The Chronicle of Le Murate (review)

The chronicle of the Florentine convent of Le Murate, composed in 1598 by the Benedictine nun Giustina Niccolini and still unpublished in Italian, has now been translated by Saundra Weddle into English as part of the outstanding series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe. It will allow students and scholars who do not read Italian access to a text of great importance, not only to the history of female convents but also to the history of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Church. Using sources ranging from older chronicles to the convent archive and the memories of other nuns, Niccolini retells the history of her institution over a period of 200 years from its foundation around 1400. The single most striking facet of the chronicle is Niccolini’s urge to communicate innumerable, disparate pieces of information about Renaissance convent life, thereby leaving a treasure trove for historians. From the point of view of possible subject matter, chronicles in this respect resemble private letters. No topic is considered too mundane—or, indeed, too secular—to be included, so written ex-votos and references to vomiting blood are mentioned alongside donations by secular women patrons and visits by ecclesiastics enforcing the Tridentine decrees. The importance of visual and material culture in convent life is readily apparent from the nun’s narrative. The simple style of the chronicle, unfailingly enfolded within a religious outer coating, betrays its origin in the spoken language, as it was composed as a dictation. Given the emphasis on obedience and self-effacement of nuns, being a nun chronicler (especially during the Counter-Reformation years) was a risky choice of occupation, which is why Niccolini feels obliged to describe herself as “an ignorant and coarse woman” (p. 45) when the opposite seems more likely; the presumption of authorship has to be buried under the rhetoric of religious conformity. Of course, religion permeated many aspects of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century convent life, so Niccolini’s narrative is populated by devils, saints, and angels as well as popes, bishops, and confessors; nuns live surrounded by the religious paraphernalia of relics, altars, altarpieces, bells, and prayer books; and religious rituals and customs are a focal point. This translation will consequently be useful for anyone with interests in any of these areas, allowing a sixteenth-century nun who also was an author the possibility of circulating her precious information to ever-expanding audiences.

The introduction by the editor, which takes the form of a literature review, is a missed opportunity for something more challenging and original, as there is a great deal of excellent recent work, especially in Italian, on nuns’ chronicles in general and on individual chronicles. In addition, as Weddle herself allows (p. 2), “scores” of scholars have already analyzed and commented on various facets of Le Murate and its chronicle. Now would therefore have been an ideal time to use this material as a springboard to present a critique of Le Murate’s chronicle as an example of its genre, instead of repeating already well-established and picked-over information. One omission in relation to the textual apparatus is also bizarre. The manuscript from which the transcription has been taken and the translation has been made—Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale II II 509—is inexplicably not divulged until a footnote on page 52, even though the “original manuscript” (without further identification) is mentioned on page 38.