Clearly the result of decades' worth of archival work, The White Nuns will likely be the go-to reference for those working on Cistercian women's monasticism in the thirteenth century. Constance Berman has brought together a great mass of material which will no doubt fuel further work in the area. However, in many ways this book reads like an appendix to her earlier The Cistercian Evolution, a rather disjointed and argument-free corpus of evidence which serves to prop up part of that book's thesis but which fails to cohere on its own. ( )