‘Divine Love and the Negotiation of Emotions in Early Modern English Convents’,
Résumé
This essay explores the affectivity of the English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth century; it relies mostly on documents which belonged to the houses at Cambrai and Paris. In conventual writings, the ‘terrene’ affections which emanated from the senses and gratified the appetites were unanimously condemned, whilst only one emotion was praised as holy and spiritual: that of divine love. Zealous contemplative nuns embarked upon a personal crusade against their natural emotions, which they envisaged as obstacles separating them from their divine lover. To achieve their goal, these nuns had to die to the world and to themselves, forsaking any interaction with mundane society and abandoning any sense of their own self-worth. In order to meet such stringent demands, religious women followed various paths, and whilst some found solace in the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises, others such as the Benedictines of Cambrai adopted different types of spiritual techniques to tame their worldly emotions. Yet regardless of the methods they chose, all nuns strove towards the same goal: they hoped to become strangers to the world and to themselves, in order to become wholly available to divine love. Only then, once they were free of all human feelings, could these contemplatives experience perfect union with their heavenly bridegroom.
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