Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (review)

After the daunting demographic and economic challenges from the mid-fourteenth century to about 1430, Florence’s nunneries saw tremendous growth; the number of nuns more than doubled from 1478 to 1515. By 1552, about one-eighth of the female population lived in convents, and by the seventeenth century, “almost half of Florentine patrician daughters became nuns” (2). Strocchia documents how this change happened and why it was important. Though focused on Florence, this carefully researched book presents “the constitutive role that nuns and nunneries played in the grand narrative of early modern Europe” (ix), making frequent references to literature about other parts of Europe and using Florence’s convents as a test case against the truisms applied to Europe in general. For instance, the book convincingly dismisses the idea that pre- Reformation convents were “morally lax” (8).

Strocchia’s evidence derives from original sources in Florence’s state archive, as well as in its archiepiscopal archive, the Vatican secret archive, and others. Her archival approach in this work, however, is closely informed by women’s studies; the book’s overarching theme is, in her words, “female agency” (xv). By viewing a historical issue through the lens of women’s experiences, needs, and goals, Strocchia portrays convents from an inside perspective that rightly places the women who populated and ran them in the central role. She emphasizes convents’ active recruitment of potential nuns, the volatile dowry market for girls destined for convents, the impact of early death on leadership, and the problems of deferred maintenance. She depicts convents as sites of socialization and opportunity for women, even though many women became nuns against their desire. Parts of the book—for instance, the discussion of nuns as the makers of clerical robes or lace— employ the methodology of art history.

The best part of the book treats convent economy and finances, positing a relationship between work and enclosure. In the silk industry, nuns constituted “the single largest . . . labor force” (121). Florentine authorities made sure that those who needed nuns’ labor, as well as those whose products were needed by nuns (for example, scissors makers), received entry permits to convents, which “flagrantly violated church decrees and threatened the very ideology of female enclosure” (123). By 1525, one convent realized about two-thirds of its income from work and only one-third from alms. Nuns often had usufruct of various investments, permitting them to spend extra resources on anything from decoration to charity. Their acquisition and management of property and investments allowed them to use their “business skills and social contacts” and to develop “a high degree of understanding about how local credit markets worked” (87, 99). Nuns provided important services for other women, like letter writing. The copying of books made them money and benefited society; “nuns played a critical role in the diffusion and expansion of literacy” (146). The fact that nuns were among the few females to own and manage shops and houses—even significant parts of entire neighborhoods—and that laywomen could visit convents also helped to define the use of Florentine space; as Strocchia put it, convents “remapped . . . social geography” (58).

The book argues that nuns may have “promoted a spirit of harmony” (44), but the later discussion of “fiscal mismanagement or convent disorder” suggests that this point is debatable (49). The discussion of voluntary vs. involuntary poverty needs to be placed in the context of the rules of a given order and further distinguished between collective or individual cases. However, this well-conceived work breaks new ground for the role of convents in society and politics in early modern Europe.