
Contents
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Early Modern Augustine: Whose Saint? Early Modern Augustine: Whose Saint?
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Augustinian Echoes Augustinian Echoes
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Early Life Early Life
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The Middle Years The Middle Years
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‘What am I? Why am I? What is this World?’ ‘What am I? Why am I? What is this World?’
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Imitatio and Truth Imitatio and Truth
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Convent Life and Textual Afterlife Convent Life and Textual Afterlife
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2 In Pursuit of Liberty of Conscience: A Seventeenth-Century Response to Augustine’s Confessions
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Published:June 2019
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Abstract
This chapter unpacks a highly significant and unusual example of a post-English Civil War era Catholic woman’s conversion narrative. Catherine Holland was the daughter of Sir John Holland, a moderate Protestant parliamentary politician, and Alathea Sandys, a Catholic. During her teens and twenties Holland began to feel drawn to Catholic doctrine and practice, and at the age of twenty-five she ran away from home to join the Nazareth convent where she soon after authored a conversion narrative modelled on Augustine’s Confessions. The unique manuscript of ‘How I Came to Change My Religion’ also contains prayers and lists, all of which have been provided in their entirety as an appendix to this volume. This chapter charts Holland’s literary response to Confessions and developments in her self-fashioning through this literature as well as translations written during more than five decades at the convent. This chapter and edition provide unprecedented access to a significant early modern writer who was willing to defy parents, Protestant bishops, and reluctant Jesuits in order to achieve ‘liberty of conscience’ and ‘escape the slavery of marriage’. The edition may be particularly valuable to teachers and students studying conversion narratives, women’s writing, gender, and Confessions.
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