This book highlights how the English Benedictine nuns lived their faith in convents where they obeyed the same Rules as their European counterparts, and served the same Church. Like other Continental convents, they were influenced by the disputes that divided the early modern Church, particularly with regards to the influence of the Society of Jesus. They embraced the missionary spirit and the devotional fervour which has been noticed as the trademark of seventeenth-century Catholicism. But beyond similarities, English convents also display features which are quite specific of the English monastic experience in exile, and which are not found in the cloistered communities of Spanish, French or Italian nuns. The social profile of Benedictine monasteries, their finances, their recruitment, the local success of their settlement, and the many facets of their spiritual life, were deeply influenced by the circumstances of English Catholicism and of the English mission; they mirrored, in microcosm, the circumstances, strengths and flaw-lines of both their national and international contexts.

Early modern nuns belonged to ‘emotional communities’, with their own ways of expressing emotions. In this chapter, the emotional experiences of individuals are compared to the communal constructions that make up the collective emotionology of their cloistered context. The personal writings of English Benedictine nuns reveal their efforts to comply with clerical prescriptive literature on emotions, usually construed as passions or appetites, and described as enemies of spirituality. Yet nuns’ relationships with emotions (and more generally with the body as a vector of emotions) remained complex. On their way to the spiritual, many religious women struggled to reconcile what they really felt with what they were taught they should feel.

The clerical documents written to guide the English Benedictines in their spiritual progress urged them to control human or ‘terrene’ emotions. Yet such discourse was balanced by what John Corrigan has called a ‘Christian hypervaluation of love’. Through the analysis of a wide range of personal documents, this chapter explores how the Benedictine nuns experienced one of the most fundamental paradoxes of Christian mystical theology: the impossibility of knowing God truy and His immediate accessibility through the channel of divine love. How did nuns negotiate their way through such a complex riddle?

By abandoning their homeland in order to become enclosed nuns in exile, English Benedictines committed to a religious of choice that may seem even more absolute than that of their continental counterparts. They were not only separated from the world by the rule of the cloister but cut off from their friends and families by the geographical displacement that vocation imposed. Or such was the theory; yet, reality was often quite different. Combining a prosopographic approach and quantitative and qualitative analyses, this chapter shows that the English convents reflected the secular patterns of the society from which they came, and that nuns were quite adept at building networks of kin. Their families did play a role in the recruitment patterns of exiled convents.

The Protestant critics of the early modern Catholic Church denounced what they sometimes described as its sensual approach to the sacred. In the convents, behavioural guidebooks exhorted the Sisters to break away from their senses and to move towards a more perfect a-sensory contemplative state, where prayer no longer needed sensate perceptions to stimulate the soul. Yet the personal writings of the nuns are full of references to the senses; they provide valuable details on the individual experience of the cloistered life. Women taking the veil exchanged a sensory world for another, in which the sights, smells and sounds evoked the sacred. In prayer, they also felt with what they described as their ‘inner senses’. Although little used until now, the prism of the study of the senses provides a fascinating insight into the lived experience of women in early modern convents.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between the programming state and social research. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the government programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained during the 1960s. Ireland’s social security provision became an object of both political debate and social scientific analysis in this period. The official response to this ferment was a Social Development Programme to which the ESRI was initially seen as a vital provider of inputs. During the 1960s a Save the West movement challenged both programmers and governing politicians. The official response to this challenge involved new structures for rural development with which the social sciences interacted as well as expanded social welfare provision to a class of smallholders whose resilience would later become an object of significant sociological study. As the 1960s proceeded, however, Irish state plans and programmes had to contend with an increasingly difficult external environment with which they ultimately failed to cope.

Chapter 7 concludes the study by first noting how ambivalently clerical sociologists responded to the changes wrought by state planning practice in the 1960s. Demands from champions of such planning that the discipline should begin to play a different societal role are next examined. During the 1970s the Hierarchy combined failure to plan for a continuation of a significant clerical presence among practitioners of sociology with the casting of itself as the conscience of Irish society. The warding off of abortion, contraception and divorce was thereby entrusted to a highly selective but this-worldly `sociological’ empiricism rather than to theological dogmatism. Initially successful, this strategy has become progressively less effective as popular confidence in church leaders has declined dramatically. Detached from the institution the framed the working lives of their disciplinary predecessors, today’s sociologists debate the respective contributions that factors such as higher education levels, economic marginalisation of the poorly educated and the uncovering of hidden histories of the abuse of clerical power have made to this decline.

Underlying the institutional politics of the Irish university question was the clash between scientific rationalism a papal-championed revival of the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. But in social science, as the growth of a Catholic social movement and a succession of Irish-published sociology textbooks illustrate, a natural law perspective long went unchallenged by secular alternatives. It was Catholic clerical academics who first embraced an empirical approach to social science in the Ireland of the 1950s but in the succeeding decade they found themselves marginalised by a new breed of state technocrats who perceived empirical social research as a useful tool for their planning project.

A key reason why the Irish Catholic social movement failed to realize its project of reconstruction was because a conservative Hierarchy baulked at the radicalism of some of its proposals. Critiques of banking and finance capital formulated within the movement were particularly divisive and on these issues ecclesiastical disciplinary mechanisms were invoked to silence some of its radical voices. During the Second World War/Emergency period communist influence became the movement’s overriding concern and Catholic adult education initiatives were launched to counter this threat. To provide such education a number of new institutions with a social science focus – the Catholic Workers College and the Dublin Institute of Catholic Sociology – were created alongside the colleges of the National University of Ireland.