Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth Century Neapolitan Convents (review)

After Paris, seventeenth-century Naples was the most populous city in Europe, a city of convents concealed by towering façades and fortress-like portals, behind which rose small municipalities. Although Naples did not have the highest conventual population in Italy — in 1623, nuns composed only about 1 percent of the populace, as compared to 5.5 percent in Florence — the culture of female enclosure was quite distinctive and distinctly aristocratic, offering women freedoms from the strictures of secular society at the same time as it promised unique control over the urban fabric in what the author encapsulates, after Michel Foucault, as "an optics of power" (18).

Hills's governing thesis is that the architecture of the convents of Naples modeled the body of the virgin nun, with all the complexities and dissonances that such a metaphor might imply. Rather than simply espousing feminine identity and aspiration, the convent was a repository and a conduit of civic action, a porous site of class tension, political maneuvering, and ecclesiastical gamesmanship. Female communities expanded in size and wealth, especially before the anti-Spanish revolt and the plague of 1656. They benefited from a kind of competitive piety initiated by the viceroys and from a strategy of survival on the part of the city's aristocracy who faced economic disadvantage with the rise of new families and their patronage by the crown. Within the peculiarly Neapolitan constellation of court, aristocracy, and Seggi (the oligarchic civic administration), the nun and her establishment were privileged and autonomous bodies, on the one hand, and vulnerable and divided entities, on the other. Hills makes a cogent and persuasive case, drawing on recent scholarship on women's religious experience (although she wonders if Daniel Bornstein's notion of women as "consumers of the sacred, even as possessing 'sacred charisma'" [10], goes far enough), as well as on a theoretical bird's-eye view drawn from Foucault.

In thematically intersecting chapters, the author explains how convents flourished, how a discourse of virginity upheld not only the traditional economy of monastic virtue but also aristocratic honor, how noble families preserved fortune and status by consigning their daughters to nunneries, but how, too, as ostentatious patrons of art and architecture, those same families guaranteed their salvation. Conventual families battled for recognition on the street and in the neighborhood, so that the "vertical city" became an identifying motif among rivalrous religious communities until the 1770s, at least. Finally, and perhaps most fascinating of all, the architecture of the convents reveals the ways in which the physical means of separation, such as parlatories and nuns' choirs, effected not only an ambiguous isolation between nun and the world, but also kept the space of the church pure. The Council of Trent did not change the theater of the church interior as an erotic space in which "love's sight lines, if not love, are made visible" (143).

After Trent, however, with a greater emphasis on the Eucharist, women became segregated observers of the mass, high in the clerestory, peeking through grilled openings; although unfree, they were closer to God and the priest. In an inversion of Foucault's panopticon, the author suggests that the gaze potentially debases: "What was at issue was protecting the virginal nun from the impure and potentially defiling gaze . . . both from her own (inappropriate) looking and especially from the looking of others" (145). Hills's discussion of sight, its evocation of presence and absence, particularly in relation to the nuns' choir, is illuminating.

Some readers may find the author's theoretically charged articulation of her subjects — female spirituality, architectural morphology, patronage, and liturgy — less than welcoming, although this would be a pity. Naples remains relatively understudied in the early modern era. Hills makes available the fruits of her work in local archives as well as the yields of regional histories (included...