‘They lik’d the Thing, but yet abhorr’d the Name’: Imagining Nuns and Convents in Seventeenth-Century English Literature

Though materially absent since the dissolution of the monasteries, the nun remained culturally significant in post-Reformation England. This thesis traces the symbolic mobility of the nun in seventeenth-century English literature. As well as registering religious difference, she is used to articulate anxieties around female sexuality, proprietary rights, singledom and safety. Nuns, convents, and other Catholic metonyms function as part of a vital cultural register to lament the precarity of poetic labour, articulate political subjectivity, and even to interrogate contemporary libertine philosophy. The project is organised by form: I examine estate poetry, polemic, printed ‘nun-fiction’, and drama, remaining attentive to the ways in which form shapes the nuns’ meanings and manifestations across a wide generic sweep. Utilising the paradigm of the long-Reformation advanced by revisionist historians such as Eamon Duffy and Norman Jones, this thesis demonstrates the pervasive influence of the dissolution on early modern culture, underestimation of which has caused the prevalence and versatility of literary nuns to be largely overlooked.