Historiographical Reviews

8/11/2019 Historiographical Reviews

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The Historical Journal,, (), pp. Printed in the United Kingdom

Cambridge University Press

H I ST O RI O GRA P H I C A L REVI EW S

WIVES, WIDOWS, AND BRIDES OF CHRIST:

MARRIAGE AND THE CONVENT IN THE

HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EARLY MODERNI T A L Y

S I L V I A E V A N G E L I S T I

University of Birmingham

. Two main alternative paths structured the lives of women in early modern Italy :

marriage and the convent.Historians have analysed the disciplinary and economic functions,and the

legal,religious and symbolic meaning of these paths,from a variety of perspectives.However,studies

of marriage and the convent have mainly developed as two separate fields of historical research. My

article reviews these two series of studies in the context of the historiography of early modern Italy, and

suggests some of the possible connections between them.

Mantua, : the secret marriage of the duke Ferdinando Gonzaga caused a political

scandal within this northern Italian court. The bride was the young lady-in-waiting

Camilla Faa, a noblewoman from the Piedmontese aristocracy. The marriage was not

in Mantuas diplomatic interest and political pressures soon forced the couple to split.

The pope intervened in support of the Gonzagas strategy of building powerful dynastic

links and the marriage was declared dissolved. The following year Ferdinando married

Caterina de Medici, sister of the grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II. Less than a decade

later he died. Camilla faced a rather different prospect. She was separated from their

baby son, and presented with the obligation either to remarry or to enter the cloister.

In , aftersix years resistance, she finally took the solemn vows in the convent of the

Corpus Domini in Ferrara. Faced with such meagre options she chose the convent wallsrather than a second husband. Removed from public scene, she nevertheless managed

to leave testimony of her experience in a brief memoir. A strikingly lucid re-elaboration

of her existence, the memoir was written in the year of her consecration as a nun, in the

monastic confinement that was to last for the rest of her life. She died there forty years

later, in her early sixties.

On the few occasions that historians of the seventeenth century have reported on this

complex episode their political perspective has led them to see it as a mere dynastic

incident, one of many caused by the strategic marriage alliances that characterized the

Fernanda Sorbelli Bonfa, Camilla Gonzaga-Faa: storia documentata (Bologna,). See also F.Satta, Faa , Camilla, in Dizionario biografico degli italiani(Rome, ), , pp. . Faasmemoir was published for the first time in . For its English translation see Valeria Finucci, Camilla Faa Gonzaga: the Italian memorialist, in Katharina M. Wilson and Frank J. Warnke,eds.,Women writers of the seventeenth century (Athens, GA, and London, ) pp. .


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history of the early modern Italian courts. Certainly this abruptly concluded affair

reflects the close interweaving of the public and private dimensions of life within the

courts, and the deep political meaning of an event such as marriage for men and women

of the elite. It also reflects the rigidity of gender roles and the disadvantaged position of

women in early modern society. If men could escape marriage by opting for a political,

military, or a religious career in the secular or regular clergy, women were presented

with a more restrictive range of perspectives. Marriage and the cloister were the two

main lifepaths provided for them by social norms. Indeed, securing a place for women

within the marital house or the convent walls was the means to guarantee family

continuity, fortune, and power, as well as an honoured and disciplined society. Finally,

this event suggests that marriage was not necessarily the solution women preferred.

Marriage and the convent, and their relevance to Catholic societies and to the lives

of individuals, are now familiar topics to social, cultural, religious, and above all gender

historians. Despite this familiarity these two institutions have traditionally been studied

as two separate fields of historical research. It is my intention here to review the recent

series of studies on marriage and the cloister in the context of the historiography of early

modern Italy, and to throw some light on the possible intersections between them.

I

Recent historiography of Italy has paid particular attention to marriage, confirminghistorians continued interest in this much-studied institution. The recent publication of

two important collections of essays, Storia del matrimonioandMarriage in Italy,,

clearly indicate the strength of this scholarly tendency.

In many ways these studies have contributed to the development of an idea of

marriage as a means through which institutions could guarantee social order. From the

time of the Romans through to the Renaissance, marriage was represented as the

founding principle of the city and of society, and therefore of the entire process of

civilization. In Ciceros words, marriage constituted the seed-bed of the State.On a

symbolic level, the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine women effectively expresses

marriages intrinsically political nature. The myth portrayed the transformation of a

violent abduction into the civilized social alliance sanctioned by the marriage bond.

Antonius Possevinus, Belli Monferratensis historia ab anno salutis M.DC.XII usque ad annum

MDC.XVIII (n.p. , ), p. and passim. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Annali dItalia dalprincipio dellera volgare sino allAnno (Milan, ), , p. ; Leonardo Mazzoldi, DaGuglielmo III duca alla fine della prima dominanza austriaca, in Mantova : la storia (Mantua,),, p. . It is interesting to note that until the end of the nineteenth century this event wasmore of a literary subject than a historical one. Between and , two short stories, ahistorical drama, a novel, and a poem were published: see Sorbelli Bonfa, Camilla Gonzaga-Faa ,pp..

