Beyond the Cloister. Jenna Lay
“holye gospellers” invade other convents in the area, a regiment of English soldiers offers, “ether of pollecye or of curtesie,” to escort members of the Syon community back to England (9r). The interpretive problem that accompanies this offer—is this a political maneuver or a courteous gesture?—shapes an encounter between Champney and one of the English captains that serves as a rebuke to the political and cultural values of English Protestantism under Queen Elizabeth.
In this remarkable passage of the manuscript, the captain practices with fair words and rewards, much like Puttenham with the other Mary Champneys: he claims “she shoulde not lacke for golde nor pearls, if shee would be his dearlinge” (9v). But she rejects his attempted sexual seduction and (probably specious) offer of marriage, and the author’s omniscient narration allows us to imagine a voice for Puttenham’s Champneys and an alternative to The Art’s violent image of married love:
Say you so sir (quoth shee) well cease these filthie speeches to me, wayinge my profession made (saithe shee) at your perill, well knowinge, as you will perchaunce to your payne, if you tempte god to farre, whose Spowse by solempe vowe I am professed & consecrated, though most unworthie of the honor: beholde here my weddinge ringe (quoth shee) which I weare, wherewith I am alredye wedded to my lorde & Savioure to live & die his trewe handmaide in holie chastitie for any temptinge or threatninge in this worlde, As for golde & coyne (quoth shee) I renownced the towchinge of it by my profession, which my harte is to keepe & continewe in my cloyster, and therefore I weighe it as chaffe. (9v)
Champney proclaims her marriage to Christ, reminding her Protestant interlocutor that his virgin queen is not the only woman devoted to chastity outside marriage. Her response simultaneously rejects the language of seduction—transformed here into nothing more than “filthie speeches”—and the captain’s religious politics, which he makes explicit in the suggestion that she might live like the “Princes of Orenge, which had ben a Nune” (9v). This reference to William I’s third wife, Charlotte of Bourbon, who abandoned her vows in 1572, provokes Champney to condemn the transition from Catholic to Protestant as vehemently as that from virgin to wife: “As for the paynted princes of Orenge, whome I shoulde be in such credit with, I detest her, as accursed of god, for slaunder which she hath broughte to religion: Such an other Nunne (quoth shee) belike as Luther was a frier” (9v). She compares both Charlotte of Bourbon and Luther to Judas, suggesting that their apostasy is no more a reflection on her religious life than Judas’s betrayal of the other apostles.
This dramatic encounter suggests that The Life and Good End of Sister Marie is a text with literary aspirations as well as religious and political goals—but Champney is no virgin martyr or Lucrece. Rather than providing English Catholics with a foundational transgression against which they could position themselves and a ruined body upon which they could rebuild their religion in England,40 Champney’s narrative reveals her rhetorical skills and raises the possibility that Catholic women might change perceptions of both their sex and their faith through individual oral arguments and written testimonies. Her “wise and vehement speeches,” underscored by the author’s repeated use of “quoth she,” leave the captain “so astonyed that he little thoughte to have founde such a Paragon, perceavinge nowe, and so it was told him by his counsellors, that all his labor aboute his purpose with her, or with any of the rest of that spirit woulde be but lost” (10r). The rhetorical skills of an English nun triumph over the persuasive capabilities of her countryman fighting on behalf of the Protestant forces in the Low Countries. Champney is simultaneously “such a Paragon” and one of many potential nuns “of that spirit” who could prove equally effective in a battle of wits and faith. These women would not allow themselves to be corrupted or converted by the Englishmen in the Low Countries who were fighting to advance international Protestantism. Instead, they engaged religious controversy on their own terms in manuscripts and printed books that recorded their educational and missionary activities as well as the details of life within their enclosures.
The possibility that Mary Champney, Bridgittine nun and early modern virago, is the same Mary Champneys who gave birth to George Puttenham’s illegitimate child and was left in misery on the continent is tantalizingly inconclusive. But this onomastic coincidence nonetheless suggests that competing narratives of—and alternate perspectives on—English literary history may be reconstructed with careful attention to manuscripts, local record offices, and continental archives. Literary criticism is still overwhelmingly influenced by late Elizabethan, male-authored Protestant narratives of the development of English literature and its relationship to early modern social, political, and religious change: the representations of The Art have entered and possessed our minds, making it difficult for us to recognize the influence of Catholic women on a significant chapter in the history of English literature. Yet Champney’s encounter with the captain suggests that counter narratives are possible: that not every woman is a bride and/or a victim, and that texts by and about Catholic women—the poems of the Scottish Queen, the legal documents of Puttenham’s wife, the manuscripts of early modern nuns—offer alternatives to a literary history that attempts to efface them. This book shows that uncovering the forgotten texts of Catholic women can help us learn new things about even well-known canonical literature by authors such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell—and thus enable us to remake our understanding of English literary history.
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The defining narratives of early modern England, fashioned by sixteenth-and seventeenth-century authors and reified by later histories, cast nuns as the relics of an unenlightened past and equate Catholic femininity with the dangerous charms of the Whore of Babylon.41 In recent decades, as historians and literary critics have uncovered the myriad ways that Catholicism continued to matter in post-Reformation England, nuns and recusant women have been recognized for their role in maintaining Catholic religious practice,42 and manuscript recovery work has revealed a remarkable and still growing body of texts associated with the early modern English convents.43 Yet these manuscripts and printed books have not yet led to a holistic reassessment of crucial decades in the development of English literary history—decades that overlapped with the establishment of new English cloisters on the continent—or of the texts and authors foundational to our contemporary canon. While Catholic women helped to craft a language for religious and political concepts such as obedience and chastity and to shape England’s literary culture in the decades following the dissolution of the monasteries, the significance of women such as Margaret Clitherow, butcher’s wife and martyr, and Winefrid Thimelby, Augustinian prioress and letter writer, was effaced in their own time and has been mostly forgotten in ours.
England’s religion was far from settled even in the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, and at various moments it was possible to imagine a Catholic future for the state, its ruler, and its subjects.44 At the same time, doctrinal affiliation had grown increasingly complex: both English Catholicism and English Protestantism were marked by internal debates regarding liturgical practice, the space of worship, and political allegiance, to name just a few of the questions central to the shaping of confessional identities in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe.45 Thus, I use terms like “Protestant” and “Catholic” flexibly, attending to internal divisions when they are relevant to my analysis: when, for example, debates over church attendance and religious conformity shape the representation of a committed recusant like Clitherow, or when the conflicts among religious orders regarding monastic spiritual direction rise to the surface in Gertrude More’s theorization of obedience. I am especially interested in the conflicted stances taken by Protestant writers with a range of confessional identities and political affiliations—men and women who struggled to define themselves, and their period, as different from that which came before, and who did so, in part, through depictions of Catholic women as historic relics, superstitious ascetics, or hypocritical Machiavels, all but the last of which faced almost inevitable rehabilitation in a Protestant marriage relationship. But Catholic women resisted any easy demarcation between a Catholic, medieval past and a Protestant, reformed present in both their religious practice and their print and manuscript books, and their diverse engagements with English literary culture offer evidence of the complexities of early modern religious politics.
The English Reformation produced a localized Catholicism that provided women with opportunities