Denis Diderot's novel La religieuse, the story of a nun struggling to be released from her monastic vows, is one of the most embittered monastic satires of the Enlightenment. In this novel Diderot, whose point of departure was a public trial in 1758, took the view that the monastic life is incompatible with human nature and indeed with Christianity itself. He demonstrated this through the sufferings of his unfortunate heroine in three separate nunneries. She was only able finally to escape from the unnatural monastic life with the help of a priest. Alessandro Manzoni's novel Monaca di Monza, in effect the germ of his great Promessi sposi, also treats the unbearable living conditions of a nun in a convent. This work, too, developed from reports of a public trial. The reports paint a truly horrific picture. They speak of murder and of the seduction of several nuns by the lover of the mother superior, who bore him two children. The novels of Diderot and Manzoni paint a depressing picture of the lies and rape which characterize the monastic experience in the modern period, an experience in which only dissoluteness and licence appear to have the upper hand. But is familiarity with these novels, and with reading the facetiae (‘comic anecdotes’) and novellas of the Italian Renaissance, an appropriate basis on which to judge the relations between the sexes in monasteries of the Middle Ages? It is well known that novels obey their own laws.