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CHAPTER 2

To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile

The female virgins of late Elizabethan literature, whether votaresses of Venus or novices of the Poor Clares, were products of a culture in transition. At the same time that Elizabeth fashioned her virginity into a sign of royal power, Catholic women exposed the fissures in a religious settlement that did not allow for monastic vocations. Some traveled to the continent to join foreign and newly established English cloisters, while others practiced their faith with relative impunity due to the conflicting legal positions of female coverture and married recusancy. These women, who put pressure on ideals of married chastity, influenced both the narrative and form of poems and plays that explored their political and social significance. The presumptive marriages of The Faerie Queene, Hero and Leander, and Measure for Measure recede before us, as each text suggests a telos thwarted by the demands of character, of book history, and of death—or fulfilled only in protest. Yet even as discourses associated with Catholic femininity helped shape the formal properties of canonical English literature at the turn of the seventeenth century, Catholic women themselves were seldom acknowledged as authors or participants in literary creation.

In the decades that followed, as the establishment of new English convents on the continent gained momentum, plays such as John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and pamphlets like Thomas Robinson’s The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon depicted women as victims of a religious culture that depended on the control of female bodies through enclosure and the corruption of holy books—two of the interlocking manifestations of depravity that undergirded anti-Catholic polemic.¹ While pamphleteers like Robinson addressed the convent directly, in exposés of specific orders or more general critiques of monasticism, the most explicitly anti-Catholic drama of the early seventeenth century responded to the revived interest in monastic life among English Catholics only obliquely. Unlike Shakespeare, who explored the legal pressures on faith and choice through a young woman who wished to be a nun in 1604, later playwrights shied away from direct depictions of the convent or its inhabitants while reviling Catholic devotional materials and the clerical hierarchy.² By not including nuns in their condemnations of Catholicism,³ playwrights such as Webster and Middleton effaced the vibrancy, popularity, and literary activities of the early modern English convents, even as they critiqued the concept of female enclosure through treatments of forced chastity and confinement. Plays like Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi were deeply invested cultural productions that obscured—and have continued to obscure, in our own critical discourse—early modern English nuns’ literary engagements with the religious politics of their native country. Rather than deriding nuns as writers, transcribers, translators, and compilers, English authors instead depicted them as objects to be manipulated by corrupt religious and political authorities. They thus repudiated Catholic women’s literary contributions as nothing more than empty echoes, produced at the behest of priests or not at all. Such representations created a double bind, in which neither the presence nor absence of texts produced by Catholic women could successfully demonstrate their unconstrained participation in literary culture.

These competing strands of early seventeenth-century literature—on the one hand, anti-Catholic Jacobean drama and, on the other, the writings of Catholic women—were woven together by the pamphlets that informed both literary representation and polemical discourse associated with religious conflict. This chapter traces these connections in order to demonstrate how physical markers of faith and history—ruins, relics, books, bones—enabled Protestant authors including Webster and Robinson to critique Catholic devotional practices as excessively focused on bodies and materiality, while at the same time practicing their own substitution of presence for absence. In place of real English nuns, living in exile on the continent, Webster staged a poisoned book and the broken walls of an abandoned cloister. In place of political epistles and illuminated manuscript histories crafted by the nuns of Syon Abbey in Lisbon, Robinson described the bones of dead babies, false relics, and interfoliated books. But these same substitutions, when dissected and reconstituted within the convent, could authorize nuns’ literary projects rather than effacing them: in a manuscript response to Robinson, the nuns of Syon imagine an allegorical trial in which Truth evaluates The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in material terms, first dismissing the pamphlet because it is printed rather than handwritten and then enumerating the many flaws in its materialist logic. By responding to a single pamphlet that shared its anti-Catholic DNA with Italianate revenge tragedies, they offered both a rebuke and an alternative to the English literature that would deny their authorial agency.

For Webster and Robinson, women occupied an untenable and abject position within a Catholic culture that celebrated and exploited the material at the expense of the spiritual, and Webster attempted to deny the contemporary appeal of the cloister through his portraits of the Duchess and Julia in The Duchess of Malfi. Both women hold liminal positions at the boundaries between the social categories delineated for women in Measure for Measure. The Duchess is widow and wife, compelled to remain single by her brothers, who wish to control her body and property, but secretly married to her steward Antonio. This relationship, largely confined to her bedchamber, enables her to redefine chastity and enclosure in a domestic space. Julia is wife and mistress, seduced by a religious man into a relationship that leads to her death. The Duchess’s torture and death, like Julia’s death by poisoned book, depend upon the manipulation of material signs that suggest contemporary debates over the theatricality of Catholic worship, the status of the book, and women’s role within the church. Nearly a decade later, Thomas Robinson explored a similar set of concerns in The Anatomy. Like his fellow pamphleteers, Robinson treated the convent as a thinly disguised prison, where nuns were “mewed up” to face poverty and sexual exploitation at the hands of “Impostors and cheating Copesmates.”⁴ But Robinson’s pamphlet was markedly different from others of the period in its focus on a single convent, Syon Abbey, which had survived the dissolution intact and eventually settled in Lisbon. Robinson’s pamphlet builds on the specificity of literary representation in order to portray women who entered continental cloisters as powerless and silly creatures, incapable of resisting priests who wielded authority through sexual dominance and corrupt books.

Robinson’s prurient depiction of monastic sexual exploits is grounded in literary culture, from the imagery of anti-Catholic plays to the convent’s alleged reading materials and writing practices. Yet even as he made female participation in literary culture nearly unthinkable, his summary of Syon’s history and description of monastic life also offered specific details for refutation. As active participants in textual exchange and production, the English nuns of Syon Abbey in Lisbon produced a manuscript response to Robinson that emphatically debunked his claims. Rather than accepting his positioning of them as the passive victims of enclosure, they transformed controversialist language into the basis for self-representation. By situating themselves within a physical space and book culture that featured neither the tragic excesses of Jacobean drama nor the bawdy priests of anti-Catholic polemic, they sidestepped the double bind that would erase or invalidate female monastic writing. Their rhetorical sophistication enables a complex series of reverse substitutions: in the absence of material proof, they provide textual presence through exegesis and thereby build an argument that not only enumerates Robinson’s errors but also offers an alternative literary culture for English Catholics.

Books, Bodies, and Ruins: The Spectral Convent in Jacobean Drama