Convent women have been composing histories of their religious houses at least as far back as the tenth century when Hroswit of Gandersheim composed Primordia cenoebii Gandersheimensis, an account of the founding of the abbey at Gandersheim. By the fourteenth century, women in several Dominican houses began composing “sister-books” that contained narratives of the lives of their “founding mothers.” Some added historical foundation accounts to their “sister-books” along with copies of documents to demonstrate the legality of their properties and of the donations they received. Meanwhile, in the Low Countries, women in the Common Life movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were founding religious communities as working women and composing works for themselves as “ordinary people.” With the arrival in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Observant Reform, a movement that swept through virtually all the religious orders, women in Observant convents were encouraged by their reformers to write their own vernacular histories that would celebrate the reform and urge the women to persevere and continue to renew it. The hybrid content of these histories, their much more personal tone, and their predominant use of the vernacular distinguish them from other chronicles.