"Carthusians are contemplative monastics who live in community but spend most of their days alone in their private dwellings. With a lifestyle similar to that of their 11th-century French founder, they wear hair shirts, practice self-flagellation and eat just one meal a day from mid-September to Easter (though some monasteries reluctantly have begun allowing such luxuries as electricity, hot water and flush toilets). Maguire, a Renaissance scholar married to an ex-Carthusian, examines this living museum of a bygone age by following the lives of five young men who entered St. Hugh's Charterhouse in England between July 1960 and March 1961. As they work, pray and live in solitude, they discover not only God but also themselves. They do not, however, learn much about the rapid changes taking place beyond their walls, and the men who leave the monastery in 1965 find themselves in a strange new world. Through painstaking research including countless phone conversations, 5,000 pages of e-mails and a reunion of the five men in France, Maguire creates a personal, sympathetic and amazingly detailed description of an ancient order and its contemporary adherents, traveling 'toward inner space within the confines of their solitary cells.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Maguire has generally focused her scholarship on the relationship between theater and politics during the 17th century. Here she documents the five-year journeys of five men who entered the Carthusian monastic order in 1960.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Maguire has generally focused her scholarship on the relationship between theater and politics during the 17th century. Here she documents the five-year journeys of five men who entered the Carthusian monastic order in 1960. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

"An Infinity of Little Hours does what the best books do: it probes, it teaches, it unsettles, it amazes." The American Scholar

"The level of detail is astonishing, and the book does what all great nonfiction does, paints a picture of a world with strokes so well-defined one feels as if he or she has visited it." MSNBC

What Ms. Maguire has set herself to do — and she does it brilliantly — is to make real to us what one might call “the Carthusian experience,” but the experience of an order that, in 1960, was still almost exactly as it had been in the 11th century, when St. Bruno built his hermitages on the mountain of the Grande Chartreuse. She describes it as “a slice of history frozen in time for nearly 1,000 years” that was, as the church enforced modernization, “about to drop into oblivion.”...Ms. Maguire takes us through every element of this strange and wonderful life, where the sole aim is to live for God alone. She makes no judgment on whether the means used are the wisest, though there is perhaps an implicit judgment in the actual life stories of her five novices as they struggle to meet the challenge. Wendy Beckett, National Catholic Reporter

In this riveting chronicle, Maguire presents a uniquely intimate portrait of the customs and practices of a monastic order and follows the trial of faith of five young men in the Carthusians, the most rigorous and ascetic monastic order in the Western world.