identity politics and nuns’ writing
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Identity Politics and Nuns’WritingMarie-Louise CoolahanPublished online: 24 Jul 2007.
To cite this article: Marie-Louise Coolahan (2007) Identity Politics and Nuns’ Writing,Women's Writing, 14:2, 306-320, DOI: 10.1080/09699080701314824
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IDENTITY POLITICS AND NUNS’
WRITING
This article focuses on the texts produced in the seventeenth century by the Englishand Irish nuns of the Order of St Clare in order to explore questions of individualand collective authorship, the expression of identity, and the exercise of politicalagency. It examines the conditions of exile, persecution, and internal controversy,arguing that translation, in particular, is the vehicle for asserting a range ofcompeting positions pertaining to the religious house, the religious order, andnational and transnational allegiance. It locates these texts in relation to theCounter-Reformation politics of the vernacular, showing that they participate inwider debates about national identity.
Scholars of early modern women’s writing have recently begun to turn theirattention to communities of nuns in Europe.1 This development raises newquestions for researchers about the relationship of collective to individualauthorship, about genre, and about the expression of identity and the exerciseof political agency in nuns’ writings. Nuns write as members of theircommunity rather than as individuals; attribution is often uncertain orposthumous. How might this refine our ideas about subjectivity and femaleauthorship in the period? The genres of nuns’ writing are determined bycommunity audience: nuns write obituaries, annals, religious lives; theytranslate devotional and foundational texts. How are identities, individual andnational, transformed or enhanced by the religious community? This essayoffers one approach to the material available in convent archives, probing thetexts of the English and Irish branches of the Order of St Clare for the layersand formulations of national and international identity, arguing that transla-tion, in particular, is the focus for the articulation of identity. For exiledcommunities of women religious, vernacular translation has a heightenedvalue. For exiled Irish nuns, the distinctions of allegiance signified by thechoice of vernacular language participate in a political framework that isparticularly fraught.
The English Poor Clares were founded in Gravelines, Flanders, in 1609,by Mary Ward (who left some months later to pursue her vision of an
Women’s Writing Vol. 14, No. 2 August 2007, pp. 306�320ISSN 0969-9082 print/ISSN 1747-5848 online – 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09699080701314824
Marie-Louise Coolahan
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uncloistered women’s order).2 This community, named Nazareth, became theinitial port of call for Irish postulants; by 1625, five Irish nuns had professed atthis house, and left with the patriotic intention of establishing a foundation fortheir own countrywomen.3 While the English foundation triggered sister-houses, firstly and controversially at Dunkirk in 1627, (relocating to Aire in1629) later at Rouen in 1644 and Dunkirk (again) in 1652, the Irish PoorClares left the continent in 1629 (via Dunkirk and Nieuwpoort) for theirhomeland.4 Initially based in Dublin, but moved on by the authorities inOctober 1630, they founded their first community, named Bethlehem, nearAthlone. This mother-house spawned another at Drogheda, but both had to beabandoned following Protestant reprisals after the Ulster rising of October1641. The Drogheda house relocated to Waterford, while members ofBethlehem divided into three groups, starting new foundations in Galway,Wexford, and Athlone. In 1647, a further community was founded inLoughrea, County Galway. However, as a result of the Cromwellian wars, allthese communities were dissolved and many ultimately fled to Galway* thelast town to surrender, after nine months’ siege, on 12 April 1652. Thefollowing year, all religious were banished from the country. Due to politicalcircumstances and the sense of a national mission, then, for both English andIrish Poor Clares, travel and mobility were key characteristics of the order’sidentity.
A community of women religious is always transnational: the womenbelong firstly to the order, and then to their nation. This order of allegiance isreflected in the homogeneity of the genres of nuns’ writing: across earlymodern Europe, nuns conformed to their communities’ devotional needs,writing annals and obituaries, chronicles and religious lives. The genres aredetermined according to the fact of being a professed nun, rather than aprofessed nun of any particular nation. This sense of transnationality isreflected in the experiences of the English and Irish Poor Clares, in the levelsof cooperation recorded by travelling women religious. The English Sr. MaryFrancis Taylor, travelling with 15 other nuns and two priests from Gravelinesto found the house at Rouen in 1644, wrote a lengthy account of their journeyto her sisters back in Nazareth. The journey itself is marked by theprioritization of nuns’ identity over that of particular orders or houses: atCalais, they stayed with the Benedictines, at Boulogne with the Ursulines,at Montreuil at the Benedictine Abbey, at Dieppe with another Ursulineconvent. Even when putting up at an inn in a village between Dieppe andRouen, they heard mass at the local Ursuline convent, and received aninvitation to visit the English Augustines at Paris.5 Irish nuns experienced asimilar generosity when all religious were banished by Cromwell in 1653.Spain was the most attractive destination, due to the king’s sanctioning ofpensions for exiled Irish religious. A number of nuns died soon after arrival,
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due to the travails of the sea passage. Others availed of an even greaterhospitality than the travelling English Poor Clares in France: they settledamong Spanish orders as far afield as Madrid, Bilbao, Maqueda, Orduna,Valladolid, and Salamanca, not always finding convents of the sameprofession.6 A smaller number sought refuge in France, founding their ownsecular house in Dieppe; two of these joined the English convent in Rouen.7
The realities of travel* voluntary and enforced*were undoubtedly eased bythe internationalism of the cross-order community of women religious.
