In The Social History of the Cloister Elizabeth Rapley goes beyond the monastic rulebooks, legal and notarial records, and memoirs of famous women who passed through monastery doors to the chronicles, letters, and other little-known writings produced by nuns for and about themselves. Working from these accounts, Rapley is able to provide a far more complex picture of women who, as a whole, were much less otherworldly than the older convent literature would have us believe, much less thwarted and unhappy than their detractors have long maintained, and much less irrelevant than some historians have assumed. She chips away at the dehumanizing stereotypes that have often been used to describe these nuns to show the essential humanity of these women.

Elizabeth Rapley is adjunct professor of history at the University of Ottawa, and the author of The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France.

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"A serious advance in state-of-the-art research. Rapley's scholarship is exceedingly sound. She thinks in such stimulating and logical ways that the exercise is never tedious, always intellectually challenging and, above all, interesting ... The extent of the research is prodigious and Rapley is so familiar with her vast documentation that she's been able to construct a new and more comprehensive interpretation than has previously been imagined of the nature of the social life of women's monasteries under the ancien regime." D. Gillian Thompson, Department of History, University of New Brunswick "A very good synthesis of female religious life." Craig Harline, Department of History, Brigham Young University