Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age. Britain, 1945–90. By Carmen M. Mangion. (Gender in History.) Pp. xiv + 327 incl. 15 figs and 3 tables. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. £80. 978 1 5261 4046 3

The challenge posed by the pre-1962 aspects of modernity is also key to her discussion of the phenomenon of the ‘Modern Girl’ and the efforts of religious communities to accommodate the ‘call of the cloister’ to a generation of young women accustomed to greater opportunities in education, employment and even marriage than had been the case for those who had entered conventual life in the years prior to the First World War. Mangion's discussion of the response of the female religious orders to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s not only locates them within the broader framework of radical social movements from which they have often been excluded by scholars of the 1960s wedded to a narrative of secularisation, but also documents their efforts to (re)construct transnational and individual identities amid the maelstrom of the renewal process. While Mangion discusses modifications of the daily round of community prayer (pp. 135–45), it would be interesting to know if the female religious orders also grappled with the broader theological implications of the changes ushered in by Sacrosanctum concilium in 1963 that did so much to reshape the liturgical life of the ordinary Catholic parish (the allusion to the removal of the convent grille in the chapels of certain communities might be interpreted as a commitment to the People of God theology that informs Lumen gentium).