Expatriates. Women’s Communities, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe: English and Spanish Nuns in Flanders
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The Spanish Netherlands were, during the 17th century, the destination of English Catholics escaping from the restrictions of the Penal Laws. The exile of English women and the displacement of their Spanish coreligionists made difficult the adscription of cultural practices to a single national tradition. Through their intense correspondence, a complex set of alliances was created in Flanders between religious Spanish and English women. This epistolary activity contributed to permeating the imagined borders of national groups by constructing a sense of collective identities around common cultural practices. The foundation enterprise of the first English Carmel in Antwerp is a case in point that illustrates how transnational women networks managed to negotiate proper, if not always legitimate, channels of influence that indicate the fluid and ubiquitous nature of power in early modern communities.