title: Nuns: A History of Convent Life
author:  Silvia Evangelisti 
description: 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&mdash;Teresa of &Aacute;vila&mdash;had her words on the subject censored from the published version of <I>The Way of Perfection</I>). 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. <I>(May)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: THE
  IN THE
  WORLD
  CARDINAL
  
  Digitized by the Internet Archive
  in 2013
  http://archive.org/details/nunin^(lclreligiOOsuen
  
  THE NUN
  IN THE WORLD
  
  THE NUN IN THE
  WORLD
  New Dimensions in the Modern Apostolate
  by
  LEON JOSEPH CARDINAL SUENENS
  Archbishop of Malines-Brussels
  PALM PUBLISHERS
  MONTREAL
  
  Translated from the French by Geoffrey Stevens
  First published in Canada 1963
  (C)
  Cardinal Suenens 1962
  English translation (c) Burns & Oates 1962
  PRINTED
  IN GREAT BRITAIN
  
  FOREWORD
  The Second Vatican Council is an invitation to an examina-
  tion of conscience.
  It
  is a matter of getting clear what
  is
  essential in the Church and what
  is only incidental, what
  must remain and what
  is dependent on the times and cir-
  cumstances. This sorting out is necessary in many sections
  of the Church's pastoral work.
  With
  this
  idea
  in mind we hope
  to examine
  in
  these
  pages the place and the mission of nuns in the Church in
  terms of the world as it
  is today. This study
  is of interest
  to the whole Church, for the nun
  i