Blending history and architecture with literary analysis, this ground-breaking study, Imagining Women's Conventual Spaces in France, explores the convent's place in the early modern imagination. The author, Barbara Woshinsky, brackets her account between two pivotal events: the Council of Trent imposing strict enclosure on cloistered nuns, and the French Revolution expelling them from their cloisters two centuries later. In the intervening time, women within convent walls were both captives and refugees from an outside world dominated by patriarchal power and discourses. The convent also spurred 'feminutopian' discourses composed by women: convents become safe houses for those fleeing bad marriages or trying to construct an ideal, pastoral life, as a counter model to the male dominated court or household. Presented in collaboration with the Center for the Humanties at the University of Miami.