The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth-Century Convent; Abridged Edition (Yale Nota Bene)

The Burdens of Sister Margaret by Craig Harline is based on a trove of letters written by a 17th-century nun in a convent called Bethlehem in the city of Leuven (part of modern Belgium). Her fears of demonic possession, complaints of sexual harassment, and suspicion of conspiracies against her among the other sisters led to her being twice banished from the convent. Set against the dramatic background of the early Reformation, The Burdens of Sister Margaret describes not only the daily lives of a community of nuns, but also the impact of the major events of the early Reformation on ordinary clergy and laity. Like Harline's extraordinary A Bishop's Tale, this book describes the grand sweep of history through the perspective of particular people in a particular place. Thus, readers are given a strong general orientation to the abiding tensions of Catholic religious orders ("special friendships versus common love, dissent versus obedience, the rights of the individual versus the demands of the community, distinguishing between temporal needs and extravagance, and maintaining separation from the world while living within it"). And readers also discover a wealth of concrete and compelling detail about the wily machinations of lives lived behind convent walls. (The book's first section, "How Just About Everyone Came to Loathe Sister Margaret," will frighten, tickle, and fascinate.) --Michael Joseph Gross