Description
Book SynopsisAn invaluable collection of primary sources for the study of eighteenth-century convent life.Between 1728 and 1744 the Catholic lawyer Mannock Strickland (1673-1744) acted as agent for English nuns living on the Continent, including St Monica's, Louvain, the Brussels Dominicans and the Dunkirk Benedictines. Most convent archives perished at the French Revolution, but Strickland's papers survived in the archives of Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire, offering a unique insight into the workings of English convents. These extraordinary documents reveal the reality of exile for a group of formidable yet vulnerable women, "doubly dead" to English law. Two hundred letters tell stories of hardship, isolation, severe winters, war, starvation, Jacobite intrigue and international finance. They show that convent bursars became skilled at playing international exchange markets yet remained at the mercy of unscrupulous investors. The letters are presented here with full notes; a thorough introduction sets theletters, cash day books, bills of exchange and other documents in context. Richard G. Williams is Librarian and Archivist of Mapledurham House; he has also held senior posts at the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, Birkbeck College London and at Yale University.
Trade ReviewWilliams' detailed explanations of contemporary banking and foreign exchange practices, however, provide perhaps the most valuable resource for a full understanding of the nuns' accounts - explanations that will be of use to scholars more widely. * INNES REVIEW *
For historians of the exile religious communities and scholars of early eighteenth-century legal and economic studies, this volume is a rich resource to be discovered and exploited from a range of perspectives. * JOURNAL OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY *
This book is a helpful primary resource for viewing the day-to-day life of British religious after their exile. * MAGISTRA *
Provides a perspective on the lives of those living in the Flanders convents.which will inform scholarship on English female monasticism for some time to come. * DOWNSIDE REVIEW *
Will be of use to scholars interested in post-Reformation Catholicism and the exiled religious orders, while also appealing to those working more generally in economic, political and legal history. * ARCHIVES *
This book gives what must surely be the most detailed picture yet of what was involved in keeping English Roman Catholic religious houses on the continent afloat in the century and a half before Catholic Emancipation.... It is a major work of scholarship, which should bring this important archive to wider attention. * ARCHIVES & RECORDS *
Table of ContentsIntroduction Part I: Letters Part II: Accounts Part III: Abstracts of Bills of Exchange and Other Documents Appendices
