Can Centuries-Old Nuns Really Save Us from Ourselves?

On November 7, 2025, Rosalía released her new album to throngs of eager devotees. As critics were quick to celebrate, Lux is a multilingual mashup of musical styles, with the Spanish-Catalan pop star’s ethereal vocals accompanied by the harmonic gravitas of the London Symphony Orchestra. Just as revelatory, Lux throws into its hitmaking blender the divine and the mundane, serving up morsels of religious passion and monastic seclusion to ease the pangs of worldly love, infatuation, and loss. On the track “Divinize,” Rosalía sings “Each vertebra / Reveals a mystery / Pray on my spine / It’s a rosary.” Over pulsating orchestral strings, in “Reliquia,” she intones, “Take a piece of me / Keep it for when I’m not here / I’ll be your relic.”¹ She has explained in interviews that the songs were inspired by a number of early holy women, including the eighth-century Iraqi Sufi mystic Rabia Al Adawiyya, the 12th-century Benedictine abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen, and the 16th-century Rose of Lima, the first person from the Americas to be canonized as a Catholic saint. The same week that Rosalía dropped Lux, Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita published Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life. With chapters on love, work, money, body, soul, fame, and “girlfriends,” the book promises novel solutions to our modern age’s most distressing predicaments, all plucked from the obscure cloisters of yesteryear. Chock-full of style, grace, wit, and erudition, Convent Wisdom is remarkable for how it brings centuries-old nuns breezily down to earth without skimping on historical precision.

To some degree, Lux and Convent Wisdom are but the latest examples of a steady crescendo of fascination with clergywomen. This aesthetic—so-called “nuncore”—can be seen in everything from designer runways to streaming media,² from horror flicks³ to historical dramas,⁴ and even in the demographic uptick of young women seeking to join religious orders.

But it is one thing to embrace habited women as a fashion trend or fount of esoterica. It’s quite another to suggest that these centuries-old nuns can assuage our contemporary psychological ailments, relationship woes, and professional malaise. Can looking to women beholden to God help us escape a society so fixated on itself? Or does it simply package those devout lives as the latest content for a culture industry desperate for the next trending topic?

Out with Convention, in with the Convent

Before the publication of Convent Wisdom, Garriga and Urbita had already gathered a loyal following through their Spanish-language podcast Las Hijas de Felipe, so named for the 16th-century king of the first globe-spanning empire, Philip II.⁵ But, unlike admirers of the art and literature that garnered that period the triumphant epithet of the Golden Age, these “daughters of Philip” steer clear of its masculine canon to channel their adoration toward the nuns who walled themselves off from that brilliant yet brutally violent society.

One of the first things that listeners to the podcast nonetheless will notice is that Baroque convents were not the secluded enclaves that outsiders might assume. Their walls were porous enough to allow their members to be willing participants in decidedly mundane pursuits: theatrical productions, festivals, the manufacture and sale of goods, natural philosophy, scientific experimentation, and social correspondence.

Long before Rosalía’s Lux, female mystics were using the carnal language of erotic love to express zealous affection for God. On occasion, they even pursued sexual and romantic relationships, sometimes with one another. Not unlike today’s viral nuns on TikTok, many of these 17th-century women of the cloth—such as the Mexican luminary Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—commanded their own sizeable networks of followers. And, according to Garriga and Urbita, even the legendary reformed Carmelite Teresa of Ávila was in her earlier years “vain” and self-absorbed.⁶ We have much more in common with 16th-century nuns than fantasies of their otherworldly aura might suggest.

Each of the dozens of episodes of Las Hijas de Felipe recorded to date treats listeners to arcane yet discerningly curated historical details on such diverse topics as alchemy, bilocation, dissection, exorcism, sodomy, fashion, menstruation, and real estate. This veritable podcast potpourri is united by an investment in spotlighting female monastics, often as a means of toppling common assumptions about the 16th and 17th centuries at large. Among Garriga and Urbita’s avowed favorite episodes is one titled “What’s a Lesbian Like You Doing in a Convent Like This?,” on same-sex intimacy in the cloister, and another on everything you ever wanted to know about Catholic relics, which clocks in at some three hours long.

By reviving female voices of forgotten archives, Garriga and Urbita bring something legitimately new to the genre. They also challenge the toxic, facts-optional gestalt of the dominant manosphere (they invariably address their audience with the feminine pronoun vosotras, a subtle yet powerful indication that this is a space by and for women). And, because they narrate each episode with irresistible enthusiasm, effortless banter, and sly nods to pop culture—or what they describe as a “cheesy yet rigorous mélange”—the podcast never feels like a stuffy lecture hall.

