Review: "Medieval Nuns at War" by Elizabeth Quillen

Medieval Nuns at War by Elizabeth Quillen
Published September 2025 via Pen and Sword History
★★★

The classic image of nuns is simple: black habit, wimple, maybe stuck in a convent. And historically, there was some truth to this—there was tremendous pressure on nuns not just from within convents but from the Catholic church more broadly to stay cloistered, stay out of worldly life.

Not all nuns obeyed. Medieval Nuns at War tells the stories of a few of these nuns, as much as is known. These are varied stories: Some nuns did battle within their own convents, fighting for control or against corruption; others left their convents entirely and sought a less reclusive life.

It boggles my mind a bit to read about literal children being consigned to convents—Matilda, whom the book discusses early on, was eleven when she was made abbess of a convent. She was the daughter of an emperor, so I suppose the normal rules did not apply (most eleven-year-olds stuck in convents were not immediately put in positions of power!), but...oh, it's much like child marriages of the era, I suppose; all these life-determining choices made when girls were far too young to decide for themselves. (Worth noting, perhaps, that leaving a convent after a nun had taken vows could get her excommunicated, so the choices made by others mattered.)

Far and away the most interesting story is that of Antonio de Erauso, which comes at the end; Erauso was born Catalina de Erauso in the late 1500s, consigned to a convent as a child...and then escaped and, according to Erauso's own memoirs, lived a wild and varied life. It's a little hard to gauge how much of Erauso's stories are true and how much are "the fish was THIS big", but Quillen has the sources to back up the general thrust of the story. Erauso is the most interesting character here simply for there being so much information available; Quillen focuses largely on nuns about whom not all that much was written, which is something of a double-edged sword: these are stories worth telling, but because they were not treated as stories worth telling centuries ago, when people were in a position to record more details, there is a very limited amount that we can know now.

I read this in part because I had just read a historical novel set in part in a beguinage, and there is some overlap (indeed, Quillen also discusses beguines and their connections to nuns). I did find it a slow read at times, partly because there's a limit to what even the most determined researcher can turn up and partly because I don't have a background in medieval history; it probably would have done me well to do a bit more general catch-up on that history (and, in particular, the medieval Church) before turning to this. An excellent book for researchers, though, and for those who want a reminder that convents have always been more complicated places than popular culture would suggest, and many nuns have lived lives every bit as interesting as those outside the habit.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.