See for instance Gabriella Zarri, Gender, religious institutions and social discipline: thereform of the Regulars, in Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds., Gender and society inRenaissance Italy(London and New York, ), pp..

Michela De Giorgio and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, eds., Storia del matrimonio (Rome andBari, ); Trevor Dean and Kate J. P. Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, (Cambridge,). On these two volumes see Renata Ago, Giulia Calvi, and Silvia Salvatici, Discussioni,Ricerche storiche, (), pp. .

Quoted in Diane Owen Hughes, Il matrimonio nellItalia medievale, in De Giorgio andKlapisch-Zuber, eds.,Storia del matrimonio, pp..


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in the face of resistance from both the localecclesiastical elites who had to apply the law,

and from those who were subject to it. Both Lombardi and Ferrante focus on mens and

womens attitudes towards ecclesiastical power, analysing cases of broken marriage

promises, divorce, invalidity of marriage, or bigamy. Ferrante took the question a step

further by assessing the extent of female protagonism in the courts. Examining

ecclesiastical law suits in the archibishops court of Bologna, she found that out of a

sample ofcases betweenand, women started the legal action in about

per cent of them, and in per cent women won the case.In her view, the picture

emerging from the court papers is one of church efforts to reach compromises and

agreements between the parties. The papers also show how individuals men and

women, of different social status, and from civic and rural backgrounds were quite

capable of dealing with power and using it in their own interests.

From different points of view, other scholars have raised pointed questions about the

variety of specific forms of marriage control established by both the ecclesiastical and

the secular institutions. These studies have revealed unexplored aspects of the

institutions educational policy. For instance, public charitable support provided by

the church and the state was a clear expression of this control. It strategically targeted

precise social, moral, and religious objectives, whilst addressing women of different

social conditions and faiths. Maria Fubini Leuzzi has shown how the Tuscan state

displayed its generosity by distributing marriage dowries to poor and abandoned girls

in order to protect their honour and keep them away from sexual sins and prostitution.

Piet Van Boxels study of Counter-Reformation Rome threw some light on the churchs

distribution of monastic dowries to Jewish girls of the ghetto who had converted or were

prepared to do so. He related the rapid increase in papal dowries towards the end of the

sixteenth century to the parallel promulgation of anti-Jewish regulations aimed at

defending the Christian faith. By drawing attention to this clever strategy for winning

more converts Van Boxel emphasized the Catholic churchs rather insidious use of

marriage in the name of missionary activities and the struggle against unbelievers.

Studies of the institutional control and social function of marriage have often

emphasized the prominent role played by the family. Marriage was the result of a

process of negotiation between families, which reflected families political strategies. In

short it was a family affair. This very common interpretation underlines the strength

of family strategies, patrimonial interests, and parental authority, and the weakness of

individual action and choice. In this view gender becomes a crucial issue. A number of

studies (by scholars such as Klapisch, Molho, Kirshner, Chabot, Chojnacki, andDelille) have shown that in spite of the differences between the north, centre, and

Lombardi, Fidanzamenti e matrimoni, p. ; Ferrante, Il matrimonio disciplinato, pp.. On the local implementation of Tridentine laws see Angelo Turchini, Dalla disciplinaalla creanza delmatrimonio allindomanidel concilio di Trento,in GabriellaZarri, ed., Donna,disciplina,creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: studi e testi a stampa (Rome,), pp. .

Maria Fubini Leuzzi, Appunti per lo studio delle doti granducali in Toscana, Ricerchestoriche, (), pp. , and idem, Dell allogare le fanciulle degli Innocenti: unproblema culturale ed economico, in Prodi, ed., Disciplina dellanima, pp..

Piet Van Boxel, Dowry and the conversion of the Jews in sixteenth-century Rome:competition between the church and the Jewish community, in Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage inItaly, pp..

Christiane Klapich-Zuber, Women, family and ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago, ) ;Anthony Molho,Marriage alliances in late medieval Florence (Cambridge, MA, and London, ) ;Julius Kirshner, Wives claimsagainst insolventhusbands in late medievalItaly , in J. Kirshner and


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south of Italy, the strong patrilineal orientation of ancien regime society guaranteed a

system of descent in which men inherited the entire patrimony. Women were given a

dowry which served either to marry them, or to place them in a convent. This dowry

was infinitely smaller than the portion inherited by men, and usually took the form of

a cash sum. Land and other property, which symbolized the identity and continuity of

the family, remained with the men. A set of municipal statutory laws canonizing family

concern for patrimonial cohesion represented the backbone of this mechanism. As

Kuehn and Chabot have shown, these laws aimed at excluding women from access to

property, and preventing them from contracting any legal action without a male

guardian.

