Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (review)

Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice. By Jutta Gisela Sperling (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000) 231 pp. $70.00 cloth $24.00 paper

At the heart of this complex and many-layered book is a simple observation. Patrician men in Venice married noble women, rich commoners, or mistresses; or they need not have married at all. Patrician women, on the other hand, could not marry down without staining the purity of noble blood, and non-marriage was equally dishonorable and unthinkable. Hence, there was a significant surplus of women, and, with dowry costs rising and economic opportunities shrinking, families felt obliged to place that surplus in convents. Some young women may indeed have had religious inclinations but, Sperling notes sardonically, "I insist on calling monachization rates of over 50 percent the result of coercion" (25).

Contrary to the perceptions of contemporaries and subsequent historians, Sperling sees dowry inflation not as the cause of "forced vocations" and "involuntary nuns" but as the consequence of the marital system. Following Marcel Mauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, she views marriage exchanges as a potlatch--and since in potlatch, the gift given must always be larger than the previous gift received, dowries had to grow with each generation. Potlatch also carries overtones of conspicuous consumption, ever-more lavish celebrations and gift exchanges, and the wastage or destruction of gifts. The sacrificial offering of a young woman to Christ constituted "the ritual waste of patrician women's reproductive capacities" (59), which ultimately proved self-destructive to the patriciate.

The rest of the book follows from that premise. Sperling is not primarily interested in looking at nuns as the "victims of a patriarchal family economy" (50), though she presents plenty of evidence for systemic mistreatment. Rather, she looks at the public implications of mass patrician monachation. In a chapter on political thought, she examines the familiar theme of Venice as Virgin, with the corollary that the city's immaculate status was closely tied to notions of nobility and virtue; the sanctity of convents was of utmost importance in maintaining the body politic. Efforts to enforce strict encloisterment and police women's bodies intensified when convents became the "safe-deposits of patrician blood and bodies" (120). The state's attempts to create and control sacred enclosures, however, were contested by the nuns themselves, who were adept at evasion and at claiming ancient privileges of self-governance. They also resisted, with some success, the state's campaigns to establish surveillance of their financial affairs. Moreover, if convents were critical to the body politic, they were equally critical to Venetian self-identity. Thus, they were arenas in the endemic battles between Venice and Rome about ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Sperling argues for these strong, and often novel, theses with force and erudition. Her archival research and her theoretical bases are impressive. It will be difficult to look at convents in the same light again. Nonetheless, the empirical basis for the core thesis of mass patrician monachation does give cause for concern. It is said initially that "the vast majority of noblewomen . . . entered convents" (7), a figure later reduced to somewhat over half (25-28). Table A2, which calculates the frequency of monachation in the 1590 to 1670 era, however, is problematic; it may overcount. Since most patricians shared their surnames with commoners, it is difficult to know if a given "Suor Raphaela Balbi" descended from the noble or the non-noble Balbi. That aside, the table shows 1,434 patrician nuns and 2,440 patrician brides, a monachation rate closer to one-third than to a majority. Moreover, a monachation rate of about eighteen patricians annually, in a city that counted over sixty convents (Table A3), does not seem exorbitant.

James S. Grubb
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

...