If Brides of Christ were a collection of Asunción Lavrin’s dozens of articles on the convents and nuns of Mexico, it would have constituted a great service to the field. Many scholars would probably have chosen this path to publication. But Lavrin did not — she had more to discover for herself, and more to say, than is represented in those path-breaking articles published over a period of almost 30 years. The result of her decision to revisit the convent is a superlative work of mature scholarship that builds in subtle ways on her earlier research, especially her most recent work on nuns’ spirituality, but is nonetheless fundamentally new. It is based on new archival research, and it is animated by a goal that was always present in Lavrin’s work but is made abundantly clear here: to help the “secular” (a word she employs at several key points) reader understand...

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