However, a concerted sense of national identity is evident in the writingsemanating from both English and Irish Poor Clare foundations. The bulk ofthese writings are translations. The Counter-Reformation, in the wake of theCouncil of Trent (1545�63), insisted on enclosure for women religious andplaced a new emphasis on the promulgation of pious texts* particularlycatechisms* in the vernacular. While there is evidence that nuns in the periodwere expected to learn Latin, it is clear that this requirement was oftenaspirational, and that levels of proficiency were patchy at best. The Rule ofSt. Clare itself makes provision for differing levels of ability, including thosewho could not understand Latin at all.8 Vernacular texts were of even greaterimportance to nuns in exile from their homeland: the Gravelines Chronicle ,describing the profession of the first eight English nuns, remarks that: ‘‘afterthey had communicated, they made their demand, before the High Altar & nothaving the language a secular Priest interpreted it for them to him whoreceiv’d them’’. That the experience of exile was always coloured byallegiances of both nation and profession is further evident in the dependenceof this community on English Jesuits and Irish Franciscans as confessors, ‘‘theyhaving no English of their own order’’. Unhappy with this arrangement, thenuns took action, arguing for a specifically English foundation of Franciscans atDouai.9 The first imperative of the Gravelines foundation, therefore, was thetranslation of the order’s rule. The Rule of our Holy Mother S. Clare translated intoEnglish was published in 1621; The Declarations and Ordinances made upon theRule of our holy mother, S. Clare (the fifteenth-century Colettine constitutions) in1622.10 The translation of these foundational texts is more than a simplematter of instruction: they became important weapons in communitycontroversy. The Gravelines house was rocked in the late 1620s by a strugglefor authority between the Franciscans and the diocesan bishop: Mary Ward’sGravelines convent had been founded on condition that it be subject to thebishop of St Omer, whereas traditionally the provincial of the Franciscans heldjurisdiction over the Poor Clares. This particular contention also encompasseda division over the strictness of the rule of poverty vowed by the order. In late1626, the commissary of the Belgian Franciscans intervened to depose thesecular priest who had been confessor to the convent, and imposed a newabbess, Sr. Margaret Paul Radcliffe, sympathetic to the Franciscans.11 The
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majority of the nuns objected to this action, and the subsequent controversyled to the departure of 11 dissident nuns (supporting Franciscan dominion andthe vow of strict poverty) for Dunkirk, and the eventual foundation of a newconvent at Aire in 1629. Throughout the controversy, the text of the Rule wascarefully read and invoked by the nuns as a means of countering unwelcomeoutside interference. Attempting to defy the commissary by voting for theirexisting abbess, Sr. Clare Mary Anna Tyldesley, immediately after herdeposition, they cited their foundational text: ‘‘since their rule gave them thefreedome of their voices’’. Foiled by the commissary, ‘‘the poor afflictedSisters again perus’d their rule’’ and insisted on its distinction from theFranciscans’ statutes.12 The women’s community consistently legitimated theirdissent and assertion of independence by reference to their foundational,translated text.
