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Abstract
Holloway and Wray consider the perspectives offered by two very different seventeenth-century women: Mary Bonaventure Browne, or Mother Browne (b. 1615) and Lady Ann Fanshawe (b. 1625) both of whom exchanged Ireland for Spain, and both of whom record journeys both ‘real’ and imagined in their writings. Browne's deployment of hagiographical tropes in her History of the Poor Clares may reveal the potential impact of Iberian conventual culture; her allusions to the markers of sanctity insistent on the immutability of the body, whilst accepting and anticipating spectral presence in the form of bilocation. Fanshawe’s Memoirs are considered alongside the material legacy of her ‘Booke of Receipts of Physickes, Salues, Waters, Cordialls, Preserues and Cookery’. Her impressions both in transit and within the domus are similarly marked by receptivity and sensitivity to the host culture. Amidst a backdrop of religious persecution and political uncertainty, in both cases Spain emerges as a potentially enabling context for creativity and self-expression.
Notes
1 Emily Lawless, ‘After Aughrim’, ll. 18–20, in The English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward, 5 vols (New York/London: Macmillan & Co., 1880–1918), V, Browning to Rupert Brooke, available online at <http://www.bartleby.com/337/1589.html> (accessed 14 June 2016).
2 John Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667, 2nd ed. (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 1989), 235.
3 Ann’s father, Sir John Harrison, having supported King Charles at Nottingham, was taken prisoner by order of parliament. His estate was sequestrated in 1642. See Peter Davidson, ‘Fanshawe [née Harrison], Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/9146> (accessed 6 May 2015).
4 See Helena Colcannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland (A.D. 1629–A.D. 1929) (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1929), 50.
5 On Browne, see Marie-Louise Coolahan, ‘Mary Browne’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com.queens.ezp1.qub.ac.uk/view/article/105827> (accessed 13 June 2016).
6 Mary Bonaventure Browne, Third Abbess of Galway, Recollections of an Irish Poor Clare in the Seventeenth Century, ed., with a foreword, by Celsus O’Brien (Galway: Poor Clare Sisters, 1993). Subsequent references to Mother Browne’s writings are to this edition unless specified otherwise. References will be given parenthetically. The original Irish account, presumed destroyed during the siege of Galway by the Williamite army in 1691, is understandably considered a very great loss by Irish scholars. See Celsus O’Brien, A Short History of The Poor Clares, Galway (1992), 7–8, available at <http://www.poorclares.ie/print/poorclarehistory.pdf> (accessed 14 March 2015). O’Brien draws upon the work of Colcannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland.
7 Ciaran O’Scea acknowledges Spain as an enabling context for female immigrants, pointing to a revolution in Irish female literacy in the Irish community in La Coruña in the first half of the seventeenth century. See ‘En busca de papeles: la transformación de la cultura oral de los inmigrantes irlandeses desde La Coruña hasta la Corte’, in Las Actas del Congreso Irlanda y la Monarquía Hispánica: Kinsale, 1601–2001. Guerra, política, exilio, y religión, ed. Enrique García Hernán et al. (Madrid: Univ. de Alcalá, 2002), 359–80.
8 Igor Pérez Tostado, Irish Influence at the Court of Spain in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008), 177.
9 Marie-Louise Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2010), 103, 128.
10 The database ‘Misión de Irlanda’ collates archival material related to Irish military and domestic migration, including petitions from and records of payment to Irish women. A 1652 directive from Philip IV orders the payment of the upkeep of three refugee Poor Clare nuns who have arrived from Ireland, to allow their entry into a convent in Madrid (Base de Datos Misión de Irlanda, 2407). A further document refers to financial support for the refugee Franciscan nuns in exile from Ireland (on the understanding that masses are said/sung for the king’s intentions). In 1652 we find a further note of payment for the upkeep of thirteen Irish Dominican nuns in Bilbao, housed in the Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, as well as a note of payment for the upkeep of two Irish nuns (‘Obreyn’) in <http://www.irishinspain.es/irlandeses/presentacion.php> (accessed 18 March 2015).
