Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy (review)

From Boccaccio and Chaucer to Nunsense, the antics of misbehaving women religious have been a popular topic in literature and the arts. Although there is nothing in Craig Monson’s new book quite as outlandish or hilariously funny as an abbess wearing her lover’s trousers on her head instead of a coif, the tales he tells have the attraction of a firm basis in the historical record. Monson, a musicologist at Washington University in St. Louis, is well known for his work on music in the nunneries of early-modern Bologna (Disembodied Voices [Berkeley, 1995]). In the course of his research in Italian archives, particularly the Vatican, Monson came across the fascinating records of a number of investigations of wayward nuns, most of them dealing not at all, or only tangentially, with music. In this new volume, he retells five of them from the late-sixteenth through the early-eighteenth century—three set at Bolognese convents, one in Pavia, and one in Reggio Calabria.

The nuns in these cases cast spells, set fire to their convent, fled with friends, argued about artistic patronage, or stole away at night to attend the opera. Although the events themselves are engrossing, Monson uses them to reveal much about the lives of these women, their relationships with each other, and their interactions with the ecclesiastical authorities whose rules and regulations they were obligated to follow. Many of these women, of course, had not become nuns by true vocation, but because their families forced them to enter the convent to avoid paying massive dowries for multiple daughters. In many cases, they found themselves locked behind walls with other unhappy women, aware of the outside world, but barred from participation in it. Some could channel their frustrations in positive directions, devoting themselves to managing the convent, developing musical skills, or sponsoring and directing the renovation of their church. Others such as the ones in Monson’s stories went in the other direction and ran straight into conflict with abbesses, bishops, and inquisitors.

As Monson explains in his wide-ranging and invaluable prologue, he has chosen to bring these cases to life by diverging a bit from standard historical procedure. Although everything here is based directly on the archival documents, sometimes quoted at length in translation and all carefully cited in extensive endnotes, the author has chosen to turn the written records of interrogations into dialogue and to show us the environment through the eyes and minds of the protagonists. For example, instead of drily describing the convent buildings as done in more traditional scholarly books, Monson shows them to us as they would have been seen by the inquisitor as he arrived to begin his investigation. The resulting narratives are fun to read, but nonetheless chock full of both information and insights. Monson also has tried to preserve for us the excitement of uncovering what others are endeavoring to keep secret, as we follow the sometimes frustrating and almost always contorted investigations of both the seventeenth-century inquisitor and the twenty-first-century historian.