Until recently, most early modern Catholic women have received relatively little attention in English-language literary and cultural scholarship. As Jenna Lay points out, ‘Catholic women's influence on mainstream literary culture beyond the sphere of the Stuart court’ has yet to receive sustained analysis. ‘To create a more complete picture of English literary history’, Lay argues, ‘we must ask how nuns and recusant women who were not central to England's courtly life shaped its literary culture’. Chapter Five will discuss the two Stuart Catholic queens, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria, and their influence upon the English court, but the two nuns with whom I open this exploration of the Female Baroque – Gertrude More (1605–1628), and Mary Ward (1585–1645) – have, by comparison, been sidelined in English literary and cultural history: by their religion (Catholicism), vocation (nun), abode (continental Europe, not England) and the fact that their writings are not novels, poems, plays, or treatises but biographical and autobiographical accounts, letters, and miscellaneous communications to their associates or followers. Neither could be seen as belle-lettrists but both were, in Kristeva's phrase, writing women.