This account, recorded by schoolboy Patrick Doyle in 1938, forms part of the Irish Folklore Commission’s ‘Schools’ Collection’, a series of written interviews conducted with more than 50,000 primary school children in Ireland recorded between 1937 and 1939. The miraculous survival of the Poor Clare nuns, as described by Doyle, occurred during the seizure of Galway by Cromwellian troops in spring 1652. The capitulation of the town, on the western Atlantic coast, marked the final epoch in Cromwell’s military conquest of Ireland (1649–53), a brutal and destructive campaign which was to have long-term social, political, and economic repercussions. The young schoolboy’s 1938 account is indicative of popular perceptions of nuns in modern-day culture as mystical, other-worldly, and illusory individuals. But these Poor Clares were tangible historical figures who surmounted extraordinary obstacles in the process of pursuing a religious way of life and whose existence has left a lasting legacy on the environments in which they lived. Indeed the ongoing presence today of the Poor Clares at Nuns’ Island, located in the centre of Galway city, is testament to the tenacity and perseverance of their seventeenth-century predecessors. The Nuns’ Island community traces a direct lineage to the small group of Poor Clares who first gathered in the city almost four centuries ago while the Nuns’ Island site remains at the heart of Galway’s rich cultural heritage.

The term ‘women religious’ is used in this study to denote both ‘nuns’ (‘moniales’) and what Elizabeth Makowski has defined as ‘quasi-religious’ women. ‘Nuns’ were female members of a religious order who had taken solemn vows, observed strict enclosure (‘clausura’), and whose lifestyle was centred on contemplative prayer and the recitation of the Divine Office. ‘Quasi-religious’ were women who had taken simple vows, were not bound by the rules of enclosure and sometimes engaged in ministries such as care of the sick and infirm, education and/or teaching.