In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 establishments across Flanders and France with more than 4,000 women entering them over 200 years. Most were enclosed convents, in theory cut off from the outside world. However, in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely. Here, these substantial communities of women found outlets for female expression often unavailable to their secular counterparts, until the French Revolution and its associated violence forced the convents back to England.

Since September 2008, an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project team at Queen Mary, University of London, of which I am a member, has been making a comprehensive study of the membership of these English convents in exile, discovering much about these women's activities. For example, it was always previously estimated that the total numbers entering these convents stood at around 1,500 rather than the 4,000 identified by the project.

Whereas the Bridgettines settled in Portugal, the other English female establishments were founded in northern France and Flanders. From 1600 to the start of the English Civil War, the women approached their enterprise with verve. They believed themselves to be playing an active part in winning back England for the Catholic faith, for which their male counterparts were suffering via the fabled "rack and rope". Since Elizabeth I's time, to be ordained a Catholic priest in a foreign country — the only place where this was possible due to the State's official Protestantism — and then to return to England was deemed an act of treason. Equally, to go abroad for education was deemed an illicit act so these women were taking grave risks by forming and joining these convents. Equally, as enclosed female orders, meaning that they remained within the convent's confines, they were forsaking family and friends. Yet, through their prayers for England's conversion, they felt united to the English evangelising mission.

They also had more tangible reminders. For example, Anne Clitherow joined the English Augustinians at Louvain. Her mother was Margaret Clitherow, executed in York in 1586 for refusing to plead for fear of forcing her children to testify against her when charged with sheltering priests. In order to aid devotion, as well as for safe-keeping, the nuns acquired relics of these executed Catholics from their homeland, such as the English Carmelites at Lierre who possessed some of the rope from which Edmund Campion had been hanged. They amassed impressive libraries, the recent deposition of that of the Lisbon-based Bridgettines at Exeter University Library being marked by a volume of essays. Not only did the convents house women writers, translators and dedicatees, but they were also hives of artistic patronage, with work commissioned to decorate the public chapels attached to the convent buildings.