The National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, 1660–1696. By James Walters. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.) Pp. viii + 213 incl. 2 ills. Woodbridge–Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2022. £75. 978 1 78327 604 2

future was central to the creation of communal identities, a claim which runs through all the book’s chapters. Goodrich demonstrates that this was not only done though the writing of community histories, such as the history compiled communally in  by the nuns at the Paris convent (based on memories and written accounts), but also through the practice of reading death notices. Readers might be surprised to learn that obituaries were one of the most important forms of Life-writing within the convents, ‘second only’, Goodrich claims, ‘to the genre of statutes in their ability to establish corporate identity’ (p. ). Teasing out the construction, reception and significance of death notices is one of this chapter’s great strengths. In the final chapter Goodrich quells any temptation that readers might have to view these works as having only limited impact. Here she illustrates skilfully the ways in which these nuns, allegedly ‘dead to the world’, not only spoke to secular audiences, but also, through polemics, influenced wider religious, secular and political debates. The breakdown in the monastic order that ensued from the Protestant Reformation in some respects forced the nuns to enter into the world of what she calls ‘imagined communities that substituted a virtual communion with the English Catholic counterpublic for spiritual fellowship of the cloister’ (p. ). The book ends with an afterword, rather than a conventional conclusion: ‘Notes toward a feminist philosophical turn.’ This is a call which may not sit easily with her earlier assertions that ‘recent scholarship has moved beyond the search for protofeminist foremothers’ (p. ). Notwithstanding this criticism though, this book is a more than welcome addition to an ever-expanding field of the history of early modern female religious.