When Blessed Anne of St Bartholomew left Spain in 1604 to take the Teresian Carmel to France, she could hardly have imagined that this decidedly European venture would eventually take St Teresa’s daughters to the New World and their first foundation in North America. Yet there is evidence that when the first sisters set sail for Maryland in 1790 they took Anne’s spirit and her teachings with them as a much-treasured part of their Carmelite heritage. 

To trace this story, we need to go back to the beginning. As is well known, Anne of Jesus and Anne of St Bartholomew left Spain for France together with four other sisters in 1604 to found the first Teresian communities outside the Iberian Peninsula. From there, the two Annes moved on to continue the expansion of the Teresian Carmel into the Spanish Netherlands, with Anne of Jesus leaving for Flanders in 1607. Anne of St Bartholomew followed four years later in 1611, travelling first to the newly established Carmel in Mons, where she stayed just a short while before moving on to Antwerp. There, in 1612, she founded the house in which she was to remain until her death in 1626.

At this time, Catholic religious life was not possible in England, and many English ladies were crossing over to Europe to pursue their religious vocation in houses on the continent. A wealthy English lady, Lady Lovell, had already provided the funds to found English-speaking houses for other Orders, and in 1619 a second Carmelite monastery was established in Antwerp; the first ever English-speaking Discalced Carmel. The prioress was a young English woman, Anne Worsley, known in religious life as Sister Anne of the Ascension, who Anne of St Bartholomew had met in Mons, and who had gone with her to make the first foundation in Antwerp. A few years later in 1616, Anne had chosen her to go on the foundation to Mechlin as sub-prioress. Such was Anne of St Bartholomew’s regard for the English Anne that she urged the prioress at Mechlin to allow her to be released to act as prioress in the new Carmel in Antwerp. Indeed, the two remained firm friends and collaborators for several years, forging close links between the two Carmels, until a difference of opinion drove them apart in 1624. This dispute – concerning whether new foundations should be established under obedience to the local bishop or under the jurisdiction of the friars – must have caused the two much distress, and although they were never reconciled, the evidence suggests that regard for Anne of St Bartholomew’s wisdom, and respect for her authority as the confidante of St Teresa, was never forgotten by the English Carmelites. 

Let’s fast forward a little, by just over a hundred years. Already demand was such that two further houses for English sisters had been founded in the Lowlands: Lierre in 1648, and Hoogstraet in 1678. Now, in the middle of the eighteenth century, another group of women unable to pursue religious vocations in their homeland were seeking to enter these houses. For some years, English settlers in the American colonies had been sending their daughters to Europe to receive a Catholic education, and many had got to know the religious communities there, such as the Carmelites. At this time, there were no female religious houses in America, but news clearly spread, and by the middle of the century young American women were crossing the Atlantic specifically to enter religious communities: Lierre received its first American novice in 1742; English-speaking Antwerp in 1751; and Hoogstraet in 1754. It was some of these women, Margaret Brent in Antwerp and Anne Matthews in Hoogstraet, who began planning to take the Carmelite ideal back to America and plant Teresa’s vision there. 

As it happened, it wasn’t until 1790 that the conditions in America were right for making the foundation. By this point America had gained its independence, and the thirteen original States had established religious freedom as a founding tenet of the new American Constitution. Accordingly, four intrepid Carmelite women set sail from Amsterdam on 1^st May 1790. The party comprised Anne Matthews who was to be the founding prioress, her two nieces who had followed her to Hoogstraet Carmel in the 1780s, and an English woman from Antwerp Carmel, Sr Clare Joseph Dickinson. Baggage lists from the voyage show that they took with them fourteen boxes and trunks containing over a thousand books, as well as historical records from the Lowland foundations, and numerous documents on prayer, spirituality and the Carmelite life.^[1] The books included the entirety of St Teresa’s writings in English translation and, among the documents, two precious records of Anne of St Bartholomew’s teaching. 

