"From the sixteenth century to our own generation, Nuns tells the stories of the women who have lived in religious communities - 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 and why they came to the cloister, responded to monastic discipline, and 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 still means in the world today."--Jacket.