Lives Of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-writing Of The Early Modern Period The Early Modern Englishwoman 1500-1750: Contemporary Editions

This book, titled "Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early Modern Period," edited by Nicky Hallett, presents previously undiscovered material about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The volume includes unmediated accounts from the women themselves, along with an introduction providing historical and cultural context. The documents reveal the nuns' astute use of auto/biographical writing within a complex political landscape, and their efforts to contribute to devotional change within the Catholic Church. The book challenges traditional ideas of gendered spirituality and expands upon the tradition of female life-writing, from Catherine of Siena to Teresa of Avila. It offers a new perspective on the self-representation of religious women and the genre of auto/biography in the early modern period. This book will be of interest to scholars studying early modern women's writing, female spirituality, and auto/biography.

Nicky Hallett has uncovered a major new source of material by and about English nuns living in exile in the Low Countries during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This volume presents the women's voices in unmediated form, direct in all their vibrancy, with an extensive introduction that provides historical and cultural contexts for an understanding of the Lives, their sources and their authors. Lives of Spirit draws upon several remarkable sets of papers compiled in enclosed convents between 1619 and 1794. These documents show that religious women developed an astute system of auto/biographical practice within a protean political situation, and that, even in exile and from within enclosure, they sought to shape a distinctive contribution to devotional change within a reforming church. This volume reveals how the women's Lives challenge, as well as affirm, notions of gendered spirituality, refiguring traditions of female life-writing that extend from Catherine of Siena (1347 - 80) through the work of the Carmelite reformer, Teresa of Avila (1515 - 82), into the later modern period. The newness of the material in this book allows a radical reappraisal of the self-representation of religious women and of paradigms of life-writing in, and beyond, the early modern period. This book is of significant interest to scholars interested in early modern women's writing, female spirituality, and auto/biography more widely as a genre.