Now, their book Convent Wisdom is cut from the same eclectic cloth, but it does not simply transpose the podcast for an English-speaking readership. Even as the book dangles the promise of beneficent counsel, it doubles down on its irreverence, packing in references to late 2010s internet memes, celebrity gossip, and millennial social media fads. The parallels drawn between 21st-century culture and early modern nunneries are sometimes dubious, often comically absurd, and always original. For example, the authors liken the miraculous feat of levitation to core-building fitness routines (“cloistered calisthenics”), or, regarding Teresa, equate “the enchanted choreography of an ecstatic body” in the throes of a mystical vision to “the well-rehearsed moves of Dua Lipa.”

While many such comparisons are made with tongue planted firmly in cheek, Convent Wisdom is also sprinkled with more earnest advice, whose timelessness is often signaled by the tagline “No matter what century you’re reading this in …” In the chapter on work, they correlate the Discalced Carmelites’ daunting task of composing the life story of their founder, Teresa, with Garriga’s and Urbita’s own travails with doctoral study. Inspired by the nuns’ formation of a crowdsourcing coterie, they affirm the shared intimacy of collaborating on their podcast as an antidote to the solitary labor of a dissertation, allowing them to declare that “an unholy amount of work will not make you any more holy.” Similarly, in their self-proclaimed penchant for bewailing their life as graduate students at Brown University, the authors identify with María de Santo Domingo, whose facility with weeping raised suspicions over her sincerity as “the ultimate sadfisher of the sixteenth century.” Yet, after holding their own self-promotional motives up to those of María, they conclude that, “if done well, harnessing the power of your woes for high drama is a media strategy as valid and effective as any other.”

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As in any good self-deprecating autobiography, these juxtapositions endear readers to authors who readily subject themselves to the same flippant irony wielded on their subjects. The confessional thread of Convent Wisdom revolves mainly around Garriga’s and Urbita’s experience as doctoral students in Providence, which allows them to skewer the privileged echelons of academe with playfully scathing disdain.

Still, the analogies they erect between life in the abbey and life in the ivory tower prove at times more ambivalent. If early modern women donned their habits as a retreat from the world, then here academia functions rhetorically as an intellectual refuge. Yet at the same time, today’s academy represents a dispiriting site of misery and deprivation that enables the authors’ fantasies of nunnery as its own palimpsestic asylum. Such complaints approximate them less to a Teresa—a relentless disruptor yet dyed-in-the-wool believer—than to an Arcangela Tarabotti, whose mid-17th-century denunciations likened convent life to Dantean circles of hell.

Of course, the lived professional experience of simultaneous joy and agony was surely no less familiar to 16th-century nuns than it is to 21st-century academics. But the life-coaching mantras of “convent wisdom” also sit somewhat uneasily alongside the fact that, whatever advice early modern nuns prescribed, they did so for the purpose of helping not themselves but, at least ostensibly, what they believed was the righteous cause of serving God.

For her part, Rosalía clarifies her allegiance to the former in the chorus line of Lux’s first track: “Who could live between the two / First I’ll love the world and then I’ll love God.”⁷ But in Convent Wisdom, this tension between saintly devotion and earthly desire remains unsettled.

Early Modern Life Coaching

Self-help manuals have likely been around for as long as there have been writing selves. Centuries before the current slogan of self-care, the ancient Greeks were promoting journaling, physical exercise, mentorship, and inner contemplation as ways of life. As Michel Foucault taught us, these technologies of the self were geared toward loftier ideals of democratic citizenship, the idea being that, to govern others, one first had to learn to govern one’s own emotions, desires, and ambitions. To care for the self was to care for the community.

Foucault famously opposed these practices of what the Greeks called epimeleia heautou to a modern, more narcissistic individualism. That investment in the self for its own sake is now more visible than ever, with social media influencers peddling the latest productivity hacks, viral shortcuts for self-advancement, and endless spinoffs on the solipsistic, gag-inducing trend of “maxxing.”

By the 16th century, a booming print industry was making self-help books available to increasingly differentiated readerships. Courtesy manuals instructed young men on fashion, table manners, and social banter, all the better for aspiring courtiers to access the gilded power centers of early modern Mar-a-Lagos.

In Convent Wisdom and Las Hijas de Felipe, we can encounter lessons for survival in the face of governmental, religious, and social oppression.

In contrast, texts like the 1583 La perfecta casada (The Perfect Married Woman), by the unwed and presumably celibate friar Luis de León, decreed modesty, submissiveness, and domestic service obligations for housewives. For women who preferred to eschew this unsolicited advice and remain single, the most socially acceptable option was to profess religious vows.

