5 - Liturgical Life: Relics and Martyrdom

Summary

This chapter examines the liturgical and spiritual life of the convents. It opens by outlining the daily routine within enclosure, exploring the devotional life of the women religious. This is followed by consideration of the spiritual ethos of different convents before focusing at greater length on the nuns’ attitudes towards relics and martyrdom, which was an especially strong devotional strain within the convents. The English convents considered themselves very much part of the English mission, and were committed to eventually replanting female religious life in their homeland, something very much central to the missionary impulse of early modern Catholicism. As such, though they had a natural interest in the fate of their persecuted fellow Catholics back home, the nuns in no way neglected the significance of martyrs from further afield, or relics more indicative of the wider Church, underlining their relationship with mainland European religious and spiritual trends.