Overview

Between 1728 and 1744 the Catholic lawyer Mannock Strickland (1673-1744) acted as agent for English nuns living on the Continent, including St Monica's, Louvain, the Brussels Dominicans and the Dunkirk Benedictines. Most convent archives perished at the French Revolution, but Strickland's papers survived in the archives of Mapledurham House, Oxfordshire, offering a unique insight into the workings of English convents. These extraordinary documents reveal the reality of exile for a group of formidable yet vulnerable women, ""doubly dead"" to English law. Two hundred letters tell stories of hardship, isolation, severe winters, war, starvation, Jacobite intrigue and international finance. They show that convent bursars became skilled at playing international exchange markets yet remained at the mercy of unscrupulous investors. The letters are presented here with full notes; a thorough introduction sets the letters, cash day books, bills of exchange and other documents in context. Richard G. Williams is Librarian and Archivist of Mapledurham House; he has also held senior posts at the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, Birkbeck College London and at Yale University.

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9780902832305

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Provides a perspective on the lives of those living in the Flanders convents.which will inform scholarship on English female monasticism for some time to come. DOWNSIDE REVIEWWill be of use to scholars interested in post-Reformation Catholicism and the exiled religious orders, while also appealing to those working more generally in economic, political and legal history. ARCHIVES This book gives what must surely be the most detailed picture yet of what was involved in keeping English Roman Catholic religious houses on the continent afloat in the century and a half before Catholic Emancipation.... It is a major work of scholarship, which should bring this important archive to wider attention. ARCHIVES & RECORDS

This book gives what must surely be the most detailed picture yet of what was involved in keeping English Roman Catholic religious houses on the continent afloat in the century and a half before Cathglish Roman Catholic religious houses on the continent afloat in the century and a half before Catholic Emancipation.... It is a major wor

This book gives what must surely be the most detailed picture yet of what was involved in keeping English Roman Catholic religious houses on the continent afloat in the century and a half before Catholic Emancipation.... It is a major work of scholarship, which should bring this important archive to wider attention. ARCHIVES & RECORDS

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