We’re delighted to be appearing at the 2025 Keble Early Music Festival for a concert presenting more new research on music from convents established expressly for English Catholic women across France, the Low Countries, and Portugal, which grew in size and number over the 17th and early 18th centuries. The theme is divine love, and the pieces chosen reflect the variety of ways early modern English Catholic women religious understood this love as encompassing physical, spiritual, sexual, and psychological feelings.

The first set features early 17th-century polyphony for the profession of a nun published by organists at the English Benedictine convent in Brussels (Peter Philipps and Richard Dering). These settings have yet to be recorded in their original voicing (i.e., for upper or equal voice parts). The second set features devotional songs for solo voice and continuo in English, Dutch, Italian, and French on the theme of intimate, individualised love for Christ from mid-17th century manuscripts and print publications used at exiled English convents. This set will also feature some secular Italian arias (such as ‘O cara spene’ from Handel’s Il Floridante ) that appear in music manuscripts recently identified as used by exiled English nuns in northern France. The third set returns to liturgical music for nuns’ professions at exiled English convents, with anonymous settings of music for profession from late 17th-/early 18th-century manuscripts with links to exiled English convents.

Tickets will be available soon through Tickets Oxford. To find out more about this year’s Keble Early Music Festival, visit the link below