Fifteen years ago, undertaking my first research as a postgraduate student, I came across a series of major disputes in convents and monasteries in the early eighteenth-century viceroyalty of Peru. The most extraordinary of these disputes, described briefly in the governmental report of viceroy Castelfuerte (1724–36), arose when the Archbishop of Lima reversed the results of an election for Abbess in the great convent of La Encarnación. This action provoked a serious split between supporters of the rival candidates, in which each party occupied separate halves of the convent, while the doors of the building remained closed to the outside for many days (even for foodstuffs). At the Archbishop's request, Castelfuerte had the convent surrounded by cavalry and infantry to guard against any disturbance within or without the walls. The dispute was resolved with the transfer to other convents of the disappointed candidate and several of her followers; ‘in which event’, wrote Pedro de Peralta, author of Castelfuerte's report, ‘it is worthy to note the extremes to which the ardour of a competition extends, even in the devout docility of sacred virgins’.

Margaret Chowning's Rebellious Nuns was inspired by, and is primarily concerned with, a comparable convent crisis in a later period and a different viceroyalty: the convent of La Purísima Concepción, in San Miguel el Grande (now San Miguel de Allende) in Mexico. La Purísima was a late-colonial foundation, created in 1756 and with the nuns taking possession only in 1765. Even before then, from as early as 1759, serious factionalism developed, in two major episodes which ran through to the early 1770s and blighted these early years. Indeed, as Chowning demonstrates throughout this meticulously researched and beautifully written book, La Purísima never really recovered from this crisis, not least because it affected recruitment and so contributed to the financial woes which dogged the convent throughout the colonial period.

The ‘rebellion’ at La Purísima was certainly a striking case: both the nuns themselves and their Bishop came to describe the convent as a ‘Hell’, and in 1762 one of them made a somewhat pathetic attempt to hang herself from a tree in the garden. Members of the rebellious faction developed an illness, the ‘salto’, which saw them jerk about uncontrollably and speak without shame or restraint. Chowning is at pains to present both factions in the most constructive light, symptomatic of a consistently sympathetic approach to the women of the convent and their various dilemmas. She situates the crisis convincingly within the period and particular circumstances of the convent's foundation: as a reformed convent of an Order (the Concepcionistas) better known for relaxation, during an age when official discourse grew increasingly hostile to the reformed model. This model was exemplified in the vida común, the communal regime by which nuns ate together from a common kitchen and slept in dormitories rather than their own cells. The rebellion at La Purísima confronted a faction which supported the vida común against another which preferred a more relaxed regime, not (insists Chowning) because they were any less devout, but because they felt that excessive austerity left them unable to devote themselves to prayer and worship as they wished.

Though concerned first and foremost with this crisis, Chowning's book goes much further, covering the whole existence of La Purísima through to the expulsion of the nuns in the Liberal reform of 1863. It stands as an exemplary account, in fact, of how convents operated and the ways their fate turned on the social, ecclesiastical and political circumstances surrounding them. Among the great strengths of the work is its deep contextualisation, beginning with the description of San Miguel itself as a recently enriched town with a strongly creole and self-consciously religious elite. Chowning demonstrates how the particular qualities of its intake affected the convent in its early years, when a few older nuns were outnumbered by an unusually youthful cohort of sisters, few of whom in the event came from local families, and many of whom were illegitimate. She traces relations between the convent and the ecclesiastical authorities and particularly the bishops, which ranged from exasperated but concerned during the colony, to frankly cold and uninterested under the Republic. Some of the most striking material in the book concerns the financial crisis that plagued the convent during its first fifty years and which derived not only from too small an endowment, but also from lack of local support and a chronic problem of non-payment of interest by debtors. Scrutiny of the endnotes to each chapter indicates the depth of the secondary and archival research (the latter, one notes, based entirely on archives in Mexico).

It is unusual in these times for a scholar openly to describe herself as a ‘narrative historian’, and still more so for her to state of the second part of her book that it displays ‘a greater emphasis on telling anecdotes than on sustained narrative’. The Introduction, whence these quotations derive, tends to present its history in almost theatrical terms, above all in a ‘cast of characters’ in which different individuals are described as ‘indomitable and exuberant’, ‘fickle and weak’, or ‘emotional and tormented’. But this same Introduction also traces a number of themes of general interest explored throughout the text: ‘the relationship between female convents and the male ecclesiastical establishment, the impact of … ideas and politics on the female convent … , the attitude of the church toward women, the interaction between the convent and the urban world, and … the ways that all of these changing influences and relationships affected the almost timeless tension within the convent between reform and relaxation’. Rebellious Nuns makes a major contribution to all these themes; above all, it provides a model study of the convent in society and of the lives and trials of the women who peopled it. It is to be hoped that it encourages closer scrutiny and a deeper probing of the context of similar crises, such as that at La Encarnación in Lima some decades earlier. My sole quibble is that the sixteen illustrations do not include any image of the convent itself – merely of its graceful and befountained main patio.