The final chapter considers the fixed, devotional brainwork that early modern writers attributed to Catholic English girls in particular who were training to serve God. By turning their body-minds toward a life of perpetual virginity, these girls might retain the cognitive gifts of adolescence indefinitely. In this way, they challenged early modern ideas about cold, mentally inert female adulthood as well as Protestant-inflected trajectories of female development that culminated in marriage. The chapter focuses on the seventeenth-century life writings and paintings that chronicle the teenage years of Mary Ward, the Catholic Englishwoman who founded over a dozen, unenclosed religious houses on the Continent based on the Jesuit’s apostolic mission, which included educating England’s recusant daughters — a process that included teaching them theatrical skills necessary for defending their faith back home. In her writings, written during her 30s, Ward is keenly aware of her adolescent mind’s ability to turn toward God with intention. Through her memorial reconstructions, she explicitly figures herself as occupying and owning the stage of girlhood that extended from puberty to marriage — using it to enact a particular kind of cultural memory about English Catholicism while projecting hopes for its future.

Chapter Five explores the early modern phenomenon of girls “putting on” the minds of others. It argues that, when they engaged in these acts of cognitive play, girls were able to try on alternative perspectives and experiences — not necessarily male ones, but those that belonged to sexually active females: the lover, the harlot, the pregnant woman. It focuses on the girls from John Lyly’s Gallathea, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, and Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure, all of whom costume their bodies and put on the minds of sexually experienced females. Their performances allow them to project themselves into these roles without actually becoming “women” in a heteronormative sense that would require their bodies to transform through penetrative intercourse, pregnancy, or birth. The girls who dress up in these plays do so under different levels of duress, but they all share an ability to use their brainwork to manipulate the Protestant girl-to-woman script they were expected to follow — to resist, revise and, in some cases, reject it.