Early bird Discount

If you purchase your ticket before the 1st October there is a discount applied of £20. After the 1st October the full price is £150.

Overview:

Fr Augustine Baker, 1575-1641, an English Benedictine monk who was sent, in 1625 to help the foundresses of a new Benedictine convent (Cambrai) for women in their formation. The women were all young (aged late teens to early thirties) and had made the perilous (and at that time illegal) journey from England to found a new Catholic community in France. The nuns brought in to help their formation taught a form of Ignatian exercises which the novices found difficult to engage with. They appealed to the English Benedictine Congregation to send them someone who could guide them in traditional Benedictine practices. Fr Baker’s lectures and treatises (especially the Alphabet for Beginners) written especially for them, were copied and disseminated by the nuns to other convents in exile and back to Catholics at home.

The English mystical tradition of contemplation was passed down through women and I hope this story will speak as powerfully to women and men in the 21st century as it did in the 17th century.

5 sessions, 5.30 – 7.00 pm

Tuesday, 14 October
Tuesday, 21 October
Tuesday, 28 October
Tuesday, 4 November
Tuesday, 11 November

Course Leader: Dr Scholastica Jacob

Biography – Dr Scholastica Jacob

Scholastica is currently working with an Anglican Religious Order to develop an Institute for Anglican Religious Life at St Antony’s Priory, Durham. This provides a central repository for Anglican community archives as well as encouraging research into all aspects of religious life and building a specialist library on the subject.

She has recently completed a Pearl Research Fellowship at the Margaret Beaufort Institute, Cambridge on ‘Creativity from the Cloister: enclosed women and their impact of Catholic revival 1850-1950’ and has given seminars on this subject. Scholastica has written entries for four of the women in the forthcoming ‘Women in British Churches: A Dictionary of National Biography’ for Bloomsbury.

Her doctorate awarded by Durham University in 2022, ‘From Exile to Exile: Repatriation, Resettlement and the Contemplative Experience of English Benedictine Nuns in England 1795 – 1838’ is due to be published later this year.

In a previous life Scholastica was a nun at Stanbrook Abbey, England (originally founded in Cambrai) and is also working on a recently discovered manuscript anthology of the Cambrai spiritual guide Augustine Baker’s writings.

Course fee: £150