An ordered cloister? Dissenting passions in early modern English cloisters

Abstract

Writing to her widowed brother-in-law, Herbert Aston, in the aftermath of her sister’s death in 1658, Winefrid Thimelby eschewed the emotional regime she had learned in the novitiate and supposedly adhered to during the succeeding 20 years: ‘Doe not suppose me a well mortified Nun dead to the world for alas tis not so, I am alive and as nearely concern’d for thos I love as if I had never left them and must shar in all ther fortunes wither good or bad.'2 Thimelby, an Augustinian nun at the English convent of St Monica’s in Louvain, evidently struggled to reconcile the conflicting emotional communities of the cloister and her family in England.