Nuns writing: Translation, textual mobility and transnational networks
Date
2018-01Author
Coolahan, Marie-Louise
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Coolahan, Marie-Louise. (2018). Nuns Writing: Translation, Textual Mobility and Transnational Networks. In Patricia Phillippy (Ed.), A History of Early Modern Women's Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Abstract
Post-Reformation Catholic religious orders provided women with privileged, multi-layered
spaces for authorship, readership, and textual transmission. Exile and travel were imperative
for British and Irish women religious, exposing them to cross-cultural encounters and
international influences. Convent membership nurtured as co-extensive a set of identities –
national and transnational, individual and communal – that, in other contexts, were perceived
as conflicting. The kinds of writing produced in these convents ranged from obituary and
chronicle history to religious rules and devotional translations. They were required for the
female religious community; they addressed, documented, and shaped that female readership.
But these texts also participated in the Counter-Reformation effort and sustained interest
beyond their initial, female audience. The religious orders, with their pan-European reach,
functioned as transnational networks for the circulation of women’s writings. This wider
transmission and reception illuminates questions relating to gender and authorial credit –
itself a complex topic when convent identity prizes the collective and collaborative over
individual authorship or attribution.
This chapter grounds its discussion of these issues in the devotional and life writings
associated with Mary Ward and Lucy Knatchbull, the translations made by English and Irish
Poor Clares, and Susan Hawley’s account of the Sepulchrine convent at Liège.