The controversy continued into the following decade; the position of thedissenting community (now based in Aire) was articulated in 1635, againthrough the medium of translation. The History of the Angelicall Virgin GloriousS. Clare is more than a religious life of the order’s foundress; the original textis adapted in order to assert their pro-Franciscan identity and adherence to therule of austere poverty. Its translation history is illustrative of the multilingualvibrancy of the Counter-Reformation engagement with the vernacular. Thesource for this English translation was French: the Franciscan priest FrancoisHendricq’s Vie admirable de madame S. Claire fondatrice des Pauvres Clairesses(St Omer, 1631). Hendricq himself was translating from another source: theLatin Annales ordinis minorum , a monumental history of the Franciscan orderauthored by the Irish Franciscan scholar, Luke Wadding (1588� 1657). Beyondthe inevitable semantic alterations imbuing each layer of translation, partisanagendas informed the texts. The first two volumes of Wadding’s Annales werepublished in 1625 and 1628; Hendricq’s French version translates parts ofthese two volumes, and it in turn is translated into English by a Poor Clare atAire. In the course of this series of translations, the original text is doctoredaccording to the contemporary needs of specific religious communities.Hendricq’s translation is customized to advertise the Franciscan community ofSt Omer. The Aire text uses the translation as an opportunity to make apolitical statement about their own foundation, pointing to the continuingcurrency of the 1620s controversy.13 It makes a claim for the authority of theFranciscan friars by inserting a new, lengthy chapter* not found in either theLatin or the French* describing Franciscan missionary activities in the Eastand West Indies, and Europe, during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenthcenturies. The translator is explicit in her polemical motivation:
I haue endeauored to put the brightsome light of the F. Minors fromvnder the bushel of the malignant tongues and pennes who labours to
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obscure them [. . .] all which I haue performed out of approued goodauthors without disparaging any other Order [. . .] principally that it mayappeare that S. Clare (whose history wee now publish to the view of theWorld) receiued hir Rule from so highly dignified a Patriarke.14
Her preface dwells on the pre-eminence of poverty, outlining 12 honours, orprivileges, of the poor with extensive scriptural support, and arguing for herconcept of evangelical, apostolical poverty:
It is this transcendent Pouertie [. . .] this perfect abdication of all manner ofproprietie, not only in proper (which other Religious Orders haue) but incommon also (the distinctiue cognisance of S. Francis children) which Ihaue to commend to Thee, as the most compendious way to perfectionheer, and immortalitie hereafter.15
The translation of the religious life is a means of articulating the Airecommunity’s distinct identity. The use of print to proclaim that collectiveidentity takes on a new dimension in the context of an enclosed community ofwomen religious. Print moves the debate beyond the internal politics of theorder into a more public arena. Manuscript texts, of course, were produced bynuns for circulation among their sisters* their own contemporary communityand those who would join the house in the future. The production of printedtexts transcends enclosure; in the case of the Poor Clares’ Rule , to disseminatethe order’s foundational text in the vernacular for the use of other Englishhouses. This life of St Clare constitutes a different order of public engagement;the fracturing of the original community* itself due to the power politics ofmale religious* engenders a more subtle manipulation of Counter-Reforma-tion print culture, which reaches beyond the order itself as a readership.
As well as playing into the contemporary politics of the order, this 1635text makes a larger claim for nationality. Exiled English communities ofwomen religious operated in a vacuum of anticipation, expecting to return to arestored Catholic country. The Aire community proclaimed their nationalallegiance via their dedication of the translation to Charles I’s Catholic queen,Henrietta Maria. Drawing attention to the queen’s French lineage and religion,the dedication hints at their hopes for a Catholic dynasty* a prospect whichwas to threaten Protestant England in reality when Henrietta Maria’s son,James II, came to the throne in 1685.16 The nuns pray for ‘‘a long andprosperous ioynt-reigne with our Soueraigne Liege-Lord, King Charles , and aglorious Race from your Royall loynes to the Crowne’’, again manipulating aprogramme of print translation for political ends.
This dedication is signed ‘‘Your Maiesties Most humble, and dayly deuotedBeads-women The English poore Clares of Aire’’.17 The collective subscription
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highlights the problems pertaining to authorship when dealing with nuns’writing. This English translation is a prime example of the apparentindifference to attribution which often frustrates scholars in search ofindividual women writers. Not only is the dedication expressly in the nameof the community, but the more specific attribution of the translation itself isalso contested. The title page attributes the translation to Sr. MagdalenAugustine (Catherine Bentley [1592� 1659; professed 1610]). However, LukeWadding, author of the Latin original, states that a younger nun, Sr. CatherineMagdalen (Elizabeth Evelinge [1597� 1668; professed 1620]) was the author,an attribution supported by the latter’s obituary notice in both the Aire andGravelines Registers.18 At the least, both women clearly had reputations asaccomplished translators. The same issue arises over the English Poor Claretranslation of the Life of St. Catherine of Bologna , published in 1621. The titlepage here names Sr. Magdalen Augustine Bentley, whereas Wadding identifiesSr. Catherine Magdalen Evelinge. Both title pages name Sr. MagdalenAugustine, attributions which are uncorroborated and directly contradictedby authoritative external sources* either posthumous (via convent obituaries)or second-hand (via Wadding). As the committed historian and bibliographerof the Franciscan order, Wadding must be considered a reliable source and heis certainly consistent, ascribing to Evelinge the 1622 Declarations andOrdinances also. The researcher must negotiate competing authorities, noneof which are definitive. The consistency of Wadding’s attributions points to asubstantial level of international monitoring with regard to texts produced aspart of the Franciscan Counter-Reformation effort. The key may liein seniority: the Life of St. Catherine was published in 1621, by which timeSr. Magdalen Augustine Bentley was a professed nun of 11 years’ standing,whereas Sr. Catherine Magdalen Evelinge had professed only a year previously.Korsten has suggested that identification of the more senior nun was deemedmore appropriate. Whatever the answer to this attribution puzzle, the fact ofthe puzzle itself directs us to the self-abnegation which is a condition of nuns’writing: personal credit is a matter for others.
