The Brigittine Convent in Lublin was founded in 1426 and reformed on strictly traditional lines in c. 1510. As the number of votaries continued to drop, about 1570 it was the home of no more than two nuns. However, from 1573 onwards the convent benefited from a tidal wave of vocations that was then sweeping the country. It soon had enough nuns (though no monks) to become the mother house of five new foundations. That period of revival and expansion can hardly be attributed to post--Tridentine reforms, least of all its early phase, 1596-1613, which is well documented in the sources (mainly visitation reports). Such features of the monastic discipline of the Renaissance as the cult of law and method, painstaking care given to monastic formation, cult of enclosure, and strict adherence to common rules and common property scarcely shaped the life in the convent. They were certainly not in evidence in 1596 when the Bishop of Cracow came to visit the growing and allegedly reformed community. He found no Rule (not even a hand-written copy), no novice-mistress, no enclosure, no consultations. The picture which emerges from the bishop’s unfavourable report is in fact that of late-medieval convent life: the novices learning the monastic ways simply by conforming to their elders’ example and complementing it with any private devotions they happen toprefer, the Abbess looking after the general welfare of the community but leaving the nuns the freedom to procure the small necessities of life for themselves, and private piety taking precedence over common observances. The new model of religious life with its mandatory code of conduct must have been eventually accepted by the Brigittine community of Lublin, but, probably, not quite wholeheartedly. If the issue of private property may serve as a case in point, we find the peculium back in force in Lublin about the year 1700. In so far as it is possible to compare the life of female religious communities in Poland, the three orders, the Brigittines, the Dominicans and the Cistercians, have been found by the author of this article repeatedly in disagreement with the post Tridentine ideal of religious life. This conclusion means, in other words, that the medieval tradition had become part and parcel of the life of each of the three orders and, as they clung to it with all their might, they were not able to see the distinction between the original medieval model of sanctity and its late-medieval distortions. It is also true that communities, just like people, mature in their own good time and are always more likely to find right and accept an altered code of conduct when they have matured, and conversely, chafe at one that has been imposed on them too early. That was indeed the case with the Lublin community, which did mature — from the historian’s point of view, most unexpectedly a century later. In 1733 the sisters gave up all private property, from income to clothes, introduced a yearly retreat, decided to go without maidservants, reformed their timetable, etc. They introduced all those changes of their own free will, without anybody from the outside trying to reform them. This reform was meant (like every monastic reform) to be a return to the initial spirit of the Founder: in fact it combined both old and new elements.