Over the last three decades historians have reaffirmed the importance of Jansenism in Old Regime politics and how the movement established important forms of resistance to various institutional authorities. But, as Daniella Kostroun notes, the historiography has separated the convent of Port-Royal, the seventeenth-century heart of Jansenism, from this history. Her book reintegrates Port-Royal and sheds light on two overlapping areas of early modern French history: the evolution of absolutism and the early modern history of women and gender. Kostroun begins with a significant question: ‘Why, then, did Louis xiv destroy Port-Royal?’ Both the French crown and the Port-Royal nuns believed in the renewal and reform of the Church. But where Louis xiv adopted a strictly top-down approach, the nuns placed individual conscience and their convent's integrity above royal, papal and episcopal commands. Beginning with Cardinal Mazarin, the crown linked divine right absolutism to the persecution of Port-Royal. Louis xiv singled out Port-Royal because it encapsulated all the woes of religious dissension (heresy, recalcitrant women and independent-minded theologians). Port-Royal also became a vehicle for Louis xiv to affirm his regalian prerogatives when he intervened in the convent's administration and prevented the nuns from electing an abbess. Moreover, the king interpreted the persecution and destruction of Port-Royal as a manifestation of his ‘Christian self’ and as a model that his subjects should emulate. Despite persecution, the Port-Royal nuns resisted such designs. Kostroun argues that they employed the ‘science of the saints’, which subscribed to the belief that theologians expounded their views through actions as well as words. The nuns claimed to emulate theologians by acting out theological doctrine without actually reading and pontificating on theology. Their vow of obedience paradoxically enabled the inhabitants of Port-Royal to resist secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The nuns became political actors who effectively harnessed their conventual rule and legal procedures to check Louis xiv's discrimination against their convent. Kostroun's narrative complicates an older model that portrays nuns as victims of patriarchy. Using Joan Scott, Kostroun argues for the inclusion of the nuns in the history of feminism. Although the Port-Royal nuns paradoxically accepted the patriarchal system of the Old Regime, they believed in their right to assert themselves. They insisted that they were obedient to their king, their bishop and their pope. However, they placed greater weight on their obedience to their monastic rule and to their consciences. Kostroun also locates the Port-Royal nuns' claims in the secular querelle des femmes and highlights how, at certain junctures, the Port-Royal nuns effectively alleged female equality on the grounds of conscience and sin. This book then expands the chronological and conceptual parameters of feminism, and suggests a link between the story of Port-Royal and the rise of modern subjectivity.