of the city the distress of our Community wee desire it may be in the first place understood and considered that this great poverty hath occurred through no excess of ours, but from the common calamnity of o[u]r Nation or rather in way of suffering for justice as being Religious and the children of Catholikes from whom the unjust lawes of England now violently executed takes all their temporall fortunes.72

Rather than linking the distress of her community to a biblical history of exile, Knatchbull situated her nuns within the political present as she invoked “the common calamint of o[ur] Nation” and made clear that this distress is caused by “unjust” English laws. Knatchbull was hence using a different mode of persuasion than we find, for instance, in the Life of Mary Champney: she elicited sympathy for her community on legal and

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political grounds. Her petition thus gestures to a more human-focused political future. In return for financial and political support, the English nuns offered their prayers. While prayer is clearly a spiritual act, the way in which the nuns made use of prayer in their petitions enacted a mode of political exchange. As they proffered their prayers in return for funding and political protection, they implicated their spirituality within worldly reciprocity, thereby further engaging in a human-centered view of the future. Such a strategic use of prayer is evident in the life of St Clare in which the Poor Clares of the Aire convent wrote a dedication in which they prayed that King Charles I and his heirs might have long reigns.73 Such spiritual efforts do not convey a secular outlook in the manner that Kosseleck describes, but they did assert the necessity of human engagement in the future. They thus offered a sense of the future in need of shaping through the prayers of religious women. An extended vision of the way in which nuns saw themselves as bartering with worldly powers is apparent in the Arundel manuscript, as in both the petitions to the Infanta and to King Philip, the nuns established themselves as having something to offer. For instance, when they wrote to King Philip, “Tomad este prezente de la mano de nuestra pobreza” [“Take this present from the hand of our poverty]” (18, 29), they suggested through the alliterative coupling of “prezente” and “pobreza” that their poverty had not only enabled them to produce the book but would also help to ensure the much greater “prezente” of a match between England and Spain.74 In their later dedication to the Spanish princess, the sisters put their destitution to productive use as a witness of divine approval: [nuestra muchedumbres [de] aflicciones, tristeza y lagrimas son verdaderos Testigos, y juntamente que nuestra daños sufrimientos, y peligros por mar y por tierra son verdaderos testimonios, quanto tuuimos padeçido y finalmente la grande falta de nuestra patria’ parientes, y language junta con nuestra grande pobreza en tierras ye Reyños ajenos declaran, y demuestran las pesadas, y grandissimas difficultades que siempre tuuimos, y lleuamos a nuestra cuestas…]. (13) our many afflictions, sorrows, and tears are true witnesses and, with our injuries, sufferings, and dangers on land and at sea, true testimony of how much we have had to suffer; finally the aching in loss of our native land, families and mother tongue, as well as our extreme poverty in foreign lands and kingdoms, declare and make evident the burdens and great difficulties we have experienced and carried on our shoulders. (25)

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Here, the sisters again played on the rhetoric of feminine vulnerability that connected them to biblical exiles and to a broader notion of suffering as a form of redemption. However, rather than framing these experiences typologically, the nuns instead imbued their afflictions with a formal, legalistic quality by using the terms “Testigos” and “testimonios.” They thus transformed their feminized defenselessness into a legal tool and used it to declare their worthiness of royal favor.75 As this petition continues, the manuscript engages in a political negotiation with King Philip, as the nuns wrote, “ofrecemos una j(h)oia de mucho ma preçio y valor”/ “we offer a jewel of much greater price and value than all the other many gifts and presents that may arrive” (17, 28). This jewel, they later specified, was the glory that the king would receive in return for his aid to their community. The sisters thus translated these immaterial benefits into material language. They further established a relationship of obligational reciprocity that echoes a political pact when they claimed that the king’s extension of favor to St Bridget “obligandola de procurer por su jntercission la feliçe y prospera suçession y proteçion de V.  Real propagaçion y generaçion por el sustento y preservaçion desta familia de sus hijas en esta su trabajosa peregrinaçion y destierro…” [“oblig[es] her to procure through her intercession the happy and prosperous succession and protection of Your royal progeny through the sustenance and preservation of this family of your daughters in their laborious pilgrimage and exile…”] (17–18, 29). The sisters framed Bridget’s intercession not as guaranteed by divine providence but rather as possible only on the condition that the king sustain their community. In contrast to the conventional exchange of women by men described by Gayle Rubin in “The Traffic in Women,” here, the nuns became both givers and gifts. In this, they portrayed ideal future outcomes as obtained through the political tactics of women.76 In their subsequent petition to the Infanta, Syon’s nuns sought to use their spiritual clout to intervene in a specific political event: the marriage between Spain and England. To convey this desire, they wrote: No dudamos, sino que los ruegos, y oraçiones de nuestra gloriosa madre uistos los trabajos destas sus hijas tiene negoçiado, y alcançado de nuestro senor el casamiento de Vuestra Alteza con nuestro muy grandioso Prinçipe de la gran Bretania con este espeçial intencion que Vuestra Alteza fuesse y entrasse en su lugar por madre patrona y singular amparo dellas. (11–12)

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[We do not doubt that the entreaties and prayers of our glorious mother, the hardships of these her daughters, have negotiated and brought about, through our Lord, the marriage of your highness with our very great prince of Great Britain, with this special intention that your highness should go to assume her place as mother and patroness and singular refuge of her daughters]. (23–24)

Here, the sisters injected political rhetoric into a spiritual framework as they portrayed their foundress’s prayers as “ruegos,” a word that means “entreaty” or “appeal.” They further implicated these “ruegos” in political discourse by stating that their own hardships “tiene negoçiado” (have negotiated) the proposed marriage. The nuns thus framed their community as spiritual brokers and drew on this identity to compel patronage from the Infanta. By using their religious identity in service of political negotiation, they posited their own community as a mediator between an old order of divine promise and a new sense of a future attained through political strategy. This newer and more overtly political view of the future exists in tension and in tandem with typology’s guarantee of a desired future. A dialectic between divinely ensured and human-produced futures is apparent in one of the most commonly produced convent genres, hagiography. Sacred biography, while it narrates the universal story of the Christian faith, also celebrates an individual’s virtuous acts. As Nicky Hallett writes, in reference to English Carmelite vitae, “There is a constant tension, therefore, between accounting for individual chronology in which pious progression is marked by the human clock and trying to describe fragments of beyondbody temporal transgression.”77 These two modes of narrative, one that stresses a universal narrative and another that foregrounds individual human acts, emerge at the end of Mary Champney’s biography. As explored earlier, the beginning of this Life creates a link between the Bridgettine community and the Old Testament Israelites, portraying the utopian return of Catholics to England as an inevitable part of a sacred history foreseen by God. On her deathbed, however, Champney foregrounds a different kind of path to a desired future, one that is more aligned with Kosseleck’s notion of political prognosis. Here, Champney prays that Syon “shalbe builded vp agayne more bewtifully … then it ever was in our tyme” and prays for “the speedei conversion of Englande” (57). Rather than relying on the inevitability of typology to ensure that Syon will be restored, Champney asserts the need for human action, which

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takes the form of religious women’s prayers, to induce her country’s “speedei conversion.” She thus portrays her prayers as having effects not merely in the world beyond but in an immediate political future. This perspective intensifies when Champney subsequently prays for Mary Queen of Scots, whom she names as “such a Susanna” (57). Here, Champney invokes typology by linking Queen Elizabeth’s Catholic rival to the Old Testament Susanna, who was falsely accused of promiscuity by the elders in the Book of Daniel. However, Champney continues by stating, “for her heavie crosse in deede-we maie hope for some grete worke of God to all our comfortes, when we ar at the lowest” (57). These words suggest that Mary Queen of Scots’ own sacrifice leads to some hope, rather than to a guarantee, that God will intervene to help the Syon nuns. Champney’s sense of women’s potential to impact the future becomes more overtly subversive when, in response to Champney’s prayers for Mary Queen of Scots, the narrator recalls, “certayne wordes which I hearde her [Champney] speake: how she had hearde by some secret hope of such a thinge a longe tyme spoken of in their howse since their first suppresion, that their order should be erected againe in the northe partes of Englande, whosoeuer shoulde live to see it” (57). These “certayne wordes” refer to the rumor that the Bridgettines hoped to use their Northern connections to re-establish their house in the North of England, hinting, in Nancy Warren’s view, at the order’s possible involvement in plots against Queen Elizabeth.78 The elusiveness of this description, in which the narrator recalls “certayne wordes” and “some secret hope,” rather than a direct statement, underscores the subversive nature of the acts to which Champney alludes. Resonant with literary utopias that deny exact descriptions—for instance, Campanella’s detailed yet impenetrable description of the City of the Sun or Cavendish’s description of a conversation between the Duke, Duchess, and Empress in her Blazing World as “so pleasant, that it cannot be expressed”—this narrator gestures toward an ideal that cannot yet be fully legible.79 Such reticence allows the utopian vision to remain intact, untainted by human language, and, in practical terms, it protected the nuns from accusations of sedition should the biography fall into the wrong hands. Alongside the trust in God’s plan foregrounded by typology, then, the Life also conveys an urgent sense that women religious will need to act, at times against their State, to achieve the changes they desire. The letters of Syon nun Elizabeth Sander (c. after 1574–1607) to Syon patron Francis Englefield (1522–1596), written just a few years

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before Champney’s biography, demonstrate how English nuns did in fact engage in acts against the States by reworking assumptions about their identities. In her account of her return to England to raise funds for the order and advance the Catholic mission, Sander reported using her identity as a woman religious as a pretext for subversive acts.80 Apprehended while distributing the Jesuit Edward Campion’s “Challenge to the Right Honourable Lords of her Majestie’s Privy Council,” she wrote that she was brought before Sir Richard Norton, a justice who “examynded me and askyd for my Pryst, for my Albes and vestments wherewt he had sayed masse, becaswe that they had found a chalice and a masse booke in my chambre” (12). Sander pleaded innocence on the grounds that the chalice and mass book belonged to her rather than to a priest: “I answeryed that I knew of no pryst albe or vestment, and that the chalice and booke was mne owne, for I brought ytt over wt me” (12). Sander here refutes Norton’s assumption that her chalice and mass book might more naturally be the property of a Catholic man and instead asserts her own ability to own such holy objects. At the same time, she relies on her gender to claim lack of further knowledge: “And I desyred hym to showe me some favour, I was but a poore woman I knew of no such matters as they examined me of” (12). In this verbal dance, Sander capitalizes on assumptions that Catholic women could not wield independent spiritual authority, but in doing so she also asserts her own spiritual autonomy by claiming a chalice and religious books as her own. Sander further mobilized her joint identities as a woman and a nun when, as she described in her second letter to Englefield (written because she was uncertain about whether the first was received), she responded to her captors using her gender as a defense: “They asked me many most impertinent questions, to all which I gave but one short answer, saying that I was a woman and a nun proof enough that I would not disturb the kingdom” (43–44).81 As Warren observes, Sander here used “received, idealized versions of both womanhood and religious life” as a “smokescreen” for her transgressive acts.82 She hence practiced a form of the bricolage that was a common tactic for nuns as she reworked assumptions about feminine passivity into a form of authority, paving the way for a utopian English Catholic future that relied on women’s actions. This utopian vision is not the guaranteed future that we find within typology. Rather, Sander recognized the risk involved, a risk that was both justified by and inherent to female community. Recognition of the intertwining of female community and precarity appears in Sander’s

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description of her return to the Bridgettine community in Rouen after she had been arrested in England for distributing Campion’s Challenge and imprisoned in Winchester Castle. She describes her longing for the Bridgettine community in Rouen as her primary motivation for escape: “had it not been for the great desire I had to obey my superior and find myself again with my Sisters, which gave me strength, I would not for a thousand worlds have put myself into such a dangerous position and one that, considered in itself, was more than rash” (48). Sander’s desire to find herself again with her sisters mirrors the kind of longing for England felt by English Catholics. However, rather than invoking a predestined return to England as Champney’s biographer had done when Syon’s chapel was destroyed, Sander longed for her female community abroad. Moreover, she envisioned this return as reliant on dangerous human action.83 Her use of conditional statements—“had it not been” and “I would not”—foregrounds the risk involved in her choice to return. This hypothetical language advances a theory of a future that is not prewritten but rather propelled by human longing, in this case a nun’s desire to rejoin her community. For Sander, then, female religious community acted as a motivation for human action toward a desired but uncertain utopian end. The final miniature of the Arundel manuscript, “Prayer for his Majesty” (Fig. 3.2), represents the potential risks inherent in a future that relies on women’s political calculation. This image, unlike the others in the manuscript, is set indoors, inside the sisters’ lower choir in Lisbon. Different from the landscapes of the earlier images, which display multiple temporal moments that create the impression of a continuous experience of exile from the Old Testament to the seventeenth century, this miniature depicts a single moment, thus introducing a sense of distinction between past and present. The Spanish king—likely Philip III on the occasion of his 1619 visit to Portugal—kneels before an altar that bears a statue of the Virgin and Child. Bridget stands behind him with her hand on his shoulder.84 The saint’s position over her kneeling patron and her gaze, as her eyes look toward the statue, foreground her spiritual authority and her special connection with the Virgin Mary. This connection extends to the nuns behind her, who, dressed in matching habits, visually echo the saint and so share in her intimacy with the Virgin. While the miniature announces the ability of the nuns to intercede with the divine on behalf of the royal family, it is, after all, King Philip and not Bridget who occupies the center of the composition. His centrality is echoed in the caption below, which states: ,“la perpetua obligacion y oracion q’esta gloriosa Santa Brizida y

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Fig. 3.2  A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Expelled from London, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library

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sus hijas hazen por su Real Magestad” [“This portrays the perpetual obligation and prayer that this glorious St Bridget and her daughters offer up for his Royal Majesty”], and is followed by a passage from Psalm 60: “Dies super dies regis adicies annos eius usque in diem generationis et generationis” [“You will add days to the days of the king, to his years, even to the time of generation after generation”]. These words emphasize the importance of the king over the sisters. While the psalm foregrounds a continuous sacred history, the “perpetua obligacion” of Bridget and her daughters evokes the language of political obligation, this time seeming to give the king the upper hand. The future glimpsed within this miniature, in contrast to the first image’s prediction of success, is uncertain as it relies on the whims of a king. Even as the Arundel manuscript depicts the nuns as mediators between religion and politics to ensure a utopian future for England and for themselves, it also registers the flip side of this assertion: reliance on human action left the nuns at the mercy of secular rulers over whom they had little control. In a more human understanding of a utopian future, nuns risked erasure.

Utopian Failures Early modern English nuns in exile thus mobilized two approaches to a utopian future, one that saw worldly outcomes as ensured by divine providence and another that viewed them as products of uncertain human action. While the second mode more nearly approximated the approach to the future taken by literary utopias, it is the combination of typological and human-actioned views of the future that collectively constructed these women’s visions of worlds that improved upon the present. It is these modes together that comprised their utopian visions. While these combined perspectives established nuns as privileged mediators between Church and state, by intervening in politics beyond the bounds of the cloister, these women found themselves in a precarious position since they were entering into the territory over which they had little control. Indeed, the aspiration of English Catholic nuns that their communities would facilitate the return of English Catholicism did not, in fact, come to fruition. Many of these communities were able to stay afloat due to the favors they gained from royal and ecclesiastical authorities, but they did not achieve their ultimate goal. This failure does not, however, negate their utopianism. In fact, utopia is perhaps most nearly defined by failure. As Jameson writes, utopia’s “deepest vocation is over and over again to

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demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.”85 For Jameson this is the failure to imagine something beyond capitalism, which utopia unmasks, but for early modern nuns, utopian failure was the impossibility of using patriarchal discourse against itself. And English nuns did, time and time again, experience such a failure. While some of their petitions did succeed in raising funds, many nunneries continued to exist in unchosen poverty. The plans for the proposed marriage between Charles and the Infanta that had so energized early seventeenth-­century Syon fell through, and although the English king did marry a French Catholic princess, toleration for Catholics did not ensue. In fact, the Arundel manuscript never reached the royal family, and the Syon community remained in Portugal until 1861, when a very small number of impoverished nuns returned to England to form a community that dissolved in 2011. The Poor Clares of Rouen described in poignant terms the events of 1688 which put an end to their hopes of return from exile for the foreseeable future: “The yeare 1688 brought great revolutions to our poor Country, the Prince of Orange invading our Kingdome, which caused great troubles to many of our Catholick friends and forced many of them to come into these parts.”86 England would never again become a Catholic nation, and nuns’ efforts to use their religious status to intervene in politics would not succeed on a large scale. English nuns themselves seem to have foreseen their own failure. A keen sense of precarity undergirds Sander’s second letter to Englefield as she vividly described the return to Rouen for which, earlier in the letter, she had pronounced her ardent wish: “I was welcomed by our Reverend Abbess, and my living Sisters with the joy you may imagine, being so ardently expected and having been so long away and in so many dangers that it seemed impossible I should ever return” (50). Though this letter describes a past event, its language imbues that moment with potentiality as Sander relates how she experienced “joy you may imagine.” By leaving her joy to the reader’s imagination, Sander heightened its intensity, but by then reverting to the time before her arrival, reminding her reader that her return was “ardently expected” and that “it seemed impossible,” she ended her letter with a sense of incompletion. Though she did, in fact, rejoin her community in Rouen, the letter gives the impression that her return is still impending. And indeed, in the larger context of English Catholicism, Sander may have rejoined her community, but she had not yet returned home. This hypothetical description of Sander’s return underscores the not-yet condition of English Catholicism, and the epistolary

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form itself further registers this uncertainty: Will the letter arrive? Who might read it on the way? Sander herself responded to this uncertainty when she wrote a second letter fearing her first had not arrived. This Bridgettine nun’s longing for her female community thus conveys both the transformative potential and the risk of failure within women’s subversive actions. A miniature from the middle of the Arundel manuscript’s image series (Fig. 3.3) visually encapsulates the fraught position in which early modern English nuns found themselves. In a scene representing the order’s 1537 expulsion from England, a group of four Bridgettine nuns in their first exile from England stand on a strip of land between the River Thames and the Atlantic Ocean. To the left lies the English shore and the nuns’ former abbey in Twickenham. To the right is the open water with a cluster of ships heading out to sea. Titled “echadas de londres” (“thrown out of London”), this image bears the caption, “Enrique 8 Rey de Inglatierra hecho estas monjas de su monasterio de Sion en el ano de 1539” [“Henry VIII, King of England cast out these nuns from their monastery of Syon in the year 1539”]. This explanation is followed by the first line of Psalm 136 (now Psalm 137), to which Champney’s Life also alluded: “super flumina Babylonis ibi sedimus et flevimus cum recordaremur Sion” [“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Syon”]. The nuns here, as in Marin’s notion of the utopic, are caught between worlds—between a spiritual past, signified by the psalm as well as by the visual representation of their former abbey, and a changing present, suggested in the reference to Henry VIII’s expulsion of the monasteries, and by the ships, which evoke a new world of travel and trade. The sisters huddle together in the liminal space between these two worlds, finding solidarity through their community. English nuns used their identity as bridges between old and new rhetorically to their advantage. However, the miniature also portrays the isolation of such a position. The sisters are alone on a strip of that land that neither belongs nor is fully detached from the world around it; they are stuck between systems to which they can never fully belong. During their early years in exile, early modern English nuns at once embraced a future promised by God through their use of typology and endorsed a vision of an ideal future precariously produced through human efforts. By framing themselves as vehicles of both types of future, they cast their own communities as utopias, capable of joining a lost Catholic past with the new political circumstances of early modern Europe. While, in

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Fig. 3.3  A History of the Peregrinations of the Syon Nuns, Prayer for His Majesty, Arundel Castle Library, published with the permission of Bridgeman Images and Arundel Castle Library

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the medieval convent, we need to imagine women’s reactions and performances largely based on texts written for them in order to discern a utopianism that these spaces may have cultivated, in this period of exile, English nuns themselves reworked materials from the past—both the Old Testament and the remnants of English Catholicism— to cast themselves as vital players in the present and future. Their ultimate failure to produce this future speaks not to their shortcomings but to the difficulty of using frameworks that had excluded women to assert women’s agency. As Audre Lorde famously wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”87 But if English nuns did not fully achieve the success that they envisioned for themselves, their documents provide a rich testament to women’s active engagement in utopian thought, showing that early modern nuns, more than confining themselves to the concerns of the cloister or even to the immediate politics of their day, contributed to transhistorical intellectual discourse. Though they did not use the term utopia, these women participated in strategic thinking about an ideal future that at once complements the literary utopias of their day and adds a more future-oriented outlook to the established tradition of early modern utopia. Merging the spiritual and the political, English nuns articulated a utopianism that, more boldly and earnestly than the literary utopias of their time, embraced contradiction and failure, tracing faint but still visible pictures of pasts and futures in which women might and did wield authority. As the rest of this book will show, the utopian practice modeled within exiled English convents laid the groundwork for Englishwomen’s utopias beyond convent walls.

Notes 1. An edition of this manuscript is available in Christopher Hamel, ed. The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns. Pages from the original Spanish and then the English translation are cited parenthetically. This manuscript was returned to England in 1809 and is now kept in the Arundel Castle library (see John Martin Robinson, “Introduction,” to Syon Abbey: The Library of the Bridgettine Nuns, 9–10). 2. While the author of the manuscript is anonymous, Elizabeth Perry suggests that nuns may have written the text (“Petitioning for Patronage: An Illuminated Tale of Exile from Syon,” in The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 Communities, Culture and Identity, Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly, eds. [Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013], 174). This supposi-

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tion is bolstered by Emilie K.M. Murphy’s assertion of the importance of language skills in convents and examples of English nuns who learned local languages (“Exile and Linguistic Encounter: Early Modern English Convents in the Low Countries and France,” Renaissance Quarterly 73.1 [Spring 2020]: 132–64). 3. The number 22 refers only to convents that survived the seventeenth century. See Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 17. 4. Supporting the association of these convents with Englishness, Walker reports that 94 per cent of nuns in English convents were of English origin while only 3 per cent claimed Welsh, Scottish, or Irish paternity. Locally recruited nuns formed the remaining 3 per cent of convent populations. Walker, Gender and Politics, 39. See also Caroline Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile and Questions of National Identity, 1600–1688,” in Emigrants and Exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603–1688, ed. David Worthington (Amsterdam: Brill, 2010), 297–314. Walker describes the biased recruitment patterns of English nuns in “‘Doe not supose me a well mortified Nun dead to the world’: Letter-Writing in Early Modern English Convents” in Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2001), 159–76, 161. 5. A connection between early modern English convents and utopianism is strengthened by the prominence of Benedictine nun Gertrude More (1606–1633), the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas More, whose posthumous Spiritual Exercises had an impact well beyond convent walls. See Arthur F. Marotti, ed. Gertrude More: Printed Writings, 1641–1700, Series II, Part Four, Volume 3 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 6. Tonya Moutray McArthur aptly calls English convents “Catholic ‘elsewheres,’” which connects them to utopia’s etymological meaning, “a good place that is nowhere.” See “Through the Grate,” 108. 7. In addition to previously cited work by Bowden and Walker, for recent scholarship on early modern English nuns, see Nicky Hallett, The Senses in Religious Communities, 1600–1800: Early Modern ‘Convents of Pleasure’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Jaime Goodrich, “Nuns and CommunityCentered Writing: The Benedictine Rule and the Brussels Statutes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 77 (2014): 287–303; James E.  Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600—1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Jenna Lay, Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Victoria Van Hyning, Convent

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Autobiography. Early Modern English Nuns in Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); “Expressing Selfhood in the Convent: Anonymous Chronicling and Subsumed Autobiography,” British Catholic History 32 (2014), 219–34; and the collected volume The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity, ed. Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 8. Augustine of Hippo, De Gratia et Libero Arbitrio, in Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff, (Boston: Rand Avery, 1887), 437–65, 448. For a discussion of Augustine’s writing on free will and grace, see On the Free Choice of the Will, on Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 9. The conundrum of how to reconcile God’s foreknowledge of events with the contingency of some aspects of the future resulted in varying approaches to future contingents, deriving from Chapter 9 of Aristotle’s De Interpretation ed. Hermann Weidemann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). See William Lane Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: Brill, 1988). 10. For a consideration of Aquinas’s position on grace and free will, see Matthew Knell, Sin, Grace and Free Will: A Historical Survey of Christian Thought, (Volume 1): The Apostolic Fathers to Augustine (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2017), 128–79. 11. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). For an expansion of Koselleck’s study of the future focused on Renaissance England, see J.K.  Barret, Untold Futures, Time and Literary Culture in Renaissance England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016). 12. Koselleck, Futures Past, 18. 13. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, January 14, 2013. See Timothy McDermott, ed. St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae: A Concise Translation (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1989). 14. Koselleck writes about the emergence during the late eighteenth century of a form of utopia that takes place in the future, which he attributes to new geographical knowledge and secularization. However, I argue that nuns enacted a prescient form of ­future-­oriented utopia long before the eighteenth century. See Koselleck, “The Temporalization of Utopia,” in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 84–99. 15. The Oxford English Dictionary lists 1850 as the first usage of typology. Frances Young argues that although typology is a modern coinage it can still operate as a heuristic tool (Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of

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Christian Culture [Cambridge University Press, 1997], 193). There is debate concerning the distinction between allegory and typology in early Christian studies in reference to Origen. For a summary of these debates, see Peter Martens, “Revisiting the Allegory/Typology Distinction: The Case of Origen,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008): 283–317. For the purposes of this chapter, typology is distinguished from allegory as it is a specific form of biblical exegesis that reads events from the Old Testament as containing “types” of events in the future. 16. Young, Biblical Exegesis, 235. 17. See Erich Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), 11–79, especially 72. For another influential study of typology see also Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London: Burns & Oates, 1960). 18. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992; repr. 2008), 228–29. 19. For a recent study of typology in the early modern period, see Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion, ed. D. Eichberger and S. Perlove (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). 20. Christopher Hughes, “Visual typology: an Ottonian example,” Word and Image 17 (2001): 185–98, 185. The tendency to reduce typology to oneto-one correspondences between the Old and New Testament has also been contested in R.K. Emmerson, “Figura and the Medieval Typological Imagination” in Typology and English Medieval Literature, ed. H.T. Keenan (New York: AMS Press, 1989), 7–34; and J.J.  Paxson, “A Theory of Biblical Typology in the Middle Ages,” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 359–83. 21. Protestants as well as Catholics used Exodus as a mirror for their own experiences. See Victoria Brownlee, Biblical Readings and Literary Writings in Early Modern England, 1558–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 30–1, and Barbara Lewalksi, “Typological Symbolism and the ‘Progress of the Soul’ in S ­ eventeenth-­Century Literature,” in Literary Uses of Typology, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 81. For further discussion of the development of typology in this period, see Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1975). 22. Auerbach, “Figura,” 58. 23. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 7. 24. See Walker, Gender and Politics, 2. As English sisters yearned to return to their homeland, their writings were filled, as Claire Walker describes, with grief, consolation, and hope, and markers of nostalgia. Claire Walker, “The Experience of Exile in Early Modern English Convents,” Parergon 34. 2 (2017): 177–259, 163.