This English translation programme was closely connected to that of the IrishPoor Clares. By 1636, the English translation of the Rule of St. Clare* likelytransported with the Irish nuns who left Gravelines in 1625* had beentranslated into the Irish language at the Bethlehem convent; the Declarations andOrdinances was translated into this vernacular in 1647. These Irish-languagetexts, however, were commissioned; they were not translated by the nunsthemselves, but by a series of scholars. The Rule was translated by two Franciscanfriars, Aodh O Raghailligh and Seamus O Siaghail; the surviving scribal copy wasmade in October 1636 by Br. Micheal O Cleirigh (c.1592�1643). The learnedclasses were professional, male, and hereditary in medieval Ireland; chargedwith the arts of history and genealogy (senchas) or poetry (filidheacht), each
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such family was traditionally attached to a particular regional sept. Highlyesteemed for their learning, they played a vital role in proclaiming and recordinglocal and tribal identity. O Cleirigh is an extremely important figure inseventeenth-century Gaelic culture; a Franciscan lay brother whose family werehereditary historians, he had been dispatched to Ireland in 1626 by the IrishFranciscans at Louvain to embark on a number of historical and hagiographicalprojects. At the time of this transcription, O Cleirigh had just completed the greatestof these: the supervision of Annala Rıoghachta Eireann (‘‘The Annals of the FourMasters’’)*a history of Ireland from earliest times until 1616, which synthesizedearlier collections of annals and provided an independent account of the later period.On his way around Ireland to obtain authenticating approbations for the Annals , hestopped off at Bethlehem, where he was put to good use by the nuns transcribingthe translation of their Rule. The literary exchange was likely mutual; as Jenningshas observed, the nuns surely had access to O Cleirigh’s manuscripts during hisstay.19 The manuscript containing O Cleirigh’s transcription of the Rule wasclearly transported with other items from the Bethlehem convent after the nuns’flight in 1642 from Protestant forces avenging the rising of the previousOctober, because following the Rule is a further translation into Irish, of the1622 Declarations and Ordinances . Undertaken by Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh inGalway in 1647, this translation highlights the extent to which portability was aprerequisite for community texts. Mac Fhirbhisigh (c.1600�71) was anotherkey figure in contemporary Gaelic culture; like O Cleirigh, he was adistinguished hereditary historian. His most important work, Leabhar Mor nanGenealach (‘‘Book of Genealogies’’), was also compiled in Galway, during 1649and 1650. The eminence of the scholars enlisted by the sisters demonstrates theirknowledge and exploitation of a network of men engaged in the preservation ofGaelic culture, and of its contemporary religious and political significance.
The translation of pious texts into the Irish vernacular was already morethan simply educational by this time; it was coloured with the politics of theElizabethan and Jacobean conquest of the country. The politicization ofCatholicism* the increasingly strong association of Catholicism with resis-tance to the English Crown*was in no small part the product of Franciscanactivity directed from the Irish colleges on the continent. The Irish Franciscanswholly embraced the Counter-Reformation encouragement of vernacularinstruction as a political tool, producing catechisms in Irish from at least the1590s, publishing their first printed catechism in Irish in Antwerp in 1611, andestablishing their own printing press at Louvain in 1614.20 By contrast,Reformation vernacular evangelization in Ireland was a failure, largely due tothe long gaps of time between the intent to provide vernacular translations andthe actual production of such texts. Queen Elizabeth I provided finance for themanufacture of an Irish printing press, but complained in 1567 of the lack of
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activity in pursuit of the project. Sean O Cearnaigh’s Gaelic translation of theProtestant catechism was published in 1571, but the New Testament was notprinted in Irish until over 30 years later in 1602; the Book of Common Prayerfollowed in 1608.21 The Irish Poor Clares’ commissioning of translations intothe vernacular, in this context, was equally as political as their English sisters’translation programme. It aligned them with the broader exploitation of theinternational Counter-Reformation programme for the fashioning of anational, Catholic Irish identity. The act of commissioning itself broadensour notions of nuns’ authorship; that they were well informed and wellconnected is clear from their involvement with such esteemed figures asO Cleirigh and Mac Fhirbhisigh.
