Cloistered emotions refashioning Anglo-Iberian relations : the case of Gertrude Thimelby

Abstract

When seventeenth-century English poet and author Gertrude Aston travelled to Spain, as an Anglican child, with her father, diplomat Sir Walter Aston, and the rest of her family, little did she imagine that, later in life, she would profess as a nun at St. Monica’s Convent in Louvain. In this article, I study, from a New Historicist perspective, the work of this author, who chose the cloister to give vent to her emotions in her writings, and analyse how she refashioned those Anglo-Iberian relations established at some point in her life.