Kathryn Burns' Colonial Habits looks at the roles played by three convents—the Clarissan Santa Clara, the Dominican Santa Catalina and the Carmelite Santa Teresa—in the economic and social life of Cuzco from the mid-sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries. Using primarily the convents' own archives, Burn shows how the ties between the convents and local elite families allowed the nuns who lived there to play a key role in regional economic development. They also provided a refuge for women and for orphaned children, as well as an education for the offspring of noble families; in their internal convent hierarchy, the distinction between nuns of the black veil and nuns of the white veil preserved external social destinctions between criolla and mestiza. Just as with their medieval European foremothers, these religious women were not cut off from the wider world by the simple fact of their claustration.

Burns writes clearly and with nuance, and is able to drawn upon an enviably wide array of empirical and statistical data relative to what is often available to those of us working on medieval and early modern religious women. There are some things, of course, which are not recoverable given the extant sources—there is little here about the interior lives of these women—and Burns clearly finds the earlier colonial period far more interesting than the late eighteenth and nineteenth century periods of decline and shifting focuses. However, this is still a very useful and interesting study of communities of unjustly marginalised women. ( )