In 1966 an anonymous Benedictine nun of Stanbrook Abbey penned a heartfelt defence of the convent grille (the physical barrier that separated members of her monastic community from the outside world). In an era of Catholic ‘renewal’ in which not merely the practice of religious enclosure but many other customs and traditions that had previously regulated the rhythms of monastic life were being called into question, such a commitment to the otherworldliness of the cloister might to many observers have appeared outmoded, yet for this nun the symbolic value of the grille loomed large in her understanding of the cloistered life. The appearance of this anecdote in Carmen Mangion's exemplary work of historical synthesis reflects a praiseworthy commitment to framing the renewal process from the perspective of its critics as well as its proponents. Her monograph builds upon the growing array of institutional histories of female religious communities (cloistered and active) that has appeared over the past twenty years, and offers a grand narrative informed by the experiences and testimonies of members of most of the major religious orders in the British Isles. Her deft analysis of a plethora of oral histories exposes the interior lives of ‘ordinary’ religious who were generally excluded from the institutional record, notwithstanding the evidential limitations that inevitably accompany such forms of retrospective historical evidence (a problem that Mangion candidly acknowledges).

The existential reality of post-war female religious communities was one in which the fortress mentality of the Catholic Church and its cultural marginalisation within the British Isles (in part a consequence of its association with the Irish diaspora) militated against an embrace of the radical approach to the process of church renewal common among female religious in both the United States and the Netherlands. Mangion provides convincing evidence of a pattern of change that was far more evolutionary than that premised on an understanding of the pronouncements of the Second Vatican Council as heralding a sudden ‘rupture’ of the preconciliar order, noting that the British crisis of vocations that has often been attributed to the late 1960s can actually be observed as early as the 1940s (pp. 51–60). The challenge posed by the pre-1962 aspects of modernity is also key to her discussion of the phenomenon of the ‘Modern Girl’ and the efforts of religious communities to accommodate the ‘call of the cloister’ to a generation of young women accustomed to greater opportunities in education, employment and even marriage than had been the case for those who had entered conventual life in the years prior to the First World War. In a chapter entitled ‘The world in the cloister, the nun in the world’, Mangion explores the reality of the ever-increasing intrusion of the outside world into the preconciliar cloister, whether through the disruptions fostered by the wartime evacuation of teaching orders, the heightened awareness of (and engagement with) mass media, the commitment to post-secondary education of novices and postulants, and the greater willingness of religious superiors to accommodate continued interactions between professed religious and their families. As one cloistered apologist for the religious life opined in 1959, it was ‘right and good’ that ‘reform’ and ‘change’ were ‘in the air’ (p. 81).

That British monastic communities had already undergone a profound transformation during the 1940s and 1950s thus anticipated some (but not all) of the changes ushered in by the Second Vatican Council. Mangion's discussion of the response of the female religious orders to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s not only locates them within the broader framework of radical social movements from which they have often been excluded by scholars of the 1960s wedded to a narrative of secularisation, but also documents their efforts to (re)construct transnational and individual identities amid the maelstrom of the renewal process. What emerges from her account is a profound sense of female agency within a religious context previously defined by its deferential character, whether of the subordination of female religious orders to the Holy See and diocesan bishops or of ordinary sisters to their abbess. The admonitions to religious communities in Perfectae caritatis to adapt to the spirit of the times set in motion a process that was both unitive (as in the development of a common constitution for the 615 Poor Clare monasteries across the world) and divisive, inasmuch as the process of consultation exposed differences of opinion (often generational) among vowed religious that threatened to undermine the harmony of their common life. While Mangion does document a process of transformation, her observation of a ‘more gentle trajectory [from traditional ministry to social justice] in the British context’ (p. 197) than in the United States can plausibly be applied to most aspects of British renewal, even if many of the theological developments occurring across the Atlantic were increasingly known – and even disseminated – in British conventual settings.

If there is one area that might have repaid greater attention it is the changing understanding of eucharistic theology and the liturgical practices associated with it. While Mangion discusses modifications of the daily round of community prayer (pp. 135–45), it would be interesting to know if the female religious orders also grappled with the broader theological implications of the changes ushered in by Sacrosanctum concilium in 1963 that did so much to reshape the liturgical life of the ordinary Catholic parish (the allusion to the removal of the convent grille in the chapels of certain communities might be interpreted as a commitment to the People of God theology that informs Lumen gentium). This is, however, a minor point that is in no way detracts from the richness of the study, not least its commitment to documenting the day-to-day lives of ‘ordinary’ vowed religious at a time of profound spiritual uncertainty. Mangion's work attests to the diversity of experience of the 1960s and to the limits of secularisation that overlook or exclude those subjects that do not conform to the prevailing narrative.