11 See, for example: Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern English Literature (Chicago/London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002), 65–70; Sharon Cadman Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1600–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2006), 90–109.
12 Madeline Bassnett, ‘ “All the ceremonyes and civilityes”: The Authorship of Diplomacy in the Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe’, Seventeenth Century, 26:1 (2011), 94–118.
13 See above note 9.
14 Electa Arenal & Stacy Schlau, ‘ “Leyendo yo y escribiendo ella”: The Convent As Intellectual Community’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 13:1 (1989), 214–29. See also, by the same authors, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Words, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989). For an overview of recent scholarship of conventual literature, see Nieves Baranda Leturio & María Carmen Marín Pina, ‘El universo de la escritura conventual femenina’, in Letras en la celda: cultura escrita de los conventos femeninos en la España moderna (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2014), 11–45.
15 Lisa Vollendorf, ‘Transatlantic Ties: Women’s Writing in Iberia and the Americas’, in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1800, ed. Daniella Kostrom & Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 2009), 79–112. For the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century precursors of said ‘Boom’, see Anne J. Cruz, ‘Willing Desire: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza and Feminine Subjectivity’, in The Mendoza Women: Gender and Power in Golden Age Spain, ed. Helen Nader (Champaign/Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003), 177–94.
16 Ciaran Brady, ‘Foreword’, in Óscar Recio Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), ix–xii (p. ix).
17 See, for example, Eduardo de Mesa, The Irish in the Spanish Armies in the Seventeenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014).
18 Morales, Ireland and the Spanish Empire, 1600–1825, 6.
19 See above note 17.
20 Celsus O’Brien, ‘Foreword’, in Browne, Recollections, ed. O’Brien, i–iii.
21 On this aspect of Browne's account, see also Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 92.
22 O’Brien dates this record at 1694 in the Foreword to Recollections, iii.
23 Colcannon, The Poor Clares in Ireland, 52. We are grateful to Dr Cristina Bravo Lozano for the reference. See her forthcoming article, Cristina Bravo Lozano, ‘ ‘‘Huyendo de los lobos carniceros de su patria”: las monjas irlandesas en Castilla, una aproximación social y discursiva (1652–1706)’, Hispania Sacra (in press). Although not explicitly concerned with the Irish women, Angela Atienza, Tiempo de conventos: una historia social de las fundaciones en la España moderna (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2008) considers the socio-political context of the convents during the period.
24 The Memoirs of Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. Herbert Charles Fanshawe (London: John Lane/Bodley Head, 1907), 51. Unless otherwise stated, all references to Fanshawe are taken from this edition and appear parenthetically.
25 Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 252.
26 Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 252.
27 Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, 106; Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 255.
28 On Richard Fanshawe, his love of Spanish literature and participation in Spanish literary networks, see: Eduardo R. del Rio, ‘The Context of Translation: Richard Fanshawe and Spanish Verse’, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 17 (2004), 6–43; Roger M. Walker, ‘A Rediscovered Seventeenth-Century Literary Friendship: Sir Richard Fanshawe and Dom Francisco Manuel de Melo’, Seventeenth Century, 7:1 (1992), 15–26.
29 Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667, 235–36.
30 Peter Davidson, ‘Fanshawe, Sir Richard’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9149> (accessed 6 May 2015).
31 ‘Richard Fanshawe’, NNDB: Tracking the Entire World, <http://www.nndb.com/people/223/000101917> (accessed 15 March 2016).
32 See Melveena McKendrick’s now classic study of the mujer varonil, Women and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age: A Study of the ‘mujer varonil’ (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1974). See also Amy L. Tigner, ‘The Spanish Actress’s Art: Improvisation, Transvestism, and Disruption in Tirso’s El vergonzoso en palacio’, Early Theatre, 15:1 (2012), 167–90 (pp. 167, 168, 173, 174).
33 Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667, 235.
34 James Howell, A New English Grammar (London, 1662; Wing H3095), 43, 45; Edmund Bohun, A Geographical Dictionary (London, 1693; Wing B3454), 173.
