ABSTRACT
The study of emotions has recently become the focus of interest in research centres worldwide. It has attracted funding from the most prestigious awarding bodies and generated a wealth of excellent publications exploring the new field of 'emotionology'. This chapter explores the affectivity of the English Benedictine nuns in exile in the seventeenth century in the Southern Netherlands and in France, and relies mostly on documents which belonged to the houses at Cambrai and Paris. Many were never expected to be read beyond the walls of the enclosure. 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.