However, efforts to forge an emerging national identity were complicatedby the composition of the population, which was comprised of three distinctethnic groups. These Irish nuns were largely drawn from the Old Englishcommunity* descendants of the Anglo-Normans, who remained Catholic andwere defined in opposition to the New English settlers. The Old English wereregularly castigated by more recent arrivals for their adoption of Irish customs,not least of the language itself. Despite the documented bilingualism of the OldEnglish community, however, Mac Fhirbhisigh added an interesting note to his1647 translation, asking the reader to notice:
The simpleness or lameness of the Irish I have put on these, that does notcome from the poverty of the Irish language, but from people’s lack ofknowledge of it, so that they find it easier to understand foreign wordsthan the genuine Irish ones. Therefore I implore the reader to give hisblessing to the D. F. and to excuse him.22
If Mac Fhirbhisigh’s ‘‘they’’ refers (as is most likely) to the Old English nuns,then the translator clearly expects other, more fluent, Irish readers as well, andexpects those readers to object to the plainness of his prose and use of loanwords. This anticipation of a readership beyond the community echoes the Airecommunity’s strategy with regard to print. Written forms of the Irish languagewere in a state of transition at this time. The cultural stability of the medievalperiod (c.1200�1600) meant that elite native Irish culture had developed acomplex and ornate literary language. As the social structures which hadmaintained this system struggled under attack from the English Crown, thefunctions of writing in Irish were politicized, and the audience such writing wastrying to reach became more demotic. Classical Irish was characterized by anornamental style abounding in archaisms and alliteration. The simplification ofthe written language for the purposes of the Counter-Reformation mission,however, was already established: Flaithrı O Maolchonaire (c .1560�1629), in
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his translation of the Spanish devotional work Desiderius (Louvain, 1616), madea similar, and enlightening, apologia:
If we can manage, with the help of the Lord, to set down these thingsclearly and comprehensibly, we think that more of the judicious, discreetpeople will pray for us on account of our labour than will seek to criticizeour best efforts because of the simplicity of the style in which we havewritten, in particular for the benefit of the simple people, who are notexpert in abstruse Irish.23
O Maolchonaire was the founder of the Irish college, St Anthony’s, at Louvain;his translation was consciously adapted for a broad Irish Catholic readership,and is best known for its argument that the authority of civil governmentoriginates in the people. The apparent limitations of the Poor Clares’comprehension of the written language should be understood in this context.Their commissioning of translations from eminent scholars indicates theirfamiliarity with native Irish cultural networks, their enthusiasm for theCounter-Reformation vernacular programme, and their identification with itsnational thrust. Furthermore, it suggests their anticipation of new professionsfrom the native Irish community. These translations were a political statementof both intent and allegiance for the nuns, in a country riven by complex ethnicand religious loyalties.
The abbess who commissioned Mac Fhirbhisigh’s translation, Mother MaryBonaventure Browne, was herself multilingual* speaking English, Irish andSpanish* and an author in her own right. She composed a Chronicle of theIrish Poor Clares during her exile in Spain, between 1668 and 1671. Originallywritten in Irish, this Chronicle was sent home to the Poor Clares in Galwaywhen they were re-established in 1672. The Irish original was destroyed in1691 during the Williamite War and what survives is a contemporarytranslation into English.24 The language of communication is an immediatesignifier of community; Browne’s Chronicle was written for an audience of Irishwomen religious, not for her hosts in Spain. This Irish nun’s writing isdistinguished by her particular experience of exile. Nuns of other nations livingin mainland Europe* even exiled English nuns* availed of some level ofphysical security; while income was affected by the civil wars in Britain, or theThirty Years’ War, these communities of women religious retained their ownhouses. Irish nuns, by contrast both to their female contemporaries and to Irishmale religious, never had a secure national foundation on the continent. Theywere utterly dependent on their host communities. Mother Browne’sChronicle , then, rather than recording the group’s continuity from a securebase, itself becomes the glue of the community; the text substitutes for
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physical unity. Thus, this nun’s Chronicle both imagines and sustains a collectiveidentity.
