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.

"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