“O that I did truly love! For by love only my soul shall become capable of understanding truth”: Dame Gertrude More’s The Spiritual Exercises (1658) from a feminist perspective on religious women’s agency and on mysticism and gender

English Catholic nuns from the early-modern period were marginalised voices for several reasons: firstly, they were women, in a historical context where their voices were usually not expressed and not heard; secondly, they were Catholic under the penal laws; finally, they were exiled on the continent. The seventeenth-century English Benedictine nun, Gertrude More, a founder of “Our Lady of Consolation” in Cambrai (France), has received scholarly attention mainly for her religious poetry and for her analysis of obedience to superiors in The Spiritual Exercises (1658), a collection of her writings assembled by her spiritual director. Building on feminist theories on religious women’s agency and on mysticism and gender, this contribution aims to reveal how More’s agentic capacity was realised through her religion: she employed the language conventions of religious women’s speech to criticise the abuse of male clerical control and she appropriated her spiritual director’s contemplative life teachings to develop her own mysticism.