By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe (review)

The communis opinio in literature and history says that since the Middle Ages many young women have been forced into a convent for various family reasons (most often with the intention of preserving the family’s patrimony), where they would be compelled to live as if in prison. In Italian, the phenomenon is called “monacazione forzata” (henceforth MF), or “forced monasticization” in English. Anne Jacobson Schutte challenges this opinio with good arguments based on the petitions in the archives of the Sacred Congregation of the Council (SCC), which are in the Vatican Archives. By studying 978 petitions to the pope (almost half of them recorded without a decision) from all over the Roman Catholic world and spanning the period 1668 to 1793, she is able to show that MF “was not . . . predominantly a female problem,” because 82.5 percent of the petitioners were men and that “sexual urges . . . did not constitute the main reason” for leaving a convent (p. 4). She insists that hers is not “a numbers-crunching book” (p. 13), although she presents much statistical material in chapter 9. Rather, she prefers the anthropological approach—what she calls “thinking with cases” (p. 13)—which she explains rather lengthily in chapter 1. The procedure before the SCC became rather expensive for the petitioners and could easily amount to more than 100 ducats, as Schutte demonstrates from a list of charges from 1694/95 (p. 103). Although the author denies it, undoing MF through the SCC became without doubt an upper-class phenomenon.

Hundreds of unwilling religious sent petitions to the pope long before the author’s starting year of 1668. Schutte did not look into the registers of the Papal Penitentiary now accessible to researchers. Had she done so, she would have noticed that many of the types of MF cases she presents from the SCC documents were decided by this papal tribunal, normally without a lengthy procedure. Leaving a monastery for the secular priesthood, for example, became a quite frequent step for many male religious (especially those with a higher education) from the end of the fourteenth century, as petitions printed in the Repertorium Poenitentiariae Germanicum (1995–) show. That premature profession was the simplest way for parents and other relatives to rid themselves of a child is widely confirmed by the Penitentiary supplications as well. “Vis et metus, qui potest cadere in constantem virum” (“Force and fear, which can affect a steadfast man”)—the juridical maxim taken from the Digest (4.2.6) and repeated in the Decretals (X 1.40.4 and 4.1.15)—was the standard argument (fiat in forma “Qui caderet in constantem” [let it be done in the form “Qui caderet in constantem”]) for almost all religious who wanted to leave a monastery or a convent, men and women alike. The “steady man” plea was common (as John Noonan showed), but the formulary of the Penitentiary also uses “constantem mulierem” (“steadfast woman”) or “constantem puellam” (“steadfast girl”; RPG IX, 1056 and 1920. “Vis et metus” also could be the vehicle to escape a forced marriage; see, for example, RPG VIII, 3272 and 3273). Procedure in the Penitentiary tended to be much cheaper than before the SCC; around 1500 the standard taxa amounted to 7 ducats. Schutte has succeeded in showing that the old opinion about the purposes of MF is not consistent, but one hopes that she might write another book on MF that extends from the later Middle Ages and uses the supplications to the Papal Penitentiary.