This view of marriage has been explored through political, legal, demographic, and

more recently symbolic perspectives. Rites, ceremonies, and the iconography of

marriage have received attention from scholars studying the impact of family strategies

on marriage. Sara Matthews Griecos analysis of marriage iconography and paintings

has shown the persuasive power of these images in reflecting gender roles and

hierarchical relations within the family. Family and couple portraits epitomized the

ideal of conjugal devotion and the civic and economic implications of this com-

mitment.Matthews Grieco has also underlined how images gave shape to changes in

family and marriage ideology. For instance, in the eighteenth century the theme of

dynastic continuity in family portraits was often replaced by an emphasis on parental

love and the affective relationship between parents and their children, a change she

interprets as an expression of the growing importance of emotional ties within the

nuclear family. Representations of marriage have also been discussed from a different

perspective by historians of consumption. Patricia Allerston has examined the relatively

unexplored issue of wedding finery and its social meaning. Her analysis of the

conspicuous consumption and luxury furnishings associated with wedding celebrations

in sixteenth-century Venice shows how by using secondhand goods and fineries, or

borrowing them, families could achieve the maximum display of wealth with a

relatively small financial investment. This reminds us once again of marriages peculiar

nature as a point of encounter between public and private, and its importance for social

S. F. Wemple, eds.,Women of the medieval world(Oxford,); Isabelle Chabot, Risorse e dirittipatrimoniali, in Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Rome and Bari,); idem, La dettedes familles: femmes, lignages et patrimonines a Florence aux XIVe et XVe sie cles (Ph.D.

dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, ); idem, and Massimo Fornasari,Leconomia della carita: le doti del Monte di Pieta di Bologna (secoli XVIXX)(Bologna,); StanleyChojnacki, Dowries and kinsmen in early Renaissance Venice, Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory, (), pp. ; idem, Nobility, women and the state: marriage regulation inVenice,, in Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, pp. ; Gerard Delille,Familleet proprietedans le Royaume de Naples (Paris and Rome, ).

Thomas Kuehn, Some ambiguities of the female inheritance ideology, in Law,family,andwomen: toward a legal anthropology of Renaissance Italy (Chigago,), pp. ; Isabelle Chabot,La loi du lignage: notes sur le syste me successoral florentin (XIVeXVeXVIIe sie cles), Clio.Histoire,femmes et societes, (), pp..

Sara F. Matthews Grieco, Matrimonio e vita coniugale nellartedellItalia moderna, in DeGiorgio and Klapisch-Zuber, eds., Storia del matrimonio, pp. ; Musacchio, The rape of theSabines, pp. ; Maria Fubini Leuzzi, Vita coniugale e vita familiare nei trattati Italiani fraXVI e XVII secolo, in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, pp. .

Patricia Allerston, Wedding finery in sixteenth-century Venice, in Dean and Lowe, eds.,Marriage in Italy, pp..


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prestige. Furthermore, research on marriage images and ceremonies has shown how

images tended to reaffirm, on the symbolic level, the strength of established normative

values and power relations within the family.

The idea of marriage as an entirely family affair, however, has come under critical

scrutiny. Whilst accepting the undeniable political meaning of marriage, scholars have

also argued for a more complex perspective. Particular emphasis has been placed on

individual behaviour. Family strategy and parental authority on the one hand, and

individual choice on the other, were not necessarily mutually exclusive.Focusing on

elite families in seventeenth-century Rome, Renata Ago has introduced the notion of

team games as a way of interpreting family dynamics and strategies. This notion,

whilst not denying the role of power relationships or conflicts within the family,

emphasizes the complementary nature of family members individual actions. Although

family interests certainly came first for fathers, Agos work suggests we should also

explore the possibility of individuals negotiating and contributing to shaping their own

lives and careers. In particular she interprets the attitudes of parents and relatives

towards the younger members of the family in terms of persuasion and negotiation,

rather than absolute paternal authority and coercion. More important still, Ago

extends her interpretation to gender relations. Women too played their part in the

game; indeed they had a unique role as mediators in those informal negotiations which

took place behind the scenes and outside the institutions of public life. Agos

interpretation offers a comprehensive view, focusing on the actions of those members of

the family that have often been cast, too simply, in a position of weakness and

subordination.

Finally, historians have discussed the dissolution of marriage. Interest in life after

marriage has particularly focused on female widowhood. From the social and legal

point of view widowhood was characterized by loneliness, hardship, and even conflicts

and negotiations with families over the control of the widows dowry and goods.

However, this status also implied some degree of independence from male authority.

Indeed, the history of widowhood has been one of the most fruitful paths for the

exploration of female identity. For example, Giulia Calvi has studied the Magistrato dei

Pupilli the secular court responsible for defining the guardianship of orphans and

widows in cases of doubt or dispute. Widows appeared before this court to accept,

claim, or refuse the guardianship of their children. On the one hand, Calvi saw widows

Dean and Lowe, eds., Introduction, inMarriage in Italy, pp..

Renata Ago, Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca (Rome and Bari, ), pp. ; idem, Giochi di squadra: uomini e donne nelle famiglie nobili del XVII secolo, in Maria AntoniettaVisceglia, ed., Signori, patrizi, cavalieri nelleta moderna (Rome and Bari, ), pp. . idem,Giovani nobili nelleta dellassolutismo: autoritarismo paterno e liberta , in Giovanni Levi andJean-Claude Schmitt, eds.,Storia dei giovani(Rome and Bari, ),, pp. .

