Purity

Catherine Coldstream's Cloistered: My Years as a Nun is a personal memoir detailing her experience living as a Carmelite nun. The book explores the daily rhythms, vows, and interior spiritual practices of contemplative life, including silence, enclosure, and the pursuit of purity and union with God. Coldstream reflects on the psychological and communal dimensions of monastic discipline and how those practices shaped her identity. She also examines wider questions about obedience, humility, and the role of religious vocation in modern life. The memoir offers both an intimate portrait of monastic commitment and reflections relevant to readers interested in spirituality and religious practice.

Louise Brangan's The Fallen investigates the history, operation, and legacy of the Magdalene laundries in twentieth-century Ireland, places where thousands of women and girls were confined and exploited under the guise of moral rehabilitation. Drawing on archival research and survivor testimony, Brangan situates the laundries within broader social, political, and religious frameworks that prioritized moral purity and social conformity. She details the processes of dehumanization—name removal, hair cutting, forced labor—and the complicity of church and state in sustaining these institutions. The book critically examines how cultural norms, censorship, and local policing enabled mass exclusion and indefinite detention, and discusses the challenges of remembrance and justice for survivors. Brangan's work contributes to scholarship on punishment, gendered control, and transitional justice.

Izabella Scott's The Bed Trick explores the historical literary motif of sexual deception known as the 'bed trick' and its unexpected appearance in a modern legal case of 'rape by deception. ' Combining literary history with legal and cultural analysis, Scott traces the plot across medieval, early modern and folkloric traditions and unpacks how such narratives intersect with contemporary ideas of consent, credibility, and the courtroom. Her book examines how juries and courts assess credibility in cases that defy straightforward categorization, and how cultural expectations about sexual purity shape legal outcomes. Through careful research, Scott highlights tensions between narrative, belief, and law, offering a nuanced account of how ancient plots can resurface with real-world consequences.

In 'Purity and Danger', Mary Douglas examines how societies categorize and manage concepts of purity and pollution, arguing that these classifications serve to maintain social order and symbolic boundaries. The book is a seminal work in symbolic anthropology, offering insights into how different cultures perceive and manage 'dirt' as a matter out of place.