An Alphabet for Beginners

Earlybird 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.

A course interweaving the historical and spiritual contexts with a textual analysis, to explore how mystical prayer empowered young women in 17th century and what it can still teach us today.

Course Leader: Dr Scholastica Jacob

5 sessions, 5.30 - 7.00 pm

Tuesday 14 October

Tuesday 21 October

Tuesday 28 October

Tues 4 November

Tues 11 November

This course will be recorded, access will be available via our online platform.

Group discounts are available - please contact us if your religious community, parish or school are interested in making a group booking for this course.

Overview:

Fr Augustine Baker, 1575-1641, an English Benedictine monk 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.

Biography - Dr Scholastica Jacob

Scholastica currently works for the Society of the Sacred Mission, which has launched the Herbert Kelly Institute in 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

Please look for the zoom details in your confirmation email.

If you have any questions please email Adele: aa2451@mbit.cam.ac.uk

Course Outline

Session 1: Introduction: Historical background - Baker and the Nuns in context

English Catholic women seeking religious life in Exile. An overview of the writings to be used on the course, with special reference to Augustine Bakers’ ‘Alphabet for Beginners’

Session 2: Baker’s Teaching and the Nuns’ writings

A closer examination of spiritual life at Cambrai, with discussion and reflection on key texts

Session 3: The Cambrai Scriptorium: Contemplative Mission

The role of religious women in the mission to England, prayer, lectio and the apostleship of the pen. The nuns’ role in preserving English mystical writings including Julian of Norwich

Session 4 : Prayer and Resistance

The nuns assert themselves against the male hierarchy to defend Baker’s work

Session 5: Reception

The Heritage of Baker and a closer look at the recently discovered manuscript Alphabet for Beginners

Join our newsletter here