The first of these is a tiny scrap of paper (less than A5 in size), lovingly copied out in the hand of Sr Teresa Cowdray, another English sister at Antwerp who had done much to raise the funds for the American venture and who had, at one time, been expected to travel with the founding party. The text comprises a week of daily devotions taken from a manuscript originally written by Anne of St Bartholomew for Anne of the Ascension and the English-speaking sisters in Antwerp. For each day, Anne recommends an act of thanksgiving for different gifts: for the sacraments, for being daughters of the Church, for Christian parents and for preachers; intentions in which it’s hard not to hear Teresian overtones. A recommended virtue follows: Monday, humility; Tuesday, patience and so on. Then there is a suggested mortification to be practised during the day: for example, to restrain the tongue (Wednesday); to abnegate our own will (Thursday); to observe silence (Sunday). The text concludes with the comment that Blessed Anne desired the novice mistress to teach this practice to her young recruits in the new Carmel.

The second work is more substantial, a short booklet titled The Manner of Bringing Up Novices Composed by Venerable Mother Anne of St Bartholomy.^[2] The booklet records that the text was faithfully translated into English from French in 1751 by the chaplain of Hoogstraet Carmel, and that it is offered to the mistress of novices ‘so that she might pray for the scribbler’! The text comprises twenty-three short chapters and reveals much of Blessed Anne’s thinking towards the end of her life, filled with the wisdom of experience and full of care and compassion for the young women negotiating their way into religious life. The novice mistress is to exercise her office with kindness, discretion, humility and prudence. Anne’s well-known insistence on obedience is evident as she recalls St Teresa’s severity with those ‘who were stubborn and disobedient’, and there are other echoes of St Teresa’s teaching – her emphasis on Christ-centred prayer, for example, and the need for courage and fervour in the way of life the novices have chosen. Obedience is, however, oriented to a holy simplicity; the novices are to be obedient to the guidance of the novice mistress, willing to open their interior to her, not exerting their wilfulness in practising excess penances, not resentful of her need to know of their struggles and temptations. In all this, moreover, Anne encourages the novice mistress to lead by example, revealing to the novices some of her own imperfections, interior pains and dryness in prayer; the sisters in her charge will be encouraged to share their struggles with her if she, in humility, shares something of hers with them. Indeed, struggles and temptations are not to be taken as a contrary sign when discerning the authenticity of a vocation, since ‘the Mistress must know that God does often try his beloved with dryness and uneasiness of mind’ and in time of temptation, ‘souls are purified and thus made worthy to dwell in this house.’ For those who are not to be admitted to solemn profession Anne is all solicitude; they must be treated with equality and charity until they leave, and on their departure the novice mistress must so safeguard their reputations that their ‘relations may not be offended.’

The presence of the two texts of Anne of St Bartholomew’s writings in the founding party’s luggage as they set out for America reveals something of her enduring influence on the English-speaking Carmels of the Lowlands; both the Antwerp and Hoogstraet communities had clearly preserved their regard for her teaching long after the regrettable break with Anne of the Ascension back in 1624. The fact that a new translation of her advice to novice mistresses was made at Hoogstraet in 1751 and that, just as preparations were being made for the American foundation, Teresa Cowdray in Antwerp copied out the community exercise of weekly devotions, perhaps expecting to take it with her on the voyage, show that, despite the passage of time, Anne’s influence remained strong among the English daughters of Teresa. It was an influence they clearly wished to take with them to the New World, and it is an influence which has been lovingly maintained in the American foundations, as witnessed by the fact that the manuscripts remain in the archives of Baltimore Carmel to this day. Four hundred years after her death in 1626, Anne of St Bartholomew continues to guide the daughters of her beloved St Teresa, and to be respected and revered by them as the woman who did so much to spread Teresa’s vision far beyond the plains of Castille. 

^[1] Sr Clare Joseph’s journal from the voyage, together with other details, is included in FitzGerald, C., The Carmelite Adventure, (Baltimore, MD: Carmelite Sisters of Baltimore, 1990).

^[2] A work with this title appears in Spanish in the Complete Works of Anne of St Bartholomew.