Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (review)

Convents were integral parts of Early Modern cities, as copious recent scholarship by Elizabeth Lehfeldt on Spain, Jutta Sperling and Gary Radke on Venice, and Ulrike Strasser on Bavaria, to name only a few authors, has shown. In spite of the tradition of female claustration, which urged partial if not total seclusion from the world, nuns exercised considerable and significant agency as active land owners and managers, litigators, patrons of the arts and architecture, and gendered markers of the relationship between church and state. Sharon Strocchia’s excellent book sheds new light on these themes and adds to them merchant capitalism, demonstrating clearly and eloquently the significant and heretofore understudied role these women played in the textile economy of fifteenth-century Florence. Far from being the women of dangerous leisure (or, worse, loose morals) imagined by some reformers and commentators, these nuns worked as weavers, embroiderers, manufacturers of gold thread, teachers, and book producers to enhance their cultural and living circumstances and, like many documented and undocumented women in history, to survive.

Through scrupulous archival research, Strocchia situates her nuns in the context of late medieval spiritual, political, social, and urban developments. She demonstrates that the significance of Florentine nuns lies first and foremost in their number: for reasons ranging from religious reform and spiritual movements to the marriage market and politics, the Florentine population of nuns grew so that in the early sixteenth century, one of every twenty-six persons living there was a religious woman. Strocchia tracks this exponential growth in the first chapter of her book, tracing the influence of events such as the plague, the rise of the Medici, and papal intervention. She demonstrates the degree to which nuns were integral to the neighborhoods in which they resided as well as crucial lynch pins in social networks in Chapter 2. As more elite women joined convents in the fifteenth century, they brought with them social ties and property from across the city, extending the reach and influence of the most powerful convents. Strocchia commonly uses the language of mapping and geography in these chapters: given the importance of neighborhood connections she documents, a map illustrating convent locations might have been helpful.

The most fascinating and innovative work here is the two chapters dedicated to convent economy and nun’s work. Here, Strocchia demonstrates the strategies nuns employed to support themselves, combatting severe underendowment that left three out of four religious women living at or below the poverty line. Nuns solicited gifts and annuities from both kin and the Medici and took an active role in managing the properties gifted to them. And they worked, especially at the production of gold thread. For example, businessman Tommaso Ridolfi contracted nearly exclusively with convents for metallic thread production, receiving nearly 80 percent of product from them. Rather than viewing nuns as last resort labor, Strocchia convincingly shows that they were a sought-after force because they were stable, reliable, skilled, and knowledgeable about market trends. Nuns worked not only to feed themselves but also to improve their living and work spaces and to express their piety: the nuns of S. Gaggio used their earnings to enlarge their dormitory, repair the roof, and install glass windows, with enough leftover to commission a brass and silver crucifix costing forty-five florins from Antonio Pollaiuolo. A few more illustrations of such fruits of nuns’ labors might have furthered this crucial argument. With detailed evidence such as this, Strocchia presents an enhanced and revised view of female contributions to early modern urban fabric and especially to market economy.

Significant ownership of land and involvement in manufacture meant nuns necessarily interacted with men—merchants, artisans, renters, neighbors, and kin—as well as laywomen increasingly seeking shelter behind cloistered walls. In her concluding chapter, Strocchia demonstrates the fluidity of late medieval Florentine enclosure. Recognizing the delicacy of this situation, the Florentine state instituted a magistracy—the “Night Officers”—which both granted...