Defending English Catholicism in English Convents in Exile
TBE
Emilie has wide interests in the cultural and religious history of early modern England, and English-speaking people abroad. Her earliest work considered the ways post-Reformation English Catholics used music to foster confessional identity in the face of persecution. Emilie’s other main interests surround travel and mobility, and she has published widely on multilingualism, transnationalism, linguistic encounter, power and identity, focusing on evidence from enclosed English convents in exile. Her most recent monograph was a pandemic-prompted pivot and Listening to Early Modern Travel Writing, for Cambridge University Press, is based on Purchas His Pilgrimes – the four volumes of travel narratives collated by the Protestant cleric Samuel Purchas. This short book brings her longstanding interests in acoustic culture together with her work on mobility and encounter, and argues that the epistemic value of sound and listening (real and imagined) was fundamental to early modern travel writing. Emilie is in the early stages of a new monograph project, provisionally dubbed Exiled Lives: English Nuns in Catholic Europe, which will offer a new cultural history of the thousands of women who left England from c.1600-1800 to join exiled English convents newly established on the continent.
