Nuns: A History of Convent Life 1450-1700

by Silvia Evangelisti

Overview

Cloistered and inaccessible 'brides of Christ'? Or socially engaged women, active in the outside world to a degree impossible for their secular sisters? Nuns tells the fascinating stories of the women who have lived in religious communities since the dawn of the modern age - their ideals and achievements, frustrations and failures, and their attempts to reach out to the society around them. Drawing particularly on the nuns' own words, Silvia Evangelisti explores how they came to the cloister, how they responded to monastic discipline, and how they pursued their spiritual, intellectual, and missionary activities. The book looks not only at the individual stories of outstanding historical figures such as Teresa of Avila but also at the wider picture of convent life - what it symbolized to contemporaries, how it reflected and related to the world beyond the cloister, and what it means in the world today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191579905
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	09/11/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	556,244
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Silvia Evangelisti is Lecturer in Early Modern History in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. She has published widely on women and gender history in both English and Italian, looking especially at female religious life in the early modern period.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. On Nuns and Nunneries

2. Cloistered Spaces

3. Voices from the Cloister

4. Theatre and Music

5. The Visual Arts

6. Expansions: Nuns across the Globe

7. Open Communities of Women

Editorial Reviews

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Review from previous edition [This] books provides a meticulously researched background to our contemporary interest. This is an elegantly argued, highly readable history of women whose lives have, until recently, remained shrouded beneath fears and prejudices."—Julie Wheelwright, The Independent (Extra)

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Nuns is a serious book by a serious thinker...Evangelisti is a conscientious historian with a wonderful subject...[a] meticulously researched history."—Mary Wakefield, Daily Telegraph (Review)

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "A rich and direct insight into convent life."—Judith Champ, The Tablet

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "[An] important new book."—Jonathan Wright, New Statesman

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "[A] fascinating book...It is a powerful record and a fine contribution to the history of women."—Joan Bakewell, Sunday Times

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "This graphic, elegantly composed and often piognant study stands out in its attempt to weigh the positive and negative aspects of the convent experience."—Olwen Hufton, BBC History

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "A richly researched book... and one that constantly manages to surprise."—The Times

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "A radically different and intriguing picture."—The Economist

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Nuns is a serious and readable study of convent life: it rescues from history the lives of women whom British and American feminists have tended to ignore because they have generally searched in secular places."—Mary Kenny, Literary Review

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "this is an elegantly argued, highly readable history of women whose lives have, until recently, remained shrouded beneath fears and prejudices."—Julie Wainwright, The Monday Book, The Independent

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "...a highly readable text..."—S. Karly Kehoe, University of Guelph

"Masterful...a tapestry that succeeds in combining serious scholarship with a writing style that is accessible to the lay reader...Evangelisti writes with authority and insight into the 250-year struggle to negotiate the complex tension between enclosure and worldly involvement, silence and speech, class and wealth, contemplation and action. Nuns is a fascinating history of a period that gave us the style of religious life we know today, a history that models how women can learn to live with paradox and change as they give form to their desire to worship and serve." —Catholic News Service

"Rich and insightful...These women, in any age they might have lived, were extraordinary as they embraced their prayerful lived enthusiastically, while demonstrating effective leadershipa nd uncommon wisdom. This book is clearly that of a serious scholar who has the ability to make her prose come alive...In all its elegant detail this publication is a significant contribution." —Catholic Library World

From the Publisher

Although limited in scope, this examination of convent life paints a detailed and in-depth portrait of the women who led mostly hidden lives of work and prayer between the late 15th and early 18th centuries. Evangelisti, a lecturer in early modern history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, tells how nuns of this period engaged in such creative pursuits as writing, music, the visual arts and theater. Some even wrote spirited defenses of their gender, confronting the prevailing view of women as less than men (although at least one of these—Teresa of Ávila—had her words on the subject censored from the published version of The Way of Perfection). Evangelisti also deals with a darker side of convent life: that of women being forced by their families to become nuns because of the few opportunities available to women of that time. Yet she points out that, for others, becoming a nun was a suitable alternative to marriage. She shows as well how women inside the convent walls challenged church restrictions of that era requiring them to live in cloisters. Many sought to go outside to perform charitable and other acts of service, developing new models that would allow such work. Evangelisti's readable, meticulously researched account should be of special interest to feminists and students of church history. (May)

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