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25. Nicky Hallett explores time in early modern convents specifically among Carmelite nuns, arguing that “Discalced accounts of time…present both an emphatically continuous version of temporality (in which the nuns trace origins), and one of transcendence (in which they trace spiritual favors of their religious order).” Nicky Hallett, “‘So Short a Space of Time’: Early Modern Convent Chronology and Carmelite Spirituality,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 42:3 (2012): 539–66, 541. 26. Richard Verstegan cited in Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile,” 302. 27. According to MS Haslemere 1876 at Downside Abbey, a Victorian history of the English Benedictine Brussels house that was based on various older manuscripts that have not survived, “At her Profession, a prediction was made, that she would found a Monastery, which should carry the Benedictine Order again into England: so that her religious Sisters would often tell her that she was destined to greater things, and would not end her days among them” (20). A footnote at the colon in this quotation states, “When the great Revolution took place at the end of the last century, the English Benedictines of Brussels, were contrary to all expectation, the first to arrive in this Country which they reached on the 6th July 1794 and thus fulfilled the Rheim’s prophecy” (20). Many thanks to Jaime Goodrich for providing this reference by email. 28. “Novice Vow” in EUL MS 389/COM/1/2/1. 29. “A petition for aid from the religious of the Order of St. Bridget, formerly of Sion in England,” in Thomas Francis Knox, Records of the English Catholics Under the Penal Laws, vol. 1 of The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douay, and an Appendix of Unpublished Documents (London: David Nutt, 1878). 30. On the history of the Syon nuns in exile, see Claire Walker, “Continuity and Isolation: The Bridgettines of Syon in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Syon Abbey and Its Books, 155–76. 31. Nancy Bradley Warren argues that Henry VIII, perhaps because of his respect for Henry V, did not insist on seizing Syon’s keys and seal, which meant that Syon could claim a continuous existence. Women of God and Arms: Female Spirituality and Political Conflict, 1380–1600 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 154. 32. The only manuscript copy of this text is London, British Library Additional 18650 (2r–16v), which is edited in Ann M.  Hutchison, “The Life and Good End of Sister Marie,” Birgittiana 13 (2002): 33–89. Citations from this edition will be cited parenthetically. From internal evidence, this biography appears to have been written very shortly after the death of Mary Champney on April 27, 1580 (Hutchison, “Mary Champney,” 5). While the Life states that Champney was the daughter of a captain from Somerset, Hutchison notes that she is not found among members of the Somerset

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branch of the Champney family in Orchardleigh and suggests that she may alternatively have been the daughter of John Champnes, in Ulfcolombe, Devon, who refers to “my daughter mary” in his will of January 9, 1568. However, Hutchison also notes that Champney’s departure abroad could also account for her absence in the Orchardleigh family records (“Mary Champney,” 14). Jenna Lay raises the possibility that Mary Champney is the same woman who was raped by George Puttenham and then abandoned by him in Antwerp (Beyond the Cloister, 12–15). Hutchison disagrees with Nancy Bradley Warren’s (ch. 6 of Women of God and Arms) argument that sisters were sent back to England for political purposes, and argues instead that the sisters returned to collect alms. See Ann M. Hutchison, “Syon Abbey Preserved: Some Historians of Syon,” in Syon Abbey and Its Books, 231. 33. Ibid., 232. Hutchison has speculated that the author may have been someone outside the Bridgettine order because Syon is referred to as “they” and that this author may have been a woman based on detailed observations of Mary’s physical appearance, but neither of these assumptions seems convincing because anonymous authors often assume an outsider voice and an author of any gender might note physical details. See Ann M. Hutchison, “Mary Champney: A Bridgettine Nun under the Rule of Queen Elizabeth I,” Birgittiana 13 (2002): 3–89, 6. 34. This translation is from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Evidence suggests that the Syon sisters may have had access to several different versions of the Bible. Their library from Lisbon, now housed in Exeter University’s special collections, includes a fourth edition illustrated New Testament published in Rouen by John Coustrier in 1633 (Syon Abbey 1633/BIB); Commentaria in quatuor Prophetas Maiores / auctore R.P.  Cornelio Cornelii à Lapide published by Martinus Nutius in 1634 (Syon Abbey 1634/COR/X). They also had several copies of the Old Testament Psalms, including Psalterium Romanum: dispositum per Hebdomadam ad formam breviarii Romanii, Pii V Pontif. Maximi iussu editi et Clementis Octavi auctoritate recogniti redactum ... cum hymnis ac officio B.  Mariae Virginis in fine positis printed in Venice (1622) by the Giunti family (Syon Abbey 1622/BIB); Psalmi: Proverbia, Ecclesiastes, Canticum canticorum, Sapientia, Ecclesiasticus published in Antwerp in 1629 (Syon Abbey 1629/BIB); Psalterium Davidis: cum canticis sacris & selectis aliquot orationibus published in Antwerp by Balthasaris Moreti in 1639 (Syon Abbey 1639/BIB); and a book of psalms that is missing all leaves before a1 (Syon Abbey 15/BIB). 35. In Bridget’s Revelations, Christ uses the metaphor of a new vineyard to symbolize the creation of a new religious order. Searby, ed. and trans.,

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“Prologue to the Rule of the Savior” in The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, 124. 36. A further house of the Poore Clares was founded at Drogheda, but the nuns were exiled to the continent as a result of the Cromwellian wars. They were able to re-establish themselves in Galway in 1672–1670. The community’s experiences were chronicled by Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne (c. 1610–1670). Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Transnational Reception and Early Modern Women’s ‘Lost’ Texts,” Early Modern Women 7 (2012): 261–70, 265. 37. “Rouen Chronicle of the Poor Clare Sisters, vol. 1,” in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 1, History Writing, ed. Caroline Bowden (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 4–196, 4. 38. Ibid, 20. 39. Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 35. 40. Sahlin, Voice of Prophecy, 78–107. 41. Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 42. Ibid., 11. 43. As Walker observes, the language of suffering and exile became a means for certain nuns “to reinvent their contemplative apostolate” as “certain women appropriated affliction as a central feature of their personal piety” (“The Experience of Exile,” 162, 169). 44. On this moment in Syon’s history, see John Rory Fletcher, The Story of the English Bridgettines of Syon Abbey (South Brent, Devon: Syon Abbey, 1933), 48–9. 45. The history of the angelicall virgin glorious S. Clare dedicated to the Queens most excellent maiesty. Extracted out of the R. F. Luke Wadding his annalls of the freer minors chiefly by Francis Hendricq and now donne into English, by Sister Magdalen Augustine, of the holy order of the poore clarcs [sic] in Aire. STC (2nd ed.)/24924, 5. Further excerpts from this text will be cited parenthetically by chapter number. 46. “Registers of the English Poor Clares, Gravelines,” 36–37. Cited in Bowden. 47. Richard Bristow, A Briefe Treatise of Diverse Plain and Sure Wayes to Finde Out the Truth (Antwerp, 1574), fol. 136r cited in Walker, “The Experience of Exile,” 161. 48. Caroline Bowden, “Collecting the Lives of Early Modern Women Religious: obituary writing and the development of collective memory and corporate identity,” Women’s History Review 19. 1 (2010): 7–20.

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49. Mary-Louise Coolahan explores some of these translations in “Irish Nuns’ Writing: The Poor Clares,” chapter 2 in Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010). 50. These are titled The Rule of our Holy Mother S. Clare translated into English (1621) and The Declarations Ordinances made upon the Rule of our holy mother, S.  Clare (1622). These are available in Elizabeth Evelinge, II: Printed Writings 1500–1640, series I, pt., 3, vol. 5, ed. Jos Blom and Frans Blom (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). 51. Coolahan, “Transnational Reception,” 267. 52. Victoria Van Hyning suggests that the author of the chronicle was Mary Copley, who tells the history between 1535 and 1668. See Van Hyning, “Naming Names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1630–1906,” in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity, ed. Caroline Bowden and James Kelly (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 87–108. In the twentieth century the chronicle was printed in the Bridgettine periodical The Poor Souls’ Friend and St Joseph’s Monitor and then in a two-volume work edited by Dom Adam Hamilton and the nuns of the Priory of Our Lady Haywards Heath. 53. The Poor Souls’ Friend and St Joseph’s Monitor editions were published serially between April 1901 (X.2) and November 1908 (XVI.9). The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon), ed. Adam Hamilton, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1904, 1906). Two early manuscript versions of the Louvain Chronicle are contained in Reading, Douai Abbey Archive, Box W.M.L. C., MSS C15–19. The Life of Margaret Clement was written by St Monica’s founder, Elizabeth Shirley, and is published as “The Life of Margaret Clement by Elizabeth Shirley,” in English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800, vol. 3, Life Writing, vol. 1, ed. Nicky Hallett (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), 1–34. 54. Dom Adam Hamilton, ed. The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran at St Monica’s in Louvain 1548 to 1625, vol. 1. (Edinburgh: Sands & Co. 1904), 33–4. 55. Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile,” 308–9. 56. Exeter University, Special Collections, EUL MS 262/add1/7, “The First Tome of the English Saintes of Kinges & Bishopps in the primitiue times of the Catholique Church...” transcribed by John Bibian, 1662. 57. Discussed in Michael E.  Williams, “Paintings of Early British Kings and Queens at Syon Abbey, Lisbon,” Birgittiana 1 (1996): 123–34. 58. Heather Wolfe, “Dame Barbara Constable: Catholic antiquarian, advisor, and closet missionary,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed.

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Ronald Corthell et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 158–88. 59. Barbara Constable, ‘“Speculum Superiorum, Composed of diuerse Collections taken out of the liues & workes of holie persons, by the most vnworthy Religious Sr. Bar: Con: of Jesus’ (December 2, 1650)” (Colwich Abbey, MS H43) iii cited in Wolfe, “Dame Barbara,” note 44. 60. Jaime Goodrich describes how at English Benedictine foundations, abbesses’ administrative writing asserted women’s religious authority. Jaime Goodrich, Writing Habits: Historicism, Philosophy, and English Benedictine Convents, 1600–1800 (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021). 61. Perry, “Petitioning for Patronage,” 165. 62. “A Short Explanation of What the Following Pictures Show.” Person’s “Preface” is printed in “A Preface, Written by Father Robert Parsons SJ to the History of the Wanderings of Syon. From a MS Preserved at Syon Abbey Chadleight,” ed. Dom Adam Hamilton OSB in The angel of syon. The life and martyrdom of blessed richard reynolds bridgettine monk of syon martyred at tyburn, may 4 1535 (Edinburgh, 1905), 97–113. Hutchison notes significant similarities between Person’s narrative and Arundel’s. Hutchison, “Syon Abbey Preserved,” 243. There is also a separate version of the story most likely put together by Persons and translated into Spanish by Carlos Dractan, a priest at Valladolid. This was published in Madrid in 1594 as the Relacion que Embiaron las Religiosas del Monasterio de Sion de Inglaterra, que estaban en Roan de Francia, al Roberto Personio de la Compania de Iesus, de su salide de aquella cuidad, y llegada a Lisboa de Portugal. Traduizida de Ingles en Castellano, por Carlos Dractan, sacerdote Ingles del Colegio de Valladolid. There is a “photographic” copy of the early printed edition of this Relacion at Valladolid; the actual edition (Madrid, 1594) is held in the Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial in Madrid. See Hutchison note 67, “Syon Abbey Preserved.” Hamilton edited all but 12 chapters of this revised version on a copy from the original manuscript by a nun in 1841 in The Poor Souls’ Friend between April 1905 and November 1909. This chapter draws quotations from this edition. Hamilton suggested a date of 1600 and originally suggested that the author of the story was a nun, based on internal references when the narrator refers to the sisters as “us” (PSF 13.2 [April, 1905], 34; see p. 36 for the passage), but he later concludes that the author of the story may in fact have been a brother due to a line in chapter 61, “we all put red caps on our heads and pikes in our hands like mariners.” Syon historian Canon Fletcher, on the other hand, suggests that this text was written at the dictation of Foster possibly in response to the accusations made against the community by Thomas Robinson (“Syon Abbey Preserved,” 248–49). Based on a con-

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nection to Robinson, Fletcher suggests a later date range for the manuscript. See Fletcher, “The Syon Manuscript ‘The Wanderings of Syon’” The Poor Souls’ Friend 14.3 (May–June, 1966), 81–4. Hutchinson, while she recognizes the emphasis on Foster, wonders whether “the occasional confusion of voice may be attributed to the strong possibility that the person actually recording the story and ultimately responsible for its final form was indeed one of the nuns” (“Syon Abbey Preserved,” 250). She also notes that the sisters would have made new copies of this text as the old ones wore out, note 103. See Fletcher, The Poor Souls’ Friend 14.3 (May–June, 1966), 82. Regardless of its authorship, the story frames the nuns as passive figures in comparison to the capable and authoritative Foster. Another possible source for the nuns’ account is a history intended to flesh out and correct Persons’, possibly written or dictated by Foster himself (c.1600). This text serves largely as a paean to Foster, who is called “our Father” and credited with shepherding the nuns who are called “his poor Flock” (chapter 44, 218) from France to Lisbon (PSF, 83). Hutchison draws attention to this focus on Foster in “Syon Abbey Preserved,” 249. 63. Coolahan, “Identity Politics,” 310. For a discussion of English nuns’ commitment the Stuart cause in the second half of the seventeenth century, see Claire Walker, “Loyal and Dutiful Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics,” in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 228–42. 64. Perry argues that the images in Arundel were not created for the Spanish Infanta but rather date from c. 1616–19, noting that Wiseman’s dedication explains that the account has already been presented to the princess’s late father on the occasion of the royal visit to the convent and was now being re-presented in light of her upcoming marriage. This fact is also suggested by the manuscript’s title: “the mirror of the peregrinations of the English nuns of the Order of Saint Bridget which they presented to their Royal patron, the Most Puissant King of the Spanish realm, Philip III” (“Petitioning for Patronage,” 173). While de Hamel suggests that the combination of historic details and accurate heraldry in these images may have been the work of a heraldic artist who compiled Spanish noble genealogies (7), Perry argues that the manuscript was illuminated by a nun since the “illuminations speak very intimately and repeatedly to experience of nuns that could not have easily been imagined by an outsider” (“Petitioning for Patronage,” 173). 65. On the political engagement of nuns, see especially Walker, Gender and Politics; and Ulrike Strasser, “Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion,” The Journal of Religion 84.4 (October 2004): 529–54. 66. Claire Walker, “Prayer, Patronage, and Political Conspiracy: English Nuns and the Restoration,” Historical Journal 43 (2000): 1–23, esp. 22; Walker, “Experience of Exile,” 175.

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67. See Caroline Bowden, “The Abbess and Mrs. Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbull and Royalist Politics in Flanders in the late 1650s,” Recusant History 24.3 (1999): 288–308; Claire Walker, “‘Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world’: Letter-­Writing in Early Modern English Convents,” in Letter Writing in Early Modern English Convents, 1450–1700, ed. J. Daybell (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 172–73. 68. See Claire Walker, “Loyal and Dutifull Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics” in James Daybell ed., Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 228–42. 69. Bowden, “Collecting the Lives,” 7. 70. Bowden, “The English Convents in Exile,” 304. Van Hyning’s Convent Autobiography chapter 5 discusses the education of girls and the housing of expatriates in English convents in exile. 71. Douai Abbey, Berkshire, Benedictine Nuns of Oulton BO, “Appeal to the Citizens of Ghent: “An account of ye necessitys of ye Community.” 72. Mary Knatchbull, “An account of the necessitys of the Community” (c. 1650) Oulton, MS G.11 cited in Walker, Gender and Politics, 74. 73. Marie-Louise Coolahan, “Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing,” Women’s Writing 14.2 (August 2007): 306–20. 74. Other English nuns made similar promises about the efficacy of their community’s prayers. For instance, Abbess Mary Knatchbull of the Ghent Benedictines wrote: “all o[u]r prayers are for his Ma[jes]tys prosperity and happy success to his affairs.” Mary Knatchbull to Sir Edward Hyde, 2/12 February 1659, Bodleian Library, Clarendon MSS 60, fol. 65, cited in Claire Walker, “Combining Martha and Mary: Gender and Work in Seventeenth-Century English Cloisters,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 30.2 (Summer, 1999): 397–418. 75. Indeed, the sisters of Syon were disempowered not only because of their exile but also because revisions made to their Rule (Lisbon Additions of 1607) to accord with the Council of Trent gave Syon’s brothers greater prominence in the monastery and the Confessor General more authority than ever before. Roger Ellis, “Syon Abbey: The Spirituality of the English Bridgettines,” Analecta Cartusiana 68, no. 2 (1984): 4–38. 76. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Linda Nicholson, ed. The Second Wave: a Reader in Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1997), 27–62. 77. Hallett, “‘So Short a Space of Time,’” 551. 78. Hutchison, “Champney,” n. 57 and Warren, Women in Arms, 148. Walker shows how sisters at other nunneries engaged in “open defiance of the English Protestant state” through tactics such as subversive prayer and support of Stuart monarchs (“Experience of Exile,” 173–74).

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79. For Campanella’s description, see The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World in Paper Bodies, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Ontario: Broadview 2000), 222. 80. Both letters have been published in The Poor Souls’ Friend (1894; 1905) and were printed in 1966. For an in-depth analysis of the letters, see Betty S.  Travitsky, “The Puzzling Letters of Sister Elizabeth Sa(u)nder(s),” in Textual Conversations in the Renaissance, ed. Zachary Lesser and Benedict S. Robinson (Aldershote: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 131–46. 81. While the original copy of the second letter has been lost, a copy exists in a Spanish translation. See Diego de Pyepes, Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra (Madrid, 1599) repr. with an introduction by D.M.  Rogers (Westmead Farnborough, Hampshire: Gregg, 1971), 724–37. An English re-translation was published in in “The History of Syon (continued) Englefield Correspondence—English College Valladolid; sister Elizabeth Saunders ‘Second Letter’ to Sir Francis Englefield,” The Poor Souls’ Friend and St. Joseph’s Monitor (March/April 1966): 43–54. In this chapter, pages are cited from this volume. 82. Warren, Women, God and Arms, 143. 83. The use of letter writing as a means of subversion was not unique to Syon, as we see in the cases of other English nuns who used letter writing for political engagement. See Walker, “‘Doe not suppose me, 159–76; Heather Wolfe, “Radical Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and Writing Practices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris,” in Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson, eds.; Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium, ed. Victoria E.  Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Routledge, 2004), 135–53; Coolahan, “Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing,” 306–20. 84. No evidence survives of the appearance of the lower church in Lisbon before the fire of 1651, but a written description of the church before the Lisbon earthquake records gray stone, gilded woodwork, colored marble, and painted wooden sculpture as seen in this image. This description of the church at Syon is found in Historia dos mosterios conventos e casa religosas de Lisboa vol. 2 (Lisbon 1950) and dates to 1704–8. Robinson has identified the central figure in this image as Philip II with the young Philip III (De Hamel and Robinson, Syon Abbey, 9), but Perry argues that it represents Philip III in the Lisbon convent with young Philip IV on the occasion of their 1619 visit to Portugal based on the fact that, in all previous captions, Philip II is referred to as King Philip II or “that same King Philip II,” whereas this caption states that the prayers are offered for his royal majesty, who would have been Philip III (1578–1621) at the time this illumination was made.

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85. Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 27.9 (July 1982): 147–58. 86. Forster, “The Chronicles,” 96. 87. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 110–14.

CHAPTER 4

Not Yet: Aspirational Women’s Communities Beyond the Convent

In The City of God, a work that had a shaping influence on More’s Utopia, Augustine described a time and place when heaven and earth would meet: as long as this Heavenly City is a pilgrim on earth, she summons citizens of all nations and every tongue, and brings together a society of pilgrims in which no attention is paid to any differences in the customs, laws, and institutions by which earthly peace is achieved or maintained. She does not rescind or destroy these things, however. For whatever differences there are among the various nations, these all tend towards the same end of earthly peace.1

This account of the joining of the heavenly and the earthly to develop common priorities comprises Augustine’s notion of the saeculum. While saeculum is the root of the modern word “secular,” it does not equate to the modern sense of “non-religious.” Rather, saeculum means “age, generation or life span” and refers to a time in which, as Robert Markus describes, “the sphere of Christian religious belief, practises, institutions, and cult” and the profane, “what has to be rejected in the surrounding culture, practises, institutions,” find common ground.2 This does not mean that Augustine considered Christianity to be equal to other religions, but rather that he recognized the need for the cities of heaven and earth to develop common goals during a time when Christians were a

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4_4

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minority group in Rome and, hence, needed to coexist with pagans. As it assembles people with different customs and beliefs, this saeculum exhibits what Markus describes as a “complete openness to and inclusiveness of diversity” and acts as a precursor for utopia.3 Fifteen years before he wrote Utopia, More had given a lecture on The City of God in the Church of St Lawrence in “the Old Jewry” of London.4 His knowledge of this text and its portrayal of a space between the cities of God and man must surely have influenced More’s conception of the island of Utopia, which, like the saeculum, joins opposites. The island of Utopia allows for religious freedom while also endorsing a common truth. It promotes equality among men but also engages in slavery; it harks back to an agrarian ideal while exercising the efficiency of proto-­capitalism. Like the saeculum, utopia is a place on earth in which different priorities come together to forge a temporary space that is as perfect as any space on earth can be. Neither More nor Augustine foregrounded women’s agency in their visions of ideal cities. More failed to involve women in the civic projects of Utopia, and while Augustine did famously describe the rape and suicide of Lucretia in Book 1 of The City of God in a way that has been read as exonerating this Roman woman, his descriptions of the city itself tend to read woman as a symbol rather than a subject.5 Quoting Paul, Augustine writes: “I saw a great city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”6 This bride symbolizes the heavenly city that is given to the men of God, aligning women, much as medieval clerical authors of religious rules did, with a spirituality that is cordoned off from the world. Since women were not considered political stakeholders in either Augustine’s or More’s times, they could not fully participate in the saeculum or in utopia. And yet, medieval and early modern women were actively engaged in theorizing the good life in this world and in mediating between religion and politics. As this chapter will show, female spiritual communities outside the convent developed their own forms of the saeculum, an intermediary space between heaven and earth, and so theorized different forms of utopia. As the last two chapters have established, medieval and early modern English convents forged a utopian outlook that drew on the past to project a desired future that challenged the norms of the present both for women and the English nation. The present chapter further builds a case for a dynamic utopianism within women’s spiritual life, but it moves beyond the walls of the cloister to examine communities of women inspired by monastic life but not formally enclosed. Considering the

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medieval allegory The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the Story Books and harmonized Bibles from the Anglican community at Little Gidding, and a range of records from Mary Ward’s Society, I show how women who were not professed but sought religious lives drew on and reinvented the form of female monastic life to imagine a way of life, like the saeculum, between heaven and earth. To create such future-oriented visions of spiritual life in the world, these communities used bricolage similar to those that we find in convents as they borrowed fragments from a range of texts—the Bible in the case of the women at Little Gidding and Jesuit sources in Mary Ward’s case. However, in this case one of the elements repurposed was female monasticism itself, which was combined with imperatives from the outside world to create an ideal spiritual life for women who could not or did not want to become nuns. This chapter is divided into three sections that trace how the convent’s model of utopia was taken up and transformed by unenclosed communities. The first section shows how The Abbey of the Holy Ghost draws on the legacy of the convent to allegorize an ideal lay spirituality that empowered those outside Church hierarchies, especially women. I, therefore, establish that as early as the Middle Ages the convent served as a vehicle for a utopian outlook that bridged the spiritual and the worldly. In the second section, I show how the women at Little Gidding, who lived quasi-monastic lives, reproduced the bricolage methods of nuns as they created their Story Books and biblical concordances. In doing so, they reworked traditional feminine virtues into forms of spiritual authority and brought women’s contributions to spiritual history in order to foreground their own authority in an Anglican present and future. Finally, in the third section, I show how recusant English Catholic Mary Ward, who was once a nun herself, at once replicated and exploded the values of the cloister to establish a new apostolate for women. In this final section, I demonstrate that while Ward’s saeculum delineated a utopia that was proto-feminist, it also anticipated colonialism. This section, therefore, shows how the bricolage within women’s spiritual utopias often introduces contradictory or incommensurate views that threaten to undo the utopia itself.