35 See ‘Entering the Alhambra’, <http://www.spainthenandnow.com> (accessed 15 March 2016) and ‘Justice Tower’, <http://www.alhambradegranada.org> (accessed 15 March 2015). The Alhambra, and the ‘Justice Tower’, were first popularly investigated in Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra (New York/New Orleans: University Publishing Company, 1901), 13–14.
36 On the history of Islam in Spain, see Richard A. Fletcher, Moorish Spain (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: Univ. of California Press, 2006), 5–13.
37 On the re-invention of the recent past, see also A. Katie Harris, From Muslim to Christian Granada: Inventing a City’s Past in Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 2007).
38 Seelig, Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature, 102.
39 Tostado, Irish Influence at the Court of Spain, 181.
40 This ‘Appendix’ is printed in the 1907 edition of the Memoirs (214–17), but does not appear in The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).
41 See Coolahan, Women, Writing, and Language, 95.
42 David B. Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2013), 155.
43 Wellcome Library, MS 7113, ff. 128v, 154v, 155r. All further references to this manuscript appear in the text.
44 Goldstein, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England, 155.
45 The Caballero de Gracia convent was founded in 1603 by Mother Mary of St Paul de Ugarte. While officially it was consecrated to ‘Jésus, Maria y José,’ the name derived from a nobleman who built a church and some living quarters on the site. Mother Mary of St Paul took possession of the site on 5 January 1603. She founded the ‘discalced’ or ‘recollect’ Conceptionists, and because of the many convents she founded became known as La Abuela. Her remains are kept in an urn at the entrance to the choir along with those of Sr Catherine Browne. O’Brien refers here to ‘Los monasterios de Conceptionistas Franciscanas en España’, Archivo Iberoamericano, 51 (1991), 411–77 (p. 453). This convent was demolished in the nineteenth century, and the nuns changed residence to Calle Blasco de Garay in 1891, bringing the body of the Irish refugee (said to be incorrupt to the present day) with them. The inscription on the sarcophagus notes her Irish origins ‘de la noble ciudad de Galvia’ (see Recollections, ed. O’Brien, 21).
46 In the ‘Foreword’ of the modern edition of the chronicle Celsus O’Brien provides a short extract: ‘As regards the sister of this Venerable Mother Sister Catherine, called Sister Mary of Saint Bonaventure, of whom it is reported that she sent to her own country some of the veil and scapular of the body of her Venerable Sister, with which God has worked miracles. We can only say that she was the chronicler of her Venerable sister, writing her life in English, and that in this community she was a most exemplary religious in all virtues, keeping to herself, praying alone and in choir, without ever failing at the community exercise’ (iii).
47 For Coolahan the chronicle situates itself ‘primarily within the paradigm of chronicle writing’. Contrasting the account with male-authored perspectives on the war she notes that ‘narrative endings are resolved in individual adherence to piety in exile’. Coolahan also underscores the presence of hagiographical conventions within the testimonial. See her chapter ‘Irish Nun’s Writing: The Poor Clares’, in her book Women, Writing and Language in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford/New York: Oxford U. P., 2010), 63–101 (especially pp. 95–97).
48 Julián Olivares & Elizabeth Boyce, ‘Introduction’ to their anthology, Tras el espejo la musa escribe: lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: Siglo Veintiuno Editores 1993), 10–11.
49 Antonio Castillo Gómez, ‘Cartas desde el convento: modelos epistolares femeninos en la España de la Contrarreforma’, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna, Anejo XIII (2014), 141–68 (p. 142).
50 Maria Isabel Barbeito Carneiro, identifies ‘un hilo conductor secuencial formado por Francisco de Osuna → Teresa de Jesús → Juan de la Cruz → Cecilia del Nacimiento → Antonio Sobrino y Estefanía de la Encarnación’ (‘En Él fueron transformadas’, Via Spiritus, 14 [2007], 31–36 [p. 31]).
51 Nieves Baranda, ‘Yo soy así y así me he construido: el poder de la voz autobiográfica femenina’, Guaraguao, 47 (2014), 19–42 (p. 22).
