Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture

• Published in: British Catholic history 2017, Vol.33 (4), p.657
• Main Author: Van Hyning, Victoria
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cultural studies; Culture; Early modern period; English language; Literary history; Literature; Metaphor; Monasteries; Nuns; Politics; Robinson, Thomas; Women; Writers
• ISSN: 2055-7973; 2055-7981
• DOI: 10.1017/bch.2017.34

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae and/or non-US-ASCII text omitted; see image) Lay Jenna , Beyond the Cloister: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Literary Culture , Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2016, pp. 256, £42.50, ISBN: 978-0-8122-4838-8 Book Reviews Beyond the Cloister is an attempt to 'read [English] literary history differently by recognizing Catholic women's ongoing participation in it, as both subjects and objects of literary representation' (p. 1) after the Reformations of the early modern period.Chapter 1 'Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity' explores the representation of virgins in Arcadia, The Fairie Queene, Marlow's unfinished Hero and Leander, Measure for Measure, and the life and legacy of Margaret Clitherow who 'blurs the boundary between the power of government [...]and the power of the domestic patriarch [...]and thus reveals how the relationship between Catholic wife and Protestant husband could be read as a metaphor for every recusant's relationship with England' (p. 39).Chapter 2 'To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile' reveals how The Duchess of Malfi, Robinson's The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, and a wider Protestant pamphlet culture attempted to deny nuns agency as authors, readers, and rational actors, while nuns' responses to these depictions reveal the complexity of their thought, their anonymous communal self-construction in literature, and their political engagement.