ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Robinson's rhetorical and representational strategies efface female contributions to monastic book culture, and examines the strategies used by members of the convent to refute his claims in a manuscript response written in the months following his pamphlet's first printing. The relationship between these two texts reveals the necessity of reading early modern polemic not only with an eye for historical detail, but also with an ear for literary tropes and techniques, which enable a more flexible understanding of the rhetorical construction of communal textual identities and offer a corrective to the idea that Catholic women, and nuns in particular, were victims of, rather than participants in and shapers of, early modern book culture. The content of Robinson's pamphlet serves as a gloss on its epigraph, erasing female agency not only from contemporary monastic practice and book culture, but also from the history of literary constructions of national identity.
