In 1947, author Beth Warren, entered the convent because she believed God called her to a special life of service for His people. She had a passionate love for nuns who combined their religious lives with outgoing compassion for others. Warren wanted to be just like them. She dreamed that answering her Call to religious life would help make the world a better place. During the sixties, Pope John XXIII asked nuns to look outside their convent walls to see where they were most needed. Warren was drawn to working with disadvantaged people, but she was told she was a teacher, not a social worker. She realized that to serve God’s deprived people and live among them, she would need to leave her religious Community. In Another Nun’s Story, Warren chronicles her joys and difficulties during her religious life from the 1940s to the 1980s. She discusses how being a rebel nun led her to break her vows and left her with unraveled feelings and some guilt. But she came to understand she was saying goodbye to an impossible dream so she could pursue one that was possible for her.

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Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life. Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways. But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive. That is, until now. In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A. Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the long-silent voices of these cloistered heroines. Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety (some real, some imagined). Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities. But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them. Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free. But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives. When they were crossed—by powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for them—bad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation. In resurrecting these long-forgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”—seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdioceses—continues even today. The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own age—and beyond.

God's will or the Devil's work? Owen Archer investigates a young runaway nun who claims to have been resurrected, setting a series of dark discoveries and violent deaths in motion. York, 1365. Dame Joanna Calverley of Leeds fled St. Clement's Priory with its precious relic - the milk of the Virgin - and died of fever soon after in Beverley. A MIRACLE RESURRECTION? Joanna is dead and buried . . . isn't she? Not according to housemaid Maddy, who finds Joanna in her master's house almost a year after her burial. Joanna claims to have risen from the dead and is seeking to return to the convent with the relic. Why did she disappear? Where is Will Longford, the master of the house? And how is the trail of death and destruction that follows linked to her supposed resurrection? THE TRUTH WON'T STAY BURIED FOR EVER . . . As Owen attempts to make sense of Joanna's troubled riddles, he unravels a dark family secret and the shocking truth behind the nun's tale. THE OWEN ARCHER MYSTERIES 1. The Apothecary Rose 2. The Lady Chapel 3. The Nun's Tale 4. The King's Bishop 5. The Riddle of St. Leonard's 6. The Gift of Sanctuary 7. A Spy for the Redeemer 8. The Cross-Legged Knight 9. The Guilt of Innocents 10. A Vigil of Spies 11. A Conspiracy of Wolves 12. A Choir of Crows 13. The Riverwoman's Dragon 14. A Fox in the Fold

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Shirley Leach lived in a world of extreme comfort, wealth and status. With every good thing life had to offer, she was due to marry the man she loved a man who, in turn, adored her. But all this was to change in a single moment. One happy day, in the midst of writing to her fiancée, her hand stopped writing unbidden; then it continued by itself, etching the words which would change her life forever:...but there's no point now, as I am going to be a nun.That bolt from the blue set events in motion that caused Shirley to lose her mother and sisters, her husband to be, her horses, her parties and life of ease. Within months, Shirley had become Sister Agatha. But her faith in her choice never faltered, despite years of great difficulty when her Convent was close to bankruptcy. Her belief took her to London to knock on the infamously intimidating and tight-fisted Sir Paul Getty's door to secure the money to ensure her community would not lose their home....and getting it. Now eighty-five, she looks back on an incredible life of love, loss and belief. This is at once a deeply poignant tale of doomed romance, and a heart-warming story of taking a leap of faith and finding a meaning in life beyond the wealth and comfort she was born into. Whether a believer or not, Sister Agatha's momentous life will touch and inspire, whilst reminding us that it is perhaps better to accept that not everything in the world is yet explained.

The new edition includes a new foreword that looks at the impact the original edition had on both the lesbian and the mainstream cultures. The authors have added individual afterwords, describing how their lives were changed when their book went mainstream.