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

Nuns Behaving Badly smacks of scandal from the outset, with a bright, colorful cover reminiscent of a tabloid or pulp fiction novel. The front and back cover art uses sixteenth-century drawings of nuns in compromising positions to further titillate potential readers. Even the blurb on the back entices the reader with its language of scandal: “Tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archives. THAT IS, UNTIL NOW.”

In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig Monson breaks away from his typical musicological research to narrate a series of unusual and scandalous case studies culled from decades of archival research. While two of these stories focus directly on issues of music in the convent, overall, the book is more broadly historical than Monson’s previous writings. Monson means this book to be light reading for the academically minded, and suggests that it might best be enjoyed before bed or on an overnight flight to Italy. Though the sources are carefully documented, Monson’s writing style is generally colloquial throughout, as if he were recounting these lascivious stories among friends.

The book relates intriguing stories ranging from 1584 to 1735 from five different convents throughout Italy, based primarily on the Vatican’s archival records, testimonies and interviews of involved parties, and individual convent histories. From disparate documents, records, and letters, Monson carefully pieces together the available information to craft coherent, if at times necessarily incomplete, stories, some of which spanned decades and left far-flung paper trails involving multiple investigations and dioceses. Monson situates his writing and research style at least partially within the concept of “microhistory” pioneered by authors such as Natalie Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre, 1983) and Carlo Ginzburg (The Cheese and the Worms, 1976/1980), though Monson is quick to point out that his narrative style draws more from the ancient art of storytelling than the “new history” (22).

In his Prologue, Monson describes how he came to write this book, drawing the reader into his personal experiences as a topo d’archivio (“an archive mouse—or rat”) (1). His descriptions of the Vatican archives and the researchers who can be found there paint a vibrant picture of the peculiarities, frustrations, and joys of archival research. The second half of the Prologue gives detailed background information on early modern nuns and the importance of convents to the Italian aristocracy as a reputable solution for the “problem” of superfluous daughters.

The five case studies each deal with nuns who were problematic in some way for church authorities. The convent of San Lorenzo in Bologna was the site of an investigation that began with a missing viola and eventually uncovered a morass of folk magic, Satanic incantations, and rituals invoking the Devil, while in Reggio Calabria, a group of nuns from San Niccolò di Strozzi set fire to their convent in order to try to escape cloistered life, a life forced upon them en masse when their family patriarch died, leaving in his will instructions to turn his house into a convent for all of the single and widowed women in his family.

At the convent of Santa Maria Nuova in Bologna, we glimpse the fascinating tensions between professed nuns of the patrician classes and the converse— the servant nuns. One nun who had paid out of pocket to ornately rebuild and decorate the main church reputedly was so offended when a servant nun contributed an embroidered cloth of her own that she threw a rather public fit, screaming and ripping the cloth to shreds. Decrees from the archbishop to restore or replace the cloth met with silence and steadfast refusal to comply, not only from the nun in question, but also her powerful and influential family.

The final two case studies deal with nuns who left their convents without permission and the scandals that followed. In chapter 5, Monson tells of a pair of nuns who, holding hands, left the...