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Nuns are everywhere – we’ve had Isabella Rossellini’s Sister Agnes stealing the show in Conclave and nuns with main character energy in The Phoenician Scheme, And Just Like That and Nine Perfect Strangers. On #nuntok (yes, a thing), real sisters demystify and give surprisingly irreverent glimpses into their lives. There was the Austrian trio jailbreaking from a care home to return to their beloved convent, and at the other end of the demographic scale, a rise in younger women following, or at least considering, cloistered vocations.
Nun memes have become a jokey shorthand for real dissatisfaction with life as a woman in 2025 – unsolicited dick pics, workplace discrimination and the endless, soul-sapping scroll. They don’t, mostly, express a yearning for strict religiosity or voluntary celibacy, but for community, purpose and a retreat from chaos. It’s the same impulse that attracts women to single-sex communities or makes them pine, like Stella in Bernard MacLaverty’s brilliant Midwinter Break, for béguinages (the lay communities of single women that flourished in the Low Countries in the middle ages). We all just want peace.
Well, sisters, now there’s a self-help book. I have been reading, and highly recommend, Convent Wisdom: how sixteenth-century nuns could save your twenty-first century life, a delightful glimpse into the colourful lives of counter-reformation nuns. The florid religiosity (levitation, mystical visions, eating cat sick and cobwebs) might not be entirely relatable, but it’s thrilling to learn how powerful, purposeful women managed the unreasonable demands of male authority figures, made ends meet and lived on their own (and God’s) terms.
It’s salutary, too, to realise any serenity was hard won: they also suffered crushes and complex friendships, finances described as “a demonic mess” (hard relate) and terrible bosses. I warmed, predictably, to Augustinian María de San José, who felt “the greatest repugnance for work” and left behind 12 volumes of lamentations about how awful writing was.
I haven’t gleaned practical life hacks or (sorry) habits, but wish I could, like María de Jésus de Agréda, solve my time management issues by bilocating (miraculously being in two places at once). And I have a new unrealistic #fitnessgoal: learn to levitate.
