For many nuns over the centuries convents were prisons. The letters of the twelfth-century couple Abelard and Heloise, and the Lettere familiari e di complimento (Venice: 1650) of the nun Arcangela Tarraboti testify to this. But many women actively chose convent life, and found some freedoms and educational advantages that they might not have enjoyed as laywomen. One such example is the Catholic convert Catherine Holland (1637–1720), whose conversion narrative survives at the exiled English Convent called Nazareth in Bruges, which she joined in 1662.
Catherine’s mother was a Catholic and her father was a Protestant MP. Sir John had several powerful Catholic friends and patrons, and advocated for liberty of conscience, yet he opposed the repeal of the Penal Laws and Test Acts. In the 1640s and 1650s the Holland family experienced a series of exiles and repatriations between England, Holland and Bruges, during which time Catherine experienced a slow, Augustine-like conversion. In Bruges she encountered Catholic culture for the first time, and made the acquaintance of the Nazareth nuns: ‘at that Time I thought it a miserable Life always to be locked up as in a Prison: That Manner of Life did not then please me at all, and I little thought I was to be one of those, I thought them so unhappy.’ Her later conversion was thus not only a move from Protestant to Catholic theology, but a shift in her understanding of convents as prisons into a belief they offered her a refuge and new freedom.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 