The Effects of Exile on English Monastic Spirituality: William Peryn’s Spirituall Exercyses

In 1557, William Peryn, an Oxford graduate and a Dominican, published his Spirituall Exercyses. A notable conservative preacher, he had left England, probably after the Act of Supremacy in 1534. The two nuns to whom he dedicated the book, Katherine Palmer of Syon and Dorothy Clement, a Poor Clare, were among the first English members of the Louvain diaspora. Peryn’s book was heavily influenced both by Ignatian and by Low Countries spirituality. The opportunity to make such ideas available in English, for English nuns, was the fruit of religious exile with its consequent direct exposure to Continental writing and thought. Peryn’s book, intended to provide spiritual direction for exiled English nuns, then subsequently published at home in England under Queen Mary, continued to be read in the seventeenth century, as the institution of female religious life moved permanently out of England.