Through the textual analysis of clerical prescriptive writings and of the notes compiled by the nuns themselves, this chapter examines the contemplative ideal and the idea of social death at its very core. By dedicating themselves to the monastic life, encosed and in exile, postulants embraced a lifestyle that required great determination to die to the world, to others and to themselves, in...
The Protestant critics of the early modern Catholic Church denounced what they sometimes described as its sensual approach to the sacred. In the convents, behavioural guidebooks exhorted the Sisters to break away from their senses and to move towards a more perfect a-sensory contemplative state, where prayer no longer needed sensate perceptions to stimulate the soul. Yet the personal writings...