The Who Were the Nuns? project made a comprehensive study of the membership of the English convents and the English members of Mary Ward’s Institute established during the period when they were proscribed in England. These institutions with nearly 4000 (mainly English), members were all founded in exile mainly in Flanders and France. Preliminary research showed that they were significant foundations with transnational connections. The aim was to understand the membership and the supporting networks. Being able to demonstrate both membership and supporting links in a database will allow scholars to recover the convents and place them in the mainstream of the history of the British archipelago.

Most (twenty two) were enclosed convents with a further ten mainly smaller houses founded on a Jesuit model by Mary Ward and her followers. In spite of enclosure, the nuns were not isolated from the world: their contacts and networks spread widely, including members of the royal family of England, the archdukes in Brussels and members of lay and ecclesiastical hierarchies across Europe among their supporters. The nuns built substantial convents and schools, commissioned works of art and music, and created important libraries and centres of learning for women. They continued to attract members until violent events associated with the French revolutions forced them to leave. All except two convents survived until recently and one (in Bruges) is still in the original building started in 1629.

Sources for the project were identified mainly in archives still held in monastic communities in England (one in Maryland, USA) with other significant documents held either in ecclesiastical archives in Belgium or state archives in France. Project researchers were generally given privileged access and permitted to take digital images of most documents which greatly facilitated the collection of data. This means that we are confident we have a virtually complete survey of members of the convents, although the Mary Ward Institute is less complete because of the destruction of records in the seventeenth century.

The project team led by Caroline Bowden brought together expertise in specialist areas: Katharine Keats-Rohan a prosopographer, Jan Broadway a historian with coding and database design experience, two researchers (Katrien Daemen de Gelder and Pascal Majerus) based in Belgium, and James Kelly who started as a research assistant became project manager for the second phase of the project. AHRC granted follow-on funding for database development to add material and to engage in outreach activities to attract new users of the online database and other material published on the website.

The research team carried out a survey of surviving relevant documents in conventual and public archives. “Membership” documents such as profession records and obituaries created by the convents, often included parental data which was invaluable to the project. Personal details of members of the convents and their network of supporters were extracted for entry into a database designed by Jan Broadway at that time based at CELL, QMUL. Some family details were added from external contextual sources if they were missing from convent texts. A representative sample of outstanding documents was edited and entered in a separate database for qualitative analysis using AtlasTi. The two databases were linked to combine quantitative and qualitative analysis experimentally, although there was insufficient time to develop this aspect fully.

The website http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ provides access to the MySQL database and supporting material. For instance, Katharine Keats-Rohan created more than 150 family trees using ‘Family Historian’ software to support research into supporting networks. These provide some significant insights into links between families and has drawn family historians into using the database.

Published print outputs include six volumes of sources mostly located during the course of project research; a volume of essays from the closing project conference; and a biographical register will appear in 2014. There are plans to publish some transcriptions on the project website. The database is available on the website for public download.

External reaction to the website and database has been very favourable with comments sent in from literary scholars, librarians, family historians, historians and potential PhD students. Geographical spread of respondents ranges from New Zealand, Australia, California, Maryland, Ireland, to France. As project manager there are research processes which I continue to reflect on and would be happy to discuss. Of particular concern at present is securing the afterlife of the project: (government/AHRC) policy towards long term support of publicly funded digital projects changed during the life time of this project. the provision of arrangements for support is now more precisely discussed on guidelines to funding applications but project managers need to be aware of support issues and to build costing and solutions into the planning stage.