Read more
Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women evaluated and articulated their senses of self through letters, chronicles, accounts and other such genres. The book explores writings by women who composed under their own names and those who composed anonymously and considers three case studies devoted to anonymous chronicling.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: 'A Pattern How to Dye'
- 2: In Pursuit of Liberty of Conscience: A Seventeenth-Century Response to Augustine's Confessions
- 3: Women's Education and Latinity: A Morean Legacy at St Monica's
- 4: Accounting, Chronicling, and Subsumed Autobiography
- 5: The Prioresses' Tales: Anonymity and Authority
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 'How I Came to Change my Religion', an Edition
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Victoria Van Hyning received a Masters in Medieval English Literature from Oxford University and a PhD in Early Modern Literature from the University of Sheffield where she held a British Library co-doctoral award. She held two postdoctoral fellowships at Oxford: a Digital Humanities and Crowdsourcing Fellowship (Zooniverse, Department of Astrophysics), and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship (Faculty of English and Pembroke). She has published on women's writing, autobiography, early modern Catholicism, and crowdsourcing. Her online humanities crowdsourcing interest has led her to relocate to the USA where she serves as a Senior Innovation Specialist at the Library of Congress.
Summary
Convent Autobiography explores the ways in which cloistered women evaluated and articulated their senses of self through letters, chronicles, accounts and other such genres. The book explores writings by women who composed under their own names and those who composed anonymously and considers three case studies devoted to anonymous chronicling.
Additional text
Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile,...enables a contemporary reader to envision more fully the convent as a space in which women's textual engagement and production thrived.
