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Review: R.J.W. Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c.1683— 1867, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2006; xx + 337 pp., 2 maps; 9780199281442, £64.00 (hbk); 9780199541621, £24.99 (pbk)

Chantal and the first Visitandines were eventually prevented from continuing their charitable activities in the world (222–4). Although Evangelisti is aware of the limitations of nuns’ agency, she underscores their cultural creativity, religious ingenuity, and active resistance in the face of male ecclesiastics’ efforts to control them. In a broad survey directed at general readers, more could have been said about the less heroic aspects of convent life in the age of Catholic reform. Nuns sometimes initiated reforms within their orders, but they often had to comply with what they perceived to be arbitrary decisions termed ‘reforms’, which completely altered the way of life that they had willingly embraced. The imposition of monastic reforms, and especially of strict enclosure, led not only to determined resistance by resolute nuns, as Evangelisti’s account suggests, but also to the outbreaks of mass possession. The well documented cases of demonic possession, which swept entire convent communities in post-Tridentine Europe, are not mentioned in Nuns. Finally, it is regrettable that Evangelisti’s impressive study did not undergo a more thorough proofreading. Typos, missing words, and inconsistencies of spelling abound, both throughout the text and in the scholarly apparatus. Notwithstanding these criticisms, Nuns is a valuable addition to the field of women’s religious history, and should be welcomed by anyone interested in pre-modern gender, religious or cultural history.