Pudentiana Deacon

Pudentiana Deacon (born Elizabeth;

Life The few details known about Deacon's life are taken from two separate manuscripts. She took Pudentiana as her religious name.

In 1623 she and two other women were sent to help with a new English Benedictine congregation for women being set up in Cambrai, Our Blessed Lady of Consolation. Gertrude More, great-great-granddaughter of Thomas More, was one of the postulants at the new convent. The transfer would seem to have been at least partially political, as the three sisters were identified with a "pro-Jesuit" Ignatian tendency within the Brussels house.

One contemporary source indicates Deacon made at least one other translation, of The Mantle of the Spouse, but if she did, the work has not survived and does not appear to have been printed. Her writing is being considered within a wider critical reassessment of religious works by women in the early modern period.

Works Translator. Delicious Entertainments of the Soule: Written By the Holy and Most Reverend Lord Francis De Sales, Bishop and Prince of Geneva. Translated by a Dame of our Ladies of comfort of the order of S. Bennet in Cambray. Imprinted at Douay By Gheerart Pinson, under the signne of Cuelen, 1632.

Etexts Delicious Entertainments of the Soule: Written By the Holy and Most Reverend Lord Francis De Sales, Bishop and Prince of Geneva. Translated by a Dame of our Ladies of comfort of the order of S. Bennet in Cambray. Imprinted at Douay By Gheerart Pinson, under the signne of Cuelen, 1632. (Digitization); (Transcription)