This essay addresses the education of religious women, figured in terms of horizontal and vertical learning, in England at the end of the Middle Ages. It highlights connections between women rather than the more widely discussed relationships between women and their male spiritual advisors. From an examination of the texts obtained by women leaders of the late medieval womenߣs houses, including the English Bridgettine abbey of Syon, it is evident that superiors acquired works relating to the religious rule of life and other devotional texts, and aimed to enable their communities to understand their life and governance. Erler shows that such works were shared via the vertical learning of refectory and other communal readings. Alongside this, more traditional horizontal learning or hierarchical instruction also took place in womenߣs houses: nuns were expected to emulate their elders, and the elders to offer guidance, including in relation to their reading, to which the exchange of books between nuns was central practice. Finally, there is evidence of more formal convent instruction, framed in compassionate and supportive terms.

This study of medieval nuns and abbesses as scribes focuses on manuscript evidence from post-Conquest England, especially in relation to changing institutional ownership. Looking initially at an early-twelfth-century legal manuscript from St Paulߣs London (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 383), the essay draws our attention to short texts that were subsequently added to it by one ߢMatildaߣ for the benefit of a female audience. Similar additions are made to another manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Vespasian D. xiv) which contains homilies and saintsߣ lives, this time by an ߢancillaߣ or nun, who inserted prayers that she had authored herself sometime in the late twelfth century. These findings are important because there is very little proof of womenߣs scribal activity in medieval England: hitherto scholars have assumed that manuscripts are written and glossed by men.

Chapter 2 sets out the history of the Province from 1348 to 1559 showing first its resilience in the face of the Black Death with new foundations in Ireland and the establishment of the nuns’ convent at Dartford. Its resilence is then shown against theological attack in anti-fraternal literature, including writings by Wycliff, and the rise of Lollardy. The Province’s continuing value to key supporters is shown through the patronage manifest in church decoration, through lay burials and grants of confraternity, while their secure place in civic life before the Reformation is seen in relation to the guilds associated with their churches. The sudden collapse of the Province at the Henrician Reformation is then examined to identify several factors, the most important of which was the crown’s imposition of its agents as Provincials and Priors.

Chapter 4 sets out and assesses the role played by Cardinal Howard in restoring the English Province and in organising its mission through the establishment of a priory and school at Bornhem, a nunnery at Brussels, a house in Rome, and, by a bequest in his will, a college at Louvain. It looks at how these houses functioned within the restored Province, the growing importance of the school for recruitment, and reveals the houses’ financial dependence on lay benefactors, before the friars and nuns were forced to flee in 1794 when the French occupied the Low Countries.

Although Hildegard of Bingen described herself multiple times in her writings as indocta (unlearned), medieval accounts and modern scholarship reveal discrepancies and conflicting information regarding this claim. What, then, was the extent of her education? Instead of answering this question directly by interrogating the intent, meaning, or reliability of her statements and those of her contemporaries, a broader picture of educational standards, resources, and contexts for the intellectual formation of women religious in medieval Germany is investigated. Invoking the full breadth of meaning of ‘women religious’ to include nuns, canonesses, consecrated widows, beguines, and anchorites unveils a wide-ranging scope of educational activity. Contemporary sources, including monastic and canonical rules, hagiographic literature of female vitae, and concrete evidence of libraries and scribal activity in female communities elucidate details of materials, learning conditions, pedagogy, and intellectual engagement and creativity. This chapter thus contextualizes the medieval German environment of female literacy and learning with which Hildegard would have been familiar.

This chapter highlights women’s roles in medieval death practice, arguing that women’s traditional care for the dying and dead and their social role as mourners were consistent with, and in fact fundamental to, the spiritual role of nuns as valued intercessors. As custodians of family memory, women were central to medieval remembering; however, nuns have typically been seen as marginal to the monastic practices of liturgical memoria – the ritualized prayer for the dead that is generally thought to have become the specialised work of ordained monks by the Central Middle Ages. Focusing on the commemorative and intercessory roles of women as wives and mothers, the place of women in biblical narratives of the Passion and Resurrection and the social and spiritual contributions of female monasticism, this chapter argues that women’s ties to death, as both a practical and a spiritual matter, provided nuns with a central and valued role in medieval memorial practice and intercessory prayer.

