Steven Vanderputten refuses to believe that women's religious communities during the ninth through eleventh centuries fell into a “dark age” of spiritual and material decline. Both medieval commentators and modern academics have assumed incorrectly that women's religious communities were damaged or destroyed by Viking and other invasions; that nunneries lost property to bullying secular authorities; and that vowed women succumbed to an overly enthusiastic enforcement of the Benedictine rule carried out in the name of reform.

Vanderputten aims to undermine this outdated consensus with his study of forty Lotharingian communities of religious women between 800 and 1050. While later medieval commentaries insist that convents declined and women's mission degenerated, Vanderputten finds evidence that nuns constantly adapted their communities and way of life to fend off attacks of both the physical and patriarchal kinds. Women developed “coping strategies” suited to particular local circumstances in order to maintain their utility to other believers. They built “intersectional” identities for their communities that bolstered them as they worked with clerics and noblemen to protect their properties, their purpose, and their religious integrity.

Vanderputten begins his chronological study with ninth-century religious reforms, often seen by historians as a new beginning for monastic practice. Louis the Pious's 816 council at Aachen urged enclosure and promoted the Benedictine rule in monasteries of men and women. The council defined two roles for religious women: Benedictine nuns living in common and in the cloister, or canonesses allowed to keep personal property, living outside the cloister, and free to leave the religious life. Yet historians have taken the council's decrees too literally, according to Vanderputten. The imprecisely worded decrees functioned more as suggested parameters for religious life, leaving women  to create their own “ambiguous” religious identities.

Throughout the book, Vanderputten rehearses the assumptions of recent scholars, searches out exceptions or contrary cases in the sparse sources, and casts doubt on received wisdom about the restriction of vowed women and the decline of women's communities after 800. He argues that even when church leaders imposed Benedict's Rule upon women's communities, it had little effect on whether women lived as nuns, canonesses, or something in between. Most of them were already Benedictines in all but name, which was one of their coping strategies.

Likewise, when forced by reformers to remain in their cloisters, sisters reorganized the sacred spaces inside their walls and opened their churches to pilgrims. By translating saints into their sanctuaries and commissioning new vitae to reflect revised political realities, nuns revised the monastic landscape and turned their cloisters into cult destinations. They succeeded so well, it seems, that royalty and would-be royals used the cults housed at nunneries as capital in bids for transregional power.

Vanderputten allows that many women's communities disappeared during this time of political turmoil, as Lotharingian lords competed for estates and gobbled up monastic properties, and bishops were constantly complaining about decadent convents. In fact, half of the nunneries in lower Lotharingia disappeared. Yet, the author declares, we cannot assume “the rapid decline into religious and social redundancy” (37) of religious women. It was not about nuns; it was all about politics and economy. Charles the Bald had issued instructions that small monasteries should be “augmented” if their membership was too low; hence, religious leaders and territorial rulers made the rational decision to wipe out small houses of women or consolidate them with larger communities, some male. Even though more women's foundations disappeared than men's, it did not represent a campaign against nuns or the “darkest hour” of convents (87). Some lords, who seized convents, or noble women, who “secularized” them, actually supported other women's communities. No one doubted the purpose of religious women, Vanderputten argues—although I suspect the nuns who were forced to move and the canonesses who lost a home might have been a bit upset.

Still, little evidence exists, Vanderputten admits, about the impact of post-Carolingian reforms on nuns’ spirituality. We cannot assume that women who resisted strict Benedictine enclosure or other reforms were bad nuns. They may have been resisting particular reforms on ideological grounds, as a group of abbesses did at Nivelles in the early ninth century. (“Having consulted each other, not caring for the statutes, they appealed to Pope Paschal for future counsel over the maltreatment they had been subjected to, and the yoke that had been imposed on them” [173].) Some women continued to insist on debating best monastic practices and the theology of their vocations. The library at the convent of Maubeuge, for instance, included all sorts of legal and penitential handbooks covering a range of monastic behaviors. References in hagiography suggest that women inside convent walls were actively discussing Benedictine spirituality. Vanderputten recounts the story of Geisa of Saint-Pierre-aux-Nonnains in Metz, who shied from donations and wore a hair shirt. This led her confessor to pore over the convent's books to find grounds for her ascetic example (185–188.) This, Vanderputten argues, is evidence that women took part in their own reform.

Or did they? The story of Geisa came from one monk's vita of another monk. Men wrote all the sources that Vanderputten trusts, as well as those documents that he believes we historians have read too literally. It seems clear that the texts depict a society controlled by great lords, who wanted great properties and greater power, and by bishops, who were determined to manage religious women and their estates with rules and claustration—not just because they were greedy men, but because they thought it best for vowed women. Despite Vanderputten's insistence, it is hard to detect in these documents the continuing flexibility of religious women's profession, any variety of self-determined vocations, or much agency among nuns in the tenth century. When an abbess campaigned for reform and welcomed the imposition of strict cloister, did she do so because she was taking active part in recreating the identity of her community and striving for its preservation, as Vanderputten believes, or because she was bullied by the bishop and her donors into doing so? If the oppressed welcome oppression are they no longer oppressed?

If Vanderputten provokes historians into reconsidering the effects of religious reform on vowed women during the central medieval period, he has done us a good turn. He offers a useful model by focusing on local environments in order to generate larger patterns of religious history. The most important point of this book is that, after ten centuries, we scholars still remain blind to the gendered biases of medieval documents.