This is the published version of Jennifer Hillman's 2012 York PhD thesis. It is a study of elite female religious life during the middle years of the seventeenth century, largely after the Fronde. More particularly, it is a detailed examination of the devotional culture of a group of eight lay aristocratic women of the generation which succeeded the dévotes so ably studied by Barbara Diefendorf and Elizabeth Rapley, a group Hillman refers to as ‘rigorist penitents’. Rigorism, a neo-Augustinian current associated with a drive against moral laxity through severity in confession, controlled access to communion and austere penitential practices, most famously associated with Antoine Arnaud and the convent of Port Royal, was adopted widely by the French Catholic Church in the mid-seventeenth century. This included certain women of the high nobility as well and, Hillman argues, was manifested in a distinctive cultural and material form in the religious and social lives of this group. To demonstrate this, Hillman offers a detailed analysis of the surviving correspondence and other personal papers of a small network of women centred on the duchess of Longueville, her sister-in-law the princess of Conti and the duchess of Liancourt. The book opens with a contextual chapter on the spiritual formation of these women in the dévot salons of Paris and their involvement in the Fronde. The second chapter examines the ‘conversion’ of Longueville, Liancourt and Conti as revealed in their spiritual autobiographies, and their growing disposition to rigorism. The third chapter analyses the spiritual networks of these women, whose friends acted as ‘guardians of the soul’, sharing religious anxieties and spiritual directors. The final two chapters, on links between devotional life and material culture, work particularly well. In chapter iv the piety and rituals of these women are reconstructed through studies of the material environments of their chapels and private devotional spaces, while chapter v focuses on the rural estate as a space for the pursuit of an exclusive devotional culture, away from the laxity of Paris and the royal court. Hillman's key conclusions are that rigorist penitents practised a socially exclusive kind of pious sociability founded on intimate spiritual friendships, which the ladies considered to be salvifically profitable. Their piety also led to certain lifestyle choices, that is, a withdrawal from Paris and a royal court which they saw as licentious, to their rural estates. Further, the participants' devotional routines were characterised by a demanding culture of penitence which underpinned their belief in their election as God's spiritual elite with an affinity with early Christian communities, commensurate with their elevated social status. In all, this is a well-researched, detailed study. It is more than the study of a small coterie; it is an erudite extension of our knowledge of Counter-Reformation piety in the second half of the seventeenth century, moving away from the dominant shadow of the Arnauds. It is a fine first book and should be read by all scholars of Catholic Reform.