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

我的项目提出了玛丽沃德（1585-1645）的生活写作的第一个文学研究。沃德作为天主教女童教育的早期倡导者而闻名于世，她实际上是一位激进的改革者，她的著作让我们有机会接触到十六世纪最独特的女性声音之一。沃德是约克郡教区信徒的女儿，为了实践她的信仰并遵循献身于上帝的生活，她逃到了欧洲大陆。然而，很快就发现，她的不顺从不仅限于新的圣公会秩序，她建立耶稣会使命（及其天主教皈依和殖民化的国际项目）的女性分支的激进愿望甚至会疏远她寻求的盟友。因此，天主教会试图通过销毁她生活的所有书面记录来压制她的遗产。然而，忠实于她的记忆的门徒保存的各种残余物幸存下来，现在形成了曼彻斯特洛雷托学院和约克的酒吧修道院档案馆的基础，现在是一个“活遗产中心”。“利用这些档案和乌苏拉·迪迈尔（Ursula Dirmeier）于2007年出版的与沃德有关的所有资料的综合学术版，我将对沃德的女性作品和关于沃德的女性作品进行第一次跨学科研究。我的项目将收集幸存的自传体片段和她的追随者组成的简历，与围绕“生活写作”研究的文学和批评辩论有关，并将其纳入这一体裁开始的经典文本。我将开始通过评估自我编辑沃德的自传片段的证据。我会问如何注释，更正，遗漏和补充表明沃德是从事的过程中组成的“生活”，并在多大程度上这是有意识的文学。然后，我将分析传记叙述和自传片段之间的差异的后果，并质疑这些修正在多大程度上是美学的，在多大程度上是实用的-这将涉及到将文本置于复合女性写作和“生活写作”作为一种独特模式出现的双重背景下。除了研究印刷文本与手稿相比如何展示编辑过程之外，我还将询问翻译之间的变化是否构成有意识的编辑行为，以及一致性和差异如何暗示某些“丢失”的英语语言来源的内容（因此可能是发明，修饰或其“编辑-作者”的个人回忆）。最后，我将探讨文本的“来世”，并考虑后续版本的影响，所有这些版本都是由属于沃德建立的秩序的修女制作的。我会问是否组成和现有的片段在以后的版本中的介绍产生替代的叙述，以及每个编辑如何谈判他们的代表沃德的自我概念，询问是否有一个共同的想象身份，这是如何对应于沃德自己的自我代表的手稿来源。我已经实施了类似的跨学科的方法在研究的一个未经研究的手稿在约翰赖兰图书馆举行。我使用了正式的文学分析，以及古文字学和编纂学来说明都铎王朝的女性读者是如何通过在祈祷手稿的附加要求中“创作”注释来颠覆虔诚阅读的可接受惯例的。一系列从不同学科角度探讨这份手稿的文章将构成我希望提交发表在《约翰·莱兰兹图书馆公报》上的一篇文章的基础。

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.