Elizabeth Rapley is adjunct professor of history at theUniversity of Ottawa. Her books include TheDevotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-CenturyFrance and A Social History of the Cloister: DailyLife in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime.
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"Life under a religious rule has been a hallmark of the Catholic tradition for millennia. Elizabeth Rapley shows how these rules of life have given shape to a plethora of religious orders and why those orders are crucial for understanding the history of Christianity. Her overview of this way of life, ranging from the fourth-century desert ascetics to the missionary orders of men and women in the modern period, is a carefully researched and highly readable work." -- Lawrence S. Cunningham University of Notre Dame