INTRODUCTION nearly four centuries of apostolic endeavour. ' his work describe it succinctly biographical dicTh tempting to It tionary the English Province I.B.V.M. but the word Province spans
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would be anachronistic . For three hundred years there was no organisation in England that merited the term Province, and not until 1929 was the title bestowed on the English houses . The early history of the Institute in this country is played on a stage where transient actors come and go, some speaking significant lines, others shadowy supernumeraries making brief, silent appearances . This book records the individual history of those members whose religious life was spent in England though some had made their noviceship on the continent , and some few died abroad . Taken together, the entries relate the fortunes of the Institute in England , but by their very nature only in a fragmentaryway, so that a cohesive summary seems called for, and is therefore attempted in this introduction. In 1609 Mary Ward began to develop her new form of religious life for women , shaping a congregation that was to have no enclosure and was to be self-governing, free of episcopal control and independent of the rules of existing Orders. As penal laws were strictly in force in her own country, she chose St. Omer as the cradle of her Institute, its easy access to the Channel Ports making it a convenient place of assembly for English Catholic refugees . From Flanders she made visits to London where some of her early members were working whether individually or in groups is not clear, though there is mention of a house in Spitalfields . We know, too , of a single member who was ploughing a lonely apostolic furrow in East Anglia during Mary Ward's lifetime. This is the mysterious Sister Dorothea , whose own account of her mission takes pains to conceal her identity and place of residence , but gives full details of her underground activity. There is no firm evidence that others were pursuing a similar course in the country, but the York Castle Depositions of 1678 state that Mary and Margaret More were arrested on a ' farm of their mother's ' in South Yorkshire; this raises the questions What were they doing there? Were they, too, on a singular apostolic mission? Were there others such, spanning the later years of the seventeenthcentury ?" We do not know. The first settlements that could be called English foundations were linked to Mary Ward's return to her own country in 1639. By then she had founded nine houses on the continent and had lived through the trauma of the suppression of the Institute in 1631 and the closure of all the houses except that in Rome and
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