The Convent as Allegory for Secular Utopia Charles Taylor has argued that the saeculum could not fully exist in Europe before the wars of religion in the seventeenth century when a schism emerged between two sets of beliefs about Christianity. However,

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something aligned with the ethos of the saeculum did emerge at an earlier moment in the late medieval desire for a middle path between cloistered life and the world. The clergy and the laity did not hold different religious beliefs, but like Augustine’s two cities they belonged to different spheres, the former associated with heaven and the latter with earth. An imagined joining of these two realms, what Walter Hilton (d. 1395) called a “mixed life,” thus, like the saeculum, sought a compromise between the priorities of the world (the profane) and those of monastic life (the sacred). This new ideal of lay spirituality operated as an interior kind of utopia, envisioning a more inclusive spiritual space than had previously been possible within the tight control of the medieval Church. The possibility of a mixed life, therefore, enacts the kind of diversity that Robert Markus argues that the saeculum enabled. The Abbey of the Holy Ghost (ca. 1325–1375) allegorizes the intermediary space of the mixed life or middle path through the figure of the convent and its female inhabitants. Translated from the French L’Abbaye du saint esprit but broadening its audience beyond the original aristocratic addressees, this work appears in Middle English in 24 manuscripts (as well as in three printed editions by Wynkyn de Worde) with the earliest of these dated to 1358.7 This evidently popular allegory uses a cloister and nuns personifying virtues such as Meekness and Charity as a frame for readers to imagine an interior spirituality. This allegorical cloister could be accessed by those who “walde be in religyon̛ , bot þay may noghte, owthir for pouerte, or for drede of thaire kyn̛ , or for band of Maryage.” To these types of lay readers, the text promises “aƚƚ tho þat ne may noghte be bodyly in religyon,…þay may be gostely” (322) and offers them a “religeon of þe herte” (322). Unlike the other works in this chapter, this text was neither written by a female community nor exclusively addressed to women, as most manuscripts begin, “dere brethir and systirs.” I include it in this discussion, however, because it shows how the convent and its inhabitants served to facilitate utopian thought for those seeking something between heaven and earth. Why, we might ask, does the convent in particular serve as a useful imaginative vehicle for utopian thinking for lay people, more specifically for lay people trying to imagine a new kind of spirituality? One way to account for the use of the convent and nuns in this text is to consider the relationship between allegory and enclosure. Allegory, derived from the Greek allos (other) and agorein (to speak in the open square), means, etymologically, to speak otherwise in public. It consists of speech that is secret

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and hidden but also visible. Nuns in a convent resemble such speech; being enclosed, they were not visible to the public, but they were also to act as public examples, serving as models of good behavior to the laity, as Chap. 2 illustrated through numerous examples from the liturgy of medieval abbeys like Barking and Syon. Moreover, the enclosed convent also mirrors the form of allegory itself, which operates in a kind of conceptual enclosure. Allegory encloses ideas; it fixes complicated concepts with concrete signifiers within a set framework (a garden, a city, a convent). To pair concrete elements, such as a wall or an abbess, with abstract virtues such as meekness and charity, a reader needs to have a contained conceptual space to work within, a finite set of possible meanings. This may be one reason why castles and closed gardens serve as frequent allegory subjects. They offer a kind of imaginary enclosed system through which readers trying to understand something abstract, such as a religion of the heart, can construe meaning. But then why is a convent in particular used as opposed to another type of enclosed space? Another reason that a convent peopled by nuns served as an apt allegory for ideal lay spiritual life stems from the conventional role of women within allegory. As Caroline Dinshaw observes, in the Middle Ages, “the representation of the allegorical text as a veiled or clothed woman and the concomitant representation of various literary acts—reading, translating, glossing, creating a literary tradition—as masculine acts performed on this feminine body recur across narratives.”8 Indeed, female allegorical personifications ranging from Boethius’s Lady Philosophy to the Statue of Liberty pervade medieval literature as well as modern culture. One way to account for this proliferation of women in allegories is that many abstract Latin nouns (and those in many romance languages) are feminine (charitas, spes, etc.). However, as Barbara Johnson in her consideration of Joshua Reynold’s portrait of Theory as a woman writes, “Just because the image’s gender derives from a ‘mere’ linguistic fiction (the gender of a noun) does not mean that the existence of half-clad, nameless women on the walls and ceilings of public spaces—or on book covers—has not shaped the cultural messages addressed both to women and to men.”9 Even if seemingly intentional, the frequent use of women as allegorical subjects does have cultural meaning; it both reflects and reinforces woman’s traditional role as a vessel rather than creator of meaning. Gordan Tesky writes, “material in allegory [is] that which gives meaning a place to occur but which does not become meaning itself.”10 The fact that women in the Middle Ages were associated not with the spirit but with the body made them rife

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subjects for allegory use, confirming their position as the material site of meaning to which they had no access. Using nuns as opposed to monks, then, might have more easily allowed, or at least been imagined to allow, readers of both genders to picture the ideal state that the text offered them, since women could be seen as material objects on which to project meaning. Women would have been convenient smokescreens for a writer theorizing a lay spirituality, which, to some degree transgressively, encouraged readers to partake in a spiritual program outside the bonds of the Church. Barbara Newman has suggested that the feminine gender of personifications allowed medieval writers freedom to discuss religious concepts that would have been transgressive had they been predicated on the male Trinity.11 Female allegorical figures were safer to theologize about than God himself and so served as vehicles “to mediate various types of religious experience, or access to the Divine, that could not easily be accommodated within the framework of scholastic or pastoral doctrine.”12 Lay piety is one such experience, which would have, unless carefully managed, created friction with the Church. Because women were less connected to scholasticism, it was easier to use a female spiritual community as a paradigm that transgressed the boundary between the religious and the laity. The Abbey, as Whitehead notes, replaces specific virtues of monasticism such as lectio (study) with virtues of a more interior, more flexible kind, suited to cohabitation with secular life, such as “rightwysnes” (justice, fairness, and impartiality), a virtue that is required in the world.13 Nuns as somewhat theological blank slates, while still falling within the sphere of the religious, thus served as convenient vehicles through which to imagine a new form of spirituality that situated itself between lay and religious life. Finally, a convent full of nuns might have served as an ideal representation of a new lay spirituality because of the perception that women religious needed to be protected from the corrupting forces of the outside world. As Chap. 2 discusses, women in the medieval period were seen as being especially porous and subject to corruption from the world. Their bodies, as in the Ancrene Wisse, were framed as both mirroring and being mirrored by their enclosures, at risk of penetration and requiring vigilant surveillance. Such reasoning was behind efforts to keep religious women enclosed. The Abbey of the Holy Ghost echoes this emphasis, calling to its readers:

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My dere breþer and systyrs, wylke of ȝow as will halde this gastely religyone & be in ryste of sawle & in swetnes of hert, halde þe with–Ine þe cloyster, and so sparre þou þe ȝates, and so warely kepe þou þe wardes of þi cloyster, þat non o[t]er fandyngeȝ nor euylle styrrynges hafe in–gate in th& make þe thy sylence forto [breke] or styrre the to synne; steke thyne eghne fro fowle syghtes, thyne heres fro foule herynges, thy mouthe fra foule speche, and thyne herte fra foule thoghtes.

This warning, its repetitive sentence structures echoing the rigidity of its commands, deploys language used to warn women to seal off their bodies. It thus capitalizes on the tropes of women’s religious life to imagine an interior state in which a layperson can cultivate a restful soul and sweetness of heart that is inwardly rather than externally motivated. The perceived vulnerability of women, moreover, might have helped, or been perceived to help, a reader’s imagination of the soul’s inevitable invasion by sin. After the abbey has been meticulously established, the narrator tells how the devil and his four daughters Envy, Pride, “Gruchynge” (“complaint” or “discontent” MED), and False come to disturb the cloister. This invasion symbolizes the potential of such deadly sins to destroy the interior space that the lay devotee has worked to cultivate. “Dyscrecyon,” the abbey’s treasurer, advises the nuns to pray to the Holy Ghost, who comes to chase out the evil spirits and restores the abbey “better þan it was by-fore” (ll. 336–7). Nicole Rice and Christina Whitehead read this ending as a reinsertion of order that relies on a male spiritual figure, suggesting that the lessons of the text, as Rice puts it, “cannot be understood or put into practice without resort to further explanation and disciplinary interventions by priestly advisors.”14 However, given that the Holy Spirit is not, in fact, an allegorical figure, I wonder whether we can be certain that he represents a cleric and part of the trinity itself. In this case, since it is the nuns who represent the reader’s conscience, this ending would then emphasize the lay devotee’s personal relationship with God rather than the need for a priestly mediator. The perceived vulnerability of the convent to invasion, something emphasized in religious rules for women, therefore, becomes a vehicle through which to imagine the fall of a person striving toward perfection, but this fall, inevitable in a postlapsarian world, also becomes an occasion for the reader to enact an interior redemption, resulting in a soul that is, like the allegory’s abbey, “better þan it was by-fore.”

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For these reasons a convent peopled by nuns was an ideal conceptual vehicle through which a reader of any gender could imagine an interior saeculum, a spiritual life that could be lived in the world. Such a model could be accessed by men as well as women, but it also envisioned authority for women in particular. While the Abbey does align women neatly with non-gendered virtues, the form of allegory never escapes its literal narrative, what Maureen Quilligan calls the horizontal operations of allegory. Rather than being confined to “distinct ‘levels,’” “meaning accretes serially, interconnecting and criss-crossing the verbal surface.”15 This ‘level’ of allegory “is not above the literal one in a vertically organized fictional space, but is located in the self-consciousness of the reader who gradually becomes aware, as he [sic] reads, of the way he creates the meaning of the text.”16 If we think about this reader and the way she might create meaning, we might then ask what a reader, particularly a female one, would have made of this story in which women not only pray but also build and govern. What kinds of possibilities might such a story have opened up? Nuns in this text are not just symbols of abstract virtue but also women whom readers might have imagined as embodied beings. Cloister allegories were popular in the twelfth century, but while other examples of this form focused on the architectural structure, The Abbey of the Holy Ghost depicts allegorical maidens building and inhabiting the space. The text thus frames these women not as passive vessels of transcendental meaning but as active agents in creating the abbey. Nuns not only represent the virtues that the individual devotee should emulate, but they also build the abbey. “[R]ightwysnes” and “luffe of clennes” clear the ground and “Mekenes” digs the foundation. In the life of the allegory, the nuns represent virtues, but they are also women actively engaged in physical labor to create a community. The text further invests the nuns with authority when it describes the abbess: “And than the gude lady Charite, als scho þat es most worthy by–fore alle oþer, saƚƚ be abbas of this sely abbaye. And also, als þay þat are in relegyone saƚƚ do no thynge, ne saye thynge, ne gange in–to no stede, ne take no gyfte, with–owtten̛ leue of þe abbasse” (325). While most English manuscripts of the Abbey were addressed to both brothers and sisters (French manuscripts were more often created for individual women or for female communities), this text still had importance for women.17 Like real convents, it acted as a conceptual space in which women played active roles, countering the status quo, which sought to relegate nuns and women in general into a realm of passivity. The Abbey in any of its manuscript copies, therefore, offers a utopian vision not only

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because it charts a middle ground for laypeople but also because it offers a vision of spirituality that validated women’s roles within Christianity. As the rest of this chapter will now show, this enabling potential of women’s enclosed life would continue in the early modern period, allowing women who were not part of the official Catholic Church to claim spiritual and political authority.

Bricolage in an Anglican Convent The convent’s symbolic function as a vehicle for a secular life increased in the female community at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire, where Anglican women drew on the form of women’s Catholic life to construct their own ideal spiritual community. Scholarship on Little Gidding initially foregrounded its founder Nicholas Ferrar, but recent critics have revealed the significant role played by his female relatives, his mother Mary Ferrar, his sister Susanna, and his nieces Margaret, Anna and Mary Collett, and Virginia Ferrar.18 These women crafted a spiritual utopia through acts of bricolage parallel to those used by nuns. They replicated and adopted Catholic monastic life for a new Anglican context, and, in doing so, foregrounded the importance of women’s contributions to religious thought. If the pasts that nuns repurposed ranged from liturgical scripts to Old Testament accounts of exile, the primary past mobilized at Little Gidding was that of Catholicism itself. The Ferrar house, although Protestant, functioned very much like a monastery: it was guided by a rule which instructed that brief prayers be said hourly in the Great Chamber and night watches be kept while two men and women prayed using a psalter. As in a monastery, the community served the poor, receiving between 50 and 100 children every Sunday for church, offering a free dinner and a penny for each psalm memorized. Little Gidding’s imitation of Catholic monastic life was sometimes attributed to Nicholas, who, his brother wrote, sought to adapt the discipline and devotion of Catholic enclosed life “to adorn our Protestant religion, by a right renouncing the world with all its profits and honors, in a true crucifying the flesh, with all its pleasures, by continued temperance, fasting, and watching unto prayers.”19 However, outsiders seemed far more focused on the community’s women, whom a 1641 pamphlet described as “Just like as the English nuns at saint Omers and other Popish places.”20 It was thus the women of the community who most closely represented what outsiders perceived as a retrograde Catholicism. Indeed, these women not only lived like nuns, dressing in

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matching outfits with veils that closely resembled habits, but they were also engaged in a devotional life that in many ways paralleled the concurrent investment in history and drive to establish new forms of piety that we find in communities of English nuns. The difference is that while the efforts of Catholic nuns were aimed at ensuring an English Catholic future, at Little Gidding they were designed to envision something different, a spiritual life lived by women in a (relatively) newly Protestant country. Little Gidding’s tactic of deploying tradition to new purposes is apparent in their Story Books, which were transcripts of seminars held by the women between early 1631 and 1634. These were once credited to Nicholas but Debora Shuger persuasively argues that his female relatives, who make up five of the six principals in the Story Book dialogues, are the more likely authors.21 The first dialogue in the book, described as taking place on the Feast of the Purification, frames the very formation of the community as catalyzed by a desire to imitate a Catholic past: the Mayden Sisters, longing to bee Imitatours of those glorious Saints by whose Names they were called (for all bare Saints Names, and shee that was elected Cheife, that of the Blessed Virgin Mary) having entered into a joynt Covenant betweene themselves and some others of neerest Blood (which according to their severall relations they stiled Founder, Guardian, and Visitour) for the performance of divers religious exercizes…. (1)

This passage describes the formation of what was called the Little Gidding Academy as grounded in the women’s desire to imitate the saints, figures who were also revered by Catholics. The “Covenant” into which the women entered is a near doppelgänger for “convent,” and the use of this word foregrounds the resemblance between this Anglican female community and Catholic predecessors. In striving to form a women’s community, the Little Gidding interlocutors self-consciously gestured back to the past, melding spiritual tradition with a new focus on individual study of scripture, which becomes evident in the way that these women used the Bible to make their arguments. In their bricolage of Catholic tradition, the women of Little Gidding also performed another act of cultural recycling: they reworked assumptions about women’s moral inferiority into a source of spiritual strength. Even in their dedication to the Story Books, which Mary and Anna bound as a gift for Mother Ferrar, they referenced women’s weakness, declaring their ambition to achieve “the Discoverie of those false Opinions

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wherewith the world misleads all Mankind, especially our weaker sex” (lii). They go on to tell their grandmother, “You have forsaken all those Affections, Imploiments, and Delights, wherein the world perswades the cheif content of womens minds should ly, and you have censured them as vanities at the best, as sins and great ones, as they are commonly pursued” (Storybooks, lii). These words rehearse anti-feminist rhetoric about women’s idle pursuits in order to promote the particular virtues of their matriarch, who was risen above such vanities. However, even within this apparent affirmation of negative stereotypes about women, the sisters do not claim these as innate; rather, by writing that the “world perswades” that women’s minds should focus on worldly affections and delights, they suggest that women are capable of more. The dialogues in the Story Books themselves do not entirely overturn traditional gender roles. Rather, they integrate these with the pursuit of spiritual learning. In the opening of the Story Books, the women wrote that “they therefore resolved, together with the Practize of Devotion, to intermingle the study of Wisedome, Searching & Enquiring diligently into the knowledge of those things which appertaine to their Condition and Sex” (Storybooks, 1). Here, they proposed to juxtapose devotion, the traditional focus of a convent, with more worldly, and more Protestant, modes of searching and inquiry, thus charting a middle ground between monastic life and newer modes of quasi-scientific study. Moreover, rather than rejecting “those things which appertaine to their Condition and Sex,” Little Gidding proposed to mix these with masculine activities of wisdom and inquiry. Such an approach reverberates throughout the text, for instance when Mary Ferrar addresses the younger academy members: “As for matters of Huswifery, when God puts them upon you it would bee sin either to refuse them or to perform them negligently, and therefore the ignorance of them is a great shame and Danger for women that intende Marriage” (Storybooks, liii). Mary encourages her relatives not to take pride in these duties but to accept them “as if they were greater matters, when they are done and undergone out of Obedience to his Command” (Storybooks, liii). Little Gidding, different from a convent, does not reject the traditional role of wife but rather integrates this with intellectual and spiritual pursuits. At the same time, however, the male figure is not the husband but God himself, so women’s engagement in household pursuits becomes a form of service to the divine, not unlike the work performed by a monastic. Replying to an accusation by Guardian (the name used for Nicholas) that women unduly “magnify” themselves with “womanly

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Niceties” such as “rubbing floores till you may see your Faces shine in them,” Affectionate retorts, “Mans Soul cannot bee without Imployment; and since you have taken away great matters from us, you ought not to vilify these so much wherein the mind in regard of its owne working is nobly busied, however the subject bee but meane” (Storybooks, 133). She continues, “Theres exercize of Invention, of Composition, of Order, and of all the other excellent operations of the Soule, and the Beauty, and Pleasure, and other good effects that arise from these Imployments. And herein lies our delight, not in the things themselves, as you seeme to conceive” (Storybooks, 134). Affectionate thus frames women’s household occupations as acts of invention, composition, and order that are usually attributed to masculine scholarly pursuits. She, therefore, re-signifies women’s labor and renders it a part of God’s divine plan. In this way, the Little Gidding women forged a space in which non-religious and religious pursuits might meet. As a consequence, conventional views of women’s roles were joined with spiritual occupations traditionally associated with men. The assumption that women were the weaker sex, familiar from the previous chapter’s descriptions of feminine weakness in the rhetoric of early modern nuns, serves in the spiritual context of Little Gidding to frame female community as a site of unrealized potential. During a long discussion on impatience, the Affectionate, the name used to describe Margaret Collett, declares: …the fruits of Impatiency, and the predominacy of it and them in our weaker sex [are] the onely ground of the flightines and insufficiency wherewith not onely all womens words and workes, but even their naturall Constution is taxed. I say not but there bee some few things perhaps whereunto neither the Capacity of womens minds nor the Abilities of their bodies doe generally serve, such as are the depth of Learning and the Labours of warre. But that in all things, I say, even in those things which seeme properly our owne, wee should be so farre outrunne by men when they sett themselves to vy with us, cannot proceed from any thing but from the Impatiency of our Minds…. (Storybooks, 132)

The impatience that plagues women, Collett continues, means that they “know and say and doe all good things but by halfes at the best, which questionlesse might be throughly in all perfection accommplished, if we would let Patience have her perfect working” (Storybooks, 132). While

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Affectionate does assert that some activities are beyond women’s capacity, “such as are the depth of Learning and the Labours of warre,” she sees most of their lack of success as due to the characteristic of impatience rather than any innate fault, and thus views women as capable of “perfection.” By drawing on assumptions about women as the weaker sex but also asserting their potential for perfection, this passage, recalling the Abbey’s use of women’s assumed weakness as a figure for ideal lay spirituality, posits women in particular as vehicles of utopia since, as Chap. 3 explores, utopian hopes for the future are often contingent on the risk of failure. The risk of embarking on a new course is underscored in Affectionate’s rousing statement, “We want an example? Let’s make one. We shall have run some hazard at first. We shall certainly reap more honour, more reward from God and good men at the last” (Conversations, 72). Women’s hitherto failure to produce perfection is thus a catalyst for a vision of a new and not yet accomplished spirituality: one that builds on the past to craft something new both for women and for Christianity. The Little Gidding Academy does not portray women as identical to men; rather, it sees them as called to a different, higher purpose. In their discussion of the austere life, Cheerful proposes that her female relatives should “proportionably sett in hand with the performance of that, which we so magnifie in him Not putting on a Friers coul, which this Prince of men & learning would haue done for Christ Jesus his sake, but putting on Christ Jesus himself” (Conversations, 171). Rather than imitating male clergy by putting on robes, Cheerful is saying that women become Christlike by dressing in Christ himself. Mary expands on this point by adding, “And though wee may not preach by words, which was his desire, yet wee may preach by our Actions, as he still doth by his…Our example may perhaps hearten on some others. Let vs not blame either our sex or condition, as disabled for the advancement of Gods Kingdome” (Conversations, 171). Women were forbidden to preach by Paul, but Mary says they spread Christ’s word through “the hands & in the feet, that’s common to all Christians” (Conversations, 172). In this way, she continues, “Wee may tread out the way to heauen & wee may lead on by good works, though wee cannot teach by words. & perhaps that Real kind of Instruction hath in all Ages beene the most forcible, is in this the most Necessarie” (Conversations, 172). Mary thus separates what her relatives can do from the capacity of male clergy, but she asserts the broader applicability of serving by action. This community, precisely because it consists of women who cannot be clergy, must operate in the world to pave the way to heaven,

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acting as a mediator between the world and the realm beyond. Their gender is not, therefore, an obstacle for the members of the Little Gidding Academy in pursuing a quasi-­monastic life but rather what enables them to embark on the new course that they are proposing. The way in which this course reworks the past to create something new is underscored in Cheerful’s proclamation that the women will make their mark “Where there are many Masters but few guides. A Dearth of Patterns in an exuberance of Rules” (Conversations, 171–2). This hope that the women will establish a new pattern recalls the traditional women’s occupation of sewing, an activity that was important for nuns, but as Cheerful is, in fact, referring to a new course of life for unprofessed women within a newly Protestant England, she delineates a new secular mode of living, a utopian vision specifically accessible to female community.22 If the Little Gidding Story Books show how women melded the framework of convent life with Anglican spirituality to forge a version of the saeculum, their biblical concordances reveal how they also used a material bricolage practice to embed themselves, just as early modern nuns had, within a deeper biblical past centered on women. Made by clipping verses from the New Testament and pasting cuttings from biblical images, these volumes, which number 15 in total, were intended to reveal but then reconcile “agreements & differences” between gospel accounts and so to offer a harmonized narrative, “Digested into order.”23 These concordances served as daily reading for the community, as well as, later on, for readers as illustrious as King Charles I.24 Just as Anglican historiography originally attributed the Story Books to Nicholas, it also tended to situate him as the mastermind of the concordances. More recent scholarship, however, has emphasized the work performed by his nieces, Margaret, Anna and Mary Collett, and Virginia Ferrar. In the act of making these elaborate books, these women renewed a Catholic tradition of illustrating Bibles and put it to the service of Protestant individual study of scripture.25 Concurrent with this spiritual “collage,” they also reframed traditionally feminine acts of cutting and sewing as modes of biblical exegesis, which served to excavate and amplify women’s spiritual authority within the Bible itself.26 Concomitant practices of material collage and conceptual bricolage frame women as vital purveyors of Christ’s word into the world. In the Houghton Library Concordance, the first that the community created, a page that depicts the Crucifixion (p. 80, seq. 116) (Fig. 4.1) foregrounds the vital role that women played in administering Christ’s word.27 Here,

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Fig. 4.1  Little Gidding Houghton Concordance, p.  80, seq. 116, Harvard University Library, Public domain

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the Virgin Mary is shown swooning below the cross tended by a group of women. The verses pasted below her body offer an extended consideration of the women who attended Christ’s death: “And many women were there beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him: Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joses, and the mother of Zebedee’s children” (Matthew 27:55–6). Pasted at the end of this line is “and Salome” from Mark 41, which is part of the line “There were also women looking on from afar: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joseph, and Salome.” This added textual fragment is striking because it doubles the presence of Salome, who is already mentioned in Matthew as “the mother of Zebedee’s Children.” This repetition of Salome’s presence emphasizes the importance of the participation of women in Christ’s death. The final verse pasted on the page further emphasizes women’s role as onlookers during the Crucifixion: “And all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afarre off beholding these things” (Luke 23:49). By adding descriptions of women from three of the gospels, as opposed to a single representative line as the concordance does in many other cases, this page asserts the importance of women’s witnessing of the Crucifixion. Women’s “beholding” of Christ in a book that would have been both seen and read by a female community during their hours of worship draws a powerful connection between the biblical holy women and the devout women at seventeenth-­century Little Gidding.28 These women, who saw themselves as Anglican versions of nuns, thus produced a material bricolage that mobilized a patriarchal past to excavate a women’s spirituality to serve as a roadmap for the future. The creators of these Bibles would have further asserted their connection with biblical women by, as Adam Smyth has observed, inserting pictures of collective female textual labor: pictures of women sewing and writing, and a desk, book, and scroll.29 George Henderson further notes that in one of their biblical concordances they cut out and pasted in four assorted nuns, who may represent the younger women and their grandmother Mary Ferrar.30 Little Gidding’s women, rather like their counterparts at Syon, thus integrated themselves into a feminine genealogy that extended from the biblical past to their Catholic predecessors and now to their own Anglican community. Cheerful’s assertion in the Story Books that although women could not preach they could spread God’s word through their hands and feet is evident in the concordance that the community created for Charles II. On

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one page, an illustration of John the Baptist preaching is juxtaposed with the painter Maerten de Vos’s image of Mercy feeding the poor.31 This pairing links the verbal act of preaching on the upper left with the embodiment of John’s words at the center, which is gendered female. The image at the center, moreover, illustrates how the female embodiment of John’s call to “prepare ye the way of the Lord” is disseminated to a larger female community, indicated not just by the woman kneeling but by the outstretched hands that pass the bread. A sense of woman’s embodied fulfillment of God’s word is further conveyed in the Pentecost image above and to the right, which illustrates the passage from Luke 3:16: “he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” In this claim for a female-­ centered story of salvation, made through visual and textual collage, the women of Little Gidding did not fabricate new material: instead, through careful juxtapositions, they depicted women’s community as always already central to the realization of Christ’s word. Implicitly, then, their own spiritual labor as they created Bibles that transmitted God’s word became, like early modern nuns’ prayers, the continuation of a female-centered typology. Through acts of both conceptual and material bricolage, the women of Little Gidding drew on the form of life developed in the medieval English Catholic convent but combined this with a new Anglican emphasis on personal reading of scripture. In doing so, they articulated a futureoriented utopian mode of spiritual life that found its roots in tradition. This spiritual life offered the vibrant possibility of a saeculum, a meeting of heaven and earth, at the site of female community.