Her foundation’s Irishness is the driving force of her writing: theChronicle ’s narrative arc follows the national imperative to return home andestablish a foundation, success and dispersal, and concludes by detailing thedeaths of individual nuns in Spain. Her account of the 1642 destruction of theBethlehem convent draws on the emerging national discourse of Catholicism,pitting the ‘‘heretickes’’ against the providential revenge enacted by a party of120 ‘‘Irish Catholickes’’.25 We might expect the layers of national andinternational allegiance to overlap in her narrative of exile, but in fact the linesof national identity are clearly drawn. Like the English and Irish nuns whotravelled across western Europe, Mother Browne availed of the internationalcommunity of women religious in order to realize her project. She instigatedcorrespondence with the superiors of her sisters’ adopted convents tocomplete her story. The narrative is self-conscious about this transnationalcooperation for authentication purposes:
[. . .] but before I ^under tooke to write in this booke what is recountedtherein of the deceased Irish nunns; I wrote to ye Convents in wch theydyed, and to ye other persons of creditt, craveing their Letters ofcertification thereof, the wch Letters I keepe still in my custody.26
The textual construction of the community is founded on collaboration.However, her account insists on individual adherence to their original, Irishfoundation; interactions between the exiled Irish nuns and their Spanish sistersare represented in terms of difference: ‘‘none of those [Spanish] conventsaneers, to the stright observance of fasting, sylence, dispropriety, and suchother Austerities, of the forementioned convents of Ireland’’.27 This emphasison their austerity recalls the self-identification of the English community atAire, encompassing, on the one hand, a defining Irish identity and, on theother, the hallmark of the particular order. She provides no information aboutdaily life in the Spanish convents which hosted her sisters, emphasizing insteadthe contrast in experience. Linguistic difficulties and the need for acountryman-confessor come to the fore once more. Sr. Julian Anthony Blakeat Orduna:
Being alwayes very backeward in speakeing the Spanish languadge, somedayes before her death, shee spoake it as eloquently as if shee had beenenative of ye same Country; by which (not haveing an Irish confessour)shee could wthout any difficultie expresse her conscience, wth whatsoeverelse shee pleased in Spanish.28
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The experience of exile, in terms of linguistic alienation, unites Irish andEnglish Poor Clares. Browne’s portraits of her sisters who died in Spain arecareful to stress the signs of grace. Srs. Catherine Bernard Browne, ElizabethBaptist Lynch, and Clara Colette Blake are reported as having miraculouslypreserved corpses*upon the latter’s exhumation five years after her death,the nuns of Madrid pulled out her teeth as relics. Sr. Margaret Clare Jonyne’sbeads were kept as relics, and a number of Irish nuns witness consolingappartitions.29 Adhering to hagiographical conventions, two of these womeninspired further exemplary biographies, now apparently lost.30 These Irishnuns, then, are recorded as inspiring religious biographies; individual PoorClares are incorporated into the established paradigms for writing aboutwomen religious, reflecting the principle observed by Browne (which alsoinforms the issue of textual attribution) that ‘‘before death, none is to bepraised’’.31
While the genres of nuns’ writing may be homogenous, they retain roomfor manoeuvre. On one level, the simple act of translation into the vernacularis a pragmatic expression of a national identity. On another, it feeds into theinternational Counter-Reformation agenda while, in the Irish case, participat-ing in the assertion of a politicized and ethnicized identity. Moreover, thetranslation of foundational documents could also provide a space for thearticulation of more particularized, public, and political statements regardingthe community. Nuns not only wrote according to the requirements of theirown communities, but also to proclaim and sustain a variety of collectiveidentities. The tensions between national and international, individual andcollective, are never fully resolved. The peculiarities of a nun’s simultaneousallegiances* to an international order and a national foundation, to aparticular house and a national foundation, to a collective which determinesand produces individual identity* are policed and asserted in these texts.Ultimately, these categories of belonging are held in the balance, juggled andjostled together. Female subjectivity, here, is shaped by membership of thereligious community; authorship evolves out of community needs. Thesewritings are also fundamentally political, exploiting the contemporary politicsof vernacular languages and engaging with the outside world on behalf of acollective, sometimes contested, often threatened identity.
Notes
1 See Caroline Bowden, ‘‘The Abbess and Mrs Brown: Lady Mary Knatchbulland Royalist Politics in Flanders in the Late 1650s,’’ Recusant History 24(1999): 288� 308 and ‘‘Community Space and Cultural Transmission:Formation and Schooling in English Enclosed Convents in the SeventeenthCentury,’’ History of Education 34 (2005): 365� 86; Frances Dolan,
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‘‘Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,’’ English LiteraryRenaissance 33 (2003): 328� 57; Dorothy Latz, ed., ‘‘Glow-worm light’’:Writings of Seventeenth-Century English Recusant Women from Original Manuscripts(Salzburg: U of Salzburg P, 1989) and The Building of Divine Love, Jeanne deCambry: As Translated by Dame Agnes More (Salzburg: U of Salzburg P, 1992);K. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003); Claire Walker, ‘‘‘Doenot suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world’: Letter-Writing inEarly Modern English Convents,’’ Early Modern Women’s Letter-Writing,1450� 1700 , ed. James Daybell (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001) 159�76 andGender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the LowCountries (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003); Heather Wolfe, ed., Elizabeth Cary,Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (Cambridge: Renaissance Texts from Manu-script, 2001) and ‘‘Reading Bells and Loose Papers: Reading and WritingPractices of the English Benedictine Nuns of Cambrai and Paris,’’ EarlyModern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/TrentColloquium , ed. Victoria Burke and Jonathan Gibson (Aldershot: Ashgate,2004) 135�56; Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early ModernGermany (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002).
