Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence

2. Nuns, Neighbors, and Kinsmen

chapter two v Nuns, Neighbors, and Kinsmen Nuns and nunneries were bound up with the physical, social, and spiritual geography of Renaissance Florence in complex ways. Richard Trexler was among the first to argue that the dense concentration of nuns living around vulnerable spatial zones like walls and gateways bolstered divine protection of the city.∞ A few convents—S. Pier Maggiore, S. Ambrogio, S. Anna—became destinations for public ritual enactments and thereby helped map a sacred topography of power.≤ More generally, convents and their churches functioned as sacral nodes housing holy images and miracle-working objects; they also served as repositories for the beloved dead and provided lively meeting places for local confraternities and self-styled festive ‘‘kingdoms’’ that organized a diverse citizenry.≥ As the number of consecrated virgins multiplied in the late Quattrocento, nuns’ social and symbolic influence became more capillary and pervasive. By 1500, convents were the most prevalent type of institutional building inside city walls, enclosing large expanses of urban space. From a social standpoint, however, Florentine convents made their deepest impact on lived experience at the local neighborhood level. Across urban Italy, neighborhoods were the primary place of communion with others, forming ‘‘one 40 Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence of the natural and necessary contexts of civilized life.’’∂ Neighborhood dynamics profoundly conditioned the tenor of female religious houses; conversely, local convents linked neighbors physically and psychologically by entangling them in skeins of relationships that stretched beyond kinship, friendship, and clientage. Florentine public spaces were hypermasculine, making the all-female worlds of convents crucial hubs of sociability for laywomen. The steady stream of female friends and family who came to exchange news and gossip, pay boarding fees, or seek spiritual solace transformed convents into the most visible node of female homosociality in the city.∑ Beyond exerting a profound impact on the cityscape, Florentine convents played an unrecognized role in remaking Renaissance social geography. Scholars have shown that neighborhood ceased to function as the locus of political activity after 1450, largely owing to the creation of a Medici party that superimposed citywide clientage networks and Medicean allegiances on an older set of local loyalties. The political character of heterogeneous urban neighborhoods had been further diluted by 1600, by which point civic elites had pushed artisans and laborers out of the city center toward the urban periphery.∏ Changing patterns of monastic recruitment and convent property holdings played a significant role in these redefinitions of the city and its locales. These changes form subject of this chapter. I begin by showing how new recruitment patterns taking hold after 1450 transformed convents from neighborhood enclaves into citywide institutions dominated by the Florentine elite. The second section shifts the vantage point from personnel to property, documenting how alterations in the geographical distribution of convent property reinforced patrician ascendance. The third section investigates how two of the city’s oldest convents, S. Pier Maggiore and S. Ambrogio, preserved neighborhood preeminence by constraining competition from local convent rivals. Viewing convents through these different lenses makes it clear that they achieved civic prominence not merely by virtue of expanding numbers but also by redefining relations between nuns and their neighbors. From Neighborhood Enclaves to Citywide Institutions Despite its centrality to Italian urban life, neighborhood was a fluid, ambiguous concept. Local definitions of neighborhood turned partly on the sixteen wards (gonfaloni) into which the city was divided in 1343, which formed the backbone of civic life as the basis for electoral scrutinies and tax levies. The city’s fifty-two parishes formed yet another overlay on the urban grid, distinct from civic admin- Nuns, Neighbors, and Kinsmen 41 istration. Topographical neighborhoods—spatially amorphous entities mapped out by a tangle of streets, intersections, and landmarks—commanded strong feelings of association that supplemented or even transcended the identities imposed by ecclesiastical and civic organization. As Nicholas Eckstein has observed, this ambiguity about what constituted a neighborhood gives the concept a certain analytical weakness but also aligns it more closely with lived experience.π Trecento convents were overwhelmingly local institutions with limited geographic reach, both in terms of recruitment and social influence. The vast majority of nuns living in any house hailed from the immediate district in which the convent was situated. These local recruitment areas can be defined in various ways that reflect the amorphous nature of Florentine neighborhoods at the time. Most nuns came from the...