Mary Ward’s Englishwomen’s Empire If the Anglican women of Little Gidding manipulated the legacy of convent life to construct a utopian outlook that suited new Anglican circumstances, they retained the structure of the convent by remaining, if not forcibly enclosed, within their home. Mary Ward, on the other hand, while adhering to English Catholic tradition, imagined a life for religious women that was far more mobile than what had previously existed, transgressing the boundaries of what had been seen as the defining feature of convent life, enclosure itself. Ward’s early life mirrors that of a more traditional woman religious.32 She was born in 1585 to a Yorkshire Catholic family and found her calling at the age of 15. In 1606, she left England to join the convent of Saint Clare in Saint-Omer.33 The following year she founded a new convent of this order at Gravelines specifically for English

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women. However, only five years later, she received a revelation in which God instructed her to “take the same of the society” (referring to the Society of Jesus), which caused her to leave traditional professed life and found the Schola Beata Mariae, the first of over a dozen houses on the Continent devoted to teaching English Catholic girls and pursuing missionary work for the English Catholic cause.34 In laying out and realizing an apostolate for Catholic women, opening colleges in Saint-Omer (1611), Liège (1616), Cologne and Trier (1620–1), Rome (1622), Naples and Perugia (1623), Munich and Vienna (1627), and Pressburg and Prague (1628), Ward established a way of life for women that was utopian both in the sense that it was not realized in her lifetime (her society was quickly suppressed by the Vatican) and so remained a “not yet” and in the sense that it imagined something that had not yet been thought, a way for women to establish their own saeculum, a means of living actively in a compromised and religiously fraught world. Like the allegory of The Abbey of the Holy Ghost and the community at Little Gidding, Ward used a bricolage approach as she joined the framework of the convent with the exigencies of a newly divided religious world to envision the meeting of heaven and the world at the site of female community. However, unlike these more enclosed communities, Ward mapped a more politically active form of secular existence for women by bringing her female followers into the world. This approach, I will argue, brought their utopianism into contact with new forms of imperialist thinking. Ward’s vision for her community, as laid out in progressively radical plans, joined the emphases of female monastic life with intervention in the world. Her first plan for her Society closely recalled the practices of cloistered nuns. Drafted primarily by her confessor Robert Lee and known as the “Schola Beatae Mariae” (1612), this plan emphasized the salvation of the Schola’s members and their separation from the world, stating in Point 5 that the Schola’s aim was to “make timely provision for our own salvation by a complete renunciation of the world. Then, in accordance with the capacity of our own sex, we may devote ourselves to the Christian education of maidens and girls whether outside or inside England.”35 This plan creates a causal connection between women’s enclosed lives and their capacity to educate girls. Rather like the Little Gidding women who sought works that pertained “to their Condition and Sex,” Ward (and her confessor) initially took a conservative approach to the teaching of girls, emphasizing the plan’s rootedness in monastic tradition.

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Even after Ward’s vision became more radically detached from the cloister in her revised plan of 1616, the Ratio Instituti, and in a third, still more radical plan from 1622, the Institutum, she maintained strong ties to tradition, all of which drew on the model of the Jesuits.36 In this revised plan, which drew from the Jesuit Formula Instituti (1550) but extended it to women, something the Jesuits themselves had forbade and fought adamantly against, Ward was keen to emphasize her new community’s connection to the past.37 She wrote that this new “mixed kind of life” was a return to early Christian female saintly practice: “Such a life appears to have been led by Saints Mary Magdalen, Martha, Praxedes, Pudentiana, Thecla, Cecilia, Lucy, and many other holy virgins and widows.”38 Some of this insistence that the Institute was inspired by female exemplars from the past may have been aimed at reassuring Church patriarchs who became immediately suspicious of the women they would call “galloping nuns.”39 However, internal documents from Ward’s Society also frame her ideas as a reprise of the past. A Briefe Relation of the Holy Life and Happy Death of our Dearest Mother, a biography written after Ward’s death sometime between 1645 and 1650 by her two close companions Mary Poyntz and Winifred Wigmore, emphasizes continuity with historical female exemplars by stating, “there was nothing in [her Institute], nor practised by her or hers which had not beene practised by Holy Woman [sic] and approved by the Holy Church in particular persons, but never practised by a community” (38).40 Poyntz and Wigmore stressed that an apostolate for women had already been practiced by women saints in the past and thus was embedded within Church tradition.41 Ward’s innovation was to transform a solitary calling into a communal one that challenged the cloister’s use of religious habit and claimed independence from the bishop’s authority. The challenge of articulating an ideal, like Augustine’s saeculum, straddling two seemingly incompatible spaces—the spiritual and the profane, the cloister and the world—surfaces rhetorically in Ward’s autobiographical writings and letters, which often pair contraries. In her English autobiography, written at the request of her confessor Robert Lee in 1617, she implored: I beseech all thos (even for our lords love) that shall read thes my falts, and the goodnes of god towards me, notwithstanding my unworthynes, that they iudge not of anie thinge hear according to theire owne affections, but determine of all as the truth ys, distinguishing the great and true differance

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betwext gods preventinge graces, his imasurable goodnes and the meanes affourded me to be wholly his; and my continuall fales, unspeakable negligence, and imperfitt concurrance with all such his favours, as your selves will iudge and wetness with me ….42

In a gesture of humility, reminiscent of Augustine’s account of his sins in the Confessions, Ward asked her readers to distinguish between God’s goodness and her own human unworthiness. To make this point, she created a rhythm that oscillated between the two extremes: “my faults,” “the good of God towards me,” “my unworthiness,” and “God’s preventing graces.” This volley between her own “unspeakable negligences” and God’s “immeasurable goodness” rhetorically expresses the paradox of Ward’s spiritual vision, which set the profane world into intimate contact with the holy. This aporia served verbally to map out an ideal that did not yet fully exist. In a letter to Lee, for instance, Ward used contradiction to chart her own version of the saeculum: a sertaine clear, and perfit estate, to be had in this lyfe, and such an one as ys altogeather needfull for thos that shoud well discharge the duties of this Institute…The felicity of this estate (for as much, as I can express) was a singuler freedome from all that could make one adhear to earthly thinges…Yt then occured and so still continues in my minde, that thos in Paridice, before the first fale wear in this estate; yt seemed to me then, and that hope remaines still, that our lord let me see yt…. (290)43

Here again, Ward was working in contraries. She described a “perfit estate, to be had in this lyfe,” an inherent contradiction since perfection was not perceived to exist in the fallen world. The estate she imagined, on the one hand, offers freedom from “earthly things” but also allows women to “discharge the duties of this Institute” in the world. Ward’s only means of describing such a life was as what Adam and Eve must have experienced before the Fall. Ward’s understanding of this new life that is also a return to Eden proves as paradoxical as the estate itself: she described it in such detail that one might conclude that she already understood herself and her followers to be living in this condition. However, she concluded with the hope that God would let her see it. In these musings to her confessors, therefore, Ward rhetorically conveyed a sense of something that is both there and not, part of the world but also outside it. Through her use of

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paradox, she illustrated the challenge faced by all utopian thinkers, that of thinking what has yet to exist. If Ward’s writings convey the not-yet status of her secular vision through contradiction, the Painted Life does so by depicting liminal spaces. Doorways appear in nearly all the paintings, acting as frames for scenes set in different time periods and places. This centrality of the doorway or threshold in Ward’s life harks back to the story that inspired Ward’s calling to spiritual life. As Ward remembered in her English autobiography, her religious vocation was inspired by a story about a nun who lay on a threshold as a punishment. This was told to her by Margaret Garrett, a maid at the Babthorpe house where Ward resided as a young woman: Once as we wear sewinge togeather in one roome shee speakeing of God, (which was her ordernary talke) amongst other good stories, she tould one of a religious Nunn, who violating her virginity and beinge found with child, was therfore by the lawes of her religioun injoined daily, and for divers years together, to lye prostrat without the Chappell or quir door of her monastary, for all the other Nunns passinge by to tread upon. This so great a pennance made the falt seem extreem and withall I reflected that the lyke was nether rare very disgracefull nor much punished a mongst wordlings: by which I emediatly conceived a singuler love, and esteem of religious life, as a sanctuary whear all might, and must be holy.44

Garrett’s story about a pregnant nun’s extreme punishment might seem a curious inspiration for a young woman’s desire to enter religious life, but it becomes legible in light of the path that Ward would later follow. In the story, Ward is attracted to the strict requirements of religious life, but in her pursuit of this life, she also came to resemble the nun who was cast out. As Lowell Gallagher writes, there is within Ward’s mission “an impossible yet lived intimacy between the chosen and the cast out.”45 Ostracized and suppressed by the Church for her radical reimagination of women’s religious life, she herself would become like the nun forced to lie on the threshold, both outside and inside, part of the community and rejected by it. This pivotal moment in Ward’s life is depicted in the ninth image in the Painted Life (Fig. 4.2), which further emphasizes the liminal position that Ward created for herself. The scene shows four women in a sewing circle: Garrett sits to the center while Ward, her cousin Barbara Babthorpe, and a servant sit to the left. This group at once harks back to the domestic lives of recusant Catholic women like Margaret Clitherow and looks forward to

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Fig. 4.2  The Painted Life, image 9, Congregatio Jesu, Augsburg, published with the permission of the Zentrum Maria Ward

the female community Ward would create in her Institute. While the cousin busily sews, Ward’s own hands are still. A light from the top of the image shines down on her head conveying the spiritual importance of this moment. There are two doorways: the one on the left frames an unidentified woman, possibly a servant interrupting the sewing scene, while the other on the right shows Ward kneeling before an altar inside a richly decorated chapel. The latter scene could represent the chapel in the Babthorpe house, though the fluidness of the background, in contrast to the sharper lines in the central scene, might also indicate that this is a depiction of a later moment when Ward would pray in a continental chapel.46 The framing of this pivotal scene with doorways on either side visualizes the liminality of Ward’s mission, which would combine the exigencies of the world, represented by the domestic scene, with more traditional piety, represented by the scene on the right.

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Ward thus planned for a future life for women that enacted a form of the saeculum, an uneasy marriage of the sacred and the profane. In envisioning such an estate for women, she went further than the Little Gidding community had in reimagining gender roles. Just as Ward troubled the distinctions between the world and the cloister, she challenged the division between women and men. This radical questioning of gender categories comes across early on in Ward’s project through a set of speeches that she gave to a community of English women gathered at Saint-Omer in December, 1617. Ward began her speech by citing a Jesuit father, who, in response to commendation of her followers by a Catholic layman, dismissively said, “It is true–while they are in their first fervour, but fervour will decay and when all is done, they are but women.”47 To this Ward lengthily and passionately responded: [I]t is true this fervour doeth many times growe could: But what is the cause; is it becaus wee are weomen. No, but because we are imperfect weomen and love not veirity, but seeke after lyes. Veritas Domini manet in aeternum; the verity of our Lorde remaneth forever. It is not veritas hominum verity of men nor veritie of woemen but veritas Domini and this veritie wemen may have as well as men, if we fayle it is for want of this verity and not because we are weomen…There is no such difference between men and weomen that women may not doe great matters, as we have seen by the example of many Saints who have done great things: and I hope in god it will be seene that weomen in tyme to come will doe much.48

If the women of Little Gidding had maintained that women were not equipped for certain masculine tasks, Ward here challenged any notion of innate difference between women’s and men’s abilities. She argued that the success of her followers was determined not by their gender but by their love of truth, which is available to men and women alike. Ward’s use of the Latin veritas hominum displays her own knowledge of the language of scripture, which would typically have been associated with the clergy. Her contrast of veritas hominum with the “veritie of woemen” consigns men to a Latinate past and situates her own followers within an active vernacular present. Her prediction that “in tyme to come” women will do much also transforms their abilities into future potential. Part of Ward’s vision of a life that had not yet been thought entailed dismantling assumptions about gender and projecting new, as yet inchoate, possibilities for her gender. In this sense, Ward’s mission had a strong feminist orientation,

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which extended not just to her companions but to women around the world, as Ward declared that her followers should be employed in the education of girls, “not onely those of our owne Nation…but also those of the places where they lived” to train them either to be nuns or to live in the world.49 If Ward’s vision mobilized paradox to accentuate its uniqueness, it was also paradoxical itself. In her bricolage of convent life to form a utopian path for women, Ward created a radically inclusive vision, which positioned women as equal to men but also valued by the world in a way that religious life had not typically allowed for. However, even as Ward drew together women from different countries and backgrounds to create secular women’s spaces, this vision also had a decidedly hegemonic dimension. In its drive to spread English Catholicism across the world, Ward’s Society both reflected and anticipated the imperial ambitions of her nation, though from a Catholic and feminist standpoint. The imperialist dimensions of Ward’s project underscore utopia’s capacity to contain competing impulses as it often presents democratizing visions that oppress as well as liberate. This tension is evident in the inclusive nature of Ward’s schools and their exclusive privileging of English identity. Ward’s biographers emphasized her investment in Englishness by stating that she “allwayes had an unspeakable Zeale for the good of England” and reminding readers that she began her career by founding an English branch of the Poor Clares, an idea that occurred to her on the Feast of St Gregory, who had sent the first Christian mission to England: “I recited privately certain prayers in honour of that saint, entreating him that as on earth he loved and helped the English so now in heaven he would help and protect one of that nation…suddenly I was enkindled with a vehement desire to procure a monastery for the English of this order.”50 Ward’s drive to give women a vocation in the world was itself grounded in a specifically English crisis: as she wrote in her Plan for the Institute, “the sadly afflicted state of England, our native country,” by which she means the nation’s embrace of Protestantism, could be ameliorated by allowing women “to embrace the religious state and at the same time to devote ourselves, according to our slender capacity, to the performance of those works of Christian charity towards our neighbour, that cannot be undertaken in convents.”51 Ward’s devotion to English identity led her to establish foundations on the Continent both to educate English Catholic girls living abroad and to transmit English Catholic values to European women.

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In this cultivation and dissemination of Englishness, Ward paralleled the early stirrings of the British Empire. Indeed, Ward’s life coincided with England’s early forays into imperialism. She was born in the same year that Sir Walter Raleigh established the first plantation in America, and she received her first calling to a religious vocation in the same year that the East India Company was founded (1600). The early seventeenth century was what David Armitage calls the first empire, which was “for the most part a maritime empire, not an empire of conquest, an empire defended by ships not troops [and by] the outgrowth of British norms exported and fostered by metropolitan migrants.”52 Ward herself participated in the exportation of British norms, though, in her view, her homeland was defined by a Catholic past in danger of being expunged. She framed her followers as a model for the world in much the same way that English men had started to. This sense of exceptionality is apparent in Ward’s third address at Saint-Omer, in which she proclaimed: “You are spectakells to god, angells and men. It is certaine that god has looked uppon you as he never looked uppon any…all looketh uppon you as new beginners of a cours never thought of before; merviling what you entend and what will be the end of you.”53 This reference to I Corinthians 4:9 (“we are made a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men”) anticipates a speech made 13  years later by the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop. Addressing a group of Puritans who had sailed to the New World on the deck of the Arabella, Winthrop famously promised, “Wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” As Michael Warner writes, this sermon, in which Winthrop describes his vision for Massachusetts, stages “an uneasy yoking of geographies and temporalities: English traditionalism, the globalizing modernity of the Protestant historical narrative, the timeless space of divine judgment and the migratory spaces of empire and capital.”54 Much like early modern English nuns, Winthrop invoked Old Testament figures such as Moses to insert his community into God’s timeless plan but simultaneously exhorted his listeners to situate themselves within the presentist and historically specific moment of founding a new plantation. I juxtapose Winthrop’s far more famous words with Ward’s lesser-known speech to underscore how this Catholic woman’s vision of a saeculum was surprisingly aligned with the thoughts of the early founders of English colonies. Despite their differences, both groups articulated a sense of exemplarity and exceptionality grounded in displacement. Winthrop’s group of Protestants and Ward’s Catholic women found themselves away from their homeland, but this

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very exteriority, reminiscent of the nun who was both outside and inside the Church, afforded them a special status. Ward’s expansive vision for her female community in this way rehearsed Britain’s imperial aspirations on a very different stage. This imperialistic dimension of Ward’s Society is articulated most clearly in her final Plan for her Institute, which, borrowing from the Jesuits’ Formula Instituti, vowed “to carry out whatever the present and future Roman Pontiffs may order,” in “whatsoever provinces they may choose to send us—whether they are pleased to send us among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies, or among any heretics whatever.”55 This clause expanded the English Ladies’ vocation to a worldwide conversion and included them in the Counter-­ Reformation’s missionary ambitions. This same section further characterizes the foundress and her followers in militaristic terms as “soldiers of God” wishing to serve “beneath the banner of the cross.”56 Ward’s drive to provide girls with access to education, emulating the pedagogical focus of the Jesuits, was thus accompanied by a drive to dominate and convert those of other cultures and beliefs. This goal is equally voiced in her plan of 1615 “to promote or procure the salvation of our neighbour, by means of the education of girls, or by any other means that are congruous to the times, or in which it is judged that we can by our labours promote the greater glory of God and, in any place, further the propagation of our Holy Mother, the Catholic Church.”57 Ward aimed to participate in the Church’s missionary, which, in light of her strong connection with an English identity, also became associated with a national identity, retained from a time when her homeland was Catholic. It is not surprising that Ward’s expansive vision for women’s spiritual life included the narrower and more destructive impulse to engage in spiritual conquest. Utopia has a long history of entanglement with imperialism. Indeed, More’s Utopia was inspired by the explorations of the early sixteenth century, which resulted in the discovery of lands that eventually became European colonies.58 More even identified Hythloday as one of the men whom Amerigo Vespucci, in his Four Voyages (1507), said he left behind in Cabo Frio, Brazil. Similarities between More’s island of Utopia and Vespucci’s account of the New World include a belief in common property, a devaluing of previous metals and jewels, the habitual exchange of houses, and what both authors identify as an Epicurean focus on pleasure.59 More replicated Vespucci’s othering of people in the Americas as “worse than animals” when he described Utopus’s desire to impart order

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and reason to “rude and wild people” to create his ideal island.60 More anticipated Europe’s subsequent colonizing efforts when he explained how Utopia solves overpopulation and shortages by invading other countries, and foresaw Europeans’ justification for colonialism when he wrote that many of the Utopians’ free and independent neighbors, who were “delivered” by them from tyranny, admired Utopian virtues so much that they took magistrates from Utopia to govern their lands.61 Other early modern English utopian writers similarly voiced colonialist outlooks. For instance, Bacon’s New Atlantis establishes an intellectual rather than territorial imperialism in Bensalem, while Neville’s The Isle of Pines, framed as a “Letter to a friend in London, declaring the truth of his Voyage to the East Indies,” depicts an Englishman who colonizes a bounteous, uncivilized island.62 In these works we see that, as Jameson has observed, “Utopia is . . . the prototype of the settler colony, and the forerunner of modern imperialism,” and that utopia often includes the notion of the settler colony wherein “‘the people without land’ supposedly [meet] ‘the land without people.’”63 Ward’s utopian vision is radically different from these male-authored literary utopias as well as the real-world utopian projects of men like Winthrop since she aimed to export an Englishwomen’s Catholicism by establishing satellite Institutes across Europe and eventually the globe. However, her outlook nonetheless echoes many of their assumptions, both in her assertions that she and her English followers were to act as models for the world and in her declaration that they would go to “whatsoever provinces they may choose to send us.” Ward was not immediately able to realize this global vision. In 1631, Pope Urban VIII signed the Pastoralis Romani Pontificis, which suppressed the Institute, and Ward was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in the Anger Convent in Munich. She was eventually released but forced to live under house arrest in Rome until falling seriously ill. She obtained permission to seek a spa cure near Liège before returning to Yorkshire, where she died on January 30, 1645. In the longue durée, however, Ward’s aim to reach even “those who live in the region called the Indies” did succeed. In the centuries after her death, the Institute slowly gained recognition and was finally given permission to adopt the Jesuit Constitutions and was renamed Congregatio Jesu in 2002.64 Her imperialistic aspirations came to fruition in the later activities of the Loreto Sisters, a branch of Ward’s Institute based in Ireland. Starting in the nineteenth century, Loreto Sisters came from Ireland to India and set up schools, first in Bengal and later in many other parts of the country; Ward’s followers thus did finally reach

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those “in the region called the Indies.”65 With a program aimed at vacating Indian girls of heathen immorality and native accents, the Loreto Sisters, even as they continued to push against the strictures of the Catholic Church, also became part of the British colonial project.66 Ward’s vision of a saeculum for women thus reveals the tremendous potential of utopian visions to chart courses never thought before, but it also foregrounds the potential of such visions to turn into ideology themselves. Across a range of documents spread over time and space, the convent served as inspiration for ways of life that exceeded the traditional cloister, charting late medieval and early modern versions of Augustine’s saeculum. Just as convents themselves had applied a bricolage approach to the past, for those outside the cloister, female monasticism itself became source material that was repurposed to forge utopian modes of thought accessible to a broader range of women. In The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the convent was used as an allegorical vehicle to imagine an inner spiritual life for lay people that also validated women’s spiritual roles. The women of Little Gidding adapted convent life for the new circumstances of an Anglican women’s community and in doing so excavated and revalued women’s traditional roles. Ward envisioned a middle path between the cloister and the world through which women could enact expansionist spiritual work. Such communities emulated but also exploded the form of the convent to articulate ways of being that could not yet be thought, charting new versions of Augustine’s saeculum that privileged women’s communities. In this radical combination of opposites, the secular and the sacred (as well as the democratic and the imperialist in Ward’s community), at the site of women’s quasi-monastic community, The Abbey’s readers, the women of Little Gidding, and Ward’s Society delineate a mode of utopia that embraces, without necessarily reconciling, incommensurate beliefs. This merging of contraries within female spiritual community would, as the next chapter argues, significantly influence the first literary utopias by women.

