EBOOK Nuns:A History of Convent Life 1450-1700

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.