Claire Walker

Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries

Introduction Female Monasticism Revived: Foundations and Vocations The Monastic Family: Order and Disorder in the Cloister The Monastic Economy: Prayer and Manual Labour Beyond the Cloister: Patronage, Politics and Society Active in Contemplation: Spiritual Choices and Practices Conclusion

The concept of the moral panic : an historico-sociological positioning

This opening paragraph by Stanley Cohen is among the most cited in the sociology of deviance and the media. Indeed, as Critcher observes, many users of the concept of the moral panic quote no more than this passage and extrapolate from single case studies to a much more extensive sociocultural condition, meaning that ‘Ironically “moral panic” has itself become a label, its application used as proof that little more need be said’.1 The concept of the moral panic has also entered the popular lexicon via the sociological dictionary in a comparatively short time and in numerous, multiplying discursive sites. To take a fairly random and unlikely example, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in launching a report on university subject areas that are strategically important and vulnerable, is reported as using it in seeking to allay anxiety, with a story opening in the education press as follows: There is no need for a ‘great moral panic’ if university courses close in future, funding chiefs declared this week ….2

The Experience of Exile in Early Modern English Convents

Abstract:English Catholic women who established and joined expatriate convents in the southern Netherlands and France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were subject to both exile and strict monastic enclosure. Separation and suffering were therefore common tropes in convent narrative, iconography and ritual. This article argues that exile was an intrinsic feature of individual and corporate religious identity in the English cloisters. By articulating grief in convent writings and appropriating anguish within personal and communal piety, the expatriate nuns were both consoled and inspired to actively pursue their goal of returning their cloisters to England.

Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early Modern English Convents

In the early eighteenth century the exiled English cloister of Augustinian canonesses in Paris celebrated an annual religious ritual centred upon the relics of St Justin, an early Christian martyr. This article argues that the festivities surrounding St Justin’s relics had political significance beyond the martyr’s commemoration. The feast of St Justin and its liturgical rituals were at the centre of an emotional community of British Jacobitism in Paris, in which the nuns, other religious and political exiles and French sympathisers gathered to pray for the restoration of the Stuart royal family to the throne and the toleration of Catholicis in Britain.

Governing Bodies, Family and Society: The Rhetoric of the Passions in the Sermons of Samuel Wesley

ABSTRACT In 1719, and again in 1725, the Reverend Samuel Wesley preached a sermon on Galatians 6:1. It exhorted forgiveness for sinners “lest thou also be tempted” and was apparently delivered at a service of public shaming. This paper examines Wesley’s sermon within the context of his support for the Societies for the Reformation of Manners. It argues that Wesley employs a rhetoric of shame to admonish both the sinner who is the subject of the sermon, but also the parish community which had tolerated her immorality in its midst, thus rendering it complicit. The Reformation of Manners movement required informants to report vice to the authorities, and Wesley’s parishioners had fallen short in this respect. Yet Wesley’s stance as a moral reformer was not unproblematic. On the second occasion of preaching the sermon, his daughter had eloped and, abandoned by her lover, had recently returned to an unforgiving family. The sermon’s exhortations to forgiveness were apparently not heeded by Wesley himself, compromising his status as an exemplar to his flock.

‘Remember Justice Godfrey’: The Popish Plot and the Construction of Panic in Seventeenth-Century Media

William Lloyd’s funeral oration for the Westminster Justice of the Peace, Edmund Berry Godfrey, who died in suspicious circumstances in October 1678, confirmed the worst fears of the seventy-two divines and ‘prodigious’ crowd who attended his funeral at St Martin’s in the Fields, and the many hundreds more who heard reports afterwards, or read its printed text, hastily published and circulated.1 Amid the already electric atmosphere in England’s capital generated by Titus Oates’ revelations of a Jesuit conspiracy to assassinate Charles II, the death of the magistrate to whom Oates had sworn the truth of his account clearly corroborated Oates’ evidence that Popish assassins were determined to murder any Protestants who stood between them and England’s return to the Roman Catholic fold. Godfrey’s demise occurred at a fortuitous juncture for Oates and those who believed his evolving testimony about secret Jesuit cabals which implicated an ever-widening circle of clerical and lay Catholics, including several closely associated with the court and government. The assumed murder of Godfrey was touted as concrete evidence for the Plot’s existence and acted as a wake-up call to all Protestants about the very real threats posed by their fellow countrymen who perversely refused to share their true faith. As a Protestant ‘martyr’ he became emblematic in the anti-Catholic discourse which permeated and in many instances dictated popular opinion and parliamentary debate from 1678 into the 1680s.

Going against some forcible wind: Writing and Reform in Medieval and Early Modern Convents

In the 1640s a nun in the cloister of English Benedictines at Cambrai in the Spanish Netherlands wrote of her personal struggle to reform her ways, dedicate herself entirely to God, and achieve spiritual satisfaction through prayer and meditation. Amidst expressions of frustration with her own failings, Barbara Constable criticized the woefully inadequate direction she and her sisters received from the priests responsible for their spiritual progress. She likened her quest to “lead a true spiritual life in this age” to struggling against a strong wind which constantly forced one backwards. 1 Constable’s evocative motif might well be applied to the experience of religious women across the centuries. From women who embraced observant reforms in fifteenth-century Germany, to French Ursulines in the seventeenth century, to charismatic founders in the New World, and nuns in eighteenth-century France, women religious faced daily battles against not only their own failings, but also the expectations and interference of confessors, church leaders, families, and even local and national political bodies, all of whom attempted to impress their own vision of the religious life upon those in the cloister. Like Constable who wrote against this “tyranny,” other women similarly voiced their concerns, fears and hopes in

Godliness, Sex and Propaganda: Gender in the Confessional Age

Books reviewed in this article: Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender and Seventeenth–Century Print Culture Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions Merry E. Wiesner–Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice