Prepare the Canons! Mary Ward and her followers at the vanguard of 'Life-editing'

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My project proposes the first literary study of the life writing of Mary Ward (1585-1645). Popularly celebrated for generations as an early advocate for Catholic girls' education, Ward was in fact a radical reformer and her writings give us access to one of the most distinctive female voices of the sixteenth century.The daughter of Yorkshire Recusants, Ward fled for the Continent in order to practice her faith and follow a life devoted to God. It soon became evident, however, that her non-conformity was not restricted to the new Anglican order and that her radical desire to establish a female branch of the Jesuit mission (and its international project of Catholic conversion and colonisation) would alienate her from even those she sought as allies. Consequently, the Catholic Church attempted to suppress her legacy by destroying all written records of her life. However, various remnants saved by disciples faithful to her memory survive and now form the foundation of the archives at Manchester's Loreto College and the Bar Convent in York, now a 'Living Heritage Centre.' Using these archives and the comprehensive scholarly edition of all sources related to Ward published by Ursula Dirmeier in 2007, I will conduct the first interdisciplinary study of female-authored texts by and about Ward. My project will situate the surviving autobiographical fragments and the vitae composed by her followers in relation to the literary and critical debates surrounding the study of 'life writing' and initiate them into the canon of texts attributed with the inception of this genre. I will begin by assessing the evidence of self-editing in Ward's autobiographical fragments. I will ask how the annotations, corrections, omissions and additions suggest Ward was engaging with the process of the composition of a 'Life' and to what extent this was consciously literary. I will then analyse the consequences of variations between the biographical accounts and the autobiographical fragments and question to what extent these amendments were aesthetic and to what extent pragmatic - this will involve placing the texts in the dual context of composite women's writing and the emergence of 'life writing' as a distinct mode. As well as examining how the printed texts demonstrate the process of editing when compared to the manuscript sources, I will ask whether variations across translations constitute conscious acts of editing and how concurrences and differences suggest what may have been the content of certain 'lost' English-language sources (and therefore what may have been inventions, embellishments or personal reminiscences of their 'editor-authors'). Finally, I will explore the 'afterlives' of the texts and consider the implications of the subsequent editions, all of which were produced by nuns belonging to the order established by Ward. I will ask whether the composition and presentation of the extant fragments in later editions produce alternative narratives and how each editor negotiates their representation of Ward's self-conception, enquiring whether there is a single common imagined identity and how this corresponds with Ward's own self-representation in the manuscript sources. I have already implemented a similarly interdisciplinary methodology in a study of one of the unstudied manuscripts held at the John Rylands Library. I used formal literary analysis alongside palaeography and codicology to suggest how accomplished female Tudor readers may have subverted the acceptable conventions of pious reading by 'authoring' annotations in the additional quires of the devotional manuscript. A series of essays approaching this manuscript from various disciplinary perspectives will form the basis of an article I hope to submit for publication in The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.