The burdens of Sister Margaret

The Burdens of Sister Margaret invites you inside the private world of a seventeenth-century convent. Hidden until now from modern eyes, this is a world you will come to know in intimate detail - from the routine events that shaped the sisters' daily lives, to the extraordinary story that surrounded one sister, Margaret Smulders, who was possessed by demons and accused a popular chaplain of sexually harassing her. Ostracized by her cosisters for "soiling" their community and causing what they regarded as the unjust downfall of the chaplain, Sister Margaret was twice banished from the convent and, after years of struggle, exorcised of the demons she claimed were haunting her. How do we know so much about this convent? In 1989, historian Craig Harline made a startling discovery: Sorting through a Belgian archive, he uncovered several bundles of correspondence that the Franciscan Grey Sisters of a convent in Leuven (Louvain) had penned more than three centuries earlier. Here were pages and pages of astonishingly detailed letters that divulged some of the deepest, most personal hopes and concerns of this community of nuns. "I marveled at the survival of these papers, their prolixity, t