Embodied forms of religious devotion have long been recognized as characteristic among late medieval and early modern Catholic women, as well as, more recently, in studies of select early modern English Protestant women. But how can these experiences, from seemingly disparate contexts of pre-Reformation monastic houses, post-Reformation nuns in exile, and women from a range of reforms, be seen as part of the same culture? This is the question that Nancy Bradley Warren seeks to answer in this study of English women and what she calls their and their communities' incarnational piety, epistemology, textuality, and politics (7). Perhaps the most notable feature of the book is its scope, bridging divides not only of periodization and reformation, but also of geography in considering national and expatriate English women and their European inspirations and protectors. Almost as notable is the break from simple chronology through which Warren organizes her evidence. Thus, the book begins with the example of the miraculously preserved body of Margaret Wake, an English Carmelite nun in Antwerp, in 1716, and the wave of spiritual autobiographies and devotion among local nobility that the discovery inspired. Subsequent chapters then interlace stories of pre-Reformation or exiled nuns with those of lay women as diverse as Margery Kempe, Grace Mildmay, Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary. In so doing, the study hopscotches back and forth across time and the English Channel. Circling back, finally, to histories that, Warren suggests, define a particularly English identity across faiths, nations, and historical periods, the study reads those histories as shaped by hopes and anxieties pertaining to women's rule and succession.
Warren's first chapter traces an incarnational emphasis in the writings of St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich, and Aemelia Lanyer, from meditation on the Eucharist, the Virgin birth, and the Passion to reflection on the labor—a term implied particularly by the Brigittines—of recording their often mystical experiences in textual flesh. Although avoiding the claim that any writer directly influenced another, Warren nonetheless highlights notably international “channels of textual transmission” that connect the fourteenth-century women to each other and English communities (21). Addressing Lanyer, who wrote for Jacobean court circles over 200 years later, Warren identifies no such paths of textual transmission, relying on Lanyer's poetry alone to reveal an embodied piety similar to that of the medieval nuns.
The second chapter connects Julian's Showings, a mainstay in the libraries of the seventeenth-century Benedictine convents in Cambrai and Paris, to the writings of women in those orders and to the autobiography of sixteenth-century Protestant gentlewoman, Grace Mildmay. Noteworthy in this chapter are two arguments: that the women's corporeal experiences are distinctly gendered, and—an argument Warren makes through the philosophies of Stanley Cavell and Karl Morrison—that the women's expressions of nuptial union and inscriptions of Christ on their hearts exceed simple metaphor. In a clarification much like the distinction between Real Presence and understandings of the Eucharist as a mere symbol of divine presence, Warren argues that the women's experiences are bona fide “perceived, corporeal experiences through which knowledge is acquired” (85). Continuing, in the third chapter, with the political concerns of the seventeenth-century Briggitines in Spanish-controlled Lisbon, Warren parallels the sufferings and risks of Briggitine Marie Champney to those of Spanish noblewoman Luisa Carvajal y Mendoza, both of whom underwent daring travels to England in hopes of returning the country to Catholicism. Identifying Luisa as a key figure associated with the Jesuits just following the Gunpowder Plot, the chapter links her devotionally inspired action to later appeals by the Benedictines for sponsorship by Royalists in exile.
The fourth chapter addresses the lives of Margery Kempe, civil war-era prophet Anna Trapnel, and Jacobean playwright Elizabeth Cary, whose daughters recorded her biography from the convent in Cambrai. Warren finds a particular similarity between Kempe and Trapnel, from their nuptial union, divine revelations during debilitating illness, and travels during which they were accused of preaching, demonic possession, and most notably, treason. Arguing that their sex made them more of a threat than any associations with Lollardy, in Kempe's case, or sedition against Cromwell, in that of Trapnel, Warren observes a comparable perceived danger in Cary. Abandoned by her husband following her conversion to Catholicism and left financially destitute, this poverty, in turn, resulted in one of several episodes of heroic fasting, including one during pregnancy in which, perhaps miraculously, the child thrived. Emphasizing Cary's role primarily as a Catholic mother committed to bringing up her children in the faith, the biography documents her defending her custody of them before the Star Chamber. Warren thus sees Cary as a Kempe-like figure for appearing to be unfaithful as she pursues her religious calling.
The final chapter reads the legacy of medieval history on early modern political and religious crisis through texts as diverse as Foxe's Book of Acts and Monuments, Thomas Robinson's scathing Anatomie of the English Nunnery at Lisbon, and Robert Parsons' Conference Concerning the Next Succession, which argues that the throne should pass from Elizabeth to the Spanish infanta. A notable departure from the devotional writings of previous chapters, the chapter finds in these and other texts' support of Elizabeth an or Lancastrian descent a set of hopes and anxieties in which women's bodies are central. These are the concerns, Warren argues, to which the women of her study respond, however varied their situations.
Warren's study negotiates a difficult, and by now familiar problem: an undeniable similarity between the experiences that these women record, and that begs study of them in conversation with one another, yet a scarcity of evidence, with the exception of the exiled nuns who read medieval texts, that the women had knowledge of the works that their writings resembled. Warren does not attempt to solve this dilemma, allowing her thorough readings of the texts to stand as sufficient evidence for their similarity. Yet her most novel response to the problem is the replacement of the question of influence with what else might connect these women: a question that the final chapter compellingly answers, and with which readers, circling through a sometimes challenging path of history, are finally rewarded.
