Few monographs in Reformations studies leave readers with such an overwhelming impression of diligent, exhaustive, and conclusive research as does Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer's most recent book, Stripping the Veil: Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth-Century Germany. The work is a tour de force, and intentionally so. Given the egregiously oversimplified modern assumptions about convent reform in Reformations-era Germany, the author would have been forgiven for utilizing a few case studies merely to problematize or question the prevailing narrative (2–3, 8–9). Instead, she performs and presents a thorough investigation of the extant primary sources in order to reset completely how scholars should approach evaluating monastic reform in early modern Central Europe. The author demonstrates that the reform of formal female devotional life in a multi-confessional sixteenth-century Germany was so nuanced, complex, and often contrary to the expectation that almost every situation, anecdote, and example—individual and communal—appear to be dramatically unique. And yet she crafts a sophisticated argument that synthesizes hundreds of these examples concisely, coherently, and convincingly.

Reflecting that nuance and complexity, Plummer pays special attention to terminology from the outset. She necessarily focuses on articulating the variety of denominational manifestations that she observes in the evidence. She distinguishes the obvious “confessional” expressions such as “Lutheran” and “Catholic,” terms that she applies only when their appropriateness is clear and firm in the sources, from the more complicated alternative options such as “blended,” “fluid,” and “hybrid,” which she likewise defines and uses with care (xx–xxi). In fact, these latter terms prove to be much more useful and compelling in the narrative, with the confessional terms applied much more sparingly.

In a succinct yet rich introduction, the author posits that “women holding diverse beliefs and practices lived and worshipped in shared spaces in convents throughout the sixteenth century,” and that “many of these convent congregations actively blended elements of traditional and evangelical practices to retain their traditional communal devotional life” (3). This phenomenon proved to be incredibly complex. The author accessed and examined it by tracing the “participation in and responses to modifications of . . . devotional and ritual practices, customs, and convent structure over an extended time” of tens of thousands of nuns in almost 1000 convents across Germany, considering further the “changing political and confessional circumstances that guided local policies” (4). Mercifully, she places maps strategically throughout the book, depicting convent locations and names chapter by chapter to help ground the reader spatially. But the reader still expects the myriad episodes and vignettes contained in the book to vary widely. The author further mitigates that breadth of material by providing a comforting overview of the general structure, characteristics, and function of the various orders and convents in early modern Germany (4–8).

Plummer's narrative stage is set in chapter 1, with a vivid description of how, during the first decade of the evangelical reform movement in Germany, “convents became popular loci for acting out rituals of reform” (18), often incurring violence against residents and destruction of property. Through this process, the laity as well as the secular and ecclesiastical authorities vied for leadership as local reformers. But this destructive phenomenon, which formed the basis for the later historiographical stereotyping of convent reform throughout the Reformations, in fact then largely ceased during the mid-1520s. For the decades thereafter, the author identifies two major alternative themes of historical development that clearly departed from the stereotype of violence and destruction, and these themes inform the two-part structure of the remainder of the book.

Part I comprises chapters 2–4 and focuses on the laicization, secularization, and contested endurance of German nuns and convents from the decline of violent expulsions in the mid-1520s to the sectarian conflicts of the mid-1540s. A host of parties participated in these processes, including secular lords, urban officials, lay reformers, archbishops and bishops, priors, and vicars, as well as the abbesses and communities of nuns themselves. Their collective motivations were myriad. The independence, existence, or closure of any particular convent had political consequences, economic effects, a community impact, and obvious spiritual implications. Thus, each of the parties involved brought different priorities to the negotiations—which is effectively what these processes always were in practice. The results varied widely, and they did not always correspond to the “confessional” homogeneity of the host polity. The most striking aspect of these processes was the remarkable degree to which the abbesses and nuns exercised agency, even in the face of unprecedented opposition and repression (160–171).

Part II comprises chapters 5–7 and illuminates the development, characteristics, function, and range of “mixed-confessional” convents from the mid-1540s until the end of the sixteenth century. This section is where the vibrant “culture” of formal female devotional life shines forth, despite or at times because of internal confessional conflicts. This culture included generational and confessional disagreements between religious sisters, new realities affecting elections and office holding within religious communities, and of course the liturgy and devotional life itself. The latter included debates about which language in which to pray, sing, or worship, how to regulate the use of sacred spaces, what to do with devotional images and materials, how to relate to the clergy, and to what degree it was appropriate to associate with people living outside the convent. In most cases, the author communicates this culture's “ongoing confessional fluidity, devotional adaptability, and multilayered practices” (263).

Plummer's impressive text is accessibly structured, abundantly supported, and compellingly argued, all despite the incredible, heretofore-overlooked complexity of how reform was implemented in sixteenth-century German convents. Truly that complexity is a revelation, one that should lead historians to consider more closely any assumptions they have about the Reformations. Because of this, the book is invaluable. It should join the list of essential monographs in the field.