‘“One may truely say she breathed out her soule”: Liminal Women and Spiritual Singing at Exiled English Convents, 1640-1700’

As part of ongoing doctoral research, this paper will interrogate how early modern English nuns in exile understood their singing voices as tools for contacting the Divine, swaying religious affectation, and treating or coping with sickness. It will offer some suggestions as to how said women understood their individual relationships to singing, conversion, and Divine matrimony relative to their relationships as a part of a corporate body. It will discuss how these relationships developed in the wake of crises such as the English Civil War and the Great Plague of 1665/1666. In discussing these issues, this paper will also provide new archival evidence and commentary on pieces of life writing from exiled English convents in order to highlight previously unremarked upon connections between professional music circles in Restoration-era London and English Benedictine convents in Dunkirk and Paris. It will use this evidence to assess how and why women from non-Catholic, non-aristocratic backgrounds used their musical skills to enter convents abroad, and how nuns from these backgrounds - as opposed to nuns from aristocratic Catholic families - might have engaged with the aforementioned issues.