2 For Ward, see Jennifer Cameron, A Dangerous Innovator: Mary Ward(1585�1645) (Strathfield: St Pauls, 2000).
3 Sr. Martha Marianna Cheevers (professed 1620); Srs. Mary Joseph Dillonand Cecily Francis Dillon (both professed 1622); Srs. Magdalen ClareNugent and Mary Peter Dowdall (both professed 1625). Throughout thisessay I provide the women’s names in religion, followed by their secularsurnames.
4 Joining a continental convent was a viable option for Irish refugees,especially as a number of religious houses were directly funded by theSpanish government. Some unruly women living on the continent, like EllenMacCarthy, were threatened with enclosure, while others voluntarilyattached themselves to convents as beata* lay nuns who lived in societybut bound themselves to religious life by simple vows of chastity orobedience. See Grainne Henry, The Irish Military Community in SpanishFlanders, 1586� 1621 (Dublin: Irish Academic P, 1992) 75�76; CiaranO’Scea, ‘‘The Devotional World of the Irish Catholic Exile in Early-ModernGalicia, 1598� 1666,’’ The Irish in Europe, 1580�1815 , ed. ThomasO’Connor (Dublin: Four Courts, 2001) 31� 45; Micheline Walsh, ‘‘SomeNotes towards a History of the Womenfolk of the Wild Geese,’’ The IrishSword 5 (1961): 102� 04.
5 Ann M.C. Forster, ‘‘The Chronicles of the English Poor Clares of Rouen,’’Recusant History 18 (1986): 59� 102 (60� 61).
6 The Conceptionist convent known as Cavallero de Gracia in Madrid hostedSrs. Catherine Bernard Browne, Margaret Clare Jonyne, Catherine Evange-list, Mary Augustine, and Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne. The Urbanist
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convent of St Clare in Bilbao hosted Sr. Catherine Francis Browne. Srs.Elizabeth Baptist Lynch and Clara Colette Blake went to the Conceptionistconvent, Maqueda; Sr. Julian Anthony Blake to the convent of St Clare,Orduna; Sr. Apollonia Connor to the Carmelite convent, Valladolid; andSrs. Clare Maria and Margaret FitzLaurence to the Urbanist convent,Salamanca. Other unnamed Poor Clares went to these convents and others.
7 The annals of the English Poor Clares record two named Irish nuns whodrifted initially to Spain, but then to Dieppe, where they founded a secularhouse. Sr. Clare Ludovick Tuite then moved to the English community atRouen, where she remained for seven years, and in 1671 was financed toreturn to Ireland, where she refounded the Athlone house. Sr. CatherineMagdalen Burke came to Rouen in October 1665, yearning to die in anenclosed religious house, which she did in January 1666. See Forster 96, 179.
8 For provisions made in the Rule for those sisters who could not read, seeEleanor Knott, ed., ‘‘An Irish Seventeenth-Century Translation of the Ruleof St. Clare,’’ Eriu 15 (1948): 14� 15, 32�33, 64� 65, 72� 73, 74� 77.The Gravelines Chronicle records the abbess’s efforts ‘‘in teaching the youngReligious to pronounce their latin well & in a good tone having herself asingular good voice, & way of reading, she took very much pains with themhow to make their stops equally & how much they were to lift up, whenthey were Cantrice or Versicles’’. (The Chronicle of the Poor Clares ofGravelines , ms., Darlington Monastery of the Poor Clares, 35; see 67� 69 foran account of the abbess’s proficiency in Latin from a young age. I amindebted to Caroline Bowden for sharing with me her transcript of thechronicle.) Woodford finds that, ‘‘by the Counter-Reformation, Latin wasrestricted to the liturgical texts. Private prayer books as well as religiousmeditations for nuns were predominantly in German’’ (18).
9 Gravelines Chronicle 21, 142.10 The place of publication is unknown, although most likely Flanders. For an
analogous project, see Dame Alexia Grey’s supervision of the translation ofThe Rule of St. Benedict (Ghent, 1632) into English.
11 Radcliffe had originally been a member of the Gravelines community; sheleft in 1621 to become abbess at the Urbanist convent of St Clare, Brussels.
12 Gravelines Chronicle 147� 48, 160.13 The dispute extended into the second half of the century, as is manifest from
the anonymous lengthy preface to the 1665 edition of the English Rule ,which articulates the Gravelines position regarding diocesan/Franciscanauthority via a detailed exegesis of the rules and ecclesiastical decisionspertaining to both orders (The First Rule of the Glorious Virgin S. Clare[St Omer, 1665] sigs. Ar �D2v).
14 Frans Korsten, ed., Elizabeth Evelinge, I (New York: Ashgate, 2002) sigs.I4r� v. For the inserted chapter, see sigs. Cr� I4v.