Ago, Giovani nobili, p.. See also Lombardi, Fidanzamenti e matrimoni, pp.. Christiane Klapich-Zuber, The cruel mother: maternity, widowhood, and dowry in

Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in idem, Women,family,and ritual, pp..Isabelle Chabot, La sposa in nero : la ritualizzazionedel lutto delle vedovefiorentine, Quadernistorici, (), pp. ; Giulia Calvi, Reconstructing the family: widowhood andremarriage in Tuscany in the early modern period, in Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, pp.. See also Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner, eds., Widowhood in medieval and early modernEurope(London,).

Giulia Calvi, Il contratto morale: madri e figli nella Toscana moderna (Rome and Bari, ) ;idem, Maddalena Nerli and Cosimo Tornabuoni: a couples narrative of family history in earlymodern Florence,Renaissance Quarterly, ().


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and orphans as social actors who were prepared to fight for their own interests, rather

than as minors, which was their legal status. On the other hand, she underlined how the

Tuscan magistrates followed a logic which protected the maternal role within the

family, and recognized love and emotional ties between mothers and children. Thus

judges and claimants often adopted a bilateral idea of kinship that went beyond the

rigidity of the patrilineal model.

Calvis work echoes Agos discussion of the need for a broader interpretation of family

relations. This interpretation has had an important impact on historians of gender and

women, as is suggested by the most recent studies on family, and property, which show

how women sometimes acted in complicity with the rest of their families.This kind

of interpretation is seen by a number of scholars as the most fruitful path for future

research on marriage.

I I

If historians of Italy have dedicated considerable attention to marriage, the same holds

true for the cloister. Indeed the past decade has seen an extraordinary growth in interest

in the nuns story promoted by the path-breaking works of Gabriella Zarri and by a

rich and stimulating series of subsequent works. From different perspectives, the great

majority of these studies have focused on the institutional dimension of convent history

that illustrates the multiple functions carried out by female convents within medievaland early modern urban society. These functions concerned religious, cultural, and

socio-economic aspects of civic life.

Historians working on women, religion, and the arts have highlighted how convents

became important poles of religious as well as cultural life. The protection and

intercessory function performed by the so-called brides of Christ and their prayers

made female convents key centres of public devotion.This function was emphasized

by the presence in some convents of particularly charismatic and mystical nuns.

Nunneries also had a significant role in the education of the daughters of the urban

elites. Monastic communities, above all the most aristocratic and wealthy ones,

provided these women with access to sources of learning, such as nun-teachers and

books, and cultural links with external artistic and learned circles through a solid

network of pious and generous patrons and patronesses.The all-female space of the

Renata Ago, Ruoli familiari e statuto giuridico, Quaderni Storici, (), pp. ;Giulia Calvi and Isabelle Chabot, eds., Le richezze delle donne: diritti patrimoniali e poteri familiari in

Italia (XIIXIX secc.) (Turin, ).See also Gestione dei patrimoni e diritti delle donne, issue ofQuaderniStorici, ().

Ida Fazio, Percorsi coniugali nellItalia moderna, in De Giorgio and Klapisch-Zuber, eds.,Storia del matrimonio, pp. ; idem, Complicita coniugali: proprieta e identita della Torinonapoleonica, Quaderni Storici, (), pp..

Gabriella Zarri, Monasteri femminili e citta (secoli XVXVIII), in Storia dItalia: annali(Turin,),, pp. ; idem,Le sante vive: profezie di corte e devozione femminile tra e (Turin, ); idem, Recinti sacri: sito e forma deimonasteri femminilia Bologna tra e ,in Sofia Boesch Gajano and Lucetta Scaraffia, eds., Luoghi sacri e spazi della santita (Turin,),pp. ; idem and Lucetta Scaraffia, eds.,Donne e fede: santita e vita religiosa in Italia(Rome andBari,).

Gabriella Zarri, Le istituzioni delleducazione femminile, in Le sedi della cultura nellEmiliaRomagna.I secoli moderni.Le istituzioni e il pensiero(Cinisiello Balsamo,), pp.; idem, Lavita religiosa femminile tra devozione e chiostro, in Le sante vive, pp. ; Danilo Zardin,Donna


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convent thus facilitated individual creative and intellectual activities which developed,

of course, under the supervision of the male clergy. Collections of essays representative

of historians strong interest in this field include The crannied walland Creative women.

Both collections provide striking evidence of convents cultural importance by focusing

on a vast range of nuns who dedicated themselves to the writing of mystical and

devotional works, poetry, plays, and musical compositions. Other studies on women

and the figurative arts, such as the volume recently edited by Sara Matthews Grieco and

Geraldine Johnson, offer a similar interpretation, including studies of nuns who were

painters, engravers, or sculptors.A theoretical formulation of this idea of the convent

has recently been elaborated by Monson. He suggests applying the notion of a womens

sphere to female convents and considering them as places where a certain degree of

womens agency can be recognized, in spite of the limits imposed by superiors.

