This book is a welcome addition to the scholarship on medieval European monasticism and medieval Irish women's history. Poor survival of both nunnery archives and archaeological remains have hampered scholarly engagement with medieval Irish women's religious life until relatively recently. Based on Collins’ doctoral research and subsequent specialist academic papers, Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland gathers the disparate and meager archaeological evidence for women's religious houses in medieval Ireland together for the first time. Her extensive use of her own excavations of St Catherine's nunnery in Co. Limerick is the key to the importance of this book, making it a substantial contribution to our understanding of medieval women's religious life.

This hefty book starts out with three chapters surveying the historical record for women's religious houses from the early medieval period, through the twelfth century reforms to the sixteenth century dissolution of the nunneries. These chapters present excellent syntheses of the current historical scholarship on Irish monasticism within the context of European wide research. Indeed, the references to these sections are particularly comprehensive. The next chapter examines the place of the nunneries within the wider ecclesiastical and secular landscape of medieval Ireland, concentrating on the surviving remains of the later medieval houses. She finds that, contrary to the relative seclusion of English nunneries in the landscape, there was considerable local variation in Ireland, which depended very much on local circumstances. Her analysis here ranges over the topography of each house, the quality of the land in their estates, access to water and routeways, and the relationship of nunneries to contemporary settlements and neighboring male religious houses.

Chapter 5 tackles the important question of the layout of buildings within the nunnery complexes and what impact this may have had on the living quarters of the nuns. In this chapter, she is particularly concerned with how the architecture of the buildings reflected enclosure of the nuns within their cloisters. After surveying the accessibility of the cloisters in English women's houses and men's houses in Ireland, she focuses on the surviving cloisters of Irish nunneries. Here, she argues that only some of the Irish women's houses had recognizable cloisters while the precincts of others may have been defined more by practice and repeated use rather than in architecture. She bases her argument on the findings from her own excavation of St Catherine's as well as field work analysis of other nunneries, including Killone in Co. Clare and Molough in Co. Tipperary, both of which have extant remains. One of English archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist's significant contributions to the study of medieval women's space in both secular and religious settings is in the way that doorways can be mapped to given an indication of the relative seclusion of women. Collins has used Gilchrist's methodologies to analyze the access points for the nunneries at Killone, St Catherine's, and Molough in her discussion of everyday life for the nuns. Again she finds that there was variation and that the Irish evidence does not map easily onto Gilchrist's model.

Churches were of course a dominant feature of female monastic houses. In Chapter 6, Collins analyzes 18 nunnery churches for their significant proportions and ratios, again finding significant variation, confirming that there was not one plan or design for nunnery buildings. Irish medieval churches, in general, and the nunnery churches, in particular, are now sadly lacking in their original features such as altars, sculpture, paintings, glass, windows, and markers of internal differentiation. Collins analyzes the meager remains from the nunnery churches with deft skill, without resorting to imaginative leaps to cover the paucity of evidence. Her analysis of the later medieval changes at both St Catherine's convent and Killone, which allowed these nunnery churches to be shared with local parishes, gives a vivid picture of the way that nuns were simultaneously part of yet apart from their local communities. In this chapter, she details how she uncovered the remains of a painting on the upper wall of the nuns’ area in the church at St Catherine's. The height of the painting suggests to Collins that it was used as a focal point by the nuns who were screened from the rest of the congregation during mass.

The excavations at St Catherine's revealed several burials around the church and the cloister. Collins published these findings in detail in a 2019 article in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy. In Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland, she incorporates her findings of this excavation within a much broader context of Irish and European nunnery archaeology. Her findings on the burials of children is particularly significant in her analysis of the nuns’ engagement with local communities. Although, as she acknowledges, the sample is small, her excavations are the first for any medieval Irish nunnery site. Collins concludes her wide-ranging analysis with a detailed examination of the archival records and physical remains of the estates that supported the nuns.

The arguments in this fascinating book are enhanced by well-produced photographs, maps, drawings, and plans. Cork University Press is to be congratulated for the high production values that allow these crucial illustrations to accompany the text. It is to be hoped that this book will inspire continued archaeological work on medieval women's archaeology in Ireland and beyond.