The importance of women to the survival of Catholicism in post-Reformation England has long been recognized but it is only in the last two decades that scholarly attention has brought into focus those Catholic Englishwomen who, from 1598 onward, crossed the Channel to join the English convents newly established in the Low Countries, France, and Spain. It was a life of exile in religious communities, which swiftly became writing collectives. Employing a variety of genres, they recorded their lives, wrote prayers, works of spiritual direction, poetry, and polemic and in doing so participated directly in the political, religious, and literary discourses of the day. Yet as Jenna Lay shows in this exceptional book, these women and their writings have been largely excluded from the record of English literary history.

Lay argues that this exclusion is a consequence of denial of their presence and relevance by Protestant critics, who, adopting specific and identifiable literary strategies, portrayed them as either irrelevant remnants of a pre-Reformation church or as rebels. Evidence of their output, she shows, not only contradicts this construction but forms a crucial tool with which to examine the English literary canon of the first half of the seventeenth century. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued, lucid book, she undertakes a careful reading of works by these women in parallel with those by canonical authors who were similarly preoccupied with literary, religious, and political issues. She directs us to read—and listen—between the lines of these texts and shows us how the lives and ideas of these Catholic women, expressed in their writings, got “under the skin of early modern authors and into their texts” (3). In so doing she reveals unexpected and persuasive new readings of these standards of the canon.

She begins with a case study of the account of sexual violence inflicted by George Puttenham, author of The Art of English Poesy, on Mary Champneys, his wife’s servant. It has been suggested that this is Mary Champney, a Sion nun who was professed in 1569 at the age of twenty-one, and the subject of a manuscript biography, The Life and Good End of Sister Marie. The link between the two, Lay argues, is speculative, but its exploration highlights the need to be alert to the erasure of Catholic women from mainstream literary history and to the texts written by and about them that are essential to that history.

The discussion then moves to the narrative structures utilized by some early modern English authors in creating female characters. She traces aspects of marriage, virginity, and chastity in works including Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. These are texts concerned with the status of women and their choice of chastity as a tool of political power and resistance. Their challenges to the social and political norms of society, Lay argues, mirror those exercised by Catholic Englishwomen. John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is typical of the canon in using anti-Catholic polemic to create images of a corrupt clerical hierarchy. Women here and in Thomas Robinson’s pamphlet Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon (1622) are presented as powerless victims of a clerical culture that exercises control of the female body through physical enclosure and corruptive indoctrination by the book. Such images, created for a popular market, would effectively erase the literary contributions made to early modern book culture by Catholic women. These include their reflections on contemporary religious and political debates in their written commentaries. Questions of the temporal and spiritual authority, which underpinned the recusant position of English Catholics, informed the nuns’ reflections on the obedience due to a religious superior and to the demands of personal conscience. Lay examines Gertrude More’s account, in her Spiritual Exercises (1658), of how the vow of obedience was interrogated in a monastic community and compares and contrasts this with the treatment of similar issues in Middleton’s A Game at Chess (1624). Debates about obedience in English political and religious life, she shows, developed concurrently with debate about the authority of female religious.

In a fine concluding chapter, Lay examines the contribution made by these women to English Catholic poetic practice in the mid-seventeenth century through a case study of the Aston-Thimelby circle’s correspondence. She traces their reappropriation of Robert Southwell’s use of Petrarchan aesthetics in his devotional verse and their uses of the secular poetry of John Donne. And she contrasts this circle with the female monastic community depicted in Andrew Marvell’s poem Upon Appleton House. Lay’s account of Margaret Cavendish’s warm representation of female monasticism in The Convent of Pleasure is particularly well argued. The book ends with Lay’s brief and telling analysis of some seventeenth-century Passion poems by, among others, Milton, Donne, Herbert, and an anonymous meditation, “On the Passion of our Lord and saviour Jesus.” She demonstrates the changes that become apparent in this one small section of the male Protestant literary canon when read in conjunction with the contemporary work of Catholic women.

Jenna Lay is to be congratulated; this is a fine book of scrupulous scholarship, close reading, and well-judged analysis. She writes clearly and persuasively, never losing sight of her argument. The book will be invaluable for everyone who works in the early modern period.