BOOK REVIEWS 451

POPE BENEDICT XVI: Great Christian Thinkers: From the Early Church through the
Middle Ages. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2011; pp. ix + 316.
This book contains seventy “brief portraits” of early and medieval Christian thinkers. As
the culmination of weekly public addresses at St Peter’s Square (Rome) between March
2007 and December 2010, these historical snapshots offer biographical musings on:
“heirs of the apostles” from Bishop Clement of Rome to Eusebius of Caesarea (part
one); “great teachers of the ancient church” from Athanasius of Alexandria to Romanus
the Melodist (part two); “monks and missionaries” from Pope Gregory the Great to
Symeon the New Theologian (part three); and “mystics, mendicants, and scholastics”
from Anselm of Canterbury to Julian of Norwich (part four). Treated in chronological
order, these captions — as the publisher’s foreword attests — offer “accessible intro-
ductions to the key framers of the pre-Reformation tradition, East and West, as useful
for personal reading or study as for classroom or congregation” (ix). Offering a clear
reminder of the pope’s strong theological and academic background, each entry draws
from core literary and historical texts to furnish short but accessible biographies or
character depictions. Owing precisely to the explicit nature, purpose, intent, and audi-
ence of this book, however, this book does not present any overarching argument,
thread, introduction, or conclusion. Given its public focus, the work is devoid of the
usual (and often helpful) scholarly conventions, such as footnotes, bibliography, or
index, which could provide the curious reader with further and recommended readings.
In this respect, this series of public addresses is not intended to replace the many extant
reference works on Christian history and tradition, such as the widely consulted Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church (third edition, Oxford, 2005), for example, or the
similarly titled works of Hans Küng or G. R. Evans. Rather, this collection on the lives
and works of “theologians and philosophers but also spiritual guides, eremites and
monks, abbots and abbesses, popes and bishops, founders and reformers, mystics and
missionaries” (ix), serves primarily to introduce the lay reader to a number of key
Christian figures while highlighting their importance to the present day Roman Church
and Christian religion.
KRISTON RENNIE
University of Queensland

C. A. MONSON: Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the
Convents of Italy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010; pp. xvi + 241.
This monograph makes a lively and rich contribution to a well-established subject in the
popular imagination — convent life in early-modern Italy — by weaving together
stories that are both entertaining and unbelievably true. Convents in this period offer so
much ripe material for the historian-storyteller: elites used them for their daughters to
avoid the high dowries required for the marriage market, while at the opposite end of the
social scale they were used to avoid or reform female prostitution, or simply to provide
a home for women with nowhere else to go. The obvious result, as Monson shows us,
was that the level of religious vocations often was very low in convents, while their
closely circumscribed living conditions meant that the potential for disruption and
subversion was very high.
It is precisely at the meeting point between the social and ecclesiastical will to
enclose and control the lives of these women, and the effort by some women to break

© 2012 The Authors

Journal of Religious History © 2012 Religious History Association