Beyond the Cloister is an attempt to ‘read [English] literary history differently by recognizing Catholic women’s ongoing participation in it, as both subjects and objects of literary representation’ (p. 1) after the Reformations of the early modern period. In her introduction, four chapters and epilogue, Lay explores the presence of early modern Catholic women, mostly nuns and the figure of the nun, within canonical literature, such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess, and Margaret Cavendish’s Convent of Pleasure, as well as in texts composed by nuns on the continent and Catholic recusants in England. The volume seeks to bring canonical and often-marginalized Catholic voices into conversation, and while the writers under discussion rarely engage directly with one another in their respective literatures, Lay’s study proves that there is value in attending to these voices in tandem. While they may not speak directly with one another, these voices speak across geopolitical, gender, and confessional divides to concerns about the place of women in early modern society, the threat or solace of Catholic belief, and the powerful lure of the convent as, on the one hand, a place of retreat, of female society or perfect devotion to God, or on the other as a place of corruption, unnatural relationships between women, and between nuns and their confessors, as represented in the salacious pamphlets of Thomas Robinson and Lewis Owen, amongst others.
Lay gives plenty of space to the anxieties of early modern Protestant authors, but she also makes room for the powerful voices of early modern Catholics, particularly women, who often defined and defended their faith with clarity and style. Lay shows us how we might bring Catholic voices into our study of canonical works, even if we must often do this via side entrances and back doors. This book would therefore be particularly useful to those structuring undergraduate and graduate level courses, who seek to complicate the canon by incorporating writings relevant to gender and Catholicism.
In her introduction Lay traces the possibility that Mary Champney, an English Bridgettine nun of Syon who professed in 1569, was the same Mary Champneys whom we find mentioned in legal records of the divorce proceedings between George Puttenham, author of The Art of English Poesy, which he dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Windsor (possibly a Catholic). Amongst the many examples of abuse and adultery laid against him is the charge that Puttenham raped Champneys, a ‘waitinge gentlewoman of [Lady Windsor’s] beinge of tender yeres’ (p. 8). Champneys is depicted in the legal records as resisting Puttenham’s seductive words, for which he beat her, raped her, got her pregnant, and then took her overseas to Antwerp to have the child, where he dumped her. ‘Champneys was not Puttenham’s only, last, or even most pitiable victim’ (p. 9), Lay writes, but Lay presents her story because of the possibility that she later became a nun, who was memorialized in The Life and Good End of Sister Marie. This possible outcome, Lay argues, offers ‘an alternative to what Woolf imagined for Shakespeare’s sister’ (p. 9) who dies unacknowledged for her writing, and women represented in Puttenham’s Art, whose virginities are forcibly taken on their wedding night, at which point they are transformed into meek and pious wives subjected to their husbands. The hagiographical Life, in which the nun Champney resists the fair words and hollow promises of a ship’s captain who promises to marry her, declaring she will be a bride of Christ instead, ‘allows us to imagine a voice for Puttenham’s Champneys’ (p. 13). The tantalizing suggestion that the Life redeems the pitiable historic Champneys is both fascinating and frustrating, as well as indicative of the analysis that follows in the remainder of the book. Readers who are unwilling to inhabit the imaginative spaces that Lay creates will be frustrated by the absence of concrete proof of contact and influence in many instances, but those willing to imagine that a Champney could be a Champneys will find the volume suggestive and enriching with regards to the links between a largely Protestant canon and early modern Catholic literary production.
Chapter 1 ‘Fractured Discourse: Recusant Women and Forms of Virginity’ explores the representation of virgins in Arcadia, The Fairie Queene, Marlow’s unfinished Hero and Leander, Measure for Measure, and the life and legacy of Margaret Clitherow who ‘blurs the boundary between the power of government [...] and the power of the domestic patriarch [...] and thus reveals how the relationship between Catholic wife and Protestant husband could be read as a metaphor for every recusant’s relationship with England’ (p. 39). Lay argues persuasively that recusant women ‘were imagined to be outside the ideological space occupied by the chaste and obedient wife’ (p. 41) which became a source of anxiety for Protestant authors in their depictions of womanhood, chastity, obedience, marriage, and religious choice.
Chapter 2 ‘To the Nunnery: Enclosure and Polemic in the English Convents in Exile’ reveals how The Duchess of Malfi, Robinson’s The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, and a wider Protestant pamphlet culture attempted to deny nuns agency as authors, readers, and rational actors, while nuns’ responses to these depictions reveal the complexity of their thought, their anonymous communal self-construction in literature, and their political engagement.
Chapter 3 ‘A Game of Her Own: The Reformation of Obedience’ offers a powerful analysis of the literary legacy of Sir Thomas More at the Benedictine convents of Cambrai and Paris, particularly within the manuscript and print production of nun Dame Gertrude More, his great granddaughter. Lay draws comparisons and contrasts between Middleton’s Game at Chess and Gertrude’s Spiritual Exercises, revealing how questions of obedience to God, superiors, and the State treated by More in the sixteenth century, and taken up by Gertrude and Middleton in the seventeenth ‘anticipate the central questions of the English Civil War’ (p. 91). In her treatment of Game at Chess, Lay argues that ‘the Black Queen’s Pawn creates a space for monastic disobedience’ akin to the allowable disobedience outlined by Gertrude in her print and manuscript writings.
Chapter 4 ‘Cloisters and Country Houses: Women’s Literary Communities’ focuses on ‘alternate narratives of English literary history, which become legible when we shift our focus away from the traces of Catholic women in canonical literature and toward traces of canonical literature in communities associated with the convent’ (p. 120). Chief among her case studies are the Aston-Thimelby coterie and letter network situated at Tixall in Staffordshire, and St Monica’s convent, Louvain, and this group’s engagement with the works of Southwell and Donne. The chapter also analyzes Marvell’s Upon Appleton House and the function of literary consumption in The Convent of Pleasure. While the latter makes no explicit mention of Catholicism or doctrinal controversies ‘Cavendish nevertheless points to convents not only as places of female community and refuge from men but also of literary creation’ (p. 157) thus suggesting that actual Catholic convents may have offered women literary opportunities and other freedoms.
In the Epilogue, ‘Failures of Literary History’, Lay examines Passion poems by Donne, Milton, Crashaw, George Herbert, and an anonymous author recorded in Constance Aston Fowler’s verse miscellany (from Tixall), arguing that we must be alive to the early modern religious prejudices that have shaped our modern canon. Lay moves on to conclude that ‘Catholic women unsettle and disrupt narrative, form, and genre, forcing us to bring renewed attention even to those poems and plays that seem not at all concerned with them’ (p. 171). This argument lies at the heart of what will make this book successful in the eyes of some readers, and hard to swallow for others. For those who need concrete evidence of influence, readership and active response on the part of one writer to another, Beyond the Cloister will prove a difficult read. But for those interested in the ways that ideas moved across confessionally divided communities and manifested at both the centre and the margin, Beyond the Cloister provides a fascinating methodology and new avenues of approach.