There is, however, another side of the coin which is much less appealing. While

discussing the cultural and intellectual relevance of convents a number of historians

have also associated cloisters with the most gender-discriminating family ideology. As

we have seen, in a society where for the ruling classes wealth and properties meant social

prestige, power, and the continuity of the family name, marriage and the dowry were

fundamental issues. Indeed, convents represented a convenient option for the

patrimonial interests of the elites. As Zarri and many others have pointed out, the

amount of money necessary to place a woman in a convent, a sum known as spiritual

dowry, was much smaller than the marriage dowry.We should note that, although

monastic dowries were less onerous, only families of the aristocracy and the financial

e religiosa di rara eccellenza: Prospera Colonna Bascape, i libri e la cultura nei monasteri milanesi del Cinque e

Seicento (Florence, ), andidem, Mercato librario e letture devotenellasvolta del Cinquecentotridentino: note in margine ad un inventario milanese di libri di monache, in N. Raponi and A.Turchini, eds.,Stampa,libri e letture a Milano nelleta di Carlo Borromeo (Milan,), pp.;Serena Spano Martinelli, La biblioteca del Corpus Domini bolognese: linconsueto spaccatodi una cultura monastica femminile, La bibliofilia, (), pp..

Craig Monson, ed.,The crannied wall: women, religion,and the arts in early modern Europe (AnnArbor,); E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative women in medieval and early modernItaly: a religious and artistic Renaissance(Philadelphia,).

Only recently historians have begun to address their interest on nuns and figurative arts:see Geraldine A. Johnson and Sara F. Matthews Grieco, eds., Picturing women in Renaissance and

Baroque Italy(Cambridge,); Silvia Urbini, Sul ruolo della donna incisore nella storia dellibro illustrato, in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, pp. . See also Suor Plautilla Nelli() :the first woman painter in Florence, special issue ofStudies in Italian history and culture (forthcoming).

Craig Monson, Disembodied voices: music and culture in an early modern Italian convent(Berkeley,Los Angeles and London,), pp.. On nuns and music see also Robert Kendric, Celestialsyrens: nuns and their music in early modern Milan (Oxford,).

Zarri, Monasteri femminili, pp. ; Pio Paschini, I monasteri femminili in Italia nel , in Problemi di vita religiosa in Italia nel Cinquecento (Padua, ), pp. ; Pietro Stella,Strategie familiari e celibato sacro in Italia tra e , Salesianum, (), pp. ;Elisa Novi Chavarria, Monachesimo femminile nel Mezzogiorno nei secoli XVIXVII, inGabriella Zarri, ed., Il monachesimo femminile in Italia dallalto medioevo al secolo XVII a confronto conloggi(Verona, ), pp. ; Antony Molho, Tamquam vere mortua: le professionireligiose femminili nella Firenze del tardo medioevo, Societae storia,(), pp. ; GaetanoGreco, Monasteri femminili e patriziato a Pisa (), inCitta italiane del tra riforma econtroriforma(Lucca, ), pp. ; Carla Russo, I monasteri femminili di clausura a Napoli nelsecolo XVII(Naples,).


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and mercantile bourgeoisie could afford them. Convents therefore remained mainly

elitist institutions, although there were some differences between them.

One consequence of the convents economic convenience for families was what we

could call their dynasticization or the presence in the same community of

generations of nuns from the same kin group. Obviously this presence provided the

convents with a constant flow of nuns and dowries. For their part, the families could

obtain discounts on dowries, and opportunities to extend their influence and control

over a monastic institution and its properties.Convents thus can also be seen as the

symbol of the strength of family interests and paternal authority over female members

of the family, besides any genuine religious vocation.

Within this perspective the economic implications of female monastic life surely

contribute to explaining the general growth of convent population from the late middle

ages onward. Work on the demography of female convents offers us some precise

quantitative information on this complex social process. Brown and Trexler provided

important data on Florence, so far one of the most studied cases. According to their

analysis, between the fifteenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century

there was a constant growth of Florentine monastic professions. Numbers grew from

nuns in(when the city population was,) to,nuns in, and,

nuns in(out of a city population of,). This growth came to an end only in

the eighteenth century, when female religious professions started rapidly to decline, and

by the early nineteenth century there were only ,nuns (out of a city population of

,). As Burr Litchfield reports, these nuns were first and foremost upper-class

women. It has been calculated that betweenand , per cent of the women

See for example Sara Cabibbo e Marilena Modica, La santa dei Tomasi: storia di suor MariaCrocifissa () (Turin, ): in the three daughters of the prince of Palma diMontechiaro, Sicily, entered the convent of SS. Rosario founded by their family.

Judith C. Brown, Monache a Firenze allinizio delleta moderna: unanalisi demografica,Quaderni Storici, (), pp..

Given the constraints of space it is not my intention to address the many implications of thepositive and negative images of the convent (i.e. spiritual and intellectual achievement as opposedto female reclusion, even forced reclusion) which have been discussed by scholars. This bipolarinterpretation raises a series of very interesting questions which should not be neglected by thoseworking on female monastic communities. However, these two opposed ideas of the convent didnot always exclude each other. See the example of the seventeenth-century Venetian nun andwriter Arcangela Tarabotti who made her unhappy reclusion the starting-point for her heavy

criticism of forced monachization.See FrancescaMedioli, L Inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti(Turin,). FrancescaMedioli, Monache e monacazioni nel Seicento, Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa,

(), pp. . Brown, Monache a Firenze, pp. ; Richard C. Trexler, Le celibat a la fin du Moyen

