I'm aware that, technically, nuns were supposed to be cloistered, and I know that they often were charged with making embroidered ecclesiastical textiles. However, I came across these two images from the 15th century:
The Hospital of Notre Dame at Tournai, Belgium, kind of Cistercian-looking
The Hotel Dieu in Paris, appears more Benedictine, though could be Fransiscan due to the black-and-white nature of the image. I couldn't find it in color, so I don't know if it exists in color.
Since they're interacting with patients, it doesn't seem as if the women pictured are cloistered by our modern definition (and in the first image, the stress lines on the women's dresses indicates that they're wearing tight clothes). Are they members of tertiary orders, functioning as sisters/lay sisters, or were nuns more connected to the world than we typically think?
Really, any information about the lives of women who took solemn or simple vows in the late Middle Ages would be greatly appreciated.
The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Nuns may be helpful to you here. I was skimming through it, and it appears that, while some nuns were kept in special houses, others were permitted to go in and out. Also, the length of time spent as a novice differed based on whether you were cloistered or not, which implies that some nuns were not cloistered.
