Planting the Cross exposes the challenges that French convents and monasteries faced as they struggled to survive the civil wars that reduced the country to near anarchy in the sixteenth century and then to raise standards and instill a new piety in their members in the wake of the wars. In this meticulously researched and attractively written account, based on a series of attempts at the reform of France's religious orders, Barbara Diefendorf provides an impressive analysis of the enormous challenges facing those orders during and after the wars of religion. She reveals the complexity of interests involved at each stage and portrays the problem of reform in its indispensable social, familial, and institutional dimensions. Taking the problems of religious change out of their ghetto, Planting the Cross will be an ideal starting point for anyone seeking to reach beyond the established and often facile generalizations about France's Catholic Reformation." - Joseph Bergin, University of Manchester