This chapter explores the competing memories about the transmission of Sir Thomas More’s hair-shirt – the penitential garment he wore beneath his clothing for most of his adult life – the object’s significance to More’s descendants, and its devotional and memorial function within the religious communities they founded or patronised between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. At the heart of the hair-shirt story are two Margarets: his blood daughter, Margaret Roper (1505–44), and his adopted ward, Margaret Giggs (1508–70). Different historical accounts claim each Margaret as uniquely aware of More’s asceticism, and that they each received the hair-shirt from him when he died. These claims suggest each woman had a superlative connection to More’s spirituality and beliefs. The hair-shirt symbolises More’s deep commitment to God throughout his political career and service to Henry VIII, a commitment that would cost him his life. More’s state execution both literally and figuratively exposed the hair-shirt and his largely private devotional practices. The hair-shirt became a new surface on which memories of the Reformation, and the construction of English Catholic identity have been formed from the sixteenth century to the present day.

Women as well as men from western Europe were drawn to the religious life in the Holy Land, and convents for women were an important feature of the Latin monastic landscape. The largest, St Anne’s and St Mary the Great in Jerusalem and Bethany, near Jerusalem, owned substantial landed property throughout the Christendom, and their abbesses could wield important political influence. St Anne’s and Bethany in particular had close associations with the Latin ruling dynasty of Jerusalem. This chapter examines the history of the women’s convents in the Crusader States and their fate after the loss of territory in the thirteenth century.

Moving on to the production and the sale of books, the chapter first considers laywomen and nuns as scribes, showing how some convents became centres for the copying of manuscripts for their own use or sometimes for sale. It then studies the ways in which some laywomen were able to contribute to the running of their families’ printing and bookselling businesses, and it describes cases in which some religious orders promoted or even assisted in the printing of books.

The second chapter considers the exile English convents’ commitment to a core tenet of the Council of Trent’s teaching on female religious life: the implementation and maintenance of full enclosure. It opens by detailing the convents’ initiation rites, through the ceremonies of clothing and profession of vows. This chapter considers the relationship between English women religious and enclosure as a touchstone indicator of commitment to the initiatives of the Catholic Reformation. In their dedication to such a major Catholic identifier, it is argued that the English convents did not just match their continental equivalents but even outstripped them, gaining a reputation for their full commitment to this aspect of religious identity. In short, English nuns were committed to the tenets of the Council of Trent, especially those surrounding enclosure. This dedication allowed the nuns to place themselves in the vanguard of new Catholic Reformation initiatives, though this in itself reveals a paradox: for all that they embraced enclosure, the communities were not cut off from the wider world or its perceptions but remained involved with it.

Chapter 1 examines recruitment, looking at questions surrounding a postulant’s choice of convent and how they managed to travel there. The very foundation of each exile convent was based on national identity: these were, after all, English convents. Yet this insistence on Englishness did not only emanate from the women religious themselves but was fundamental to their gaining permission to establish convents in the first place. Nevertheless, it is argued that particular religious identities affected the process of joining a convent. It takes as its case study convent recruitment from the county of Essex to argue that women chose particular convents based on an interplay between home and abroad, as well as clerical and familial patronage. It highlights the effect of one clerical movement – the Jesuits – on convent recruitment patterns, yet these issues of competing spiritualities were not, despite first appearances, solely products of particular national contexts but part of wider developments in Catholic Europe. They show the formation of the English convents as part of the European – and even global – Catholic Reformation rather than presenting them as isolated national enclaves.

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.

Monastic writers have long been considered the prototypical writers of history in the Middle Ages. This essay asks just how writing about the past related to the monastic life, in the myriad ways that nuns and monks practiced it in Ireland and Britain in the Middle Ages, and how history-writing was part of a broad array of memorial practices over the whole period. The concept of memory offers a practical context for considering the full range of historical production in monastic archives: romances, lais, sagas, and letters alongside chronicles, saints’ lives and cartularies. Since memory was also a major means of interaction between monastics and seculars, memory also clarifies the fluid boundaries between so-called monastic and secular forms of history.