Hallett Nicky, Lives of Spirit: English Carmelite Self-Writing of the Early ModernPeriod

Abstract

This book comprises an edited (and abbreviated) collection of accounts of the lives of Carmelite nuns in the English convents in the  Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taken from the annals that were compiled to bear witness to the  tribulations these women overcame to become nuns and their daily lives of obedience and humility, as well as to the occasional  miraculous occurrence. The sub-title ‘self-writing’ is in some ways misleading, since they are largely written in the third person, with  occasional quotations from autobiographical accounts; they are, however, drawn largely from personal recollections – often of  childhoods in England marked by early devotion.