Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art and Arson in the Convents of Italy (review)

The 1990s saw a groundswell of musicological interest in the artistic and cultural pursuits of women in religious life. A particularly happy hunting ground was the world of Italian convents where, contrary to received opinion, it was not unusual to find lively up-to-date musical fare, some of it decidedly secular in tone, being cultivated by accomplished nun-musicians. This is perhaps not surprising given the high proportion of the female population that lived behind convent walls: in Bologna c. 1630, for example, 14 per cent of the population, while it was 75 per cent of genteel women in mid-seventeenth-century Milan. For women consigned to life in a convent by their families, music making (and singing in particular) enlivened their otherwise mundane lives. It also brought pleasure to members of the public who attended services in convent churches where the sound of nuns singing the liturgy, out of sight, could be enjoyed by all. Entertaining the public, unintentional though it might have been, also had the potential to bring individual women artists and their convents into conflict with the Church hierarchy.

Matters to do with discipline in monastic houses were handled by the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars (est. 1572), a slow-grinding bureaucracy for which no detail was too trivial. Its reports, deliberations, and adjudications are a treasure-trove for the scholar with a keen eye and the stamina to trawl through the hundreds of thousands of documents kept in the Congregation’s Secret Vatican Archives. Craig Monson is just the man, a self-confessed topo d’archivio (archive mouse). His well-received earlier monographs – Crannied Walls: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (1992) and Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (1995) – delved into these documents and brought to light stories of women artists, their accomplishments, rivalries, and travails with the Church hierarchy that coloured their cloistered lives.

Nuns Behaving Badly gathers together five of the more unlikely tales Monson came across during the course of his research for these books. He has many more madcap stories in store that entertained his colleagues, and he provides tasters of another seven towards the end of his book. What sets these five, unrelated tales apart is the sheer wealth of descriptive detail, dialogue, and first-hand accounts that Monson has been able to uncover, sufficient to sustain a narrative thread that stretches over years and sometimes over decades. ‘Each tale relates a singular response to the cloistered life and all touch off major crises’, as Monson puts it. ‘They disrupt the convent status quo’, he continues, ‘provoking aftershocks that might continue for generations. They reveal the incapacities of hierarchically imposed systems of external oversight and control. Given these realities, they sometimes even destroy their communities’.

In Monson’s telling, the stories also make for a rollicking good read. At times droll (‘taken to visit the convent at age three, a careless nun had dropped her out of an upstairs window’), at times pathetic (‘She had experienced carnival first hand in the streets, not the parlatorio. And of course she had been to the opera four times. The very same things that had made her a criminal may now have contributed to her role as something of a celebrity’), the tone is light and there is a journalistic delight in revealing the quirky turn of events. Indeed, a couple of the tales would not be out of place in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Imagine, if you will, a Carmelite couple eloping hand-in-hand from their ramshackle convent, mother prioress in a swoon, and the uproar that ensues when the bedraggled pair barge in, unwelcome, on an unsuspecting Benedictine nunnery.

Although Rome imposed a strict prohibition on forcing girls into convents against their will and obliged local bishops to...