By Force and FearAn unwilling, desperate nun trapped in the cloister, unable to gain release: such is the image that endures today of monastic life in early modern Europe. In By Force and Fear, Anne Jacobson Schutte demonstrates that this and other common stereotypes of involuntary consignment to religious housesshaped by literary sources such as Manzoni's The Betrothedare badly off the mark. Drawing on records of the Congregation of the Council, held in the Vatican