Age: les religieuses de Florence, Annales ESC(Nov.Dec. ), pp. (trans.: Celibacyin theRenaissance: thenunsof Florence, in Power and dependence in Renaissance Florence (BinghamtonNY,, , pp. ). On the Florentine female monastic population see also Julius Kirshnerand Antony Molho, Il Monte delle Doti a Firenze dalla sua fondazione nel alla meta delSedicesimo secolo. Abbozzo di unaricerca, Ricerche storiche, (), pp. ; Gene A. Brucker,Monasteries, friaries, and nunneries in Quattrocento Florence, in T. Verdon and J. Henderson,eds., Christianity and the Renaissance: image and religious imagination in the Quattrocento Florence (Syracuse,NY,), pp.. On Milanese and Perusian nuns see Dante E.Zanetti, La demografia delpatriziato milanese nei secoli XVII, XVIII, XIX, Annales Cisalpines dhistoire sociale, nd ser., (), and Luigi Tittarelli, Monacazioni, matrimoni e fecondita a Perugia nel Seicento, inBollettino di Demografia Storica SIDES, (), pp..


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in a sample of twenty-one patrician families entered the convent. Significantly, this

development of female monastic communities coincided with a clear increase in the

value of Florentine marriage dowries. Between the middle of the sixteenth century and

the early seventeenth century patrician dowries doubled. Although there is little

information on the relative values of marriage dowries and convent dowries in this

period, Trexler reports that in the fifteenth century convent dowries amounted to

between one-third and one-tenth of the value of a marriage dowry.

To assess the impact of family ideology on female monasticism scholars have

considered another important, and often underestimated, factor: female inheritance

legislation. This connection between legal and monastic history was highlighted more

than a century ago by the jurist Francesco Scaduto in his work on the relationship

between the state and the church in Tuscany. Scaduto observed that in Florence, and

in Tuscany more generally, the laws on family property transmission were particularly

strict, perhaps more than elsewhere in Italy. This situation accounts for the strikingly

high proportion of Tuscan women who joined convents. Although medieval civic laws

already strongly discriminated against the female line of descent, further restrictions

were added inby the grand duke Cosimo II. In Scadutos view this worsening of

womens position within the order of hereditary succession explains why, in the early

modern period, [] the number of nuns was [] always far higher in comparison

with the total number of monks and friars, and often higher than these two and priests

put together.Scadutos argument is supported by Isabelle Chabot who has pointed

out how the Florentine legal system was stricter than others, such as the Venetian

system.Certainly we need to analyse more deeply the relationship between womens

legal position and the demographic trend of female religious professions in the Italian

states. This will allow a more comprehensive interpretation of female monasticism, and

in particular of its geographical peculiarities.

Given historians strong interest in family strategies it is not surprising that

considerable attention has been paid to the question of enforced monachization.

Francesca Medioli offered a well-documented survey on this issue for the period

between the fourteenth century and the early nineteenth century. She analysed a range

of cases of nuns who claimed before the Roman authorities that their religious profession

was invalid on the grounds of coercion. Drawing on a variety of ecclesiastical and legal

documents Medioli pointed out how difficult it was for those women who had been

obliged by family pressures to takethe veil against their will to abandon the convent and

return to a lay existence. They had to fight against their isolation and faced strongopposition from their ecclesiastical superiors. The nuns who succeeded in their intention

were those who could rely on the support of influential friends, and of some of their

relatives. This issue of forced monachization has not only been a matter of concern for

R. Burr Litchfield, Demographic characteristic of Florentine patrician families, sixteenth tonineteenth centuries,The Journal of Economic History, (), p., table.

Marriage dowries went from , scudito , scudi, remaining stable until the mid-eighteenth century. In order to have an idea of the value of such capitals, ,corresponded toroughly five years of incomes for an elite family; see Burr Litchfield, Demographic character-istics, p. ; Brown, Monache a Firenze, pp. ; Trexler, Le celibat, p..

Francesco Scaduto,Stato e chiesa sotto Pietro Leopoldo I granduca di Toscana () (Florence,), p. ; Lorenzo Cantini, Legislazione toscana raccolta e illustrata (Florence, ), , pp.. Chabot, La loi du lignage, pp. .

Francesca Medioli, Monacazioni forzate: donne ribelli al proprio destino, Clio, (),pp.. See also Romano Canosa,Il velo e il cappuccio :monacazioni forzate e sessualita nei conventi


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historians of female convents. Guido dallOlio has carried out a pioneering inquiry on

male forced monachization and apostasy in mid-sixteenth-century Bologna. He

analyzes a number of cases of monks who deliberately left their monasteries despite the

measures taken by the pope to restrain such a practice. For men too quitting monastic

life was not an easy solution. The gender implications of this action remain to be

explored.

As a development of the studies on the cultural relevance of convents, and their social

and economic function, scholars have recently begun to look at nunneries emphasizing

individual responses and resistance to monastic rules and constraints, such as the work

by Medioli and dallOlio. It is inevitable therefore that the history of convents has

become a history of power and gender relationships, specifically addressing the

interaction between the individual and the institutional dimension of monastic life. As

far as the early modern period is concerned, many of these studies focus on the impact

of the reform programme approved by the Council of Trent. Whilst recognizing the

effect of this major reform imposed from above by ecclesiastical authorities, scholars

have moved beyond this strictly vertical interpretation. Elements of greater complexity

in the process of reformhave been identified, and studies have stressed thecontradictions

implicit in its implementation, as well as the nuns resistance to it.

