... contemplatives. The female religious life was a transnational phenomenon, and the book draws on sources and scholarship in English, Dutch, French and German to provide insights into gendered spirituality, memory and the post-conciliar renewal of the religious life....

...Through the textual analysis of clerical prescriptive writings and of the notes compiled by the nuns themselves, this chapter examines the contemplative ideal and the idea of social death at its very core. By dedicating themselves to the monastic life, encosed and in exile, postulants embraced...

...The Protestant critics of the early modern Catholic Church denounced what they sometimes described as its sensual approach to the sacred. In the convents, behavioural guidebooks exhorted the Sisters to break away from their senses and to move towards a more perfect a-sensory contemplative state...

...The Catholic female religious life burgeoned in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, including the contemplative life. There is a great deal of scholarship on this phenomenon, and the Introduction provides a survey, with particular attention to non-anglophone historiography. The inner...