Notes 1. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), book 19, chapter 17, 946–7. 2. Robert Austin Markus, Christianity and the Secular (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 5. Oliver O’Donovan critiques Markus’s ascription of secularity to Augustine, arguing that there is no

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consensus between those of the heavenly city and the earthly: “The Political Thought of City of God 19,” Bonds of imperfection: Christian Politics, Past and Present, ed. Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004), 48–72, especially 58. This chapter, however, aligns itself with Markus’s broader points about moments in Augustine’s work that gesture to a middle ground even if Augustine’s thought exceeds a simple equation with secularity. 3. Markus, Christianity, 6. Oliver O’Donovan supports this view when he writes, “Secularity is the stance of patience in the face of plurality” (Common Objects of Love: Moral Reflection and the Shaping of Community [Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002], 63). 4. William Roper, The Lyfe of Thomas More, knighte, ed. E.V.  Hitchcock, EETS, o.s. no. 197 (London: Early English Text Society, 1935), 6 cited in Raitiere, “More’s Utopia”; Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Thomas More, ed. E.V.  Hitchcock, EETS, o.s. no. 186 (London: Early English Text Society, 1932), 13–4. These lectures are not extant, but Thomas Stapleton’s The Life of Sir Thomas More (New York: Fordham University Press, 1966), 7–8 gives a sense of them. R.W.  Chambers thought they “may have embodied some of the criticism of social evils which More later put into Utopia” (Thomas More [New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935], 144). 5. Suzanne Edwards persuasively reads Augustine’s portrayal of Lucretia as a story of surviving rape (The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature [London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 3–10). 6. Rev. 21.2 cited in Augustine, The City of God, book 20, chapter 17, 1003. Augustine also earlier characterizes the earthly Jerusalem as a handmaid or bondwoman and the celestial city as a free woman: “All these things came upon Jerusalem the handmaid, in which some also reigned who were children of the free woman, holding sway over that kingdom for the time being, but holding the kingdom of the heavenly Jerusalem, whose sons they were, in true faith, and hoping in the true Christ” (The City of God, book 17, chapter 10, 796). 7. See Christina Whitehead, “Making a Cloister of the Soul in Medieval Religious Treatises,” Medium Ævum 67.1 (1998): 1–29. Editions of the Middle English The Abbey of the Holy Ghost appear in Middle English Religious Prose, ed. N.F. Blake (1972), 88–103, in G. G. Perry, Religious Pieces in Prose and Verse, rev. edn, EETS OS 26 (London: Early English Text Society, 1914), 48–58, and in Yorkshire Writers. Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church, and his Followers, vol. 1, ed. C. Horstmann (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1895), 321–7. The present chapter cites from Horstmann’s edition by page number. The English

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Abbey was frequently collated with The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost, an exclusively Middle English text that sets the allegory within the larger context of salvation history. 8. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Politics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 9. Barbara Johnson, “Women and Allegory,” in The Wake of Deconstruction (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Press, 1994), 52–75, 73. On the association of women and allegory see also Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Athenum, 1985). 10. Gordan Tesky, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 19. 11. Barbara Newman, God and Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 39. 12. Ibid., 49. 13. Whitehead, “Making a Cloister,” 15. 14. Nicole R.  Rice, Lay Piety and Religious Discipline in Middle English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 25. 15. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 28. 16. Ibid. 17. There were, in fact, a few manuscripts associated with women’s religious houses and with lay female readers. Boffey points to the association of Vernon MS 4 with female readers and to the appearance of the Abbey and its sister text the Charter together in anthologies that may have been compiled with women readers in mind⁠. Julia Boffey, “‘The Charter of the Abbey of the Holy Ghost’ and Its Role in Manuscript Anthologies,” The Yearbook of English Studies, 33 Medieval and Early Modern Miscellanies and Anthologies (2003): 120–30. Another manuscript, British Library, Stowe 39, is associated with a female religious house. On this manuscript see Boyda Johnstone, “Reading Images, Drawing Texts: The Illustrated Abbey of the Holy Ghost in British Library MS Stowe 39,” in Editing, Performance, Texts: New Practices in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jacqueline Jenkins and Julie Sanders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 27–48 and Peter Kidd, “Codicological Clues to the Patronage of Stowe MS. 39: A Fifteenth-Century Illustrated Nun’s Book in Middle English,” Electronic British Library Journal (2009): 1–12. 18. For an insightful analysis of these, see Debora Shuger, “Laudian Feminism and the Household Republic of Little Gidding,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44.1 (2014): 69–94. For recent work on the women of Little Gidding, see, for instance, Michael Gaudio, The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony (New York: Routledge, 2016) and Whitney Trettien,

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“Media, Materiality, and Time in the History of Reading: The Case of the Little Gidding Harmonies,” PMLA 133.5 (2018): 1135–51. 19. Lynette Muir and John White, eds., Materials for the Life of Nicholas Ferrar (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1996), 96, para. 145. The community’s resemblance to a monastery was even commended by Queen Henrietta Maria who apparently heard from the King that there was “a Protestant family that outdid the severest monastics abroad” and dispatched a servant to observe their manner of living (The Story Books of Little Gidding: Being the Religious Dialogues Recited in the Great Room, 1631–32, ed. E. Cruwys Sharland [New York: Dutton, 1899], xxxvii). 20. The Arminian Nunnery; or, A Briefe Description and Relation of the Late Erected Monasticall Place, Called the Arminian Nunnery at Little Gidding in Huntingtonshire (London, 1641). 21. Among the evidence that Shuger cites for this claim are the facts that (1) family letters mentioning the Story Books never mention that Nicholas is the sole author, nor does John Ferrar’s life of his brother say this (2) Anna and Mary presented the manuscript of the first year’s colloquies with a cover letter saying that the volume is “the first fruits of our labors” (3) Nicholas wrote a letter to Susanna referring to the book as belonging to her sisters (4) Arthur Woodnoth, a Ferrar relative and friend, wrote to Nicholas asking his cousins to send Mrs. Herbert “one of their stories.” See Religion in Early Stuart England, 1603–1638: An Anthology of Primary Sources, ed. Debora Shuger (Waco Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012), 592–93. Portions of the Little Academy dialogues are published in The Story Books of Little Gidding, ed. Sharland; The Ferrar Papers, ed. B.  Blackstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938); Conversations at Little Gidding, ed. A.M. Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Religion in Early Stuart England, ed. Shuger, 90–616. 22. On the importance of needlework as a moral and utilitarian activity in early modern English convents, see Walker, Gender and Politics, 96. The Little Gidding women’s dismissal of trifles recalls advice given to the Blue Nuns of Paris to “employ the time of work faithfully, profitably, and for the good of the Community, and not to lose their time in frivolous Trifling.” The Diary of the ‘Blue Nuns’ or Order of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, at Paris, 1658–1810, ed. Joseph Gillow and Richard Trappes-Lomex (London: J. Whitehead & Sons, 1910), 296. 23. The Actions & Doctrine & Other Passages touching Our Lord & Sauior Jesus Christ (1635), BL C.23.e.4, title–page. 24. Joyce Ransome has recently argued that the Ferrars may have initially made their own cut-and-paste book with the goal of sending this “dummy” manuscript to a printer, to be typeset and published as just such a concor-

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dance; but they were pre-empted by the publication of Johan Hiud’s The Storie of Stories (1632). See Ransome, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., Lutterworth Press, 2011). 25. Engraved prints for the concordance created for King Charles I, known as the King’s Harmony (The Actions & Doctrine & Other Passages…1635, British Library, C.23.E.4.), were primarily produced in Antwerp, brought to England and sold in London. The family relied on a network of friends to buy these prints. See Paul Dyck, “The Discovery of Pattern at Little Gidding,” in Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, ed. Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 135–52, 140. 26. On this reframing of women’s work, see Whitney Trettien, “Women’s labor and the Little Gidding Harmonies,” in Routledge Companion to Women, Sex, and Gender in the Early British Colonial World, ed. Kimberly Anne Coles and Eve Keller (New York: Routledge, 2016), 120–36. 27. Paul Dyck and his collaborators Stuart Williams and Ryan Rempel have created a digital edition of this book: http://littlegidding.pauldyck.com/. 28. A similar accumulation of verses about women occurs on the following page which juxtaposes the passages “And there was Mary Magdalene, and the other Mary fitting over against the Sepulchre” (Matthew 27:61); “And Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was layd” (Mark 15:47); and “And the women also which came which him Galilee followed after and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was layd. And they returned and prepared spices and oynments, and rested the Sabbeth day according to the Commandement” (Luke 23:55–56). 29. Adam Smyth, “Little Clippings: Cutting and Pasting Bibles in the 1630s,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 45.3 (2015): 595–613, 608. See, for example, the King’s Harmony chapters CXLVIII, which feature cut-out images of a desk, book, and scroll; chapter CXXV, which shows women sewing and writing, and chapter XLII, which contains images of women weaving, sewing, and praying. 30. George Henderson, Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 8.2 (1982): 173–216, 198. 31. Dyck argues that this page makes “a powerful implicit claim about female embodiment as constituting the Gospel itself, both living the word and making it possible” (“The Discovery of Pattern at Little Gidding,” 146). 32. On Ward’s life, see Mary C.  E. Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, ed. H. J. Coleridge, 2 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1882–1885); Margaret Mary Littlehales, Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic (Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Burns and Oates, 1998) and Mary Ward (1585–1645): A Woman for All Seasons: Foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (London:

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Catholic Truth Society, 1974); Henriette Peters, Mary Ward. A World in Contemplation, trans. Helen Butterworth (Gracewing Books, 1994). Right Rev. Abbot Gasquet, The Life of Mary Ward, Foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (London: Burns and Oates, 1909); Leo Hicks, “Mary Ward’s Great Enterprise,” The Month 151 (1928); Mother Margarita O’Connor, That Incomparable Woman (Montreal: Palm, 1962); and Mother M. Salome, Mary Ward: A Foundress of the Seventeenth century (London: Burns and Oates, 1901). 33. Sources of Ward’s life have recently been compiled in four volumes with editorial material in German: Mary Ward und hire Gründung. Die quellentexte bis 1645, ed. Ursula Dirmeier CJ, 4 vols. (Munster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2007). 34. Until the suppression of her institute in 1631, Ward used the title “Society of Jesus” or “Mothers of the Society of Jesus,” and a similar seal to that of the Jesuits for her letters. The IHS monogram was mounted over the entrance to the Institute’s house in Liège and also in Vienna, where it can still be seen. As I am writing exclusively about this community within Ward’s lifetime and just after, I generally refer to Ward’s movement by its original name “society” though I do also use the term “institute,” referring proleptically to the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. 35. The plan is analyzed in depth in Peters, Mary Ward, 124–32. 36. On Ward’s progressively radical plans, see Laurence Lux-Sterritt, “An Analysis of the Controversy Caused by Mary Ward’s Institute in the 1620s,” Recusant History 25.4 (London: Catholic Record Society, 2001), 636–647. The full text of the Ratio is in Chambers, Life of Mary Ward, vol. 1, 375–85. The three plans of the Institute are described and excerpted in Orchard, Til God Will: Mary Ward through her Writings (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985), 34–38, 43–46, 64–65. For an account of the apparent tensions between Ward and her spiritual advisors who helped draft the protocol for her community, see Peters, Mary Ward, 120–32, 198–203. 37. Lux-Sterritt points out that about 85 percent of the language in the Institutum is taken from the Jesuit Formula. 38. Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, vol. 1, 376. On the role of martyrs’ stories in English recusant households “as comfort literature and conduct books,” see Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2002). 39. The nickname “galloping nun” appears in a number of sources. See “Sister Dorothea’s Narrative,” in Littlehales, Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic, 251; William Prynne, Hidden Workes of Darkenes Brought to Publike Light (London, 1645), 203. Ward’s notoriety led Thomas Middleton to feature her in his satirical A Game at Chess (1624) allegorically as the Black Pawn

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of the Black Queen, Maria of Spain, the proposed bride for Charles I. In her article ‘“Wandering Nuns’: The Return of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the South of England, 1862–1945,” Recusant History 24:3 (1999), 384–96, Sr. M.  Gregory Kirkus, IBVM explores what she calls “the purposeful mobility” of the members of the Institute in more recent years. 40. Mary Ward, A Briefe Relation, with Autobiographical Fragments and a Selection of Letters, ed. Christina Kenworthy-Browne (Woodbridge, Suffolk: the Boydell Press, 2008). The goal of this life seems to be to “strengthen the fidelity of companions” after Ward’s death and possibly to defend Ward against accusations by the English secular clergy and by others in Flanders, Bohemia, and Vienna (Kenworthy-­Browne, xvii). 41. On the tensions between the cloister and the apostolate for religious women, see Marie Chalendar, La Promotion de la femme à l’apostolat, 1540–1650 (Paris: Editions Alsatia, 1950); Louis Chatelier, L’Europe des dévots (Paris: Flammarion, 1987); Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes. Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987); James Cain, “Cloister and the Apostolate of Religious Women,” Review for the Religious 27(1968): 243–80; Ruth Liebowitz, “Virgins in the Service of Christ: The Dispute over an Active Apostolate for Women during the Counter–Reformation,” in Women of Spirit, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 131–52; Linda Lierheimer, “Redefining Convent Space: Ideals of Female Community among Seventeenth Century Ursuline Nuns,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 24 (1997): 211–20, and James Cain, “The Influence of the Cloister on the Apostolate of Congregations of Religious Women,” PhD diss., (Pontifical Lateran University, Rome, 1965). 42. This passage is from “Autobiographisches Fragment (AB) 1” in Mary Ward und ihre Gründung, vol. 1, 12. 43. Ibid., 290. 44. Ibid., 22–23. 45. Lowell Gallagher, Sodomoscapes: Hospitality of the Flesh (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2017). I would like to thank Lowell again for his guidance on Ward’s career and for our discussions of the Painted Life. 46. The Babthorpes were known to hold mass frequently. As Father Pollard, who lived in the house at the same time as Ward, described, there was mass every Sunday and on weekdays twice a day (Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, vol. 1, 40–41). On the technique of using a blurred background to convey different moments in time in Spanish visionary paintings, see Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1997).

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47. “Drei Ansprachen Mary Wards,” Saint-Omer, December, 1617  in Mary Ward und ihre Gründung, vol. 1, 358. 48. Ibid. 49. Briefe Relation, 16. 50. This episode is also recounted in the Italian Life, though slightly differently. Ward writes, “On the feast of St Gregory the Great (my particular advocate) sitting in silence at work with the nuns, I recited privately certain prayers in honour of that saint, entreating him that as on earth he loved and helped the English so now in heaven he would help and protect one of that nation…suddenly I was enkindled with a vehement desire to procure a monastery for the English of this order” (129). David Wallace discusses Ward’s attachment to her English identity in Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 414. Ward’s Society coincided with the rise of English national consciousness. This sense of England as a nation is often connected to Protestantism, given that the Elizabethan regime sought to define itself against Catholicism. See John Gregory, “The Making of a Protestant Nation: ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ in England’s Long Reformation” in Nicholas Tyacke, ed. England’s Long Reformation 1500–1800 (London: University College London, 1998), 307–34; Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, “The Trials of a Chosen People: Recent interpretations of Protestantism and National Identity in Britain and Ireland,” in Protestantism and National Identity, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 11, and Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). More recently, however, scholars have argued that Catholics also participated actively in shaping the discourse of Englishness. See, for instance, Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 51. Ratio Instituti in Anglia Historia (1616) in Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, vol. 1: 382–83, n. 3. 52. David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 53. Mary Ward und ihre Gründung, vol. 1, 363. 54. Michael Warner, “What’s Colonial about Colonial America,” in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert St. George (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2000), 49–70, 51. 55. Institutum, f. 22 cited in Orchard, Til God Will, 65. 56. Ibid. 57. Scheme of the Institute (1615), Chambers, The Life of Mary Ward, 378. 58. On utopia and imperialism, see Mosab A.  Bajaber, “Utopian Literature and Imperialism,” PhD diss., (University of North Dakota, 2015); and

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Susan Bruce, “Utopian Justifications: More’s Utopia, Settler Colonialism, and Contemporary Ecocritical Concerns,” College Literature 42.1 (2015): 23–43. 59. For a more extensive exploration of these parallels, see Alfred A.  Cave, “Thomas More and the New World,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 23.2 (1991): 209–29. 60. Martin Waldseemüller, The Cosmographiae Introductio of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimile Followed by the Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci, with Their Translation Into English; To Which Are Added Waldseemüller’s Two World Maps of 1507, ed. Charles George Herbermann (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 135 cited in Cave, “Thomas More,” 213; More, Utopia, 50. 61. Ibid., 95. 62. Henry Neville, The Isle of Pines in Three Early Modern Utopias, 190. Utopian foreign policy, as George Logan argues, is hard to distinguish from imperialism (The Meaning of More’s Utopia [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983], 223). This point has been made more recently by Andrew Hadfield, who observes that Utopians “have to confront exactly the same problems as their real [­European] counterparts, including the question of appropriating foreign lands to ease domestic pressures” (Literature, Travel and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1544–1625 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998], 11). 63. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 205. Antonis Balasopoulos also argues for a fundamental connection between imperialism and utopia, arguing that Utopia “provided the template for utopian expansionism” because it “so inventively [negotiates] the interface between the misreading of power and the power of misreading” (“Unworldly Worldliness: America and the Trajectories of Utopian Expansionism,” Utopian Studies 15.2 [2004]: 3–35, 8). 64. There was a slow build up to this final achievement: the Institute received full confirmation by Pope Pius IX in 1877; in 1900, the name Institute of the Blessed Virgin became its official title; in 1909, the petition for Ward’s habilitation received approval from Pius X.  Ward was given the title ‘Venerable’ by Benedict XVI in 2009. 65. On Loreto in India, see Kumari Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia During British Rule (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 66. See Mother Mary Colmcille, First the Blade, History of the IBVM (Loreto) in India (1841–1962) (Calcutta: Firma K.  L. Mukhopadhyay, 1968), 122–23.

CHAPTER 5

Convents of Pleasure: English Women’s Literary Utopias

Women’s spiritual communities not only produced a utopianism of their own, but they also influenced the utopian visions of non-religious women writers. A century before More coined the word utopia, the French author Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) in The Book of the City of Ladies (c.1405) had envisioned an ideal allegorical city that closely resembled a convent. Like a cloister, this city of ladies has walls that enclose female virtue. It is governed by the Virgin Mary and inhabited by virgins and holy women. Christine herself would have been intimately familiar with female monastic community not only because she retired to the Dominican Convent of Poissy at the end of her life but also because, in the early 1400s, before she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, she paid a visit to her daughter, who was a nun at Poissy. Following this visit, she wrote the poem “Le Dit de Poissy,” in which she described the abbey as “riche et precïeuse,/ Noble, royal et moult delicïeuse” [“riche and precious, noble, royal and very delightful”] and as a “paradis Terrestre” [“earthly paradise”].1 Christine’s visit to Poissy may well have served as inspiration for the allegorical walled city of women about which she later wrote. A relationship between Christine’s real-world experience of the cloister and her allegory in The Book of the City of Ladies is buoyed by the parallel language used to describe the fortified architecture of the two sites: Poissy has “main fort corbel” [“very strong corbels”], “grans voultes haultes devers les nues” [“great vaults high towards the skies”], and “tourelles/ D’entailleure de pierre” [“towers sculpted in stone”], while the city of ladies is of “grant largesce © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4_5

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et long circuite de la closture et de la muraille” [“great size and long circuit from the cloister and the wall”] and contains “belles et fortes mensions and herberges” (634) [“beautiful and strong houses and refuges”].2 Both accounts emphasize the scale and enclosure of these architectural spaces, and their similarity suggests that what is arguably the first woman’s literary utopia drew on the  spatial imagery of a real-world medieval convent. Christine’s utopian city not only shares physical features with cloisters; it also reproduces the bricolage method that was the signature of women’s spiritual utopianism. The Book of the City of Ladies self-consciously deploys an androcentric past to project futures that serve women’s interests. The dream vision itself is catalyzed by Christine’s encounter with an anti-­ feminist work by the thirteenth-century poet Matheolus. Amid her distress at this work’s claims about women’s evil doings, Christine is visited by feminized allegorical personifications Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, who guide her to create a city whose foundation, walls, and inhabitants are great women from history. To tell the stories of women ranging from the legendary Mesopotamian ruler Semiramis to Christian saints, Christine used source material by male writers, especially Giovanni Boccaccio, whose De Mulieribus Claris [Of Famous Women] (1361–2) praises a select number of exemplary women in contrast to the generally wicked nature of women. Christine repurposes these stories to prove the inherent worth of all women. This practice of creating something new within the rubble of the old is mirrored in the narrative itself; to characterize her work, Christine uses the metaphor of excavation: “je pris a fossoier et fouyer…a tout la pioche d’inquisicion” (1.8, 66) [“I began to excavate and dig out the earth with the spade of my intelligence”]. Christine’s process of bricolage is particularly apparent in her rewriting of Boccaccio’s account of the classical poet Proba. Recalling the collage practices of the women at Little Gidding, Proba is a bricoleur as she wrote the Bible using the verses of Virgil: “d’une partie les vers tout entiers prenoit et maintenant de l’autre aucunes petites parties touchoit. Par merveilleux artifice et soubtivieté a son propos ordeneement vers entiers faisoit…” (1.29, 156) [“in one part she would take several entire verses unchanged and in another borrow small snatches of verse. With marvelous craftsmanship and subtlety, she composed entire verses in good order”]. Proba’s methods, which repurpose Virgil’s text to new ends, mirror those of Christine, who took pieces of stories by male authors, first from Boccaccio and then from the hagiographies of Vincent of Beauvais, and transformed

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them into a work that celebrates women’s accomplishments and capabilities.3 As this example demonstrates, Christine’s City of Ladies evokes a convent not only in its physical appearance but also in its methods: Christine forges a utopia that, like those examined in the previous chapters of this book, reworks a past that excluded women to imagine a more inclusive future. Christine’s book was initially read by French audiences, most notably Queen Isabeau of Bavaria, but it soon traveled to England, where it may have inspired subsequent Englishwomen’s writings.4 Copies of the Cité were available to English readers in manuscript copies owned by French-­ speaking aristocrats and, later, in an English translation by Brian Anslay (d.1536), which was printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521.5 In this translation, Christine’s identity underwent a transformation as she was presented as a cloistered nun.6 As Jennifer Summit has argued, this portrayal of Christine as a nun foregrounds the authority of her male editors, translators, and readers.7 However, it also parallels the allusions to female monasticism in the book itself. In addition to the print forms of Christine’s book that would have been available to English readers, English aristocrats at the Tudor and Stuart courts may also have been familiar with Christine’s utopian city through tapestries (now lost), which are mentioned in the inventory of Henry VIII’s household.8 Christine’s narrative about an ideal city of women may thus have been widely available in visual and textual forms for audiences in early modern England. Among the Cité’s possible early female readers was Margaret Cavendish, who might have, along with her husband, owned Harley MS 4431, which contained illuminated versions of several of Christine’s works.9 Christine’s convent-like city ladies may, therefore, have served as a literary influence on the woman who produced what is often called the first literary utopia written by a woman in English. Indeed, it is the contention of this chapter that the first women’s literary utopias written in England were influenced, if not directly by Christine’s City of Ladies, by the idea of women’s Catholic spiritual communities. Although monasteries were exiled from England, memories of these institutions survived in the separatist women’s communities in works by Protestant women authors, including the poems of Katherine Philips, Aemelia Lanyer’s Salve deus rex judaeorum, Margaret Cavendish’s The Female Academy, The Convent of Pleasure, and The Blazing World, and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest. The specter of the convent, with its emphasis

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on collective women’s learning, female authority, and same-sex intimacy and desire, haunts these secular women’s utopian worlds. Early modern Englishwomen were not only inspired by the physical form of the convent as an enclosed space of self-governing women, but they also imitated these communities more conceptually in their bricolage of the past. As these early modern women writers borrowed from a ‘ruined’ Catholic past and intermingled it with newer enlightenment ideals of learning and science, they forged spaces that, like nunneries, the Little Gidding community, and Ward’s society, juxtaposed incommensurate ideals and were self-­consciously aware of their own impossibility. In these fictional writings, the more practice-­based utopias of medieval and early modern convents and societies like Ward’s translate into visions of utopia that aspired to transform women’s lives in the world. A crucial shift in the transit of proto-feminist ideals from the convent to the literary page was the refocusing of women’s utopianism from community to particular friendships, which leads to a change in the types of utopias produced. Whereas the utopianism of the convent resided within women’s communities, Protestant writers projected utopianism onto female friendships, making these individual bonds emblematic of women’s utopia. In this shift, the tensions between belief systems that were more often synthesized within women’s religious communities (past/future, old/new, lay/religious) are laid bare and often left unresolved. Friendships between women at once enable the collective empowerment of each woman and, through inevitable divisions between friends, anticipate the impossibility of joining self and other, failing to resolve difference. Such friendships hold out the possibility of harmony and unity but they also register real-world conflicts and divisions. The literary utopian works that center on friendship hence retain the bricolage joining of incommensurate beliefs found in Catholic women’s religious communities, but, by setting these elements within the framework of friendship and its potential to turn into enmity, keep dissonant beliefs in play rather than synthesizing them. In the increased sense of difference that friendship enables, these literary utopias resemble what Tom Moylan calls critical utopias, which display “awareness of the limitations of the utopian tradition…reject[ing] utopia as a blueprint while preserving it as a dream.”10 Gary Saul Morson refers to this same concept as “meta-utopian,” pointing both to More’s Utopia and H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905) as examples of meta-utopias, works that, despite the authoritarian nature of their fictional sociopolitical structures, open up multiple and contradictory readings.11 The idea of

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critical or meta-utopia—utopias that are aware of their own contradictions—is most often applied to twentieth-century science fiction, but I argue that a similar phenomenon occurs in seventeenth-century women’s imaginary utopias. Given the patriarchal world in which these writers operated, their utopias both register the hope for women’s friendship as the foundation of a utopian society and stage the inevitable difficulties of such a vision. But the presence of multiple or contradictory ideas does not negate the hope that such utopias offer. The female friendships in works by Philips, Lanyer, and Cavendish foreground desire as a fundamental component of their utopian visions. This desire consists of a desire for each other, a desire that can verge into the erotic that goes hand in hand with the desire for a better world. The messiness that desire produces is what generates the “critical” aspect of these friendship-based and convent-inspired utopias, but it is also what endows them with flexibility and range. This quality of desire evades the homogeny of the standard early modern utopia and instead establishes utopias that enact desire across difference. It is through their desire that women form the coalitions that enable them to imagine better worlds. In this chapter, I pursue this argument about the influence of the convent on Englishwomen’s literary utopias across four sections. The first section explicates the relationship between early female friendship and utopia, explaining how and why women’s friendships emerge as sites of alternative ideals across a range of literary texts. The second section demonstrates how literary works by Lanyer, Philips, Cavendish, and Astell depict female friendships as forms of convent-like enclosure, revealing how the idea of the convent may have influenced these authors’ notions of female friendship. The third section shows how these friendships extend the practice of bricolage exhibited in convents to foreground antagonistic juxtapositions of incommensurate ideals. Finally, I show how these friendships serve as the locus of a critical utopianism as they register their own impossibility while also holding up the desire for something other as a core value that emerges from women’s bonds.

Friendship as Utopia As I have argued elsewhere, women’s friendship in the medieval and early modern eras had a particular capacity to serve as a site of utopia, and it was through their portrayals of female friendship that authors such as Mary

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Wroth, Lanyer, Philips, and Cavendish preserved something of the utopianism that women’s collective life, intimacy, and enclosure in convents had enabled.12 Indeed, the very concept of friendship between women was utopian since they occupied a “no place” within traditional theories of friendship. Reading Carl Schmitt’s Theory of the Partisan, Jacques Derrida sums this position up by writing that friendship “is a certain desert. Not a woman in sight … In vain would you look for a figure of a woman, a feminine silhouette, and the slightest allusion to sexual difference.”13 While women’s friendships certainly existed, women did not appear in medieval or early modern theories of friendship, evoking utopia’s original etymological meaning of no-place. This absence of women from friendship theories dates back to the classical writings that undergirded medieval and early modern notions of the friend. According to Cicero, the friend was identical to the self: “he who looks upon a true friend, looks, as it were, upon a sort of image of himself.”14 The ideal of a virtuous, reciprocal relationship between male equals was seen as the foundation of moral political life and, in a later Christian context by theologians like Aelred of Rievaulx, as the foundation of spiritual life.15 Women were excluded from this perfect bond because they were not considered capable of the virtue such friendship required. Encapsulating this view, Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay “Of Friendship” that “the ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot.”16 From the classical to the early modern period, then, women were perceived as unsuitable for one of the most important bonds in political and religious life. Because no codified theory of female friendship existed, the representation of women’s bonds in the medieval and early modern periods, where it did occur, had a utopian quality: it portrayed something good that was both there and not there. Like utopias, women’s friendships offered alternatives to contemporary discourse, holding up a critical mirror to the present day. Not only did their existence resist the pervasive misogyny of their age but the models of friendship that they enacted often subverted the norms of the classical friendship model, which insisted on a bond between social equals, generally of the elite classes. Women’s bonds, in contrast, often cut across class boundaries and defied the classical mandate of exact reciprocity between friends.17 As women’s friendships articulated

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alternatives to the status quo, they emerged as utopian spaces within the discourse of friendship. This utopian quality of women’s friendship is apparent in medieval and early modern fiction, particularly within the genre of romance. Works such as Philip Sidney’s New Arcadia (1590) and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) present same-sex female bonds as sites of intimate sociality that is absent from the parallel relationships of male characters.18 Eroticized friendships between women, such as Britomart and Amoret in The Faerie Queene or Philoclea and Zelmane (who is Pyrocles in disguise) in the New Arcadia, offer glimpses of caring and intimacy between women that diverge from the main plots of masculinist heroic exploits.19 That these women’s bonds are soon subsumed by the heterosexual love narratives only foregrounds their utopian nature, since, as previous chapters have argued, utopia is the contemplation of an as-yet-unrealized future that is often overshadowed by failure.20 Women’s friendships thus haunt romance works as specters of things that might have been, signs of a world that could be different. In this sense, they parallel the what-if worlds in the documents of convents, particularly of early modern English convents in the wake of the exile of Catholicism. If the romance writings of men offer only fleeting glimpses of utopian friendships between women, the writings of women in a range of genres—from lyric poems to philosophical treatises—offer far more extended treatments of female friendship. In doing so, they look back to the same-sex solidarities permitted by the convent and adapt this model of female collective life to their own circumstances in Protestant England.