The research on the little-explored issue of nuns and property is an example of this

scholarly trend. Sherrill Cohens work on convents and asylums for penitents in

Tuscany showed how nuns resisted the Tridentine call for religious poverty. Far from

following a regime of communal property which implied the rigid control of financial

management by the nuns superiors matters of property continued to preoccupy

convents and their inhabitants. In practice some communities maintained a mixed

economic system based on small-scale individual exchanges. This form of economic

organization allowed private property partially to survive, often through exchanges

between family members, allies, or friends. Cohen carefully examined nuns claims of

ownership rights over personal goods of limited value, such as small sums of money or

convent cells. Her work thus underlined the inextricable connection between material

culture and monastic life, and the centrality of personal property in the formation of

individual monastic identity. More generally the research on this topic also raised

pointed questions about the permeability of the convent walls.

If the issues of religious poverty and property are representative of recent

femminili in Italia tra Quattrocento e Settecento(Rome, ); Paola Vismara Chiappa, Per vim etmetum : il caso di Paola Teresa Pietra (Como, ); Giovanna Paolin, Lo spazio del silenzio:monacazioni forzate, clausura e proposte di vita religiosa femminile nelleta moderna(Pordenone,).

Guido dallOlio, La disciplina dei religiosi allepoca del concilio di Trento: sondaggibolognesi, Annali dellIstituto Storico Italo-germanico in Trento, (), pp..

Francesca Medioli, La clausura delle monache nellamministrazione della congregazioneromana sopra i regolari, in Zarri, ed., Il monachesimo femminile, pp. ; Gabriella Zarri,Gender, religious institutions and social discipline: the reform of the Regulars, in Judith C.Brown and Robert C. Davis, eds., Gender and society in Renaissance Italy (London and New York,), pp..

Sherrill Cohen,The evolution of womens asylums since : from refuges for ex-prostitutes to sheltersfor battered women (New York and Oxford, ).

On nuns, property, and religious poverty see my Farne quello che pare e piace: lusoe la trasmissione delle celle nel monastero di Santa Giulia di Brescia () ,Quaderni storici,(), pp.. See also idem, La poverta impossibile: monache, famiglie e proprieta inItalia (secc. XVIXVIII) (Ph.D. dissertation, European University Institute, Florence, ).


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as a compensatory strategy to access at least symbolically the existence from which

they had been separated, within the relative freedom granted by artistic illusion. The

same could be said for those art works and paintings which were produced by nuns and

sent out of the nunnery to be sold on the external market. In this case nuns used their

artistic skills as one of the many tactics for overcoming their isolation and maintaining

contacts with the world outside, without being physically present in it. These studies on

artistic activities in the post-Tridentine convents made clear the crucial relationship

between the arts, politics, and convent life.Artistic expression thus can be seen as a

political weapon available to women who lived in seclusion.

There are at least two important considerations that emerge from the research on

convents. The first refers to Monsons notion of the convent as a female sphere. As

scholars have underlined, the heavily controlled world of the convent still left nuns some

space for action. Such action was not necessarily successful. Nevertheless, it is the

meaning of this action which is important to a full understanding of the past female

monastic experience. The historiography on convents reinforces the idea that the power

of institutions and social norms did not completely nullify individual initiative; there

were ways of manipulating these norms and acting with a degree of autonomy. The

second consideration relates to the assumption of the convent as a separated space. The

most recent studies on this topic stress the material and symbolic connections between

the inside and outside of the convent. This questions the idea of the clear separation

between the lay world and the cloister and challenges the image of the closed monastic

community. One important lesson which we can learn from this approach is that we

should consider elements of integration of the convent into the outside world, as well as

its separation from it. I will draw on this latter consideration in the next, final section

of my discussion.

I I I

A history of the relationships between marriage and the cloister is still to be written.

Nevertheless, some historians have made us aware of the many connections between

these two female lifepaths. Certainly Sandra Cavallos book on charity in early modern

Turin provided extremely interesting evidence on this key issue. From the perspective

of a scholar focusing on charitable initiatives towards religious institutions, Cavallo

adopted the interpretation of the convent developed by the historians of claustration

mentioned above. She concluded that, although Tridentine legislation forced nunstowards physical segregation, it did not transform their communities into hermetically

closed spaces. As she put it, convents were sealed with regard toexits [but] they did

not prohibitentry .In practice, although nuns external activities became impossible,

An insightful discussion on such a topic in the medieval period is proposed by Jeffrey F.Hamburger, Art, enclosure, and the Cura Monialium : prolegomena in the guise of a postscript,Gesta,(), pp..

For a thought-provoking study concerning marriage and the cloister in Germany see UlrikeStrasser, Aut maritus aut murus? Womens lives in Counter-reformation Munich (Ph.D.dissertation, University of Minnesota,Minneapolis, ). I would like to thank UlrikeStrasserforsending me a copy of her dissertation.

