Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530-1700

The lives and experiences of Irish women religious highlight how an expanding nexus of female houses perpetuated European Counter-Reformation devotion in Ireland.

JOINT WINNER: 2023 National University of Ireland's Publication Prize in Irish History
HONORABLE MENTION: 2023 Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender (USA) Book Awards
SHORT-LISTED: Royal Historical Society 2023 Whitfield Book Prize
LONG-LISTED: 2023 Reformation Research Consortium (REFORC) Book Award


This book investigates the impact of the dissolution of the monasteries on women religious and examines their survival in the following decades, showing how, despite the state's official proscription of vocation living, religious vocation options for women continued in less formal ways.

McShane explores the experiences of Irish women who travelled to the Continent in pursuit of formal religious vocational formation, covering both those accommodated in English and European continental convents' and those in the Irish convents established in Spanish Flanders and the Iberian Peninsula. Further, this book discusses the revival of religious establishments for women in Ireland from 1629 and outlines the links between these new convents and the Irish foundations abroad.

Overall, this study provides a rich picture of Irish women religious during a period of unprecedented change and upheaval.