By Paige Bottorff, Elliot Fish, and Kaycee White
Gertrude More was not the first nun to write poetry, nor was she the last. New York Times-acclaimed poet Madeline DeFrees and ex-nun (d. 2015), said of her craft: “Some people seem to think that being a member of a religious order would be restrictive as to writing, but I don’t feel this as far as poetry is concerned. I feel more free than I would be otherwise” (Ripatrazone). While More felt trapped when she entered her seventeenth-century convent at Cambrai, her poetry reveals that writing helped her feel more free than she would have otherwise. Exceptional for its underlying political and social implications and easily understood in its plain style, More’s poetry participates in the centuries-old tradition of convent poetry.
Poetry was a vessel into which the English nuns such as More poured feelings and opinions that they might not otherwise, or as effectively, express. Carefully preserved, recorded and copied in the convent, poetry was a time capsule. Through it nuns communicated across space and time and, via posthumous manuscript circulation, even after death. Most convent poetry was religious in nature. Some, like More’s, had political implications.
More’s poetry appears plain at first glance, perhaps even crude. If it is plain, though, it is so by design, delivering More’s message without regard to contemporary literary aesthetics. Rather, she adopted a spare poetic style in line with Benedictine humility, which allowed More to focus on her ultimate goal: praising God. The humility instilled in Benedictine convents led More to place her emphasis on the poetry, not the poet: “English Benedictine convents fostered distinctive attitudes toward speech and writing that reflected their order’s traditional emphasis on humbleness” (Goodrich, “Low and plain stile” 601). The Cambrai Benedictines developed a preference for poetry that was low in aesthetic qualities and would thus not distract the nuns from the poems’ pious content. As an influential member of this community, More sought to make her poetry accessible to her audience, her fellow nuns. More’s and the Cambrai nuns’ teacher, Augustine Baker, too, “wrote several treatises for the Cambrai convent that recommend simple language unmarked by any aesthetic ornamentation” (Goodrich, “Low and plain stile” 603). More’s use of simple language was highly appropriate for this context and much appreciated by other Benedictines. The Cambrai nuns took care to preserve her writings and sent them to their filiation at Paris to circulate there, as well. The Paris nuns, in turn, published the 1658 edition of her poetry.
After More’s death, another important Benedictine writer, Mary Cary (professed 1640, d. 1693), arrived at Cambrai, in 1638. Cary was responsible for producing the Cambrai Psalter, a partial transcription and emendation of the Psalms written by Protestant poet Samuel Woodford (Goodrich, “Monastic Authorship, Protestant Poetry, and the Psalms Attributed to Dame Clementina Cary”). Although Cary does not claim authorship of the Cambrai Psalter, she took on an authorial role by rewriting some of Woodford’s verses. Cary’s participation in the continuing tradition of poetry at Cambrai consequently offers “an important glimpse into how Catholic convents received and adapted popular devotional literature even across confessional lines” (Goodrich, “Monastic Authorship” 2). Like More’s poetry, Cary’s revisions often revert to a plain style at odds with Woodford’s more elaborate verse, thus keeping with the “low and plain” literary aesthetic at Cambrai.
Although Cary’s preparation of the Cambrai Psalter for her community “…contains a female voice that responds to 17th-century Protestant poetry” (Goodrich, “Monastic Authorship” 6), scholars, even feminist ones, have long overlooked her work. Nuns like Cary “fell into the category of women writers whose works did not agree with the feminist project of finding proto-feminist foremothers” (Goodrich, “Monastic Authorship,” 6). If scholars have paid little tribute to poetry hailing from Cambrai, a convent well known for the prominent role writing played in its community and for the works of More (great-great-granddaughter to Thomas More), then the poetry of less prominent nuns has been nearly invisible. Such is the case with the poetry of the English Poor Clare, Catherine Magdalen Evelyn (1596/7-1668), unearthed by Goodrich in a 2016 article, “A Poor Clare’s Legacy: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn and New Directions in Early Modern Women’s Literary History.”
Like More, Evelyn’s poetry served to benefit her religious community and strengthen her faith. Evelyn often wrote under a cloak of anonymity due to Franciscan values: modesty, poverty and humility. Her poem The Life of Blessed Sainte Euphrosina tells the story of Euphrosina: a crossdressing saint. In it, she praises Euphrosina’s defiance of worldly mores, social rank, and material wealth, indicating Evelyn’s extreme repudiation of secular paradigms. Evelyn’s political, proto-feminist poem “emphasizes the spiritual value of a quasi-Franciscan poverty rather than simply praising monasticism in general” (Goodrich, “A Poor Clare’s Legacy” 18), and offered a monastic perspective on marriage, which Goodrich describes as being “…a useful counterpoint to secular women’s criticisms of domestic patriarchy” (Goodrich, “A Poor Clare’s Legacy” 17). This poem takes a radical stance, is subversive in nature, and unique in subject matter. Evelyn was the first English author to write about Euphrosina in over a hundred years: “Prior to Evelyn’s poem, the most extensive treatment of Euphrosyne available in English was William Caxton’s 1495 abbreviated translation of the Latin life from the Vitae patrum” (Goodrich, “A Poor Clare’s Legacy” 15). Evelyn brought the character of Euphrosina to light in her community. Evelyn’s Life thus functioned as an exemplar of the monastic identity of the convent in Aire that she had helped found and where she later served as abbess.
Despite the subversive and impactful poetry of Evelyn, Cary, and More and their importance to their communities, English nuns’ verse is rarely taught or read, in part due to a lack of accessible editions. This edition seeks to remedy that situation by making More’s poetry available to a wider audience, including scholars and undergraduate students, and by revealing its importance to convent and early modern poetry. In this digital edition, More’s simple yet effective “low and plain stile” lives on.
Works Cited
Goodrich, Jaime. “A Poor Clare’s Legacy: Catherine Magdalen Evelyn and New Directions in Early Modern Women’s Literary History.” English Literary Renaissance. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
—. “‘Low and Plain Stile’: poetry and piety in English Benedictine convents, 1600-1800.” Br. Cathol. Hist (2019), vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 599-618. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
—. “Monastic Authorship, Protestant Poetry, and the Psalms Attributed to Dame Clementia Cary.” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts V: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, ed. Michael Denbo, pp. 193-207. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014.
Ripatrazone, Nick. “The Nuns Who Wrote Poems.” America: The Jesuit Review, May 15, 2020.