Sandra Cavallo, Charity and power in early modern Italy: benefactors and their motives in Turin ,, (Cambridge,), pp.(emphasis in the text). On womens commemorativebequests see Sharon Strocchia, Remembering the family: women, kin, and commemorativemasses in Renaissance Florence, Renaissance Quarterly, (), pp. .


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female religious houses remained the privileged recipients of female charitable actions.

A large part of female charity was devoted to female monastic communities, and women

often made bequests to convents in order to be buried within their walls in a nuns habit.

Some of them chose to join the community as lay guests, occupying private rooms or

apartments attached to the convent building, and sometimes even spending the rest of

their lives there. Monastic seclusion could thus represent a temporary as well as a

permanent retreat for women, without the obligation of taking the veil. Lay women, in

life or in death, had physical access to the cloister even after Tridentine regulation.

Cavallo drew a sketch of the identity of these women. They were widows, or older

unmarried women, or women whose marriages had failed. A high proportion of them

although not all of them came from the urban elite. On the basis of such observations

Cavalloargued that there was an ambiguity of functionsbetween monastic communities

and the penitents communities such as the Malmaritate and Convertite. Indeed,

convents and communities specifically aimed at sheltering women whose honour was

in danger fulfilled a partially similar function, that of the refuge. However, the

monastic communities were certainly more elitist in their recruitment; as Renee

Baernstein confirms in her work on sixteenth-century Milan, wealthy women widows

in particular founded convents and joined them as lay guests, finding there a kind of

refuge.

Female charity shows how lay women made use of convents. Nunneries should

therefore be seen as places that women chose to enter after experiencing marriage

difficulties or dissolution. This is particularly important for our understanding of

convents in early modern society. It opens up the possibility of considering them as

institutions with a dual social function: to meet the needs of patrimonial and marriage

strategies, and to contain the disfunctionalities of marriage.

Other historians such as Zarri and Lowe discussed the interaction between marriage

and the cloister from a totally different perspective. Both of them devoted their attention

to the mystical marriage and its meaning in the life of religious women. As Zarri

underlined, the condition of religious men and women was defined in relation to

marriage. There was, however, a fundamental gender difference. For men religious life

meant abstension from marital bonds, or celibacy. For women it implied a particular

marital status, that of the bride of Christ. In religious literature, hagiography, and

iconography, the concept and image of the bride of Christ the sponsa Christi assumed

particular relevance in the definition of womens identity. Indeed, the bridal metaphor

represented the unifying status of a woman. This metaphor applied to female identitywhatever a womans life condition lay or religious might be. Furthermore, this

metaphor proves to have been of crucial importance in the rituals of consecration of

On asylums for penitents see Cohen, The evolution ; idem, Asylums for women in Counter-Reformation Italy, in Sherrin Marshall, ed., Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe:private and public worlds(Bloomington and Indianapolis, ). See also Lucia Ferrante, Honorregained: women in the Casa del Soccorso di San Paolo in sixteenth-century Bologna, in EdwardMuir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Sex and gender in historical perspective (Baltimore,), pp..

P. Renee Baernstein, In widows habit: women between convent and family in sixteenth-century Milan,Sixteenth Century Journal, (), pp. ; idem, Family and faction in aMilanese convent, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Renaissance Papers (forthcoming). I amvery grateful to the author for sending me a copy of her forthcoming article.

Zarri, Gender, religious institutions, pp. ; idem, Ursula and Catherine: themarriage of the virgins in the sixteenth century, in Matter and Coakley, eds., Creative women, pp..


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nuns. According to Lowe there were striking parallels between the ceremonies of

marriage and of consecration. Both these ceremonies involved a change in the womans

status and identity which was symbolized, first of all, by the change of name. They also

implied similar liturgies and rites. Finally, they both contemplated the display of the

family coat of arms as tangible signs of the nuns family power and prestige.

These points mark the intersection between the studies on marriage and those on the

convent. It is clear that behind the normative formula ofaut mas aut murus either a man

or the convent in practice a more complex pattern was hidden. This complexity

should encourage historians to deepen their exploration of the links between marriage

and the cloister, and of the blurred boundaries between them. By devoting more

attention to this issue it will be possible to gain a broader understanding of the

functioning of these two institutions, and of womens position within early modern

society.

Kate Lowe, Secular brides and convent brides: wedding ceremonies in Italy during theRenaissance and Counter-Reformation, in Dean and Lowe, eds., Marriage in Italy, pp..

One fascinating issue which historians have recently addressed is the possibility for women ofa third way, or female celibacy without monastic vows; see Zarri, The marriage of virgins, pp. ; Cecilia Nubola, Liberta, cultura, potere per le donne: il Traite de la morale et de lapolitique di Gabrielle Suchon, in Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, pp. . Seealso Anne Conrad,Il concilio di Trento e la (mancata) modernizzazione dei ruoli femminili ecclesiastici, in PaoloProdi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds., Il concilio di Trento e il moderno (Bologna, ), pp. andUlrike Strasser, Aut maritus aut inurus, pp. .

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