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2007-2008 Fellows

 

 

Jenna Lay

Stanford University
English Department

Jenna Lay is a Ph.D. candidate in English. She received her B.A. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is currently writing a dissertation on early seventeenth-century Catholic Englishwomen. Her related interests include early modern women’s writing and the literary intersections among gender, religion, and politics.

Project Summary

“They Wil Not Be Penned Up in Any Cloister”: Nuns, Recusants, and the Development of Protestant Literary History examines Catholic women and their influence on the literature of early modern England over a period of approximately fifty-five years: from the establishment of the first new English continental convent in 1598 to the publication of Richard Crashaw's Carmen Deo Nostro in 1652. By examining the ideological concepts—including chastity, enclosure, obedience, and education—that were central to depictions of female monasticism in literature and in the writings of nuns and recusant women, Lay reveals how female Catholicism continued to shape English culture long after the break with Rome.