Dr Caroline Bowden

Honorary Senior Research Fellow

Email: c.bowden@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 6930

Profile
Research
Publications

Profile

I came to Queen Mary as Research Fellow/Project Manager of the Who were the Nuns? project in 2008.

I completed my PhD thesis as a mature student at the Institute of Education, London where I investigated attitudes to girls’ education in early modern England.

My first post in research was a Wellcome-funded project researching health care in the Cecil family, c.1550-c. 1660 at Royal Holloway.

Research

Research Interests:

My research interests are currently focussed on the English convents in exile c.1600-1800, their creation, supporters, survival and significance in cultural and religious terms.

The creation of the project database and its publication on the website has involved innovative IT and prosopographical techniques which have allowed the development of a comprehensive database with a user-friendly interface.

This will serve to transform the study of early modern English women by showing how women religious can be integrated into main stream research on women writers, scribes, translators, managers, benefactors and patrons.

Web publication is supported by the print publication of six volumes of texts and a further volume of interpretive essays.

Publications

The English Convents in Exile and Questions of National Identity, 1600-1688’, in Emigrants and Exiles from the Three Kingdoms in Europe, 1603-1688 (link is external), edited David Worthington, Amsterdam, Brill, 2009.
‘Women in Educational Spaces’ in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, (link is external) edited Laura Knoppers, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
‘Books and Reading at Syon Abbey, Lisbon in the seventeenth century’ in Syon Abbey and its Books: Religious Communities and Communication in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (link is external), edited by E A Jones and Alexandra Walsham, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 2010.
‘Collecting the Lives of Early Modern Women Religious: Obituary Writing and the Development of Collective Memory and Corporate Identity’, Women's History Review (link is external), 19.1 2010.
‘Patronage and Practice: Assessing the Significance of the English Convents as Cultural Centres in Flanders in the Seventeenth Century’, in English Studies (link is external), Vol. 92, No. 5, August 2011.
English Convents in Exile 1600-1800 (link is external), a collection of six volumes of sources with commentary for publication between 2012 and 2013 by Pickering and Chatto. I am General Editor of the series and Editor of Volume I as well as contributing to Vols. V and VI.
‘Les Clarisses anglaises d’Aire-sur-la-Lys (1629-1799): stratégies d’une survie’, Etudes Franciscaines, Nouvelle série, 5, 2012, fasc. 2.
The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (link is external), edited by Caroline Bowden and James Kelly, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013.

Editorial Positions

Editorial board, History of Education Society (link is external) 1998-2002
Joint Creator/Editor History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland Website (link is external) 2006-2011

Global main menu

Study at Queen Mary

Experience Queen Mary

Subjects

Research and Innovation

Research by faculties and centres

Collaborations and partnerships