Teresa’s 1577 Las moradas del castillo interior (The Interior Castle) offered her fellow Discalced Carmelites practical advice on introspection, resilience, and what today we might call mindfulness. Like Juan Huarte de San Juan’s roughly contemporary Examen de ingenios (The Examination of Men’s Wits, 1575) or Robert Burton’s later The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Teresa also prescribed certain psychological remedies for those suffering the effects of mental illness and depression.

The key difference is that Teresa, like her monastic sisters, was concerned with self-actualization not as an end unto itself but as a necessary step in the spiritual journey toward union with God. Scholars of the last few decades have vindicated female monastic life as a vital epicenter of women’s agency, ingenuity, solidarity, and resistance. Yet, until Convent Wisdom, never have nuns been in such high demand for strictly nonspiritual counsel, for advice applicable to life beyond the cloister.

That the book revolves around the external validations that Teresa and her principled kin sought to renounce is Convent Wisdom’s most startling and most beguiling proposition. But the incongruity between traditional religious piety and modern egocentrism raises deeper questions that the book’s selectively hagiographic take on early modern nuns leaves unresolved.

From Self-Renunciation to Self-Promotion

The visual idioms chosen by the marketing departments behind Convent Wisdom and Lux are strikingly similar. On the fluorescent orange sleeve of the book, a skyward-looking nun poses for a selfie, while the cover of Rosalía’s album features the singer enveloped in a tightly fitting habit that, akin to a straitjacket, forces her into a posture of self-embrace. Both images seem to broadcast the idea that holiness need not imply genuine sacrifice, reassuring readers and listeners that these forays into asceticism require no personal abnegation, that one can aspire to celestial realms without forfeiting self-indulgence. You can have your saint and eat it too.

Despite the fact that Garriga and Urbita briefly take Rosalía to task for selling out to the temptations of financial capital, their media strategies—which have leveraged various locales to drop additional tracks, release new episodes, and livestream to their eager fandoms—differ perhaps only in scale. Though the authors acknowledge “the capitalist tyranny of productivity and the exhausting rituals of self-promotion,” they also confess their “infectious hunger for notoriety.” The altar of celebrity gathers worshipers of all stripes, even the nuns who occupy, mostly facetiously, the book’s culminating chapter on fame.

For all its pretensions of salvation, Convent Wisdom conspicuously lacks chapters on concepts like selflessness, service, and empathy. Not even in our age of newly ascendant religiosity does anyone want to read a preachy book.

Yet today—when Roe is no more, feminism is becoming taboo, the tradwife is trending, and religious identification is rising in step with right-wing grievances—romanticizing bygone stories of nunnery is not without risks. One wonders whether such idealization might even unwittingly beckon a theocracy of the sort that made those early modern monasteries such an indispensable refuge. Fun as it is to fetishize 16th-century nuns as unlikely avatars of hustle culture, it is not clear that they are the figures of liberation we really need in our current moment (to say nothing of their unacknowledged complicity with the ravages of colonialism). And even if they could save us from the growing tyranny of everything from crypto bros to climate denialism, the casual nuns of Convent Wisdom are too busy with their own dramas to shepherd us through these peskily existential threats.

There is, however, an understated yet more vital takeaway from Convent Wisdom and Las Hijas de Felipe for how we should approach these venerated yet entirely human female saints. In them, we can encounter lessons for survival in the face of governmental, religious, and social oppression (categorical distinctions that, in early modern Spain, amounted to more or less the same thing, and that in the US seem to be getting blurrier by the day). We can take inspiration from their courage in creatively navigating the violent structures of heteropatriarchy, as Sor Juana did within the stifling constraints of her inquisitional epoch. We can learn when to resist, and when simply to hunker down or bunker up in whatever literal or metaphorical sanctuaries we can find.

In this sense, Garriga and Urbita’s nuns are not self-help gurus as much as they are models of resilience, single-minded focus, communal living, and devotion to a collective cause. Confounded as they are by life’s everyday demands—convent bills to pay, meddling inquisitors to placate, trying colleagues to suffer—they never lose sight of their visions, ecstatic or otherwise.

At a time when followers express their fervor not by reciting prayers but by retweeting, when a cause is endorsed not by lighting candles but by clicking “like,” and when saintliness is gauged by the number not of ex votos but of emojis, there is something comfortingly quaint about the obsession over centuries-old nuns. Insofar as it sustains a community bound by shared knowledge of esoteric rituals, that fandom is not so different from early modern convents. Garriga and Urbita make that distant, foreign space feel unusually intimate. With scholarly rigor, captivating prose, and comic brilliance, they bring marginal subjects alive in a chorus no less exhilarating than Renaissance polyphony in a Baroque sanctum or Rosalía belting out pop canticles in a packed stadium. As wise readers and listeners from any century know, sometimes the best salvation is simply to marvel at those with a flair for their craft, and to rejoice in the glory of their varied creations.