Over the last twenty years there has been a groundswell of scholarship illuminating the lives and work of English nuns (also termed women religious) living on the European mainland during the early modern period. In Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile, Victoria Van Hyning recovers and examines women's written activity at two houses of English Augustinian Canonesses: St. Monica's, founded in 1609 in Louvain and its 1629 offshoot in Bruges, the Convent of Nazareth. Seventeenth-century authors including Catherine Holland (1637–1720), Winefrid Thimelby (1618–1690), Augustina Bedingfield (1604–1661), Mary Copley (1591/92–1669), Mary Constable (1606–1673), and Lucy Herbert (1669–1744) were composing letters, chronicles, accounts, devotional works, pedagogical texts, conversion narratives, translations, and governance documents. Through impressive primary research from convent archives, Van Hyning focuses on these “powerful post-holders”—those charged with the maintenance of the communal documents—because they could shape the legacy of the institution through their contributions (35). Van Hyning categorizes chronicle writing as anonymous autobiography, in which an author does not use their own name, and subsumed autobiography in which an anonymous writer “shapes a text around their own experiences, politics, theology, or ideology to such a degree that the work can be read as an expression and exploration of the author's selfhood” (29). The examples that Van Hyning discusses suggest a reflective process in which the individual perspective is shaped by the expectations, beliefs, and norms of the community. When there is a glimpse of the real person behind the façade of anonymity, the past comes to life.
Although there were customs of surveillance limiting personal writing or correspondence, textual production and dissemination were taken very seriously in the English convents. Texts were woven throughout nuns’ daily lives; beyond composing, they engaged with written documents through singing, reading, and listening. Nuns also translated texts for use within and across convents. Extensive convent libraries attest to the value placed upon spiritual education, as well as the acquisition and preservation of books and manuscripts.
The letters of Winefrid Thimelby, prioress at St. Monica's from 1668 until her death in 1689, are the subject of chapter 1. Written to her extended family, the letters portray an identity shaped by recusant resistance. In chapter 2, Van Hyning turns to Catherine Holland, professed at Nazareth in 1664, and who shortly thereafter composed How I Came to Change My Religion, detailing her Protestant family's moves to Holland and Bruges and back again during the Anglo-Dutch Wars. Van Hyning argues that Holland's conversion narrative is modeled upon Saint Augustine's Confessions.
From Augustinian influences to those of Thomas More, Van Hyning investigates in chapter 3 the writings of Mary Copley, a nun at St. Monica's from 1631 until 1659. Copley's chronicling draws upon the oldest text surviving at the convent, Elizabeth Shirley's The Life of Mother Margaret Clement (1626), which details the life of the first and last English prioress at the Flemish St. Ursula's. Like Clement, a descendent of Thomas More, Copley frames the nuns as the spiritual offspring of Margaret Gibbs, “a good grandmother” who was Clement's own mother through adoption by More (147). These connections provide a spiritual lineage legitimizing the community's origins.
Indicating competent management, financial support, and heavenly favor, a convent's solvency was another measure of its reputation. Yet the roles of procuratrix and arcaria (which included managing convent accounts alongside the subprioress and prioress) were carried out by nuns with no formal training. In chapter 4, Van Hyning turns to Grace Constable, professed at St. Monica's in 1625 and founder of the 1629 branch in Nazareth, and who served as procuratrix, arcaria, and subprioress. Constable's contributions to the Nazareth chronicle are her “adaptation and expansion” of the institution's financial accounts (197). Also of interest is Augustina Bedingfield who began at St. Monica's, moved to Nazareth in 1639, and later became their prioress. She is named by writers from both convents as a gifted translator of the statutes at St. Monica's put into use at the Nazareth convent in 1644–45, resulting in a more centralized process of money management just as their institution was expanding.
The intrepid Lucy Herbert is the subject of chapter 5. From a prominent Jacobite family who followed James II into exile, Herbert joined Nazareth in 1662, becoming prioress from 1709 until her death in 1744. Beyond composing the chronicle as prioress, Herbert also wrote and published devotional and instructional materials for use within convents. Herbert's “evolving interest in hierarchy” can be seen in her portion of the chronicle (240). For example, she describes the women under her leadership as “subjects” (244). Her theological preferences also come to light, namely her interest in angels, and her work revising the community's statutes, which put her into conflict within the community. There is not always conformity to a communal ethos in writings by those whose ambitions or self-interest outpaced the confines of anonymity. Collaborating less but producing and disseminating more, Herbert should be a better-known figure in women's history. Van Hyning gives less attention to subsequent Nazareth chroniclers, Mary Olivia Darrell—the first writer to break anonymity—and Mary Augustina More. The ways in which they contended with Herbert's legacy and shaped the evolving identity of the community into the latter half of the eighteenth century would be interesting to explore further.
In addition to a helpful glossary, the appendix contains the full text of Holland's How I Came to Change My Religion, transcribed from the non-autographed manuscript that survives in the Bruges archives. This lively account is a rare and tantalizing contribution to women's life-writing during the period and would supplement readings in literature and history anthologies. Van Hyning's expansive analysis of the documents and genres produced by women religious—and their various influences, uses, and receptions—enables a contemporary reader to envision more fully the convent as a space in which women's textual engagement and production thrived.
