The editor’s acknowledgments encapsulate this book’s allure. She moves from “acquaintance” with her subject to being “hooked” on her writings. Her collaborative work, with Paul Arblaster, Susan Smith, and others, mirrors that of Sister Margaret herself, whose work comes with attendant linguistic and textual complexity via Dutch, Spanish, and French versions, and manuscript and archival complications. Several versions of the nun’s diary exist, compiled between 1635 and 1643. That the edition has been over ten years in the making suggests the challenge and the richness of its material. This was autobiography by mandate from her confessor to Margaret of the Mother of God (Magriet Van Noort, 1587–1646), a lay Discalced Carmelite in Brussels. The rhetoric as well as the reality of this instruction justified her authorship and shaped its form, as for many other early modern religious women; her rhetoric of humility underlines what she terms “this foolish scribbling” (233), another familiar refrain in such material.

The book adds impressively to the flourishing field of nun studies and the wider imperative of uncovering silenced early modern voices. It provides a powerful edition of Sister Margaret’s compelling autobiographies, diaries, letters, and devotions, appended with posthumous testimonies to her blessedness, probably compiled to support her veneration. This material is distinctive, less in Margaret’s method than in her lay status, exposing rarer convent areas: as van Wyhe puts it, the topography of kitchen, medicine, and spirituality. Her introduction usefully locates material within the Low Countries of the Eighty Years’ War, Spanish Carmelite and Catholic history, and ideas of illness, care, and sacred pain. The edition connects Margaret’s life and writing to that of other religious, especially Ana de San Bartolomé (1549–1626), companion to Teresa of Ávila, and Ana de Jesús (1545–1621), Teresian prioress at Brussels. Indeed, like many Carmelite pioneers, the women express mutual indebtedness and repeat foundational storying of the order, supporting each other’s legacy as successors to the saint.

Editions like this cannot do everything. Their main aim is to make available new primary material, and thus enable later analysis of it. Perhaps, though, more might have been made of the ways in which Teresian textual legacy is framed, since this informs so much of the shape that Margaret’s writing takes. She frequently echoes her precursors. This is telling if not surprising; she read autobiographies of Saint Teresa and Catherine of Siena, among others. They give her spiritual shape. She also learns her narrative process at their writerly knees, incorporating a reflective method that secures her own authority through its apparent lack: “I had forgotten to put this in its proper place” (152). Such phrases suggest an absence of planning; yet the diaries are organized for devotional effect, cumulatively toward an outburst of praise after “surrender and rapture” (156). Certain festivals understandably led to certain kinds of visions: at Corpus Christi Margaret saw Christ’s wounds “shining and burning like fire” (171); on Mary Magdalene’s day she asked to cry for her sins, stirred by liturgy to particular affective forms. She ponders on the role of the interior senses. The palpable presence of Teresa of Ávila is textual as well as extrabodily. Margaret’s accounts of pain are at once derivative and vividly personalized. Her allover gout is memorably acute: “it seemed that my head was a lit oven and sparks of fire were shooting out of my eyes until I thought I might lose them” (229). The edition adds modern medical information to the understanding of imitative suffering (a diagnosis of spinal tuberculosis).

It ends with a glossary, useful for readers less familiar with such material, suggesting the wide appeal of an edition of this kind. The bibliography is rather vexed by its subdivision of secondary sources, some of which might fit in several sections. This excellent edition augments our ever-widening knowledge of lives of early modern women within, and beyond, the convent. It shows what is often hidden, not only in women’s experience and testimony, but also in the painstaking work of editors across several archives, sometimes in different countries, their endeavors often rendered invisible by the very books that contain them. Such scholarship takes time and patience. Here it is richly rewarded. Like the editor, we move from acquaintance to enthrallment at Sister Margaret’s writing.