Illness and death were an important part of monastic life in the seventeenth century; healthy nuns cared for their sick and dying Sisters every day. Their chronicles and obituaries emphasize the importance of prolonged or severe diseases, and dwell, in long descriptions, upon the last moments of exemplary individuals. Though formulaic, these writings do provide clues about the ways in which English Benedictine nuns construed the concept of imitatio Christi. They reveal both the tragic suffering of individual women and the communal constructions they allowed. The suffering body found a power it never enjoyed in health: it assumed an aura of martyrdom akin to holiness. It became a holy relic, a witness of the truth and effectiveness of the basic principles of the Roman Church. Through such writings, the English nuns in exile hoped to edify populations beyond the walls of their cloisters.

Despite their enclosure and their lack of geographical mobility, Benedictine nuns were an integral part of the Catholic missionary effort which was in full flow in seventeenth-century England. This chapter shows that the Benedictines demonstrated a keen interest in everything concerning the affairs of the English mission. They kept each other informed of the conditions of their co-religionists in their homeland, they wrote letters of spiritual guidance and ministered to their families, they offered their prayers to the cause of the faith, and were aware of all current controversies and disputes, partly thanks to their close connections with missionaries. As staunch royalists, some of them even played an active political role in support of the Stuart dynasty.

If they are not creatures of the world, cloistered nuns must still survive in the world. The English Benedictines relied on the support of the most important and infuential Catholic families of England, to which many of them belonged. Moreover, to ensure their subsistence, convents had to establish local networks in the cities where they settled. They enlisted the help of agents, both exiles and local, ecclesiastical and lay, to whom they entrusted the tasks they could not carry out themselves, especially regarding their assets and finances. This chapter uses the account books, chronicles and correspondence of the Sisters to develop a clearer picture of the practices of cloistered life in exile, and of its complex management.

This introduction provides an overview of the historiography of English Catholicism in the early modern period and highlights the absence, until recently, of substantial academic work on the place and role of enclosed nuns in the survival and the Catholic mission. In an effort to contextualise the English convents in exile on the Continent, it asks the question of the national specificities of institutions which belonged to the same Church and the same Orders as continental monasteries yet were the product of very different circumstances at home. Moreover, the introduction highlights the interdisciplinarity of the study of convents, which is at the crossroads of prosopography, religious history, social history, political history, but can also be approached through the prisms of art history, literary studies, gender studies or emotion studies.

Through the textual analysis of clerical prescriptive writings and of the notes compiled by the nuns themselves, this chapter examines the contemplative ideal and the idea of social death at its very core. By dedicating themselves to the monastic life, encosed and in exile, postulants embraced a lifestyle that required great determination to die to the world, to others and to themselves, in order to exist for and in Christ only. The manuscripts of their spiritual guides, their superiors, and the few personal notes left by the nuns themselves show how these ideals form the infrastructure of religious life; spiritual progress appeared impossible without absolute abandonment and self-denial.