Silvia Mostaccio has compiled a compelling collection of essays that examine the education of women in the southern Low Countries during the decades after the Council of Trent (1545–63). The essays pursue key avenues of research that employ the categories of gender and education. The authors highlight the complexities of post-Tridentine Catholicism in the region, most notably the problematic nature of Habsburg rule and the religious violence spawned by the Reformation. Medieval mysticism, humanism and religious movements from Spain, Italy and France all influenced female education. Using a wide range of archival and published sources, the authors explore the development of female models of behaviour promoted by numerous orders of the post-Tridentine Church, including the Carmelites, the Cistercians, the Annunciades and the Ursulines. Mostaccio points to the reign of Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella (1598–1621) as a key turning point in the re-Catholicisation of the southern Low Countries, where the court provided a key model for the appropriate education and demeanour of Catholic women. Both Mostaccio and Cordula Van Wyhe explore the importation of the Carmelites and the influence of Teresa of Avila. Philippe Annaert's expansive essay on the full range of the Ursulines' efforts to educate girls (and even a few boys), offers compelling evidence of the lengths to which the nuns went to transform the lives of young women. The Catholic Church played a central role in all aspects of female education and for all classes of society, from elites to domestics. While the collection reveals that the range of appropriate education for women expanded after Trent, it also reminds us of the continued limitations that females faced in comparison to the educational options available to men. Elite women, especially those who took the veil or were pensionnaires in convents, had more access to education, yet all women were expected to be obedient to male authority and devoted to Catholic Christianity. As these essays reveal, despite innovation in educational methods such as a book of emblems, L'Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, by the Carmelites and the Ursulines' instruction of poor girls gratis, the nuns prepared females for a life of subordination as religious, wives or servants. The final essay, on anti-Jesuit sentiments in France, does not coalesce with the rest of the essays, but this is a minor criticism of a strong collection. In sum, the authors offer valuable contributions towards our understanding of the complex lives of women in the early modern world.