Scholastica Jacob lives in a village outside Durham. She is Director of the Herbert Kelly Institute for Anglican Religious Life, which provides a central repository for Anglican community archives as well as encouraging research into all aspects of religious life and building a specialist library on the subject.
She recently completed a Pearl Research Fellowship at the Margaret Beaufort Institute (MBIT), Cambridge on ‘Creativity from the Cloister: enclosed women and their impact of Catholic revival 1850–1950’. In autumn 2025 she led a course for MBIT entitled ‘An Alphabet for Beginners: Exploring contemplative prayer through Seventeenth Century Benedictine texts written for and by women’. Scholastica received her doctorate from Durham University in 2022, this explored the exile experience of English Benedictine Nuns returning to England in the late eighteenth century.
Scholastica’s research interests include the development of religious life in nineteenth century England – both Catholic and Anglican, women’s religious experience and writing in the Early Modern period, the mystical tradition, especially as experienced and transmitted by women, and Jewish mysticism and prayer. She has written and taught on these subjects.
In a previous life Scholastica was a nun at Stanbrook Abbey, England (originally founded in Cambrai) where, among other duties, she was archivist and cared for the Abbey’s small flock of sheep and hens. She is currently working on a recently discovered manuscript anthology of the Cambrai spiritual guide Augustine Baker’s writings.