Enclosed Friendship Many of the earliest published writings by Englishwomen portray female friendships as catalysts for utopian visions of women’s agency and fulfillment. The importance of friendship in some of these writings has been remarked upon by scholars in a growing subfield of early modern women’s friendship studies, but the link between such friendships and monasticism has not been explored.21 Although convents were no longer present in England, many early modern English women writers drew on the imagery of the cloister to depict women’s friendship. This is true of Philips, whose poems on friendship, as Susannah B.  Mintz has observed, frequently deploy images of enclosure.22 These poems portray friendship as a confined space in which women find satisfaction and mutual fulfillment. For

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instance, in “On Rosania’s Apostasy,” Philips wrote, “Thy heart locks up my secrets richly set,/ And my breast is thy private cabinet” (ll. 8–10).23 This use of enclosure conveys the intensity of women’s affection, as one’s secrets are enclosed in the heart and breast of the other. Such poems not only recall the convent as a physical space but also remember its refusal of the world in favor of spiritual calling. In “To Mrs. M. Awbrey” (1651), Philips wrote, “Let the dull world alone to talk and fight,/ And with their vast ambitions nature fright” (l. 15–16). In contrast, the friends the poem describes in the line “by Love sublim’d so high shall rise” (l.19). Here, friendship itself replaces the retreat from the world and becomes a site of spiritual fulfillment, a point encapsulated at the end of this poem when the narrator declares, “we that sacred union have engrost, Which they and all the sullen world have lost” (ll. 15–22). Women’s friendship in Philips’s poetry thus becomes not only a substitute for marriage but also, more subliminally, a replacement for the enclosed religious life in which English women could no longer participate on English soil. The utopian dimension of these cloister-like friendships is illuminated in one of Philips’s most famous poems, “Friendship’s Mystery, To my Dearest Lucasia” (1667). Here, the speaker declares, “let’s prove/There’s a Religion in our Love” (ll. 4–5), imbuing same-sex friendship with sanctity. She goes further to cast this enclosed friendship as the meeting point of opposing values, a characterization reminiscent of Mary Ward’s use of contradiction in her depiction of her Institute: And we, whose minds are so much one, Never, yet ever, are alone. We court our own captivity, Then Thrones more great and innocent: ‘Twere banishment to be set free, Since we weare fetters whose intent Not bondage is, but Ornament. (ll. 14–20)

These lines, in which the speaker portrays captivity and bondage as modes of collective freedom, recollect the Ancrene Wisse’s portrayal of enclosure as liberation. Pledging oneself to another in the bond of friendship, such that two minds become one, evokes imprisonment, heightened by the reference to “fetters,” but it is, in fact, a form of mutual liberation. The enclosure of female friendship in Philips’s poetry thus becomes utopian as it negotiates (or bricolates) contradictions to move toward harmony.

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Friendship operates in conceptually similar ways to the cloister to become a site of proto-feminist utopia. The convent also provided a powerful inspiration for other women writers’ considerations of female friendship. Women’s spiritual community is at the core of Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a work that consists of 11 dedicatory poems to women, followed by the story of Christ told from a female perspective, and a country-house poem centered on a lost women’s friendship.24 The book’s titular poem echoes the bricolage methods of the women of Little Gidding and Christine de Pizan as it retells biblical history from a feminist perspective. Just as the Little Gidding concordances foregrounded the presence of women at the Crucifixion, Lanyer insists that Christ was “begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women” (ll. 43–46). She expands on women’s roles in the Bible, rehabilitating Pilate’s wife and Eve and drawing attention to “the teares of the daughters of Jerusalem” (ll. 969–1008), the sorrow of the virgin Marie (ll. 1009–40), Mary’s Annunciation, and the piety of her primary patron, the Countess of Cumberland, as examples of women’s spirituality.25 While critics have emphasized links between Lanyer’s poem and radical Protestantism, these portrayals of different women from the Bible also collectively evoke the devotion that Catholic female communities paid to female forebears, recalling, for instance, the female genealogy that the Syon nuns established between themselves, Saint Bridget, and the Virgin Mary.26 Lanyer’s poems as a whole not only recall the kinds of female spiritual communities facilitated within the convent but also, like Philips’s work, use imagery of enclosure and devotion to characterize bonds between women. As Michael Morgan Holmes has observed, Lanyer depicts herself in something like a nun’s cell when she writes to Queen Anne that she has been living “clos’d up in Sorrowses Cell,/ Since great Elizaes favour blest my youth” (ll. 109–10).27 She further describes the queen as a woman who takes “holy habite” in order “Still to remaine the same, and still her owne” (ll.117–18). In her poem to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, she imagines “the closet of your lovely breast” and “that Cabbine where your self does rest” (“To the Ladie Lucie,” ll. 2, 4). In “To the Ladie Susan,” Lanyer asks her dedicatee to “grace” Christ’s Passion, which she describes as “this holy feast” (l.6), a term that evokes the Catholic Eucharist. Most reminiscent of the convent are numerous references to Christ as spouse in Lanyer’s poems, which recalls the marriage of nuns to Christ during their

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professions. All these details suggest that while Lanyer was herself Protestant (though her Italian husband Alfonso Lanyer was Roman Catholic, so she must have had some exposure), she drew on the imagery of female monastic life to depict idealized spiritual communities and friendships between women. In the context of her larger work, these friends prove to be vehicles of a utopian life for women as they act as conduits to the divine. While the poets Philips and Lanyer depicted friendships as figurative forms of enclosure that metaphorize the space of a convent, utopian prose writers Cavendish and Astell instead set women’s friendships within actual convents or convent-like spaces, which in Cavendish’s case may have been inspired by real-world experience. Cavendish would have been familiar with spaces of medieval convent life in England during her youth.28 As Julie Crawford points out, two former English convents, St John’s Abbey and Welbeck Abbey, were transformed into homes for the Lucas and Cavendish families.29 Moreover, as Jenna Lay and Nicky Hallet observe, Cavendish would have visited functioning convents on the Continent during the time she spent as a lady in waiting for Queen Henrietta Maria in Antwerp when she lived next to an English Carmelite convent.30 At this time, Cavendish even participated in the monastic clothing ceremony of a young Englishwoman.31 Such experiences clearly influenced her work, for while she was a Protestant, Cavendish frequently framed monastic life as a vehicle of women’s freedom. In her Sociable Letters, a fictional epistolary exchange between two women, she wrote: “Marriage is a very Unhappy Life when Sympathy Joyns not the Married Couple, for otherwise it were better to be Barr’d up within the Gates of a Monastery, than to be Bound in the Bonds of Matrimony.”32 The freedom and pleasure that the convent could offer women friends is most clearly announced in the speech with which this book began when Lady Happy declares that she will take women into her cloister to live a life of delights and pleasure. The convent for Cavendish served not so much as a symbol of religious life but rather as a site for philosophical and political inquiry about what the good life for women might look like.33 Even Cavendish’s utopia The Blazing World, which would seem to have no connection with the convent and rather to be engaged with the tropes of the utopia genre established by More and Bacon, contains references to enclosed female community. This occurs when the Empress, a woman who was kidnapped and shipwrecked in the Blazing World and married its

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emperor, decides to establish a group of religious women. As the narrative describes, she: resolved to build Churches, and make also up a Congregation of Women, whereof she intended to be the head her self, and to instruct them in the several points of her Religion. This she had no sooner begun, but the Women, which generally had quick wits, subtile conceptions, clear understandings, and solid judgments, became, in a short time, very devout and zealous Sisters; for the Empress had an excellent gift of Preaching, and instructing them in the Articles of Faith; and by that means, she converted them not onely soon, but gained an extraordinary love of all her Subjects throughout that World.”34

This description of a community of sisters who follow the empress’s preaching establishes a feminocentric religious structure in the Blazing World that has been little noted. While this convent-like congregation of women does not reappear in the narrative, the friendship that later develops between the Empress and the Duchess, who arrives to write the Empress’s Cabbala, assumes aspects of corporate enclosure. This is especially apparent when we learn that there developed “such an intimate friendship between them [the Empress and the Duchess], that they became Platonick Lovers, although they were both Females” (210). These women, whose friendship, I have argued elsewhere, becomes more utopian than the blazing world itself, become like “several parts of one united body” (210).35 They fuse literally as well as figuratively when the Empress invites the Duchess’s soul to reside in her own body: “Your Soul, said the Empress, shall live with my Soul, in my Body; for I shall onely desire your Counsel and Advice” (234). These women become two souls in one body, revising the traditional male friendship trope of “two bodies, one soul” but also invoking the shared corporate identity of women in a convent.36 Their friendship thus evokes in microcosm the enclosure of female community within the body of the convent. A generation later in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and Serious Proposal Part II (1697), Astell proposed a female community that was to be “a Monastry” or “Religious Retirement” for “Ladies of Quality,” although it would not require “Vows or irrevocable Obligations,” leaving women’s participation entirely “voluntary and free” (117).37 While Astell distinguished her retired community from the Catholic convents, all of her language recalls this earlier model, and her detractors inevitably compared

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this community to a female monastery.38 The institution that she imagined has the same concern with virtue and with reforming the future that we find in medieval and early modern convents: it promises to help women be “kept out of the road of sin” and provide “an institution and previous discipline, to fit us to do the greatest good in it; such an institution as this (if I do not mightly deceive my self,) would be the most probably method to amend the present and improve the future Age” (74). Like the convents of the past, this “Happy Retreat!” promises to show women “such a Paradise as your Mother Eve forfeited,” revealing  such delights “as will make you truly happy now, and prepare you to be perfectly so hereafter” (74). Astell thus uses the idea of the convent to depict an ideal same-sex community that redeems the past to pave the road for the future. In this vision particular friendships between women become crucial. Such friendship itself becomes an “emblem” of what Astell calls “this blessed place”— “a blessed World … shining with so many stars of worship” (37). For some of the earliest women writers to publish their work in print, the convent thus served as a conceptual site of possibility: it enabled them to imagine enclosed friendships that offered alternatives to marriage and to envision separatist communities in which women friends could work together across time and space toward greater freedom. These writers thus harnessed the utopian potential for female authority that enclosed life had offered Catholic women and invested it in women’s friendships to imagine their own utopias.

Agonistic Friendships and Self-Critical Utopias The friendships that these convent-inspired women’s utopias depict not only resemble convents in their references to enclosure and separatist spiritual life but  also reproduce the utopian methods in Catholic women’s community. Namely, fictional utopias by Englishwomen engaged in self-­ conscious bricolage, drawing, like their religious counterparts, from a range of theological and political positions and so joining opposing ideas and perspectives on the world. However, while in the convent the merging of opposing ideals—anti-feminist alongside proto-feminist beliefs or different perspectives on the future—was grounded in community, early modern secular Englishwomen’s literary utopias, while preserving the importance of community, focused the joining of contraries far more within particular friendships. Friendships within the utopias of Philips, Lanyer, Cavendish, and Astell rehearse the meeting of opposites found in

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women’s religious communities, but by drawing attention to the precarity and potential antagonism within such friendships, these authors articulate utopias that are cautiously critical of their own aspirations. Many portrayals of women’s friendship in the early modern period contain undercurrents of tension, contradiction, and strife. Penelope Anderson has shown how writers like Philips and Lucy Hutchinson foreground the betrayals of humanist friendship in order to relate a tension within couverture—in which the wife is simultaneously obligated to both her husband and the state—and draw attention to the competing and shifting loyalties of Royalists during and after the English Civil War (1642–1651). Anderson shows how “friendship provides a vital, flexible, and apt model for citizenship at this historical moment because it incorporates the inevitability of conflict in its structure.”39 Nandini Das has also explored tensions within early modern women’s friendships as she argues that Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania depicts women beset by jealousy over men, which leads to mimesis between antagonistic female friends. This, Das contends, reflects Wroth’s relationship with her generic and familial models, especially her uncle Sir Philip Sidney.40 In multiple cases, then, women’s friendship was not simply a harmonious bond; it was an active site of debate, difference, and conflict. In the utopian works of Lanyer and Cavendish, the tensions and betrayals of women’s friendships represent competing political and philosophical positions. Examples of conflict among women friends occur in the poem at the end of Lanyer’s book, “The Description of Cooke-ham,” which juxtaposes the utopian possibility of social equality among women with the preservation of social hierarchy. The poem recalls Lanyer’s visit to an idyllic rural estate with her patron, the Countess of Cumberland, and the Countess’s daughter, Anne Clifford in 1609.41 Cookeham, the manor leased to the Countess of Cumberland’s brother, William Russell of Thornhaugh, where the Countess resided periodically until 1605, is portrayed as a lost paradise for devout, learned women since the poet spent time there with her patron but has now left. At the beginning of the poem, Cookeham is a site of creative inspiration, which enables the poet not exactly to become the social equal of the Countess but to establish her own power as a poet for her lady: “And where the muses gave their full consent,/I should have power the virtuous to content” (ll. 3–4). This sense of mutuality continues toward the end of the poem when the poet describes her parting from the Countess:

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To this fair tree, taking me by the hand, You did repeat the pleasures which had passed, Seeming to grieve they could no longer last.

Clifford’s taking of Lanyer’s hand conveys an understanding of social equality, as does the communication of shared pleasures. However, alongside this mutual love and respect, the poem retains a strong sense of the disparity between the women’s social stations. Following her descriptions of the idyllic estate, the poet laments: Unconstant Fortune thou art most too blame, Who casts us downe into so lowe a frame: Where our great friends we cannot dayly see, So great a difference is there in degree (ll. 103–6)

After Clifford has brought Lanyer to the tree, she does not stay but leaves her friend behind. Lanyer recounts how “with a chaste, yet loving kiss took leave,/ Of which sweet kiss I did it soon bereave,/Scorning a senseless creature should possess/So rare a favor, so great happiness.”42 This parting ruptures the utopian vision of parity between the women, as the poet is instead reminded of great social distance from her patron. Critics of “The Description of Cooke-ham” have differed over whether the poem is primarily an expression of class resentment or female solidarity.43 Women’s bonds here serve at once to offer up the possibility of erasing class difference and also to mark the real presence of class hierarchy. The friendship between the poet and her Countess then contains rather than resolves two competing notions of social class. Frictive friendship is also at the heart of Cavendish’s most overtly utopian work, The Blazing World, which juxtaposes Cavendish’s competing political and philosophical views. While critics have discussed friendship in relation to Cavendish’s closet dramas and in her epistolary fiction Sociable Letters (1664), the topic has been far less examined in The Blazing World, perhaps because the Empress and Duchess are often seen as refractions of Cavendish herself rather than as fully separate characters. However, when read through Cicero’s dictum that friends should be “two bodies one soul,” a well-known idea in the early modern period, the fusion of identities is not mutually exclusive with friendship. While the intimacy of the Empress and Duchess’s friendship recalls the enclosed structure of a convent, it also contains difference and rivalry and so calls into question the

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ideal of oneness that it promotes. Through its double capacity as a sign of unity and division, this friendship operates as a self-critical utopia and serves as a heuristic for Cavendish’s conflicting scientific and political ideas. Cavendish’s oeuvre bridges two competing notions of the natural world. On the one hand, she endorsed atomism, an idea derived from the Greeks and embraced by natural philosophers like Bacon and Thomas Hobbes who posited that the universe was composed of atoms and movement was possible only through the waring of these parts. In this view, all matter was seen as inert and inorganic, subject to molding and use by humans for their own ends. Early in her career, Cavendish, known for her interest in science and her visit to the Royal Society, subscribed to this way of understanding the universe; however, she later converted to a theory that understood matter differently, as a vital substance infused with the spirit of God. Such a perspective is referred to as vitalism, also known as animist materialism, a theory of nature that influenced other writers such as Andrew Marvell and John Milton. In this view, matter is corporeal, infinitely divisible, and self-moving. As Cavendish writes in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, the text that precedes The Blazing World, I conceive Nature to be an Infinite body, bulk or magnitude, which by its own self-motion is divided into infinite parts, not single or indivisable parts, but parts of one continued body…it is impossible to have single parts in Nature, that is parts which are individable in themselves, as atomes; and may subsist single, or by themselves, precised or separated from all other parts for although there are perfect and whole figures in Nature, yet are they nothing else but parts of Nature, which consist of a composition of other parts and their figures make them discernable from other parts or figures of Nature. (161)44

Because nature is ever-changing, constantly moving, and creating itself anew, contrary to experimental scientists, Cavendish argued that the natural world was impervious to scholarly dissection. Within her Observations, she produced a theory of ecology in which “sense and reason are the same in all creatures and parts of nature,” where “all creatures” includes humans, animals, vegetables, and minerals as living beings (128). Cavendish’s natural philosophy is apparent not just in this scientific treatise but also in her portrayal of the friendship between the Empress and the Duchess in The Blazing World as they become part of one whole. As Daniel Richards observes, Cavendish’s view of nature as possessing

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worlds within worlds is echoed in “the mise en abyme that takes place in the multiple (and possibly endless) division and regression of female subjectivity within the souls and created worlds of both the Duchess and the Empress.”45 Just as in Cavendish’s philosophy, nature’s parts, even as they possess individual, interior self-knowledge, share “one Infinite natural knowledge,” in which movement occurs through mutual perception and sympathy between parts (119). These friends, while they are separate beings, share desires, as they create imaginary worlds in response to each other and even inhabit the same body. The worlds that they collectively build further mirror Cavendish’s natural vitalism since they consist of “sensitive and rational self-moving Matter” (215); the Duchess promises her friend, “your Majesty’s mind is full of rational corporeal motions; and the rational motions of my mind shall assist you by the help of sensitive expressions, with the best Instructions they are able to give you” (216). However, at the same time that Cavendish’s utopia portrays women and their work as part of an organic sympathetic whole, the book nonetheless retains traces of her former atomistic views. This doubleness is true even in her Observations, which while it visualizes nature as one infinite whole also concedes that “there is an Inanimate part or degree of Matter, as well as Animate” (23), tempering Cavendish’s statement that all nature is animate. As Sheehan and Tillary observe, “From Cavendish’s earliest writings to her final books on natural philosophy, we see a strong adherence to atomism, a mechanistic concept; however, we also witness a complicated attempt to reconcile the vitalism of organicism with the stark implications of Enlightenment mechanism.”46 Cavendish does not seem to choose one view of the natural world over another but rather lets both sit in tandem and tension within her writing. In her fiction, Cavendish also displays this same ambivalence, and her vacillation between a vitalistic view of nature and an atomistic one plays out within the friendship between the Empress and the Duchess. While these friends are united, even on a bodily level, and are inspired by each other to create worlds, they also exhibit jealousy and rivalry. Indeed, even the impetus to create worlds is derived from a sense of competition when the Duchess declares, “my ambition is, that I would fain be as you are, that is an Empress of a world” (210–211). As both the Duchess and Empress each create their own worlds, these women create independent universes rather than inhabiting each other’s. The fictional worlds that the friends build also reflect a multiplicity of positions on matter. The duchess, in her

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competitive desire to imitate her friend, forms a world of her own invention: and this World was composed of sensitive and rational self-moving Matter; indeed, it was composed onely of the Rational, which is the subtilest and purest degree of Matter; for as the Sensitive did move and act both to the perceptions and consistency of the body, so this degree of Matter at the same point of time (for though the degrees are mixt, yet the several parts may move several ways at one time) did move to the Creation of the Imaginary World. (215)

On the one hand, this description emphasizes unity between parts: it is composed of matter that all moves at the same point in time to create this world. And yet, at the same time, Cavendish writes in parentheses that the types of matter are in fact mixed (both rational and sensitive). The parenthetical interruption of the phrase underscores the way in which it undercuts her meeting. Apparently, this world also consists of several parts that move in multiple ways, a point that evokes more the warring elements of atomism than Cavendish’s accounts of natural vitalism. Similarly, this world is at once “well order’d” and “full of variety.” The world that is the result of competitive mimesis between friends thus juxtaposes a vision of unity with one of difference and division. This friendship between women who are both united and at odds with each other, therefore, reflects a contradiction or doubleness within Cavendish’s theory of the natural world, as well as in her notion of what would make up an ideal world. Moreover, while the mutuality of this friendship between women mirrors Cavendish’s vitalistic notion of nature, the way in which these women harness the resources of the natural world also gestures to a more atomistic view. As Richards argues, “while Cavendish repudiated the dominance that experimental philosophers sought over nature, [in The Blazing World] it is the physical utilization of nature that eventually mobilizes the female subject to a position of complete power and dominion, revealing…an uncontested Baconian rise to power over nature.”47 Crucially, the Empress’s Baconian harnessing of nature arises from her cooperation with the Duchess. When her native country is invaded, the Empress follows the Duchess’s advice because she loves the Duchess “as her own soul” (233) and sends her hybrid men to wreak havoc on surrounding nations to “give them a proof of her Power, and check their Obstinacies by burning some of their smaller Towns” (240). The Worm-men under the Empress’s

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command use natural resources by laying fire-stones that burn towns when rain falls, forcing nearby kingdoms to submit to the Empress’s native country. When one nation resists, “a flowing Tide” causes “not onely a destruction of their Houses, but also a general barrenness over all their Countrey that year” (241). The Empress’s use of nature as a weapon against other humans, an act both inspired by and imitative of her friend the Duchess, counters Cavendish’s insistence elsewhere that matter moves sympathetically. Moreover, when these friends enter the Duke’s body during a visit to Nottinghamshire, forming a “Platonick Seraglio,” the Duchess grows jealous of her friend: “the Duke’s Soul being wise, honest, witty, complaisant and noble, afforded such delight and pleasure to the Empress’s Soul by his conversation, that these two souls became enamoured of each other; which the Duchess’s soul perceiving, grew jealous…” (223). The friendship that was so generative when the women were alone becomes a source of enmity when it tries to admit a third. The Duchess eventually recovers from this jealousy, “considering that no Adultery could be committed amongst Platonick Lovers” (223), but the traces of this envy nonetheless linger in the text. A memory of this jealousy between friends endures in the epilogue in which Cavendish addresses her readers: And if any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their minds, fancies or imaginations but if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own…let them have a care, not to prove unjust Usurpers, and rob me of mine” (251).

