Silvia Evangelisti

WIVES, WIDOWS, AND BRIDES OF CHRIST: MARRIAGE AND THE CONVENT IN THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF EARLY MODERN ITALY

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.

We do not have it, and we do not want it: Women, power, and convent reform in Florence

This article discusses the introduction of Tridentine reform in Tuscan convents, in particular the implementation of enclosure and the subsequent reactions of nuns. In Tuscany, Tridentine laws coexisted with disciplinary measures sponsored by the church and the state concerning the government of convents. Enclosure laws were enforced through negotiations within local communities involving both ecclesiastical and state authorities and the nuns, who expressed their discontent and sometimes refused to live under lock and key. Evidence from various sources, including convent writings by nuns, suggests that they feared physical segregation because it would limit their economic welfare, their religious and social visibility, and above all their capacity to exert authority and power over their own community. When Tridentine reform made headway within Tuscany, enclosure was still a much-debated notion, and was not simply the universal model for female religious life supported by the Catholic church.

Learning from Home:Discourses on Education and Domestic Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy

This article focuses on the idea of domestic education in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Drawing on the cross-reading of a selection of two different sets of printed sources – pedagogical tracts, and art tracts which largely intersected with Catholic aims of religious reform and the creation of a confessional state and society – the article discusses the educational value that was attributed to the home environment, in its private, public and political dimensions, and the relevance which was attached to domestic visual and material culture and to the senses as learning tools to be used by children of different gender, age and class. Debates about education uncover less-known aspects of domesticity while suggesting the possibility to explore the continuities that might have existed between pre-modern notions of education and modern ones.

MONASTIC POVERTY AND MATERIAL CULTURE IN EARLY MODERN ITALIAN CONVENTS

This article discusses the meaning of material culture in early modern Italian convents. Although nuns were required to give up private property rights and embrace religious poverty, many of them brought into the convent a vast range of material objects and goods for their personal use. These goods could also be given away, exchanged, or lent to others within the monastic community and even outside it. By exploring the circulation of objects, money, and goods, we get an interesting picture of how female monastic institutions worked internally and interacted with the city. We also gain a better understanding of the role of objects in articulating religious discipline and regulating the networks of interpersonal relations within cloistered communities.

To Find God in Work? Female Social Stratification in Early Modern Italian Convents

Early modern female monastic communities hosted two different groups – technically ‘classes’ – of nuns: choir nuns and servant nuns. Choir nuns usually came from an urban elite background, and occupied the most important administrative and governing positions in the community. Servant nuns, in contrast, often came from humble backgrounds, and entered the convent with the specific duty of performing all the manual and heavy domestic jobs. In return for this work contribution, these nuns could be admitted into monastic profession with a reduced dowry, or even with no dowry at all. For these nuns the religious house represented a work opportunity, and a guarantee of social and economic security. The communal monastic regime was therefore a stratified microsociety, which reproduced the most common social dynamics that governed the world outside. Inside as well as outside the convent, unmarried women shared similar conditions: privileges on the one hand, manual work and servant status on the other. This article examines the complex social and religious dynamics within convents, and in particular between the two main groups of servant and choir nuns. Drawing on a sample of prescriptive texts on convent life, my analysis develops along two dimensions. First, I examine the stratification behind convent walls in connection with the ideal of female religious life promoted by the Catholic Church, in the decades following the Council of Trent. The major reform programme launched by the Council in the middle of the sixteenth century sponsored a renewed spiritual european history quarterly 

Religious Women, Mystic Journeys and Agency in Early Modern Spain

This article examines the narratives of female mystic journeys that were sometimes included in the biographies and the autobiographies of religious women printed in Spain between the mid-sixteenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century. By showing the ability of women to convert non-Christians in Asia, North Africa and America, and to defend the Catholic faith in Europe, the texts provide the opportunity to examine idealized models of female religious engagement from an unusual angle.

Introduction: Perspectives on Women’s Religious Activities in Early Modern Europe and the Americas

Proposing activity as a useful category of analysis, this special issue considers Catholic and Protestant women in Europe and the Americas in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. We examine women in religious communities, which include both monastic communities as well as confessional communities. A close analysis of the social, economic, and cultural actions of these women religious challenges historiographical assumptions about monastic cloister and domestic space in the early modern period. In fact, we revisit monastic and domestic spaces to reveal them as stages for previously unexamined activity. This cross-denominational and transnational special issue highlights new spheres of women’s religious activity and raises new questions for the study of early modern women’s lives and their capacity to act in early modern society, economy, and culture.

Maria Arcangela Biondini (1641–1712) e il monastero delle Serve di Maria di Arco. Una fondatrice e un archivio (review)

between the Observant Franciscans, who had the right to govern the convent, and the local secular clergy, who wished to take it over.4 Watt finds this explanation problematic and accuses the author of “reducing the possession to a by-product of these disagreements” (p. 9).Watt offers a number of alternative plausible causes: the growing fear of demonism across Europe between 1450 and 1650 (p. 206), a rebellion against enforced enclosure, ambivalence concerning vows, curiosity about the outside world, and of course, the ubiquitous “sexual urges” that allegedly control nuns’ lives (pp. 80, 87–88, 207) and “lesbianism” (p. 81). But why in the spring and summer of 1636? And why in this convent rather than in others? By dismissing the political context of the event that Lavenia proposes, Watt falls back on clichés. It is a pity, because in the end, this detailed study does not add much to our current understanding of demonic possession and witchcraft accusations in early-modern Europe.

Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Notes on texts and translations Introduction 1. Renaissance culture in Italian convents, 1450-1650 2. The convent theatre tradition 3. Plays and playwrights: the earliest examples 4. Spiritual comedies in the convents 5. From manuscript to print, from the convent to the world 6. Beyond Tuscany Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.