For the English Poor Clares in Exile
[POOR CLARES.]
A Pious Collection of severall profitable Directions fitted for the English Poor Clares in Graveling in order to the better Observance of their Institute. Very useful and profitable for all religious Women … Douai, M. Mairesse, [1684.]
[bound with:]
[PRAYERS.] Three and thirty most godly & devout Prayers or Salutations. [Douai, 1684?]Two works, 12mo, I: pp 183, [1], with woodcut headpieces and initials, and II: pp. 48, with a drop-head title and a woodcut headpiece; very good copies in nineteenth-century half roan, marbled papers sides, spine gilt in compartments with a lyre device, edges worn.
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A Pious Collection of severall profitable Directions fitted for the English Poor Clares in Graveling in order to the better Observance of their Institute. Very useful and profitable for all religious Women …
First edition, rare, of A Pious Collection – a devotional guide for English nuns in exile in the Low Countries – bound with an apparently unrecorded edition of thirty-three prayers for ‘souls departed’’.
An enclosed Franciscan order founded in 1212 by St Clare of Assisi, an early follower of St Francis, the Poor Clares had expanded within the century into France, Spain, the Low Countries, and Britain, where they were known as ‘minoresses’ and had their principal convent near Aldgate in London (preserved in the street-name the Minories). The Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII left few opportunities for English Catholics intent on a religious life except for exile, and in c. 1607–1609 an institution for English Poor Clares was established at Gravelines by Mary Ward (1585–1645), who had joined the order at St Omer in 1606 and went on to establish the less restrictive Sisters of Loreto.
A number of Irish nuns also professed at the convent at Gravelines in the 1620s, becoming the first Poor Clares in Ireland since the Reformation after they returned there in 1629. Dependent communities were established at Dunkirk in 1625, Aire-sur-la-Lys in 1629, and Rouen in 1644, but the convent at Gravelines itself was tremendously ill-fated: burnt down by fire in 1626, the rebuilt convent was again destroyed in a disastrous explosion during the Siege of Gravelines in 1654.
The present collection assembles prayers, devotions, and meditations for the use of the Poor Clares of Gravelines, with a preface by the convent’s Confessor William Warren (alias Pelham, d. 1701) ‘to all true poore clares’, stressing the two ‘wings’ of mortification and devotion on which one might rise to heaven. The printer, Mairesse, published a edition of the same texts, with different preliminaries, in octavo, for the nuns at Aire in the same year (Folger – imperfect; and Harvard only in ESTC). Of this edition, ESTC records six copies: BL, Downside, Bodleian; Franciscan House of Studies (Killiney); Folger, and Illinois.
Bound at the end are a set of thirty-three prayers for the thirty-three years of Christ’s incarnation, seemingly first printed at St Omer in 1640–1. This edition, which is not in ESTC, Library Hub, or OCLC, is a paginary reprint of the earlier edition.
ESTC R218253; Wing P2282A.