This excellent volume explores social, artistic, literary, and patronage networks that nuns deployed to circumvent the Church's rules of enclosure and preserve their individual and collective identities in convents between 1400 and 1750. Nine essays by Jennifer A. Cavalli, Meghan Callahan, Catherine Turrill Lupi, Laura Llewellyn, Ludovica Galeazzo, Kimberlyn Montford, Sheila Barker, and Julie James, as well as the two editors, Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle, present evidence from convents in Northern Italy, Florence, Venice, Rome, and Siena. Particularly interesting is the editors’ introductory discussion of the field of network analysis, with its identification of so-called nodes, edges, nexus, and hub. Although they admit that their authors do not explicitly apply this methodology, the essays offer raw materials that could be used to differentiate types and functions of convent networks in future studies. The volume's major impact and greatest value to readers is its documentation of the sheer power and influence wielded by religious women in secular public and urban spheres.
Networks of influence formed by individual female spiritual advisors could be local or stretch across Italy. Cavalli describes spiritual advisors as valued intercessors who cared for the salvation of souls and offered pious practical advice about illness, domestic, and political adversity. The Dominican tertiary Suor Stefana Quinzani maintained active correspondence with Isabella d'Este in Mantua, Lucrezia and Elisabetta Gonzaga, and Lucrezia Borgia in Ferrara. Callahan discusses letters from the Dominican mystic Suor Domenica da Paradiso, who had a similar widespread influence, ranging from Medici relations in Florence and Camerino to nuns at Sant’ Antonio in Polesine, Ferrara. She proposes that this stemmed from admiration for Savonarola and that Suor Domenica was the nexus of a spiritual community that helped realize Savonarola's vision of a New Jerusalem at La Crocetta.
Patronage networks could depend on shared religious expressions of devotion in a particular urban quarter. Based on new archival evidence, Llewellyn argues that Botticini's Saint Monica Altarpiece was installed in public view at Santo Spirito, Florence in the 1480s, the women depicted are Mantellate or Augustinian tertiaries, not the nuns of Santa Monaca, and the altarpiece served public devotion of several communities in this Augustinian quarter. In contrast to this public cult, Turrill Lupi finds new evidence of Savonarola-inspired artistic patronage by former piagnoni or their nun relatives at S. Caterina a Cafaggio, as well as at Dominican convents in Prato and Pistoia in the 1500s. Suor Plautilla Nelli portrayed Savonarola as a martyr despite official Church prohibition against such images. Nun patrons surreptitiously advanced their agenda of Savonarolian devotion inside convent walls.
Geography affected network-building since Tridentine reform was enforced differently across Italy. In Venice in 1519 patriarch Antonio Contarini forbade the acceptance of Conventual novices and introduced Observant sisters in eight houses. As Weddle describes, at Le Vergini walls were constructed to separate the two groups. The patrician nuns fought hard, tearing down walls, engaging kinsmen to argue their case, and visiting the Collegio themselves. Eventually, Observant spirit modified artworks and pervaded building projects. Older networks adapted, and the ancient status of Le Vergini was reaffirmed. The lesser-known S. Caterina dei Sacchi at Venice provides an extraordinary example of elite nuns’ entrepreneurship and civic presence. As Galeozzo explains, they invested heavily in real estate on the northern edge of the city. Renting warehouses, workshops, low-income housing, and illegally reclaiming land from the lagoon, they were deeply involved with the people and the commercial development of their own urban neighborhood.
Location also affected convent success in combating Tridentine musical reform. Montford contrasts strict enforcement in Bologna and Milan with Siena, where convent music was part of the city's public cultural identity. Nuns everywhere circumvented restrictions to polyphony, solo performances, and male music teachers by applying for special licenses, rearranging spaces or instruments, and organizing support from family networks and church officials such as cardinal protectors or local confessors.
These studies verify that family alliances were the single most effective tool used by nuns to preserve their independence and individual identities. In seventeenth-century Rome, Dunn finds family dynasties or multigenerational lineages in the Dominican convent of Ss. Domenico and Sisto. Colonna nuns collaborated as artistic patrons and founders of new Observant convents on their brother's family property in Marino and Avezzano. In early eighteenth-century Florence, nun artist Suor Teresa Berenice Vitelli mined her family's collections for imagery in her paintings, as well as their Medici contacts to create networks of gift-giving within the family and at the Medici court. Finally, though Tridentine reforms aimed to curtail family influence inside convents, it failed to stifle these powerful networks.
