In recent years, scholars have begun to remedy the earlier critical neglect of the convents founded on the Continent for Englishwomen by publishing editions of nuns’ writings as well as articles and monographs analysing the lives and texts of these women. Convent Autobiography is a timely and welcome contribution to this larger effort to recover the cultural, historical, and literary importance of these institutions and their members. Offering a meticulous analysis of self-writing within the English Augustinian convents of St Monica’s at Louvain and Our Lady of Nazareth at Bruges, Van Hyning ambitiously seeks to document the role of autobiography within these cloisters while also reconfiguring scholarly ideas of this genre itself. She demonstrates the relevance of the exiled convents to literary studies more generally by revealing that the nuns’ writings have the potential to reshape our understanding of textual production within the early modern era.
In addition to providing much-needed historical context for the two convents at the centre of this study, the introduction identifies two new subgenres of autobiography. While Van Hyning uses the term ‘anonymous autobiography’ to describe ‘texts in any format in which an author communicates about themselves without using their own name or a pseudonym’ (p. 28), she coins the phrase ‘subsumed autobiography’ for ‘works in which an anonymous author, through the very vehicle of their anonymity, shapes a text around their own experiences, politics, theology, or ideology to such a degree that the work can be read as an expression of the author’s selfhood’ (p. 29). This new terminology reflects the bespoke forms of writing that emerged within the cloister, where key elements of monastic piety such as humility resulted in distinctively religious—as opposed to secular—attitudes toward authorship.
In its opening chapters, Convent Autobiography displays a thought-provoking willingness to test the boundaries of autobiography as a genre by considering unconventional kinds of autobiography with more standard exemplars of this form. The first chapter analyses autobiographical tendencies in the letters of Winefrid Thimelby, a member of the Louvain house. While Thimelby’s correspondence with her family back home in England has already received substantial scrutiny from historians and literary scholars, Van Hyning sheds fresh light on these works by considering how the epistle could serve as a form of life writing, both for Thimelby and her correspondents. In the second chapter, Van Hyning turns to the genre of autobiography proper by examining the conversion narrative of Catherine Holland, who joined the Bruges Augustinians. Noting that critics have so far failed to recognize Catholic women’s engagement with St Augustine’s Confessions or the genre of autobiography more generally, Van Hyning redresses this scholarly oversight through a painstaking consideration of the ways that Holland uses Augustine as a template for her account of her conversion to Catholicism.
The remaining chapters all centre on the genre of the chronicle, intriguingly and persuasively demonstrating the importance of anonymous autobiography and subsumed autobiography within the cloister. In chapter three, Van Hyning identifies Mary Copley as the author of the ‘Chronicle of St Monica’s’, which covers the years 1535 to 1659. A great-granddaughter of Margaret Giggs Clement (Thomas More’s adopted daughter) and great-niece of Margaret Clement (foundress of the Louvain Augustinians), Copley carefully situates her convent as the spiritual descendants of More by emphasizing the spiritual legacy of her great-aunt as well as female learning at Louvain, thereby rewriting the Morean legacy for a cloistered setting. Chapter four makes a strong, if circumstantial, case that Grace Constable acted as the first chronicler at Nazareth by drawing on the text’s relationship to the house’s financial records. Deftly exploring the way that bookkeeping provided a framework for understanding corporate history, Van Hyning presents a new and interesting method for reading chronicles. Finally, the fifth chapter, aptly titled ‘The Prioresses’ Tales’, turns to later sections of the Nazareth chronicles in order to understand how Lucy Herbert and Mary Olivia Darell portrayed their roles as prioresses in a text that was ostensibly anonymous. Through a careful comparison of Herbert’s anonymous manuscript works and her printed texts, Van Hyning is able to demonstrate this writer’s consistent interest in strengthening the authority that prioresses and other convent officials possessed as representatives of God on earth. The result is a stunning exposé of how one controversial prioress employed anonymity in order to legitimate and increase her power within the cloister.
Convent Autobiography concludes with an Appendix that will be of great scholarly interest in its own right: a critical edition of Holland’s ‘How I Came to Change My Religion’. Previously available only in C. S. Durrant’s lightly censored version (A Link between Flemish Mystics and English Martyrs [1925]), this important conversion narrative—the only such extant autobiography composed by a member of the English convents abroad—has long deserved a new edition according to modern editorial standards. As a result, Van Hyning has done a great service to the larger community of historians and literary scholars working on early modern English nuns. Presented in original spelling and contextualized with thorough glosses, Holland’s account is now available for the first time in its complete form to a broad scholarly audience.
In general, this monograph is scrupulously researched, although eagle-eyed scholars of the Morean tradition may notice two very minor errors. Richard Hyrde dedicated Margaret More Roper’s translation of Erasmus’ Precatio dominica (and not his own translation of De institutione foeminae Christianae) to Frances Staverton (p. 149). Elsewhere, the monograph seems to suggest that Mary Roper Basset translated More’s entire English Works into English (p. 152), rather than just one text within this massive folio. However, such trivial mistakes are easily outweighed by the otherwise high quality of this excellent monograph.
Overall, Convent Autobiography is a major contribution to criticism on early modern Catholicism, and it belongs on the bookshelves of scholars interested in autobiography, the convents abroad, cloistered writing, and monastic history. Van Hyning’s intrepid detective work and ground-breaking treatment of autobiography will open up valuable new terrain for anyone specializing in history, literary studies, religious studies, and women’s studies.
