Rebellious nuns details the tumultuous history of San Miguel el Grande's convent of La Purisima Concepcion from its founding in 1752 to the nuns' forced exclaustration in 1863. At the centre of this narrative account stands the controversy created by the convent's embrace of the vida común, an austere and communal form of piety. The ensuing battles roiled these religious women for roughly forty years, as a wily faction of the recalcitrant employed everything from feigned illness to epistolary appeals to the hierarchy to stymie the changes. But, although the nuns' numerous letters to the church hierarchy provide a rare glimpse of the machinations of the women behind the walls, the real strength of the book lies elsewhere. Chowning is that rarest of academic polymaths, a cultural historian with a background in economic history. She links the cloister's changing world to shifting intellectual currents and cold economic realities and it is these linkages that give this work its lustre. The first of the intellectual trends was the Enlightenment, which she rightly reads as a religious movement in New Spain. The vida común's champions, nuns and bishops and vicars alike, lionised simplicity and utility and lambasted the sensual celebrations and lavish displays of baroque piety; convents should eschew aristocratic excess and promiscuous sociability in favour of simple meals, communal dormitories and strict separation of the worldly from the spiritual. The convent's adolescent founder, María Josepha Lina, embraced these reforms, facing opposition from fellow religious who felt that God's work was best done by the well fed and well rested. Chowning's number-crunching, however, provides provocative excurses away from these well-defined battle lines and into the compromises necessary to keep the peace. Under reformed leadership, for example, the nuns enjoyed bountiful meals, and thus bartered the extra food for the small services formerly provided by the personal servants banned by reformers. One suspects that the definition of excess and poverty may have been shifting to allow simultaneously for increased consumption and principled rejection of excess. Be that as it may, Chowning's comparative economic data on food in the convents of the region, like the economic data throughout the book, illuminates subtleties lost on less numerate historians. Overly stark religious divisions and monolithic intellectual trends are also dealt a damaging blow in her discussion of the Enlightenment. It was a bishop enamoured of Adam Smith who brought an end to the vida común among the Conceptionists in 1792; and it was the anti-reform nuns who rejected convent hierarchies in the name of social equality. These ‘proto-liberals’ embraced the austerity and simplicity of the earlier reforms but rejected its communalism. Collective finances gave way to individual control over resources in an effort to promote ‘rational’ and individual economic conduct. These shifts emanated from the church hierarchy and the nuns themselves, not from the absolutist state. It was this individual freedom that later liberals would use in 1863 to justify banning perpetual religious vows and closing the convents. Chowning's work will allow historians of Mexico to cross more freely the borders between economic, cultural and religious history in order to create nuanced work like her own. The book provides a model of meticulous archival research and attractive prose and should find a wide readership.