Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay

      Introduction. Gender, Religion, and English Literary History

      Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

      Success in Circuit lies

      — Emily Dickinson

      This book traces a circuitous path through English literary history and the process of canon formation—a path by which Shakespeare’s sister takes a detour en route to the suicide Virginia Woolf depicted as her likely fate, converts to Catholicism, travels beyond the seas, joins a convent, and writes devotional poems that imaginatively rebuild her brother’s bare ruined choirs. But we needn’t create our own fictions to glimpse how it would be possible to read literary history differently by recognizing Catholic women’s ongoing participation in it, as both subjects and objects of literary representation. Their stories are woven into the fabric of early modern literature and poetic theory, and we find them in both the texts that exclude them and those that foreground their authority and agency. Recent scholarly work has demonstrated that nuns and other Catholic women wrote in a range of genres and for multiple audiences;¹ I show how their writings offer a fresh perspective on English literary history, enhancing our understanding of the available contexts for canonical literature and the conversations of which that literature was a part. By excavating conflicted engagements with Catholic femininity in early modern poems and plays, the following chapters enable a more nuanced interpretation of how confessional and gender identities are woven into the poetics of erasure undergirding the English literary canon.²

      The exceptional work of feminist literary critics over the last three decades has done much to draw attention to the significance of female authorship in the early modern period, and the writings of Protestant women of a wide range of social positions and sectarian affiliations have been the subject of multiple monographs.³ But Catholic women’s influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court has yet to receive such sustained attention.⁴ To create a more complete picture of English literary history, we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to England’s courtly life shaped its literary culture. I demonstrate that these female authors, whom we might imagine to be marginal figures because of their gender, religion, and social position, are centrally important to an enriched analysis of how literature works in the early modern period and how our own critical perspectives have been shaped by the texts at the heart of our canon that have rendered a more expansive literary history illegible. Rather than taking either conformist Protestant ideology or pamphlet literature at its word, I query the formal effects of Catholic women evident in a wide range of literary texts, thereby illuminating the fraught relationship of gender and religious change to canon formation.

      By reading the revelatory works of Catholic women alongside well-known authors who were both formally and thematically engaged with similar literary, religious, and political issues, this book proposes a reassessment of the relationship between canonical literature and its intertexts. Building on the foundational work of scholars of both early modern English Catholicism and women’s writing, I show how the literary strategies of men and women of various and shifting confessional identities contributed to the exclusion of Catholic women from the main narratives of English literary history. While the monastic associations of characters like Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and William Shakespeare’s Isabella demonstrate that contemporary authors were aware of the continued relevance of nuns and recusants, such representations do not directly respond to the texts produced by those women. As a result, it is easy to imagine them writing only for themselves and one another: images of nuns quietly confined to their monastic cells and rendered inconsequential through exile spring to mind. But it is the contention of this book that the writings of post-Reformation Catholic Englishwomen profoundly engage with early modern literature. Through their incursions into contemporary literary culture, Catholic women offered alternatives not only to their country’s religious settlement but also to the forms and genres that helped to define and support that settlement. The exclusion of nuns and recusant women from literary history thus results not from an absence but from their contemporaries’ routine denials of both their presence and their relevance. In writing, compiling, and authorizing manuscripts and printed books that rejected limited or pejorative representations of their religious practices and identities, Catholic