Nuns: A History Of Convent Life by Silvia Evangelisti

Paperback: Cloistered and inaccessible 'brides of Chirst'?

Or socially engaged women, active in the outside world to a degree impossible for their secular sisters?

Nuns: A History of Convent Life (2007) is about the world of nuns and convent life in the words of the women themselves.

About the author: Silvia Evangelisti is Lecturer in Early Modern History in the School of History at the University of East Anglia, UK. She has published widely on women and gender in both English and Italian. She has co-edited (with Sandra Cavallo) Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate 2009), A Cultural History of Childhood and the Family in the Renaissance (Berg 2010); (with Fancisco Chacon) Identidad y comunidad en el mundo Iberico (Universitat de Valencia 2013). 

Her main research interests so far have been focusing on female monastic institutions in early modern Italy and Europe, women's writings (particularly religious writings), and how religious women responded to normative practices implemented by the Catholic church and state, in the decades following the Council of Trent. She has also done research on women's writings in Italy and, more recently, Spain.