The intellectual world of Catholic piety

Abstract

This chapter examines the importance of books, reading and writing for Catholic women after the Reformation. Women who were believed to be naturally inferior to men might do great things for God through the twin virtues of humility and courage. The chapter considers the textual engagements that informed early-modern Catholic women's piety. It draws particularly upon the experience of those from England's Catholic minority whose reading and writing practices traversed subjects and centuries from biblical times to their own, and which inevitably drew upon the rich spiritual material of reformed Catholicism, but places this material in a European context. The chapter examines variety of ways in which women engaged in the intellectual world of Catholic piety. The intellectual world inhabited by the nuns, connected often by correspondence and the exchange of pious texts with their families, church authorities and secular rulers, equipped them for engagement with religious and secular politics in the world outside convent walls.