Description
Book SynopsisThe lives and experiences of Irish women religious highlight how an expanding nexus of female houses perpetuated European Counter-Reformation devotion in Ireland. JOINT WINNER: 2023 National University of Ireland's Publication Prize in Irish History HONORABLE MENTION: 2023 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (USA) Book Awards SHORT-LISTED: Royal Historical Society 2023 Whitfield Book Prize LONG-LISTED: 2023 Reformation Research Consortium (REFORC) Book Award This book investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways. McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad. Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.
Trade ReviewHONORABLE MENTION: A fascinating account of the experiences and journeys religious Irish women underwent, both in Ireland and continental Europe. * SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF EARLY MODERN WOMEN & GENDER *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Female religious communities and the Henrician suppression campaigns 2. Negotiating religious change: survival and continuity in post-dissolution Ireland 3. 'What difficultie a place is heare gotten for won to enter': Irish women religious in France, and Flanders during the first half of the seventeenth century 4. Irish nuns in Iberia: The Dominican convent of Nossa Senhora do Bom Sucesso, Lisbon 5. Reintegration and renewal: female religious communities in Ireland, 1629-49 6. Cromwell and the cloister: female religious and the impact of the Cromwellian campaigns, 1649-60 7. Restoration, revival and survival, 1660-1700 Conclusion Bibliography
