ABSTRACT
This article analyses the writing culture from textual modes practiced in female cloisters. Some Exemplary Lives, literature predominant in Portuguese convents in the XVII and XVIII centuries, will be used. The strengthening of individuality, the emergence of the printing press and the Catholic Reformation made possible the advance of biographies and autobiographies by religious women who served to exemplify and to model a conventual lifestyle considered ideal to the eyes of the Catholic Church. These were educational works to the religious normalization and met masculine orders on the feminine universe in the interior of the cloisters.
Keywords:
writing culture; exemplary lives; convents; Portugal; modern period