This epilogue celebrates the integration of future friends into the Duchess’s world but also jealously guards against infiltration. This sense of antagonism and divisiveness seems to endorse an atomistic rather than vitalistic view of the world. The friendship between the Empress and the Duchess not only reflects tensions with Cavendish’s theory of natural philosophy, it also overshadows her political ideals. Catherine Gallagher has argued that The Blazing World shows how absolutism provided a model of a singular, sovereign subjectivity for early modern women. Since women were excluded from state offices except that of the monarch, the easiest way for a woman to imagine herself as a political subject, Gallagher argues, was through

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absolutism: “a woman’s ambition can only take the absolute form.”48 In support of this argument Gallagher reads the Empress and the Duchess as refractions of Cavendish’s own identity. Understanding them as friends, however, might further bolster Cavendish’s investment in absolutism. Friendship, a bond in which self and other move from separateness to sameness, offers Cavendish a kind of case study for absolutism that contends with the multiplicity inherent within the notion of one ruler. In the aftermath of the English Civil War, this vision might indeed have seemed utopian.49 However, since this friendship includes rivalry, it also calls absolutism into question. Friendship thus becomes a site at which Cavendish questions her own theories. While this bond promises oneness, both materially and politically, it also foregrounds competition and division. Female friendship in Cavendish’s work, rather like the bricolage creations of her religious predecessors, serves as a site of multiple viewpoints. Rather than reconciling these different positions, Cavendish’s fictional friendships entertain available competing beliefs. In this way, they model a utopia that instead of promulgating one ideology embraces difference. Astell’s vision of a separatist female society similarly joins oppositional perspectives in order to articulate a utopia that accommodates contradiction.50 However, in place of Cavendish’s more scientific and political concerns, Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies uses female friendship to think through a complicated relationship between the material and the spiritual. Astell is often understood to have endorsed mind/body dualism. Critics generally posit her theory of mind as Cartesian, and, like René Descartes, she seems to have held that the distinction between mind and body can be known.51 However, her view of friendship complicates such a neat distinction between material and immaterial or spiritual being. On the one hand, she views friendship as participating in the divine, declaring, in a manner reminiscent of Cavendish’s vitalism, that her “happy Society” is as “but one Body, whose Soul is Love, animating and informing it” (87). Such friendship is “a Type and Antepast of Heavn’n” (94). With their “God-like temper,” “like him who made them,” Astell wrote, friends “diffuse their benign Influence” (38). On the other hand, her Proposal portrays friendship’s links to the material world: “we shall have opportunity of contracting the purest and noblest Friendship; a Blessing, the purchase of which were richly worth all the World besides! For she who possesses a worthy Person, has certainly obtain’d the richest Treasure! A Blessing that Monarch may envy, and she who enjoys is happier than she who fills a Throne! … for were the World better, there wou’d be more

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Friendship, and were there more Friendship we shou’d have a better World” (98). Astell thus saw friendship not as above and beyond the world but as tied to it.52 Though the opening of her Proposal seems to pitch the body against the soul by contrasting “a corruptible Body to an immortal Mind” (51), friendship serves as a site at which the worldly partakes in the divine. Astell’s theory of friendship joins Neoplatonist materialist philosophy with the more idealist approaches of her friend and correspondent John Norris (1657–1712), showing how elements of the divine might be positively embodied by women’s friendship.”53 This both divine and worldly female friendship serves in Astell’s Proposal as a vehicle of criticism that leads to self-improvement. Astell writes that friendship can contribute to a woman’s self-improvement because virtuous friends will be as devoted to “bettering the beloved Person” as they are to bettering themselves (37). She expresses a similar view in her poem “Enemies,” writing that enemies are paradoxically her “truest Friends” because “Kind Monitors you tell me of my faults.”54 Equally, in her Proposal, she writes that true friends “endeavour the bettering the beloved Person” (94). Friends correct each other’s faults and set each other on the right path to virtue and wisdom “by sweetness not severity; by friendly Admonitions, not magisterial Reproofs” (28). In this representation of friendship as a means of self-correction, Astell accords with what Epicurus in his garden retreat described as a core value of friendship55: friends within the community were expected to use “frank speech” (parrhêsia) to help one another imitate their chosen sage.56 Similarly, Astell’s Proposal suggests that friends have a duty “to watch over each other for Good, to advise, encourage and direct, and to observe the minutest fault in order to its amendment” (37). Astell expands on this point in her later work The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of The Church of England (1705), in which she further echoes Epicurus: “For as I plac’d Christian Friendship in giving frank Advice, so I now reckon the taking it among the Duties we owe to our Selves. Nor can we be more unkind to our own Souls, or guilty of a greater Folly, than by supposing we are too Great, or too Wise, or too Good to be Advis’d.”57 As Jaqueline Broad observes, in this view, “friendships can permit women to reflect critically on their ‘moral starting points.’”58 The friend thus serves as a kind of internal critic, pointing women in the right direction and encouraging improvement that will eventually create a better world. It makes sense that a bond capable of improving its participants would be both worldly and spiritual. Astell’s insertion of such a vision of friendship into her proposal suggests an

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openness to reflection on and reconsideration of her own ethical views. Indeed, one might imagine that Astell had such a relationship in her own network of female friends, who included Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who would later liken the harem to a utopia in her Turkish Embassy Letters. Friendship in the utopias of Lanyer, Cavendish, and Astell thus serves as a site of contradiction and critique.59 The friends in each of these works support each other but also engage in difference, rivalry, and dissent. In this, they retain a distinct but still recognizable element of the bricolage process that convents used to form their visions of the future. Just as convents and other similar religious communities included risky mergers of the political and the religious as well as differing attitudes to women’s authority, secular women writers crafted utopian visions founded on the uneasy entanglements of female friendship. The difference and rivalry within these friendships challenge essentialist assumptions about women’s supposedly peaceable natures. Instead, they show that agonism can be included within women’s utopian visions. Moreover, the diversity of these friendships also models other types of diversity of thought, from competing positions on social class to different notions of the natural world and the relationship between body and soul. In this way, women utopian writers, through the vehicle of friendship, performed their own mode of bricolage, taking values from the past and joining them to create more nuanced theological, political, and scientific positions than were otherwise available to them. By preserving the sense of multiplicity and contradiction that was already apparent in the writings of their religious forebears, these authors forged utopias that, rather than claiming perfection, are open to the critiquing their own visions. Lanyer was aware of the illusion inherent in her world of social harmony; Cavendish questioned her vitalism and vision of absolutism; Astell troubled her own dualist notion of the world by portraying friendships that are at once earthly and divine. The utopias that grew out of such friendships gain strength from this awareness of their own conceptual cracks. Observing such cracks opened up new possibilities and new desires.

Utopian Impossibility and Utopian Desire If the women’s critical utopias, produced through processes that evoke the bricolage of convents, generated more flexible models of community, they also demonstrated an awareness of the precarity of their own visions. Just

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as communities like the nuns of Syon Abbey foresaw the failure of their aspirations for political authority, secular utopian women writers also contemplated the difficulties of achieving the ideal societies they depicted. However, this contemplation of impossibility does not negate the hope that such visions offer. The fact that these women’s utopias are not perfect or “whole” in the way that we might imagine utopia to be is not a flaw. Rather, lack catalyzes future desires. Competition and agonism between female friends strengthen their desire for better worlds and also draw them to each other. In this way, the desires that emerge from within these complex friendships are one of the lasting signatures of these early feminist utopias. Desire is ever-present in utopia; indeed, Levitas defines utopia as the desire for a better existence. However, what seems distinctive in the feminist utopias that this chapter has examined is the way in which the desire of women for each other—physical, intellectual, and spiritual— dovetails with their desire for better worlds. The desire for more is instigated by the very moments when utopias run up against limitations. Such limits are everywhere apparent in early women’s utopian writing. Lanyer’s vision in her “Description of Cooke-­ ham,” in fact, depends for its emotive appeal on the fact that the pleasures that had once been had between the women are no longer available: Vouchsafe to think upon those pleasures past, As fleeting wordly Joyes that could not last: Or as dimme shadowes of celestiall pleasure. (ll.11–15)

The Countess’s absence and the concurrent loss of “pleasures past” increase the poet’s desire for her friend. As Furey writes, “the live circuitry of desire links not only characters within the poem but also the author and the reader.”60 Lanyer’s poem, in its description of a lost place, a lost time, and a lost friend, not only expresses the desires of its narrator but also generates desire in its readers. As Lanyer describes a world that is lost, we, outside the poem, also desire to see such a world. As Furey writes, “utopia is the act of narrating what we seek rather than the model of desire fulfilled.”61 Desire needs to be forestalled and utopias need to fail in order to prompt readers to keep seeking something different beyond the present. This sense of women’s utopian community as a fleeting worldly joy that generates new desires in narrators and readers is further evident in Astell’s acknowledgment of the imperfection of her own plan. She wrote, “My earnest desire is, that you Ladies, would be as perfect and happy as ‘tis

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possible to be in this imperfect state” (112). Here, she recognizes, just as Ward did, that nothing on earth can attain the perfection of heaven. No worldly utopia can truly mirror the heavenly. Astell even acknowledges the possibility that her proposal might well fail: “For imperfect as it is, it seems so desirable, that she who drew the Scheme is full of hopes, it will not want kind hands to perform and compleat it. But if it miss of that, it is but a few hours thrown away” (112). In both these recognitions of likely failure, Astell expressed her own desires. Imperfection and impossibility, therefore, do not exist as problems in her work; rather, they serve as springboards for longing and desire that in themselves constitute her proposal’s utopianism. The Convent of Pleasure offers a more extended contemplation of the failure of the utopian ideals offered by women’s friendship and the consequent desire that emerges.62 The beginning of the play enacts the radical possibility not simply of women’s separatist community with Lady Happy’s foundation of her convent dedicated to female pleasure but also of erotic same-sex relationships between women friends. This suggestion is raised when a princess joins the convent and forms an intimate friendship with Lady Happy. The radical visibility of this bond between two women is clarified by Valerie Traub’s explication of the trope of amor impossibilis in portrayals of early modern female same-sex desire. Unlike love between men, love between women, Traub notes, was not explicitly outlawed in the early modern period; the English jurist Edward Coke defined buggery as a sin committed “by mankind with mankind or with brute beast or by womankind with brute beast” (1644), thereby failing to acknowledge the possibility of erotic female relationships. Thus, sexual relations between women remained both invisible and impossible within early modern law. This perception, as Traub has explored, filtered down into English literary works.63 Such impossibility is present in Cavendish’s work too since the princess ultimately turns out to be a prince whose wedding to Lady Happy at the end of the play forecloses both the promise of same-sex love and that of female community, since her convent closes upon her marriage. However, in Cavendish’s work, the love between the princess and Lady Happy does not immediately appear impossible. In fact, there is a constant play in this closet drama between the viability and impossibility of same-­ sex love. The way in which the play considers love between women friends as a real possibility is especially striking when compared to works such as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which Olivia falls in love with Viola, who is dressed as Cesario. Here, in a reversed scenario, love between women is

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part of a masquerade to which the audience is privy. Moreover, Cesario, does not, unlike the princess, reciprocate Olivia’s advances. Love between women is, therefore, forestalled from the beginning. Cavendish, on the other hand, does not reveal that the princess is a prince until the end of the play. Her readers are thus in the same position of ignorance as Happy herself and therefore experience the love between two women as real as long as the prince’s identity remains hidden. This illusion is enforced by the fact that the list of characters is at the end of this closet drama instead of at the beginning, so readers would not have seen the role of “the Prince” before reading the end of the play. Given Cavendish’s familiarity with Continental female actors during the Interregnum, Horacio Sierra also posits that although the play was never actually performed, Cavendish may even have imagined a female actor playing the role of “the Prince.”64 In one of her “Sociable Letters” Cavendish discusses “the Best Female Actor that ever I saw; and for Acting a Man’s Part, she did it so Naturally as if she had been of that Sex” (206). Cavendish may, therefore, have wanted her audience to see the princess from the same perspective as Lady Happy and so to believe fully in the love between women. Even as Cavendish presented the love between Lady Happy and the princess as real, she also repeatedly reminded readers of the impossibility of such a love. Speaking of her new beloved, Lady Happy declares, “More innocent Lovers never can there be, Then my most Princely Lover, that’s a She” (229). Here, Lady Happy at once confidently announces her delight in her lover but also nods to the impossibility of this match: the first line when read by itself retains the meaning of “never can be” while the pairing of Princely and She in the following lines points to the contradiction inherent within Lady Happy’s proclamation. The princess also subtly points to an apparent contradiction and so to the impossibility of women’s same-sex love: “Nor never Convent did such pleasures give,/ Where Lovers with their Mistress may live.” The double negative “Nor never” at the beginning of this sentence seems to put in doubt the promise that follows: that convents were places where (female) lovers live with their mistresses. Speaking in a soliloquy, Lady Happy subsequently asks, “But why may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?” and answers her own question with a vigorous negative: “No, no, Nature is Nature, and still will be/ The same she was from All Eternity” (226). And yet, even within this denial that Nature will allow Lady Happy her amorous desire, this line contains doublings that bely its negation of same-sex joinings. The repetition of “no” and the statement that “Nature

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is Nature” followed by the two paraphrases of the point that nature is eternal create a series of matching pairs that verbally display and celebrate a meeting of likes. Within a statement that desire between women is taboo, therefore, lies the enactment of such a possibility. This intimation that what has been deemed impossible may, at least in the space of the drama, become possible emerges more overtly when the two women act in a play within the play. Lady Happy dresses as a shepherdess and the prince as a shepherd, and before the play starts, they speak to each other as lovers, their change in garb seeming to permit a change in affect. Lady Happy speaks first in questions, which express her hesitation about her taboo love. She asks first, “Can Lovers love too much?…Can any love be more vertuous, innocent and harmless than ours?” (229) When the princess/shepherd replies, “Then let us please our selves, as harmless Lovers use to do,” Lady Happy follows up, “How can harmless Lovers please themselves?” The princess explains, “Why very well, as, to discourse, imbrace and kiss, so mingle souls together” (229). Lady Happy then objects, “But innocent Lovers do not use to kiss” (229). But the princess reassures her, “Not any act more frequent amongst us Women-­ kind; nay it were a sin in friendship, should we not kiss: then let us not prove our selves Reprobates” (229). These tentative questions thus lead to the princess’s reversal of Lady Happy’s earlier concern that love between women is unnatural. Instead, by claiming their relationship as one of friendship, she naturalizes the idea that they might kiss. This suggestion materializes into action with the stage instruction “They imbrace and kiss, and hold each other in their Arms.” Female friendship thus becomes a site at which the impossible becomes possible: a utopia. Like utopia, however, this site of deviation from the status quo is precarious, and this love between women does not last. Just after the crowning of Lady Happy and the princess as King and Queen of the Shepherds in their dramatic performance, in an ending marked “Written by my Lord the Duke,” the princess is revealed as a prince who has come to win Lady Happy’s hand. The vision of two women in love is hence shattered and replaced by heterosexual union. The possibility of women’s same-sex coupling is, thereby, suppressed by the arrival of a male narrator. The play ends with the marriage of a silent Lady Happy and the dissolution of her convent. The transience of women’s amorous joining is emphasized by the stage direction in the Duke’s part: the scene vanishes. Lady Happy speaks only four short lines after this moment, and when Mimick has a joking question about the convent, that it be divided into two parts, “one for

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Fools, and th’ other for Married Men, as mad Men,” he addresses it not to her but to the prince. The prince answers that he will rather divide it into sections for virgins and widows, thereby excluding his wife from the institution she founded. Mimick makes this exclusion into a joke by declaring that it would be better to give the convent to “old decrepit and bed-­ rid Matrons” (246) and so to call it the Convent of Charity since it cannot be a Convent of Chastity. The radical space of women’s pleasure thus ends as a joke. When the prince ends this exchange by pronouncing, “Noble Friends, let us feast before we part,” the play abandons intimate friendship between women and gestures instead toward a more public notion of friendship that evokes classical models. This vanishing of women’s utopian aspirations is also apparent in Cavendish’s other closet drama about separatist female community, The Female Academy. In this play, the Matron informs a group of men whose trumpet-playing has made it impossible for the ladies to discourse throughout the play: “Gentlemen pray give me leave to inform you, for I perceive you are in great Error of mistake, for these Ladies have not vowed Virginity, nor are they incloystred; for an Academy is not a Cloyster, but a School, wherein are taught how to be good Wives when they are married.”65 This shift from the play’s portrayal of society in which women embrace learning to the presentation of a school through which women learn to be good wives conveys Cavendish’s awareness of the challenges facing any vision in which women friends and communities claim desires that are independent from men. The utopianism of The Convent of Pleasure, however, resides in this vanishing and the desires that are left latent within the text. By showing how separatist communities and individual women’s friendships may be swallowed up by the society outside, Cavendish critiqued the prevailing patriarchal systems of her day. But her dramas allow us to linger on a glimpse of something else, an imaginative engagement that the form of drama itself underscores. Closet drama, which was necessitated by the closing of theaters, allowed Cavendish to be more experimental in her playwriting, creating what Sierra calls “an unspecified state of possibilities for her female characters.”66 In a closet drama, acts are hypothetically imagined within the readers’ minds rather than fully staged, which perhaps allowed women writers to stage more subversive plots. Even though the play eventually forecloses women’s same-sex love, by asking readers to stage such intimacy in their minds, it still offers possibilities for these

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transgressive forms of desire. Indeed, the eventual negation of such possibility may have produced new desires in its readers. The dramatization of the limits of utopian imagination, therefore, did not result in the total failure of such visions. Rather, these fictions present women’s utopian friendships and communities as generative sites of desire. Because such works foreground the eroticized longings of women like Lanyer’s narrator for the Duchess of Cumberland and the desire expressed between Lady Happy and the princess as well as the erotically charged agonistic friendship of the Empress and the Duchess in the Blazing World, they frame women’s unfulfilled desires as catalysts for forming better worlds. Friendships in these utopian texts thus foreground both the negation of women’s dreams and the ways in which such a thwarting can in fact cause desire to reemerge all the more strongly. These works thus frame feminist utopia not as an already achieved ideal but as a process of feeling and responding to the ever-evolving desires of women.

Conclusion In tracing the movement of utopian tropes from the convent to Protestant women’s fictional utopias, I am not arguing for a direct line of influence. Cavendish, although her joining of opposing positions resembles that of the nuns of Syon, would not have seen the Arundel manuscript’s petition; Mary Ward’s letters to her followers, which were only published in the twentieth century, could not have directly influenced Philips’s poems; Lanyer’s vision of separatist Protestant female community predates the establishment of the Anglican convent at Little Gidding. The circumstances of medieval and early modern women’s lives, particularly given the enclosure of nuns, meant that women from different spheres did not frequently encounter each other (though this is not to say that laywomen did not enter the convent and that nuns did not leave). Women’s writings were less often published and circulated, and so there was less opportunity for women to draw on each other’s work as sources. In order to reconstruct a women’s intellectual tradition, then, we need different ways to think about influence from those that patriarchy has taught us. Approaching women’s cultural production in a more rhizomatic rather than linear genealogical way elucidates how shared awareness of the convent as a space of utopian possibility and of mutual desire between women enabled secular women writers to produce utopian visions that echoed the aspirations of their religious counterparts.

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Reading early women’s utopian writing with an eye to how its depictions of friendship echo the utopias imagined in convent life not only shows that these writers were influenced by the cloister when they wrote about their visions of female separatist communities but also illuminates distinctive aspects of their utopianism that might not otherwise be visible. Both real-world women’s spiritual communities and imagined separatist women’s communities had to contend with the challenge of depicting something that did not and indeed could not fully exist in the present-day world: women’s interdependent agency and collective fulfillment. Hence, like nuns within cloisters, laywomen found themselves rupturing and refashioning pre-existing masculinist modes of thought—friendship and male-dominated discourses of class, government, and science. Through this bricolage, nuns and later women writers took a heritage that had rejected them and used it to forge visions of feminist futures. Like religious women seeking to shape the future, secular women writers had to contend with the fact that they were a largely disempowered minority; they existed within an ecosystem of male writers and thinkers who had little interest in including them. Their visions of ideal women’s communities of learning, pleasure, and same-sex romantic love were, therefore, unlikely and even definitionally unable to be realized. By foregrounding this impossibility, however, these writers, like religious women who anticipated the failure of their own projections, engaged in a critique of the systems that excluded them. By recognizing their likely failure, they enhanced the utopian potential of their work. Rather than portraying already perfect homogenous communities, authors like Lanyer, Cavendish, and Astell, by reproducing the bricolage method of the convent within female friendships, mirrored the contradictions and challenges that real-­ world women’s communities faced. They thus crafted critical utopias that were aware of their own limitations. Rather than renouncing all possibility, however, these writers articulate a radical form of hope, as the connection between them looks forward to the possibility of transtemporal women’s intellectual community and validates women’s desires. Women’s spiritual communities left a clear yet unacknowledged mark on utopian writings by women. This book’s final chapter has examined only the earliest instantiations of this legacy. In the eighteenth century, Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall enacted “an imaginative fulfillment of Mary Astell’s first book.”67 The sealed off, self-reproducing community of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland recalls the structure and chastity of a convent. This work’s support of eugenics is reminiscent of Ward’s

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doubling of radical feminism with a colonialist agenda. Ursula Le Guin’s exploration of utopian ambiguity in The Dispossessed (1974), a book that juxtaposes two planets, recalls the joining of opposites enabled by the bricolage nature of early women’s utopias and produces a utopia that is similarly critical of its own operations. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower argues for the positive influence of Christian fundamentalism as a non-­dogmatic belief system of world making, an example of the presence of religion within present-day utopias.68 These feminist utopian works contain memories of the first communities in Europe in which women lived independently and imagined more empowered lives for themselves. Toni Morrison’s novel Paradise more overtly remembers women’s collective spiritual life as it depicts a former convent that becomes a safe haven for women. Unlike the homogeneity of the neighboring African American planned utopia of Ruby, the convent comprises women from diverse personal, class, sexual, and racial backgrounds. Each of the women puts herself in the place of the others in order to think and feel differently. By acknowledging their own and the others’ painful experiences, these women are collectively able to move beyond them. They inhabit a place that puts the traumas of the past, including the nuns’ racist project, to new use. The building itself, bearing traces of the convent’s eventful history and its numerous inhabitants and visitors, serves as a metaphor for the women’s open, inclusive, hybrid, and dynamic community.69 As the women share their traumas, they hear, enter, and relive the others’ experiences, creating a “multivocal, dialogic space” in which different, equally valid histories merge. It is precisely in “its ability to accommodate differences” that the true freedom of the convent lies.70 The convent then becomes a truer utopia than the town of Ruby, “[a] backward no place ruled by men whose power to control was out of control.”71 Morrison’s reintegration of plurality into the convent community and her reuse of a past that has to be rejected are situated within the particular race politics of the twentieth-century United States, but her presentation of a utopia that is partial and process-based as opposed to the closed and finished utopia that More had envisioned echoes the medieval and early modern tradition of women’s utopianism that this book has identified. Morrison’s characters, like religious women of earlier periods, sought independence within a system that aimed to deny them power, and they achieved this through the support of female community and friends. Hence, this

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twentieth-­century novel retains a mode of utopia that relied on a bricolage of the past and recognition of potential failure, features that women from many centuries before had anticipated.

Notes 1. Christine de Pizan, “Le Dit de Poissy” in Œuvres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, vol. 2, ed. Maurice Roy (Paris, 1886), 159–222. See also C. C. Willard, selected and edited, “from the Tale of Poissy” The Writings of Christine de Pizan, trans. B. K. Altmann (New York: Persea, 1994), 64–5. This poem is joined with a débat amor, a pairing that Barbara Altman argues underscores parallels within the codes that regulate the social orders of love and religion, with the convent proving to more peaceful and productive than the fraught situation of the lovers in the debate. Barbara Altman, “Diversity and Coherence in Christine de Pizan’s Dit de Poissy,” French Forum 12.3 (1987): 261–71. “Le Dit de Poissy,” 160. Translations are my own. 2. The latest edition of the City of Ladies is La città delle dame, ed. Earl Jeffrey Richards and trans. Patrizia Caraffi (Milan: Luni Editrice, 2001). This contains a facing-page Italian translation of the Middle French. For an English translation, see The Book of the City of Ladies, rev. ed., trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1998). Both editions are based on British Library, Harley 4431. There is also an earlier edition of the original text in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames: A Critical Edition, ed. Maureen Cheney Curnow, PhD. Diss. (Vanderbilt University, 1975), which is based on the manuscript copy presented in 1407–1408 by Christine to Duke Jean de Berry (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, Fonds Français 607). Bnf FR. 607 and Harley 4431 are virtually identical aside from orthography. See Earl Jeffrey Richards, “Editing the Livre de la Cité des dames: New Insights, Problems and Challenges,” in Au Champ des scriptures: III Colloque international sur Christine de Pizan, ed. Eric Hicks, Diego Gonzalez, and Philippe Simon (Paris: Champion, 2000), 789–816. 3. On Boccaccio’s portrayal of women, see, Constance Jordan, “Boccaccio’s In-famous Women: Gender and Civic Virtue in the De mulieribus claris,” in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). 4. Important French manuscripts of Christine’s work including MSS Harley 219, Royal 19B XVIII and Royal EV show signs of having been copied for English owners. Harley 4431, the manuscript of her works that Christine had created for the queen, for instance, was taken to England by John, duke of Bedford for his French wife Jacquetta of Luxembourg. Cristina Malcolmson has recently argued that manuscript copies of the Cité were available to educated English women in the sixteenth and seventeenth

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centuries. Cristina Malcolmson, “Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies in Early Modern England,” in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, ed. Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 15–35. On the circulation of Christine’s writing in England during her life and in the decades after her death see P.G.C. Campbell, “Christine de Pisan en Angleterre,” Revue de Literature Comparee 5 (1925): 659–70; Carol Meale “Patrons, Buyers and Owners: Book Production and Social Status” in Books Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed.  Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 201–38; Stephanie Downes, “A ‘Frenche booke called the Pistill of Othea’: Christine de Pizan’s French in England” in Language and Culture in medieval Britain: the French of England c. 1100–1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 2009), 457–68; James C. Laidlaw, “Christine de Pizan, the Earl of Salisbury and Henry IV,” French Studies 36 (1982): 129–43. 5. Only five copies of the English Cyte remain intact, plus a fragment in the Bagford Ballad collection. These copies are held at the British Library; Kings College, Cambridge University; Longleat House, Warminster England; Corpus Christi College, Oxford University; and the Folger Shakespeare Library. This small number is misleading, however, since there were 600 copies or more per edition by 1521. A full edition of Anslay’s translation exists in: The Boke of the Citye of Ladyes by Christine de Pizan, ed. Hope Johnston (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014). Little is known about Anslay’s background, aside from the fact that he was probably the son of William Robert Annesley and Mabel Anne English and born near Nottingham. He first appears in Tudor records among attendants at Henry VII’s funeral on May 11, 1509 listed among a group of attendants assigned to Catherine of Aragon’s chamber (Johnston, xxxix–xliii). I would like to thank Dr. Johnston for generously sending me the microfilm of Christine’s text while I was working on my dissertation. For a discussion of Anslay’s translation in its contemporary context, see Mary Beth Long, “A Medieval French Book in an Early Modern English World: Christine de Pisan’s Livre de la Cite des Dames and Women Readers in the Age of Print,” Literature Compass 9 (2010): 521–37. 6. Due to John Fastolf’s connections with translators Scrope and Worcester, who translated l’Epistre d’othea and le Livre des Faits d’Armes, it has been argued that he was behind the transformation of Christine into a nun in these editions. See P.G.C. Campbell, “Christine de Pisan en Angleterre,” Revue de littérature comparée 5 (1925): 669. 7. Jennifer Summit has examined how the translation of The City of Ladies erased Christine’s authorship in Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Summit’s view is seconded by Stephanie Downes, “Fashioning Christine de Pizan in Tudor Defences of Women,” Parergon 23. 1, (2006):

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71–92; and Ferguson in Dido’s Daughters, 222–23. Anne E.  Coldiron, however, writes that “in any languages, the City of Ladies directly challenges aspects of patriarchy and their literary and social consequences.” English Printing Verse Translation and the Battle of the Sexes (London: Routledge, 2009), 36. On Christine’s identity in later English versions of her books, see John Rooks, “Boke of the Cyte of Ladyes and Its SixteenthCentury Readership,” in The Reception of Christine de Pizan from the Fifteenth through Nineteenth Century: Visitors to the City, ed. Glenda McCleod (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1991), 101–26. See also Diane Bornstein, “Anti–feminism in Thomas Hoccleve’s Translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au Dieu d’amour,” English Language Notes 19 (1981): 7–14; Cynthia J.  Brown, “The Reconstruction of an Author in Print: Christine de Pizan in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. Marilyn Desmond, Medieval Cultures 14 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Jane Chance, “Christine de Pizan as Literary Mother: Women’s Authority and Subjectivity in ‘The Floure and the Leafe’ and ‘The Assembly of Ladies,’” in The City of Scholars: New Approaches to Christine de Pizan, ed. Margarete Zimmermann and Dina de Rentiis (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994), 245–59 and “Gender Subversion and Linguistic Castration in Fifteenth-­century English Translations of Christine de Pizan,” in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Walecka Roberts (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998), 161–94; and Dhira Mahoney, “Middle English Regenderings of Christine de Pizan,” in The Medieval Opus: Imitation, Rewriting and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. Douglas Kelly (Amsterdam: Editions Rodolphi, 1995), 405–27. 8. See Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) and “A Lost Tapestry: Margaret of Austria’s Cité des Dames,” in Dulac and Ribemont, Une Femme, 449–67. A reference to the castle of Ladiez appears in an account of royal festivities held at Kenilworth Castle during the reign of Elizabeth I in 1575, as one of the books belonging to the guest Captain Cox Johnston, xliii. 9. Malcolmson, “Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies,” 15–35. 10. Moylan, Demand the Impossible, 10. My use of “critical utopia” to describe a utopia that is critical of itself also draws on Jameson’s claim that utopian literature performs a “critical negativity” in Archaeologies, 211. For a critique of Moylan’s concept of the critical utopia, see Levitas, Concept of Utopia, 197–200. 11. Gary Saul Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 164–5.

