This study, a revision of the author's 2005 Mainz dissertation, investigates the fates of two male and three female religious houses and their residents in Strasbourg during the sixteenth century, when the city became Protestant under the leadership of Martin Bucer and others. The author explicitly frames her study within two theoretical perspectives: first gender history, which leads her to compare the situation of male and female religious rather than only looking at the experience of nuns, and, second, rational choice theory, which leads her to reject the idea that discourse determines and limits human experience (an idea that was powerful in gender studies during the heyday of post-modernism in the late 1980s and early 1990s). She situates her analysis effectively within a broad range of contexts: the debates about clerical celibacy, the religious life, and the centrality of marriage in the early Reformation; the political situation in Strasbourg, a free imperial city in which the city council had great power over the religious houses; the changing economic situation of religious houses; familial and social networks within which both houses and their residents were enmeshed; and the strength and health of the religious orders with which the Strasbourg houses were affiliated, and the varying interest that they took in what was going on in the city. She concludes that the willingness of certain houses to oppose reform or closure, and their ability to do so, resulted from a mixture of all of these factors. Some houses were able to use family networks effectively in opposition to the city council, or use the council against their order, and so on. Of particular interest is her chapter on individuals (‘The I in focus’), in which she examines the ways in which monks and nuns developed their sense of religious identity, and how this then shaped the decisions that they made about leaving a convent or fighting to keep it open. Each of the chapters ends with a short section entitled ‘gender history observations’ in which Sauerbrey explicitly compares the possibilities for and actions of men and women. The three women's houses fought reform moves more than the men's did – a pattern that has been noted and examined in many parts of the Holy Roman Empire – and were able to keep their houses open and take in new residents until the end of the century, again a pattern that happened elsewhere. Thus this book does not dramatically alter what we understand about the response of religious houses to the Reformation, and the difference that gender made, but it adds depth and nuance.