The study of English women religious in the early modern period has blossomed over the last decade. Now a thriving area of research, scholars from varied disciplines have started to uncover the lives and writings of some four thousand women who became nuns between 1600 and 1800. The publication of a substantial online database relating to these women, entitled “Who Were the Nuns?,” has encouraged scholars to continue contextualizing the lives of individual nuns. Yet scholarship has largely focused on the works of nuns who wrote under their own names, something which Victoria van Hyning's thought-provoking new monograph, Convent Autobiography, presents as problematic. What is to be done with convent documents that are anonymous? How are they to factor into our understanding of the literary outputs of early modern nuns? What can they tell us about the wider relationship between anonymity, authorship, and autobiography in the period?

Convent Autobiography seeks to answer these questions by focusing on a range of documents in which autobiographical expression can be identified. While convents in the period gave women freedom to govern aspects of their daily lives, conditions surrounding reading and writing were prohibitive and restrictive. Modesty and humility were at the heart of writing within convents, encouraging women to write anonymously and on behalf of their whole community. Works in which nuns were named were often “peppered with . . . self-abjuration” (24) to show discomfort with this form of overt identification. While communal texts such as rules, statutes, constitutions, and customs were often written anonymously—and individual nuns used anonymity as a tool with which to conform to monastic ideals—Van Hyning argues “it is also important to recognize that they continued to have individual experiences and that individuals were responsible for convent texts” (23–24).

The book focuses substantially, but not exclusively, on material from the Augustinian convents of St. Monica's and Nazareth. Using this material, Van Hyning constructs two new terms relating to autobiography which are intended to widen our understanding of the genre. The first is “anonymous autobiography,” in which an individual communicates about themselves without using their own name or a pseudonym. The second is the term “subsumed autobiography,” which refers to a text which is so shaped by the experiences, politics, theology, or ideology of an anonymous author that it can be read as an expression of the author's selfhood (29). In focusing on examples of these two subdivisions of the autobiographical genre, Van Hyning reveals what early modern women religious could do “when writing anonymously that they [could not] do when writing under their own name’” (265).

One of the most impressive aspects of Van Hyning's findings is her ability to isolate what she refers to as “acts of self-betrayal” (32), or moments where an individual nun inadvertently reveals facts about her own identity. When combined with palaeographic observations, manuscript analysis, and prosopographical data, Van Hyning convincingly identifies individual nuns as authors, often for the first time. In chapter 3, the sections of the “Chronicle of St. Monica's” covering the period between 1535 and 1659 are revealed to have been written by the nun Mary Copley between 1631 and 1659. A close reading reveals that even the smallest shift in language can uncover much about authorship. In Copley's case, this can be as subtle as writing a narrative of the convent's history that describes the nuns as “they” before her own arrival in 1610, and then using a communal “we” afterward (132). Van Hyning describes examples of anonymous autobiography in Copley's account, in which the nun speaks at length about the siege of Louvain in 1635 from the perspective of an eyewitness. Equally, she outlines an example of subsumed autobiography in which Copley highlighted the important familial connections the convent had with the martyr Thomas More and suggested that “the true fulfilment of More's legacy—in terms of his Catholic practice and women's education—lay within the convent” (173). Such a focus inadvertently reveals much about Copley's own attitude toward women, learning, and her belief that “convents were an integral part of Catholic resistance and identity (175).

Other chapters present us with equally fascinating examples. In chapter 4, we are introduced to an anonymous author of the “Chronicle of Nazareth,” identified as Grace Constable, whose various roles securing the financial health of the convent undeniably influenced the focus of the document and betray her as the author. In chapter 5 we are introduced to Lucy Herbert, who used the anonymity of the Nazareth chronicle to defend her own program of reform and expansion as prioress, revealing her preoccupation with her own power and reputation, as well as the wider reputation of the convent in local and international networks. When combined with earlier chapters on the letters of Winefrid Thimelby, and the writings of Catherine Holland consciously fashioned on those by Augustine of Hippo, the book provides us with a varied range of fascinating examples of women religious engaging in various forms of autobiography.

The work highlights some interesting ethical issues concerning the identification of authors who wished to remain nameless. In the introduction, Van Hyning tells us that “anonymous authors may hope to be identified or they may hope to remain obscure” (28). Additionally, in the conclusion she argues that her findings do not mean that “we should not accept anonymous or pseudonymous authors on their own terms or always seek to identify them” (265). A greater discussion of the ethical concerns here would have been fascinating, especially the extent to which we are consciously breaking away from the wishes of individuals when trying to identify them. Further guidance for future research attempting to navigate this ethical minefield would have been valuable.

Overall, this is a skillful and thought-provoking book. It contains a substantial bibliography and index, a range of figures and tables, a useful glossary and seventeen plates, many in color. A weighty appendix consisting of a transcript of the account given by Catherine Holland of her conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism is also likely to be of use to a range of scholars of the period.