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12. Alexandra Verini, “Utopian Friendships in Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 60.3 (Summer 2020): 441–61. 13. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 155–6. 14. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinatione, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library 154 (London: William Heinemann, 1923), 133. 15. Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship, ed. Marsha L.  Dutton, trans. Lawrence C. Braceland (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2010). 16. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 138. 17. On the subject of women’s friendships across difference, see my article, Alexandra Verini, “Models of Medieval Female Friendship in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies and The Book of Margery Kempe,” Feminist Studies 42.2 (2016): 365–91. 18. Linda Woodbridge suggests that in male-authored Renaissance texts female friendships are characterized by a social dependency and domesticity absent from parallel depictions of male friendships. Women and the English Renaissance (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 240–241. 19. For a consideration of Zelmane and Philoclea’s relationship that focuses on what it might suggest about real-world women’s relationships, see Richard A. Levin, “What? How? Female–Female Desire in Sidney’s ‘New Arcadia,’” Criticism 39.4 (1997): 463–79, 464. Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron provides another example of this phenomenon in French. See, for instance, Mary I. Baker, “Friendship Revisited: Heptaméron Tales 10, 21, 15, and 70,” Romance Quarterly 48.1 (2001): 3–14. 20. Dorothy Stephens notes the fleetingness of women’s bonds in early modern romance when she writes, “The Faerie Queene does not allow many such meetings between women to happen within its borders.” Dorothy Stephens, “Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 192. See Valerie Traub, “Setting the Stage Behind the Seen,” The Queerest Art: essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater, ed. Alisa Solomon and Franji Minwalla (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 55–105. The foreclosure of these women’s friendships reflects what, as Tracy Sedinger argues, is the book’s anxiety that the “the libidinal investments of ‘true loue and faithfull friendship’” might “lead to discordant erotic and/ or aggressive relations which undo the virtuous concord Book 4 seeks to promote.” Tracey Sedinger, “Women’s Friendship and the Refusal of Lesbian Desire in The Faerie Queene,” Criticism 42. 1 (2000): 91–113.

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21. For recent scholarship on early modern women’s friendship, see Penelope Anderson, “The Absent Female Friend: Recent Studies in Early Modern Women’s Friendship,” Literature Compass 7.4 (March 2010): 243–53; Friendship’s Shadows: Women’s Friendship and the Politics of Betrayal in England, 1640–1705 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Allison Johnson, “‘Virtue’s Friends’: The Politics of Friendship in Early Modern English Women’s Writing,” PhD diss. (University of Miami, 2010). 22. Susannah B.  Mintz, “Katherine Philips and the Space of Women’s Friendship,” Restoration 22.2 (1998), 62–78, 62. 23. Philips’s poems appear in many editions. The most comprehensive print edition is Katherine Philips, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, ed. Patrick Thomas, G.  Greer, and R.  Little, 3 vols (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1990–3). 24. An edition of this work is found in The Poems of Aemelia Lanyer, ed. Susan Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Citations will be given by line number within the text. 25. Scholars such as Barbara Lewalski, Lynette McGrath, and Janel Mueller have discussed the importance of female association in Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. See Barbara K.  Lewalski, Writing Women in Jacobean England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 213–41; Lynette McGrath, “‘Let Us Have Our Libertie Againe’: Aemilia Lanier’s Seventeenth-Century Feminist Voice,” Women’s Studies 20 (1992): 331–48; Janel Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,’” in Feminist Measures: Soundings in Poetry and Theory, ed. Lynn Keller and Cristanne Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 208–36. 26. See Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics” for a discussion of radical Protestantism in Lanyer’s poetry. For feminist readings of this poem, see Barbara Lewalski, “Seizing Discourses and Reinventing Tropes,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 49–59. 27. Michael Morgan Holmes, “The Love of Other Women: Rich Chains and Sweet Kisses,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 167–90. 28. See Hilda Smith, “Claims to Orthodoxy: How Far Can We Trust Margaret Cavendish’s Autobiography,” God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish, ed. Brandie R.  Siegfried and Lisa T.  Sarasohn (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 15–25, 16. 29. Julie Crawford, “Convents and Pleasures; Margaret Cavendish and the Drama of Property,” Renaissance Drama 32 (2003): 177–223, 183.

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30. Lay, Beyond the Convent 122. Hallet, the Senses in Religious Communities. Jean Pierre Vander Motten and Katrien Daemen-de Gelder find a reference to the Duchess of Newcastle in the annals of the English Carmelite convent in Antwerp. They also surmise that the costume of Sister Mary Cotton, described in the annals as “like a Nimph,” may have been designed for a performance of Cavendish’s play The Convent of Pleasure, in which a group of water nymphs appear (“Margaret Cavendish, the Antwerp Carmel and The Convent of Pleasure,” Archiv für das Studium der Neuren Sprachen und Literaturen 251.1 [2014]: 134–45). 31. Hallet, Senses, 13. 32. Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press 2004), letter 60, 113. Convents also appear in Cavendish’s “The She-Anchoret,” a prose tale in Natures Pictures (287–357). 33. For more on the role of the convent as a site of intellectual inquiry, see Katherine R.  Kellett, “Performance, Performativity, and Identity in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” SEL 48.2 (2008): 419–42. 34. All quotations of The Blazing World are from Paper Bodies: a Margaret Cavendish Reader, ed. Sylvia Bowerbank and Sara Mendelson (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press 2000). There is a link between the Convent of Pleasure and The Blazing World in the musical entertainment of the birdmen and fishmen towards the end of the text and the masque of Neptune and sea-nymphs performed near the end of The Convent of Pleasure, see Paper Bodies, 125–8. 35. Verini, “Women’s Friendship and Utopia.” 36. As Laurie Shannon notes, early modern friendship, drawing on classical models, called the friend “another self” and two friends “one soul in two bodies.” Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3. 37. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest, ed. Patricia Springborg (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2002). Page numbers will be cited from this edition parenthetically within the text. 38. There were other similar proposals at the time: for instance, Juan Luis Vives of Valencia, De Institutione Christianae Feminae (1523) translated as Instruction of a Christian Maid, and Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (1673). Astell’s plan is different from these, however, in its recourse to the convent as a model structure. 39. Anderson, Friendship’s Shadows, 2.

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40. Nandini Das, “‘Dancing in a Net’: Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 (2011), 163–93. See also Sheila T. Cavanagh, “‘My foule, faulce brest’: Friendship and Betrayal in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania,” in Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, ed. Daniel T.  Lochman, Maritere López, and Lorna Hutson (London: Routledge, 2010), 149–64, which argues that friendship—usually based on similitude—is a crucial, but unpredictable, affective bond for Wroth’s characters. 41. For an analysis of the bond between these women, see Holmes, “The Love of Other Women.” 42. Jonathan Goldberg cites the kissing scene as one of many instances in Lanyer’s poetry in which “just as male friendships in the period often cross over into a terrain that involves sexual relations, such, too, must have been the case among women.” Johnathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (California: Stanford University Press, 1977), 37. 43. Lewalski argues that the poem depicts an ideal landscape in which hierarchies of wealth and social position are momentarily displaced by “natural associations dictated solely by virtue and pleasure” (239). While some later interpreters have followed Lewalski in emphasizing the poem’s depiction of gender solidarity over class affiliations, others have argued that Cookeham’s portrayal of class antagonism undermines this idyllic vision. While Holmes argues that “Lanyer presents homoerotic affection as a way for women to overcome the ravages of men’s proprietary claims and as a positive ground for real-world communities” (Utopian Negotiation 167), Goldberg claims that “a contest between women is necessary to produce the category of good women, a contest . . . that, in its very vehemence, may also be sexually charged” (Desiring Women 26–27). 44. Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, ed. Eileen O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pages will be cited parenthetically within the text. On Cavendish’s natural philosophy, see Eve Keller, “Producing Petty Gods: Margaret Cavendish’s Critique of Experimental Science,” ELH 64.2 (Summer 1997): 447–71; John Rogers, “Margaret Cavendish and the Gendering of the Vitalist Utopia,” in The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 177–211; Lisa Sarasohn, “A Science Turned Upside Down, Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish,” Huntington Library Quarterly 4.4 (Fall 1994): 289–307. On The Blazing World’s reflection of Cavendish’s natural philosophy based on early modern theories of female irregularity, see Angus Fletcher, “The Irregular Aesthetic of The Blazing-World,” SEL Studies in English

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Literature 1500–1900 47.1 (Winter 2007): 123–41. Catherine Gallagher and Rachel Trubowitz have written about female subjectivity in The Blazing World and have argued that like nature, it is open to infinite alteration. Catherine Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute: The Politics of the Female Subject in Seventeenth-Century England,” Genders 1.1 (Spring 1988): Rachel Trubowitz, “The Reenchantment of Utopia and the Female Monarchical Self: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 11.2 (Autumn 1992): 229–45. 45. Daniel Richard, Spectacle, Sex, and Property in Eighteenth Century Literature and Culture (New York: AMS, 2015), 83. 46. Richard Johnson Sheehan and Denise Tillery, “Margaret Cavendish, Natural Philosopher: Negotiating between Metaphors of the Old and New Sciences,” in Eighteenth-Century Women: Studies in Their Lives, Work, and Culture, ed. Linda Troost (New York: AMS Press, 2001), 1–18, 11. 47. Richards, Spectacle, 84. 48. Gallagher, “Embracing the Absolute,” 27. 49. Holmesland has also linked Cavendish’s literary choices to her situation within post-Civil War England, writing that she avoids “one-sidedness, searching for more comprehensive answers” (Negotiating Utopia, 1). He has also written that Cavendish’s realism competes with her idealism and that she engages in “competing and contradictory ways of understanding the problems of status, honor, power, love and self-fashioning” (Negotiating Utopia, 1). 50. Alessa Johns has also made the case for considering Astell’s work as a feminist utopia: “Mary Astell’s ‘Excited Needles’: Theorizing Feminist Utopia in Seventeenth-Century England,” Utopian Studies 7.1 (1996): 60–74. 51. Alice Sowaal, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind, Method, and Custom,” Philosophy Compass 2.2 (2007): 227–43. Astell presents an argument for the real distinction between the mind and body in The Christian Religion (249–52 (sections 259–61)). She then uses this argument as a basis for a critique of Locke’s view about the possibility of thinking matter. 52. As critics have observed, Astell diverges from philosopher John Norris’s denunciation of the body by seeking an accord between body and spirit. See Kolbrener, who argues that Astell harks back to “an earlier metaphysics–of Donne, Milton, and the Cambridge Platonists [that is] presupposed upon the continuity between divine and human realms (where material part can stand in for spiritual whole)” (William Kolbrener, “Astell’s ‘Design of Friendship’ in Letters and A Serious Proposal, Part I,” in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007], 49–64, 62). 53. Ibid, 63. On friendship in Astell, see also Nancy Kendrick, “Mary Astell’s theory of spiritual friendship,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (2018): 46–65; Jacqueline Broad, “Mary Astell on Virtuous Friendship,”

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Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26. 2 (2009): 65–86. 54. Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 404. 55. On friendship in Epicurus, see Attila Németh, Epicurus on the Self (London: Routledge, 2017), esp. Chapter 5. 56. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 134–37. The fragmentary remains of On Frank Criticism by the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus (c. 110–35 BCE) are explicit about the therapeutic role of candor. See Dirk Baltzly and Nick Eliopoulus “The Classical Ideals of Friendship,” in Friendship, a History, ed. Barbara Caine (London: Equinox, 2009), 39–41. 57. Mary Astell, The Christian Religion, As Professed by a Daughter of The Church of England, ed. Jacqueline Broad (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2013), 288–89. 58. Broad, “Mary Astell,” 84. 59. Holmesland has also described how Cavendish celebrates complexity and distrusts “attempts to impose a fixed form or interpretation on it” (Utopian Negotiation, 11). He writes that Cavendish and Aphra Behn “present diverse ideological attitudes in a potentially utopian space, seeking a mediating solution” (Utopian Negotiation, 289). However, Holmesland focuses in part on male-female alliance to describe the complexity of Cavendish’s (and Aphra Behn’s) utopias, whereas the present chapter has looked at how same-sex alliances also reflect the ambivalence of her utopia. 60. Furey, “Utopia of Desire,” 574. 61. Ibid., 580. 62. For studies of friendship in The Convent of Pleasure, see Holmesland, Utopian Negotiation and Theodora A.  Jankowski, “Pure Resistance: Queer(y)ing Virginity in William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure,” Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 218–55. 63. Judith Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) is an influential work in the study of both early modern lesbianism and the sexuality of nuns. Brown’s study focuses on Benedetta Carlini, the abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God in early seventeenth-century Pescia, Italy. While Sister Benedetta was being investigated for her mystical visions, her fellow nun Sister Bartolomea Crivelli, accused her of forcing her to engage with her in sexual acts. 64. Sierra, “Convents as Feminist Utopias,” 667.

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65. Margaret Cavendish, Playes written by the thrice noble, illustrious and excellent princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: Printed by A. Warren, for John Martyn, James Allestry, and Tho. Dicas, 1662), 679. 66. Sierra, “Convents as Feminist Utopias,” 649. 67. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, 112. 68. On Butler’s use of religion, see Donna Spalding Andréolle, “Utopias of Old, Solutions for the New Millennium: A Comparative Study of Christian Fundamentalism in M. K. Wren’s A Gift upon the Shore and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower,” Utopian Studies 12.2 (2001): 114–23; Philip H. Jos, “Fear and the Spiritual Realism of Octavia Butler’s Earthseed,” Utopian Studies 23.2 (2012): 408–29. 69. McKee draws attention to the fact that, as “[t]he interior of the Convent holds on to the past,” each location within its space is multiply occupied, “so that ‘otherness’ remains internal” (Patricia McKee, “Geographies of Paradise,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.1 [Spring 2003]: 197–223, 209–10). 70. Nicole Schröder, Spaces and Places in Motion: Spatial Concepts in Contemporary American Literature (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006), 190. 71. Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1998), 307.

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Index1

A The Abbey of the Holy Ghost (L’Abbaye du saint esprit), 22, 117, 118, 120, 122, 132, 142 Abbey of the Minoresses of St. Clare, 37 Adrian V (pope, Ottobuono de’ Fieschi), 34 Alvastra monastery, 41 Ancrene Wisse, 35, 39–41, 61, 120, 158 Anslay, Brian, 153, 181n5 Aquinas, Thomas, 72, 73, 103 Arundel manuscript, 21, 69, 70, 83, 85, 86, 90, 95, 97–99, 177 Astell, Mary, 11, 19, 22, 153, 155, 160–162, 169–173, 178, 185n38, 187n50, 187n51, 187n52 Atwood, Margaret, 6, 33 Audelay, John, 42

Augustine of Canterbury, 82 Auroville, 10 B Babthorpe, Barbara, 135 Bacon, Francis, 7, 9, 16, 22, 141, 160, 165 Baker, Augustine, 82 Barking Abbey, 52, 53 Begumpura, 5 Behn, Aphra, 7, 188n59 Bellamy, Edward, 16 Benedict Biscop, Saint, 82 Berkeley, Joanna., 75, 76 The Blazing-World (The Description of a New World, Called The ­Blazing-­ World), 22, 153, 160, 164, 165, 167, 168, 185n34, 186–187n44 Bloch, Ernst, 5, 13, 17, 51 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 152, 180n3

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Verini, English Women’s Spiritual Utopias, 1400–1700, The New Middle Ages, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00917-4

219

220 

INDEX

The Book of the City of Ladies (Le livre de la cité des dames), 1, 151–153, 181n7 Bricolage, 11–16, 20–22, 27–28n40, 28n42, 28–29n43, 29n49, 35–37, 43, 45, 46, 52, 57–59, 70, 71, 78, 83, 86, 94, 117, 123–132, 138, 142, 152, 154, 155, 159, 162, 169, 171, 178–180 Bridget of Sweden, 20, 36, 41, 44, 78 Bridgettines, 21, 41–47, 49, 54, 62, 69, 70, 76, 77, 79, 82, 84, 86, 92, 93, 95, 99, 106, 108 A Briefe Relation of the Holy Life and Happy Death of our Dearest Mother, 133 Bristow, Richard, 80 Brook Farm, 9 Browne, Mary Bonaventure (abbess), 107 Butler, Octavia, 9, 11, 179 C Cambrai, 82, 83 Campanella, Tommaso, 16, 93 Campion, Edward, 94, 95 The Canterbury Tales, 6 Carmelites (Antwerp), 92, 105, 160, 185n30 Cavendish, Margaret, 1, 6, 7, 11, 17, 19, 22, 23, 24n1, 24n3, 93, 153, 155, 156, 160, 162–169, 171, 173, 174, 176–178, 185n30, 186n44, 187n49, 188n59 “Challenge to the Right Honourable Lords of her Majestie’s Privy Council,” 94 Champney, Mary, 21, 76, 77, 79, 80, 89, 92–95, 99, 105, 106

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 6 The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a Daughter of The Church of England, 170, 187n51 Christine de Pizan, 1, 19, 23, 27n33, 151, 159 The City of God, 5, 8, 13, 115, 116 The City of the Sun, 16, 93 Clare of Assisi, Saint, 78–80, 90, 131 Clifford, Anne, Countess of Cumberland, 163, 164 Coke, Edward, 173 Collett, Mary, 123, 128 The Convent of Pleasure, 1, 2, 6, 18, 22, 24n3, 153, 173, 176, 185n30, 185n34, 188n62 Cookeham, 163 The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, 163 Cranford, 11 D De gratia et libero arbitrio, 72 De Mulieribus Claris, 152 Derrida, Jacques, 12, 27n38, 156 Descensus, 53 “The Description of Cooke-ham,” 163, 164, 172 A Description of Millenium Hall, 6 Dialogues of St Catherine of Siena, 47 The Dispossessed, 179 Le Dit de Poissy, 151 E Eadburga, Saint, 82 Edgar, King, 55 Edith, Saint, 34, 52, 55, 56 Elevatio, 53 Englefield, Francis, 93, 94, 98

 INDEX 

221

“English Saintes of Kinges & Bishopps in the primitive times of the Catholique Church when our Countrie of England was governed by Heptarchie of seaven Kinges,” 82 Epicurus, 170 Evelinge, Elizabeth (Sister Catherine Magdalen), 79, 81

H Handmaid's Tale, 6, 33, 34 “Having a Coke with You,” 13 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 84, 145, 160 Herland, 11, 178 Heterotopia, 36–41, 59 Hildegard von Bingen, 78 Hilton, Walter, 82, 118 Hutchinson, Lucy, 110, 163

F The Faerie Queene, 157 The Female Academy, 153, 176 Ferrar, Anna, 123, 128 Ferrar, Margaret, 123, 128 Ferrar, Mary, 123, 124, 130 Ferrar, Nicholas, 123 Ferrar, Virginia, 123, 128 Fishbourne, Thomas, 43, 63, 64, 66 Formula Instituti, 133, 140, 147 Foster, Seth, 83, 109, 110 Foucault, Michel, 36–39, 43, 49, 59 Four Voyages, 140 Fox, Richard, 37, 39 The Friars’ Chronicle, 6 “Friendship’s Mystery, To my Dearest Lucasia,” 158 Furey, Constance, 13, 18, 172

I Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen, 153 The Isle of Pines, 9, 141, 150

G Garrett, Margaret, 135 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 11 Ghent, 88, 89 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 11, 178 Goad, Thomas, 6 Goodwin, Francis, 16 Gregory the Great, 82, 149 Guin, Ursula Le, 11, 179

J Jameson, Fredric, 5, 8, 13, 16, 18, 28–29n43, 29n58, 30n66, 51, 74, 97, 98, 141, 150, 182n10 Julian of Norwich, 60, 82 K Kalmarnenensis, Johannes Johannis, 48 Knatchbull, Mary (abbess), 88, 89 L Lanyer, Aemilia, 7, 13, 17–19, 22, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 162–164, 171, 172, 177, 178, 186n42, 186n43 Lanyer, Alfonso, 164 Lee, Robert (Father), 132–134 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 12, 14, 27n40, 52 The Life and Good End of Sister Marie, 76, 80, 105 The Life of Saint Bridget, 48 Lisbon, 6, 21, 69, 76, 82, 86, 95, 106, 110, 112

222 

INDEX

Little Gidding concordances, 117, 128, 129, 159 conversations, 4 Story Books, 117, 124, 128 Looking Backward 2000-1887, 16 Louvain, 82, 108 M The Man in the Moon, 16 Marin, Louis, 5, 13–15, 30n66, 99 Mary of Modena, Queen, 88 Mary Queen of Scots, 93 Matheolus, 152 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 23 Montagu, Mary Wortley, 11, 171 Montaigne, Michel de, 156 More, Thomas, 3–5, 7–9, 13–16, 18, 19, 22, 42, 82, 102, 115, 116, 140, 154, 160, 179 Morris, William, 18 Morrison, Toni, 6, 179 Moylan, Tom, 5, 154, 182n10 Muñoz, José Esteban, 5, 6, 13 N New Arcadia, 157 New Atlantis, 7, 9, 16, 141 News from Nowhere, 18 Newton, Matilda, 43 Norris, John, 170, 187n52 Norton, Richard, 94 O Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, 165 O’Hara, Frank, 13 The Orcherd of Syon, 47

P Pacheco, Francisco, 82 The Parable of the Sower, 9, 179 Paradise (novel), 6, 179 Pepwell, Henry, 153 Persons, Robert (Father), 83, 109, 110, 169, 170 Philips, Katherine, 7, 17, 22, 153, 155–160, 162, 163, 177 Piercy, Marge, 11 Piers Plowman, 5 Plans of Education, 11 Plato, 4, 13 Poissy, Convent, 151 Poor Clares, 21, 35, 37, 38, 77–79, 81, 84, 85, 88, 90, 98, 138 Poyntz, Mary, 133 The Principle of Hope, 51 R Ravidas, 5 Reeve, Clara, 11 Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden, 41 Robinson, Thomas, 6, 59, 109, 110 Russell, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, 159 Russell, William, Baron of Thornhaugh, 163 S Saeculum (definition), 22, 115 Saint Lawrence Church, 48, 116 Saint Monica’s, 82, 108 Saint Omer, 81, 123, 131, 132, 137, 139

 INDEX 

Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 13, 18, 22, 153, 159 Sanders, Elizabeth, 21, 93–95, 98, 99 Scott, Sarah, 6, 11, 178 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 11, 22, 153, 161, 169 A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part II, 161 Sidney, Philip, 157, 163 Sociable Letters, 160, 164, 174 Spenser, Edmund, 157 Syon Abbey Texts Additions, 43–45, 47, 54, 56, 57 The Myroure of Oure Ladye, 43, 46, 63 Rule of Saint Saviour, 46 Sermo Angelicus, 43, 45 The Syon Breviary, 54 T Taylor, Mary, 78 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 78 Thomas of Canterbury, Saint, 82 “To Mrs. M. Awbrey,” 158 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 5

223

U Utopia critical utopia, 154, 171, 178, 182n10 etymology, 16 V Verstegan, Richard, 75 Vespucci, Amerigo, 4, 140 Vincent of Beauvais, 152 Virgil, 152 Visitatio sepulchri (Visitation at the Tomb), 53 W Ward, Mary, 4, 10, 16–18, 22, 78, 117, 131–136, 147, 149, 150, 154, 158, 173, 177, 178 Welbeck Abbey, 160 “Why Can’t I be a Nun,” 6 Wigmore, Winifred, 133 Wilton Abbey, 20, 54, 68 Winchester Castle, 95 Winthrop, John, 139, 141 Wiseman, Barbara, 83, 110 Wriothesley, Charles, 42, 63 Wynkyn de Worde, 118