Who Were the Nuns?
The project is a prosopographical study of the English convents in exile during the period 1600-1800 when it was illegal to be a nun in Britain. Key research questions include a broad response to the question 'Who were the nuns?' This involves locating the members in their family, religious, political and economic context and identifying the support networks sustaining the convents over two centuries. By incorporating qualitative data analysis into the quantitative databases to draw upon the rich array of surviving sources to understand the convents as sites of cultural production and intellectual activity to consider their contribution to English Catholicism. To understand how the links between the American members and the English convents were developed.