52 Baranda, ‘Yo soy así y así me he construido’, 22.
53 Antonio Castillo Gómez, ‘La pluma de Dios: María de Ágreda y la escritura autorizada’, Via Spiritus, 6 (1999), 103–19 (p. 106); see also La vida de soror Estephanía de la Encarnación, monja professa en el monasterio de religiossas franciscas de Nuestra Madre Santa Clara en esta villa de Lerma (Madrid, 1631), Biblioteca Nacional, Mss. 7459, f. 141v.
54 See Coolahan, ‘Irish Nun’s Writing’, 94–95, which foregrounds Browne’s transparent approach to her methodology.
55 Morrás points to studies such as that by Grace Jantzen on female mysticism which point to the role of the community in the creation of the category of mystic (Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism [Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1995]). See María Morrás, ‘Ser santa y mujer (Peninsula Ibérica: siglos XV–XVII)’, Medievalia, 18:2 (2015), 9–24 (pp. 11–12).
56 Pointing to the intersection between body and text in cementing Teresa’s sanctity, Carol Slade writes: ‘Efficacious as Teresa’s writing was for her protection and advancement, the text that finally convinced her contemporaries of her special relationship with God was not verbal but carnal’ (Carol Slade, St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995], 127).
57 Brian Treanor ‘Mind the Gap: The Challenge of Matter’, in Carnal Hermeneutics, ed. Richard Kearney & Brian Treanor (New York: Fordham U. P., 2015), 59.
58 The pain of estrangement from family which entry to the convent necessitates is memorably evoked in Teresa’s Libro de la Vida: ‘Acuérdaseme, a todo mi parecer y con verdad, que cuando salí de casa de mi padre no creo será mas el sentimiento cuando me muera. Porque me parece cada hueso se me apartaba por sí, que como no había amor de Dios que quitase el amor del padre y parientes, era todo haciéndome una fuerza tan grande que, si el Señor no me ayudara, no bastaran mis consideraciones para ir adelante’ (Obras completas de Santa Teresa de Jesús, transcripción, intro. & notas de Efrén de la Madre de Dios & Otger Steggink [Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1962], IV, 1).
59 Elizabeth Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). This ‘biological’ metaphor was also developed by Alison Weber, ‘Locating Holiness in Early Modern Spain: Convents, Caves and Houses’, in Structures and Subjectivities: Attending to Early Modern Women, ed. Joan Hartman & Adele Seeff (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2007), 50–74.
60 For example, on Sister Elizabeth Baptist (Lynch), who died in the convent of Immaculate Conception, Málaga, Browne draws upon the authority of the confessor: ‘Her confessor testified about her that he had never in all his life dealt with a more pure soul. Some years after her death, as another nun was being buried near her, some of her grave was uncovered and her body was seen to be fresh and white, without any bad odour’ (Recollections, ed. O’Brien, 14).
61 Jane Tar, ‘Flying through the Empire: The Visionary Journeys of Early Modern Nuns’, in Women’s Voices and the Politics of the Spanish Empire: From Convent Cell to Imperial Court, ed. Jennifer L. Eich, Jeanne Gillespie & Lucia G. Harrison (New Orleans: Univ. Press of the South, 2008), 263–302. See also Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2002).
62 Tar, ‘Flying through the Empire’, 284–85.
63 Vollendorf, ‘Transatlantic Ties’, 79. See also Tar, ‘Flying through the Empire’, 296–98. The source for Gerónima Nava y Saavedra’s vision is Stacey Schlau, Spanish American Women’s Use of the Word: Colonial through Contemporary Narratives (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2001), 14.
64 Cap. XVIII entitled ‘En que se trata del suceso de una monja desta casa en Vida y Muerte; acerca de las inteligencias que della tubo esta sierva de Dios’ (see Bibliografia de Escritoras Españolas, directed by Nieves Baranda, <http://www.bieses.net/> [accessed 12 February 2015]).
65 Tar, ‘Flying through the Empire’, 271.
66 Richard Kearney, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’, New Literary History, 46 (2015), 99–124 (p. 99).
67 José L. Sánchez Lora, Mujeres, conventos y formas de la religiosidad barroca (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1988).
68 Morrás, ‘Ser santa y mujer’, 10.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.