Winefrid Thimelby

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Though the focus of her life was religion, the seventeenth-century WT expressed in several genres an urge to write: pious meditations, lively familiar letters, and in all probability a long sequence of the annals of her convent, a form of women's history. She was well versed in the theology of St Augustine and St Bernard of Clairvaux , and although living and writing at a time of Jansenism, she stresses the incarnational, the divine immanence within human nature.
Latz, Dorothy L., editor. “Neglected Writings by Recusant Women”. Neglected English Literature: Recusant Writings of the 16th-17th Centuries, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1997.
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  • BirthName: Winefrid Thimelby

Milestones

Probably by 1619

WT was born, most likely at Irnham in Lincolnshire, the youngest but one among thirteen children to survive in her family.
Latz, Dorothy L., editor. “Neglected Writings by Recusant Women”. Neglected English Literature: Recusant Writings of the 16th-17th Centuries, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1997.
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From about 1660

WT was likely the anonymous author of her convent's chronicle, a composite work which was then continued by later generations of nuns.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

1690

WT died in her convent, St Monica's at Louvain, after twenty-two years as prioress.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

Biography

Birth and Family

Probably by 1619

WT was born, most likely at Irnham in Lincolnshire, the youngest but one among thirteen children to survive in her family.
Latz, Dorothy L., editor. “Neglected Writings by Recusant Women”. Neglected English Literature: Recusant Writings of the 16th-17th Centuries, Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1997.
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