This chapter considers the treatment of religion in Puccini’s operas, with a strong focus on the two works with particular ecclesiastical themes, Tosca and Suor Angelica. It shows how Puccini drew upon the example of earlier models of religious representation in opera, by composers including Boito and Verdi. It considers the changing relationship between the Church and the state during Puccini’s lifetime, and the ongoing (though evolving) role of censorship laws. The use of liturgical scenes by Puccini and his contemporaries within the giovane scuola is discussed, with close analysis of stock techniques that are employed. The author concludes that Puccini’s works are made particularly effective by their habit of contrasting the secular and the sacred, using a more nuanced characterisation than is found in the works of his contemporaries.

This essay examines medieval women dramatists, from Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim in tenth-century Germany, through Hildegard of Bingen and her Ordo Virtutum (Play of the Virtues) in the twelfth century, to Katherine Sutton, Abbess of Barking in the late fourteenth century, who composed liturgical dramas for Holy Week. The essay locates these women dramatists within the wider context of medieval convent performances in England and Europe, and shows that religious women were not only authors but also actors, directors, and costume makers; their convents provided the play space, while laywomen sometimes also contributed. Niebrzydowski also explores the often speculative or conjectural evidence for womenߣs participation in drama outside the convents. Although there is only one definitive English example of women as associated with a Corpus Christi production, a lost Chester pageant of ߢour Lady thassumpcionߣ, other fragmentary evidence suggests lay womenߣs involvement in a range of dramatic forms from saintsߣ lives, interludes, and morality plays to processions and pageants.

The rich textual history of Syon Abbey, the only English house of St Birgitta of Swedenߣs Order of St Saviour, is the focus of this essay. Although there is limited evidence of English Bridgettine nuns authoring their own texts, St Birgitta, Syon Abbey, and its community of nuns as well as monks had profound and multiple influences on womenߣs literary culture in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century England. While the significance of Syon within the late medieval English cultural landscape cannot be overemphasised, its (textual) community is also representative of the intricacies of womenߣs literary culture. Syon women, including as well as superiors aristocratic lay women with close ties to the abbey, were engaged in the commissioning of texts. The Syon community, led by Abbess Elizabeth Gibbs, was quick to exploit the new technology of printing, and also supported by the patronage of wealthy noble women, such as Lady Margaret Beaufort. However, the textuality of the abbey expanded beyond these powerful women to include the wider community of Syon nuns, and beyond England into continental Europe.

Chapter 7, “Matters of Faith: Catholic Intelligentsia and the Church,” asks how Catholics behaved in Warsaw and why. Roman Catholicism was the religion of the majority of Varsovians and had played an important role in the development of the Polish national project. In the absence of a Polish government, the Church provided a potential locus of authority for Poles. Warsaw’s priests drew particular negative attention from the Nazi occupation for their potential influence and they were viciously persecuted, imprisoned, and often sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Nevertheless, leaders of the Church, from the pope in Rome to local bishops, were hesitant to provide guidance, support Nazi occupation, or encourage opposition to it. Despite the lack of a top-down Catholic policy, this chapter argues that individual priests and lay Catholic leaders were motivated by their religious faith to form everything from charities to a postwar clerical state. Crucial among Catholics was the question of the developing Holocaust and the role of Polish Jews in Polish Catholic society, which sharply divided them.

This chapter considers the financial management of the English convents in Catholic Europe. It places the convents’ economic dealings in the context of their overall history, underlining just how vital this aspect of convent life was to their very survival and function. This chapter starts by briefly considering the nuns’ devotion to poverty, before exploring some of the necessary expenses accrued by the foundations. The different economic income strands exploited by the English convents is then outlined, before some of the problems they experienced in their finances are explored. The chapter finishes with a consideration of whether the convents were ever able to separate completely from their English roots as far as finances were concerned. Though the English convents adopted similar approaches to financial management as their continental equivalents and were frequently the model of Tridentine economic behaviour, they did face additional problems as a result of their nationality. Ultimately, the English convents existed in a precarious economic zone that could easily fall prey to both domestic and international fluctuations in more than just the economic environment.

The conclusion asks whether the exile women religious were English women who happened to be Catholic, or were they Catholic women who happened to be English? It argues that there is a far stronger case for the latter interpretation. Yes, they kept an English element of identity but this was as part of the transnational Church. It challenges a historiographical approach to the English convents and women religious that prioritises their position as communities of women or interprets them through a lens of nationality, considering them simply as communities of English. It stresses that there is a need to reorientate our understanding of the convents towards Catholic Europe and its centres, with Rome predominant but also acknowledging the importance of Spanish and French religious trends. The English convents were self-consciously Catholic communities, not isolated but fully committed parts of the universal Catholic Church and this is the core identifier that underlined their very existence.