Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (review)

Thanks to Elissa Weaver, we have come to learn a great deal about the remarkable theatrical productions written by and for Italian nuns, as her dozen groundbreaking articles and her fine edition of Beatrice del Sera’s Amor di virtù have put Italian convent culture on the map. She has thus opened up a new field of study that takes us far beyond the genre perhaps most associated with convents, the necrology. And while individual figures such as the three Saint Catherines —of Siena, Bologna, and Genova — have been the focus of recent (though hardly sufficient) attention, Weaver’s attentiveness to an entire tradition has enabled scholars to move away from individual case studies and examine, as Kate Lowe has recently done, a cluster of phenomena relevant to that ubiquitous institution in medieval and early modern Europe in which women did have spaces of their own.

All the more welcome, then, Weaver’s Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy, which first came out from Cambridge University Press in 2002, and has just been issued in paperback. While it draws on Weaver’s previous articles, it significantly reshapes them, and the book’s historical trajectory moves far beyond the frame of a single essay. Weaver opens discussing a 1781 production of a Goldoni play performed in the Convent of San Clemente in Prato that scandalized the local bishop, and then takes us back to the origins and development of theatrical practice in primarily Tuscan convents. The Bishop of Prato wasn’t the only one to ever express disapproval, but his reaction was by no means typical. Nor was the nuns’ choice to stage Goldoni. Weaver’s special interest is the large literature of plays written and “cultivated by convent women for themselves,” a tradition that on the one hand constitutes a “feminine sub-culture” and on the other has strong ties to the secular world.

Weaver’s first chapter appropriately considers Tuscan convent culture in general, focusing on the social and economic functions of Tuscan houses between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries and the kind of women either they attracted or for whom convent life was the only option. The high rate of literacy in Tuscan convents is attested by a wide range of written material, from letters to ricordi, while their wealth is apparent from their many prominent artistic commissions. That theater flourished in such an environment — the focus of chapter 2 — can be attributed, in part, to the nuns’ social standing and education. Or at least to the nuns’ interest in education: for in addition to providing spasso or relaxation, theater also was believed to teach. In this somewhat rambling but informative chapter —we learn about music, dance, the typical seasons for production (Christmas and Carnival), and the role of the novice mistress as director — Weaver also alights on the question of whom such “spiritual fun” was for; Trent notwithstanding, lay-women (and sometimes men) attended many convent plays. The next three chapters provide a nuanced view of Tuscan convent theater through the eighteenth century. Beginning with Antonia Tanini Pulci and the anonymous Santa Caterina di Colonia, Weaver moves from Quattrocento sacre rappresentazioni to the impact of humanism and the revival of classical comedy on the new genre of the “spiritual comedy” in the sixteenth century. She then turns to productions of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, which ranged from lively farces to plays with Dantesque devils to pastoral romance. A number of these plays were printed, earning an author such as Maria Clemente Ruoti a measure of renown when she became the only female member of Florence’s Accademia degli Apatisti. A final chapter takes us beyond Tuscany, as Weaver explores a Santa Cecilia from Umbria and a Santa Barbara from Reggio Emilia. She concludes that these plays do not differ very much from the Tuscan...