Jenna Lay, graduate student in English, explores the curious fascination that English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had with nuns. Why did authors such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Marvell feature female characters who had taken vows of virginity, even after such vows were dissolved in England? What relationship did these fictional nuns have to the Catholic women who continued to practice their faith in England or who traveled to the continent in order to join monastic communities? And how might archival research help us to discover the self-representations of women who resisted the English Reformation?