Description:
In Creating Cistercian Nuns, Anne E. Lester addresses a central issue in the history of the medieval church: the role of women in the rise of the religious reform movement of the thirteenth century.
Brief description: Anne E. Lester is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Review Quotes:
Anne Lester's Creating Cistercian Nuns is a wonderful achievement. This book reconstructs ground-up a whole new socioreligious landscape in and around the country of Champagne while also contributing broadly to a new and evolving narrative of women's religious life in the thirteenth century. Lester's craft in this first monograph is remarkably mature, an ability to construct landscape and narrative out of the raw stuff of documentary records and to do so in pleasing prose.
--John Van Engen "Speculum"