Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia

Jo Ann Kay McNamara was a historian, and this academic book, published by Harvard University Press, is a broad history of Catholic women's religious life across two thousand years, from early Christian ascetic women through medieval and modern religious orders, drawing on monastic records, hagiography and institutional archives. Its strength is its extraordinary chronological range synthesized by one historian with deep expertise in medieval religious women specifically, letting a reader see continuity and change across the whole history of Catholic female religious life in one place. Its limit is that such broad chronological scope necessarily means less depth on any single order or period than a specialized study would offer, so a question about one specific order in one specific century is better supplemented with a focused source on that case.