This examines the lives of nuns in the 16th to 18th century mostly with occasional coments on the continuing traditions and some of the reasons that somethings are the way they are today. It was interesting to see how the council of Trent completely changed things from where Nuns could have interaction with the outside world. Before it they could go out into the world and retreat to their cloister but after it they couldn't go out. Their influence and interaction with other people was utterly changed.

It was also interesting to see the rise and fall of certain orders and the changes that the reformation wrought on them. Occasionally changes that restricted the choices some women had.

During this period women really only had two choices; marry or join the cloister. In some instances they didn't really have those choices, they were imposed upon them by the men in their lives (usually brothers or fathers); dowries were expensive commodities and while many convents also wanted a dowry this wasn't as high as a marriage dowry making it a less expensive proposition for families, particularly if they had several daughters to apportion.

It's quite readable, and if you know anything of nuns (I am a convent school alumnus and I have an aunt a nun) you can see the echoes of the past in the present. An interesting book that deserves a sequel dealing with more modern issues and a prequel dealing with medieval issues. ( )

Wonderful ( )

I picked this up off the new release shelves at the library, based on my general fascination with religious vocations. The book focuses on the development of female religious orders during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation. Although the book had clearly been meticulously researched, I came out of it not much more knowledgeable than I was went I went in, and without a clear idea of what this author was trying to acheive. On the one hand, the author seemed to assume a basic knowledge of religious orders on the part of the reader; what kind of different groups exist, who some of the main saints are, etc. That seemed reasonable enough, since a completely uninformed lay person is probably less likely to pick up a book like this. On the other hand, she would explain other things in detail, such as the daily routine of a typical nunnery. Things that someone knowledgeable about nuns would know.

The other thing that kind of annoyed me about this book was the way that Ms. Evangelisti basically dismissed anything that would make the Church look bad. Sure, she mentioned things like abusive confessors and families that forced daughters into convents, but she mentioned them in passing, without really addressing the underlying complaints. I get the feeling that Ms. Evangelisti is a really big fan of the Church. That's fine, but it makes this book far from unbiased. There's a lot more to this story than this book addressed, and I think it would have been a much better book if that information had been included. Basically, I felt like this would be a good book for a nice Catholic girl to read if she wanted to learn a little bit more about nuns, but not about the darker side of the convent. As for me, I was disappointed. ( )