Introduction

Summary

The introduction opens by detailing the development of the conventual movement, giving an overview of the two-hundred-year lifespan of this exile initiative. The chapter then discusses archival survival rates, as well as recent historiographical trends that have seen the English convents in exile become a major area of interest. This literature is explored with the intention of contextualising the English convents in Catholic Europe, opening up wider themes relating to religious and national identity in the convents. As well as providing the context for the chapters of the monograph, the nuns’ adherence to the edicts of Trent are also placed in the broader context of the Catholic Reformation and Catholic Europe. Each chapter is then summarised, with an explanation that, rather than a linear, chronological approach to the convents, the book explores the English convents in exile thematically. The chapters have been ordered to take the reader through the experience of a nun, from entry into the convent to life in enclosure, from what the nuns’ surroundings looked like to how the whole enterprise was funded, from what nuns did all day to their wider place within the Catholic world.