In Beyond the Cloister Jenna Lay considers the question of how English nuns and Catholic recusant women shaped England's literary culture. While the writings of Protestant women from a range of social positions and sectarian affiliations have been the focus of a great deal of research, Catholic women, even while appearing as heroines in some of the most important poetic and dramatic works of the period, have yet to receive much attention from literary scholars. Moreover, while it is often taken for granted that Protestantism liberated women from oppressive Catholic Church doctrine and an oppressive ecclesiastical hierarchy, the reality, according to Lay, is that Catholicism actually provided women “opportunities for political, religious, and literary expression that were not necessarily available to their Protestant counterparts” (17). As Lay shows, English works of Protestant propaganda, such as Thomas Robinson's The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon (1622), tended to present English nuns as oppressed and victimized by the Catholic clerics that supervised their communities as well as by those exiled religious authorities that directed religious controversy and issued devotional writings. In contrast to this account of female monastic life on the continent, Lay elegantly shows that Catholic women actually participated in and shaped Catholic book culture and that their participation had a not insubstantial influence on canonical English literature.

In the first chapter Lay focuses on Edmund's Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590), Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598), and William Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (1604), all of which are most often read as participating in the Protestant trajectory by which female virginity is understood as a transitional stage between complete abstinence and licit female sexual expression within the chaste confines of marriage. Lay shows that these works actually offer up only the promise of marital chastity without necessarily fulfilling that promise. For example, in The Faerie Queene, for many of Spenser's couples, consummation and marital fulfillment are always on the horizon and just out of reach to the heroes and heroines.

Especially interesting is the figure of Hero in Marlowe's poem, which Lay presents in the context of John Mush's hagiographical biography of Catholic recusant, Margaret Clitherow, who utilized the “coverture” provided by the patriarchal authority of her conformist husband as a protective shield against the power of the state. Lay shows that Marlowe uses his portrayal of Hero in order to allegorize the position of recusant women within English culture during the period. According to Lay's reading, Hero is, like Clitherow, both an outsider and an insider within Sestos, a figure determined both to preserve her virginity and to relinquish it, thus problematizing the meaning of virginity and chastity within the poem. Ultimately George Chapman's continuation of the poem makes this clear when he presents Hero as determined to maintain her religious duties as a supposedly virginal votaress of Venus, while maintaining a sexual relationship with Leander. Finally, at the conclusion of this chapter, Lay shows that, by the ending of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, the novice nun Isabella can similarly be understood as deferring the chaste closure offered to her by Duke Vincentio by refusing to respond to his marriage proposal. Thus each of these literary work defies any attempt by readers to render a single interpretation of the character's life trajectory, something which Lay attributes to the influence of Catholic women, whose biographies were similarly not easily categorized.

Lay's second chapter considers both the way that English Protestant writers and dramatists represented the exiled English monasteries on the continent and how English nuns responded to such characterizations. In particular, she details the way in which Thomas Robinson's The Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi (1614) present Catholic women as oppressed by an ecclesiastical hierarchy bent on exploiting them both materially and sexually. The most interesting portion of this chapter discusses the manuscripts generated by the inhabitants of the Bridgettine English monastery in Lisbon, including their detailed response to Thomas Robinson's supposed slanders in his Anatomy. According to Lay, the monastery's complex response to Robinson's printed pamphlet shows that the inhabitants of the Syon monastery were seasoned and motivated controversialists, who were skilled at participating in polemics within the larger public sphere. They deftly refuted the stereotype of English nuns as “silly seduced women” trapped by a predatory ecclesiastical hierarchy on the continent (88).

Subsequent chapters similarly connect non-literary texts to fiction, in which Catholic women are presented in stereotypical and non-stereotypical ways. Lay connects the Spiritual Exercises (1658) by the Benedictine nun Gertrude More to Thomas Middleton's play, A Game at Chess (1624), which satirizes Catholic intrigue within the English court during the years leading up to the Spanish match. More was the descendent of Sir Thomas More, and similar to her famous ancestor, she attacked Protestant claims for temporal authority over the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, but unlike more typical Catholic polemicists, More claimed that the individual ultimately owed her allegiance directly to God's authority, rather than to intermediating ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, for More, individual conscience was not bound by either ecclesiastical or temporal authority. Similarly, in Lay's reading, Middleton's play seems to be about the politics of disobedience, and in particular, those singular Catholic women who were able to defy the authority of the male ecclesiastical authorities.

In Lay's last chapter she illustrates how the epistolary correspondence of Catholic members of the Aston and Thimelby families reveal important insights into seventeenth-century literary representations of an independent female community in such works as Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House (1651) and Margaret Cavendish's play The Convent of Pleasure (1668). In particular, Lay notes that Cavendish's Restoration play presents a community of letters that closely resembles the Aston-Thimelby circle of female poets, writers and readers: “women writing across multiple genres, influenced by both secular and religious traditions, and contributing to a communal literary culture” (157).

In the end, Lay's book is a remarkable study of a neglected but significant chapter of English literary history, which allows us to come to terms with the Catholic women who influenced and shaped some of the most important and compelling works of fiction produced during the early modern period. In this respect, this book will be of interest to advanced literary scholars and historians doing work on English Roman Catholics, and it will also be of interest to feminist scholars interested in uncovering and retrieving the confessional identities and gender issues that undergird some of the most important literary works of the English literary canon.