15 Korsten sig. cr; see also chapters 20, 21.
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16 For a discussion of English nuns’ engagements with the Stuart cause in thesecond half of the seventeenth century, see Claire Walker, ‘‘Loyal andDutiful Subjects: English Nuns and Stuart Politics,’’ Women and Politics inEarly Modern England, 1450�1700 , ed. James Daybell (Aldershot: Ashgate,2004) 228� 42; also Bowden, ‘‘The Abbess and Mrs Brown’’.
17 Korsten sig. a3v.18 For a discussion of authorship, see Korsten ix� x.19 Brendan Jennings, Mıcheal O Cleirigh and His Associates (Dublin: Talbot, 1936)
150.20 Bernadette Cunningham, ‘‘The Culture and Ideology of Irish Franciscan
Historians at Louvain 1607� 1650,’’ Ideology and the Historians , ed. CiaranBrady (Dublin: Lilliput, 1991) 24.
21 See Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: EnglishRenaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cam-bridge UP, 2001) 125� 34; Mıcheal Mac Craith, ‘‘Literature in Irish,c .1550� 1690: From the Elizabethan Settlement to the Battle of the Boyne,’’The Cambridge History of Irish Literature , ed. Margaret Kelleher and PhilipO’Leary, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006) I: 194� 195.
22 ‘‘Da ttugadh an treas nı da aire, mar ata simplidheacht no bacuighe na Gaoidhelgedo chuireas orra so; nı tre ghainne na Gaoidhilge tig sin, acht tre easbaidh a heoluisar chach, ionnus gurob usa leo focail choimhightheacha do thuigsin inaid focail fhırena Gaoidhelge. Ar an adhbhair sin ailim beandacht, agus mo lethsgel on leughthoirdon DF .’’ Royal Irish Academy, ms. D i 2, fol. 162r; translated in Knott,‘‘Seventeenth-Century Translation’’, supplement, 109� 10.
23 ‘‘ma thig linn amhain, maille re congnamh an Choimdheadh, na neithi-se do chorsıos go soilleir sothuigsi, saoilmıd go madh lia do na daoinibh deaghaithneachadeisgreideacho ghuidhfeas oruinn ar son ar saothair, ina bhias ag iarroidh toibheimido thabhairt dar ndıthcheall ar son simplidheachta na sttıli inar sgrıobhamar gosonnradhach chum leasa na ndaoine simplidhe, nach foil gearchuiseach anduibheagan na Gaoidhilge .’’ Thomas O’Rahilly, ed., Desiderius by Flaithrı OMaolchonaire (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1941) 2; my translation.
24 The surviving manuscript’s watermark is the arms of Amsterdam, verysimilar to Churchill’s no. 24, which is dated 1686; Watermarks in Paper inHolland, England, France, etc. in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and theirInterconnection (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, 1935). Browne is alsoreported to have composed ‘‘a huge work, in quarto, in the Irish language’’(‘‘opus in 4. magno, sermone Hybernico’’), now apparently lost, in abibliography of Franciscan publications. See Joanne a s. Antonio Salmantino,Bibliotheca universa franciscana , 3 vols. (Madrid, 1732; rpt. Farnborough:Gregg, 1966) II: 328; Helena Concannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland(A.D. 1629�A.D.1929) (Dublin: Gill, 1929) xv� xvi.
25 Chronicle of Mother Mary Bonaventure Browne , ms., Galway Monastery of thePoor Clares, fols. 5r�6v (4� 7). For a modernized edition, see CelsusO’Brien, ed., Recollections of an Irish Poor Clare in the Seventeenth Century
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(Galway: Connacht Tribune, 1993); for extracts, see Concannon. TheBrowne Chronicle is followed in the manuscript by the anonymous ‘‘AdditionalMaterial Following the Narrative of Mary Bonaventure Browne’s ‘Narra-tive’’’, dated 1694.
26 Browne Chronicle fol. 9r (12).27 Browne Chronicle fol. 10v (15).28 Browne Chronicle fol. 9r (12).29 Browne Chronicle fols. 8r� 9v (10� 13).30 The abbess at Orduna is reported to have written the life of Sr. Julian
Anthony Blake; Sr. Catherine Bernard Browne’s life was authored by herIrish Franciscan confessor, James O’Neill (Annals of the English Poor Clares ofGravelines and of their Foundations in Ireland and at Aire, Dunkirk and Rouen ,ms., Darlington Monastery of the Poor Clares, 43; Browne Chronicle fol.8r [10]).
31 Browne Chronicle fol. 10r (14).
Marie-Louise Coolahan is a lecturer in English literature at the National
University of Ireland, Galway. She has worked with the Perdita Project on
women’s manuscripts, and has published on Katherine Philips, the Cavendish
family and Irish-language women’s verse. Her article on occasional meditation is
forthcoming in The Seventeenth Century. She is currently working on a study of
women’s writing practices in early modern Ireland. Address: Department of
English, National University of Ireland, Galway, University Road, Galway City,
Ireland. [email: [email protected]]
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