Brides of Christ is a study of professed nuns and life in the convents of colonial Mexico. "A superlative work of mature scholarship that builds in subtle ways on [Lavrin's] earlier work ... but it is nonetheless fundamentally new . . . The greatest strengths of this book-its clarity, its archival richness, its strong sense of purpose, its clear and powerful arguments, its empathy . . . It is also worth noting that the book is gracefully written in a stately, careful, almost dispassionate prose which is quite appropriate for a book with passion aplenty on the part of the nuns themselves."