ABSTRACT
When young women from English recusant families crossed the Channel to begin new lives as enclosed nuns, they were leaving behind more than their loved ones and their country. They were leaving behind a way of viewing the world, a way of processing infonnation, a way of reading, thinking and writing. At the English Benedictine communities of Our Lady of Consolation, Cambrai, founded in 1623, and its daughter-house, Our Lady of Good Hope, Paris, founded in 1651, they were entering a world of contemplation, silence and enclosure, where every thought, word and deed was for God alone. Their daily life was now reduced to four activities: praying, working, resting and reading. Their new purpose in reading was to prepare themselves for the highest stage of mental prayer, an experience 'so spirituall that it cannot be expressed in wordes', but commonly referred to as mystic union (Heinecke MS Osborn b.268, 'Book H', p.25).
