This collection of essays, the product of a conference held at Trent in 2004, presents a fascinating portrait of Maria Arcangela Biondini (1641–1712), the important religious reformer and founder of the Servite convent in the northern Italian town of Arco. True to the title of the book, the essays focus, not solely on Biondini herself, but also on the convents that played host to her career, both as reformer and founder at Burano and later at Arco. The essays also have a textual and archival aim, in that most make use of the remarkably large and extant body of writings produced by Biondini in concert with her confessors and secretaries; the collection also contains extensive discussions of the archive of the Servite order at Arco, which is a treasure trove of documentary records (many little known or studied), including the reading materials used by the nuns themselves, listed and analysed here in the final chapter as an appendix. Although the danger of provincialism and excessive particularism in some areas of Italian historical scholarship is sometimes remarked upon by the English-speaking historical fraternity, this series of essays justifiably and fruitfully takes as its key focus the protagonist, and the two regions of her activities (especially Arco); this focus is maintained to good effect, and with good reason, considering the little that is known about Biondini. Taken together, there is some unnecessary repetition in the essays on Biondini's life and some of her more noteworthy writings, especially her Autobiography and Libro della fondazione. Despite this, the essays cover a wide variety of topics, which will be of interest to scholars and students of Italian religious history, gender history, as well as to literary historians and specialists in ego documents. Cecilia Nubola provides very useful biographical background, as well as some fascinating observations about Biondini's self-identification and construction in her writings and in her relationships with her male confessors and secretaries. Adriana Valerio explores Biondini's spirituality, especially her distinctive (although not unique) emphasis on the sweetness and kindness of the Saviour, rather than on the severity of Christ as Judge. The third essay, by Franco M. Azzalli, provides broader historical context for the order of the Servants of Mary in the seventeenth century, while the fourth essay, by Giuliana Boccadamo, keeps the focus squarely on Biondini's founding of the convent at Arco. A very original essay is presented by Lucio M. Pinkus, who, exploring Biondini's construction of ‘gender identity’, identifies in her, as both religious reformer and innovator, an anticipation of modernity in terms of a new expression of the monastic ideal as a personal experience. Liliana de Venuto explores to good effect the relationship between Biondini and the male figures with whom she dealt throughout her career, while Remo Crosatti analyses the correspondence between Biondini and the musician Paris Francesco Alghisi. Luigi Bressan provides the Europe-wide political context within which Biondini operated, in particular the significance of the Emperor Leopold i's patronage. The final two essays are literary and archival in focus: Rosa Casapullo undertakes a cultural and linguistic analysis of Biondini's remarkable Autobiography and Liliana de Venuto provides a fascinating account, and list, of the books held at Arco. Post-Tridentine Catholicism is the pervasive backdrop to all these essays, and while their authors acknowledge the common assumption of a stagnant, culturally immobile religious culture in this period, their own findings and observations in relation to this remarkable woman and the communities and individuals with whom she interacted, reveal instead a vivid world of dynamism, innovation and female agency. Biondini herself emerges as a figure of energetic self-fashioning and self-expression, even if contained within male-dominated institutional frameworks, and expressed by way of common conventions for describing and expressing female submissiveness and unworthiness. When any period is subjected to careful and detailed analysis, the picture that comes into focus often calls for a re-evaluation of common assumptions about it. This study is a valuable contribution to exactly such a process for the study of early modern Italian religious culture.