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

In the prologue to his fascinating romp through the cloisters of five Italian convents that left an archival trail in the records of the Vatican Secret Archive, Craig Monson writes that the late medieval aphorism “A woman should have a husband or a wall” remained firmly in place for Italian women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. While Rome forbade any woman to be placed in a convent against her will, Monson suggests that many nuns, especially those who came from aristocratic families, were there because they had no other choice; a convent dowry made less of a dent on a family’s overall wealth than that needed to marry a noblewoman off. Throughout the book, Monson’s sympathies lie with these fated nuns—he calls them “heroines” (197)—whose “bad” behavior often led them into unwinnable tussles with the men who controlled their lives.

Details regarding the individual lives of most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian nuns are generally relegated to a few lines in the convents’ own necrologies. But the records of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, which oversaw all aspects of monastic life, offer additional glimpses, both into the mundane (a fat Neapolitan nun requests that male servants be allowed to carry her to mass as the females cannot handle her girth) and into the irregular (a vicar seeks counsel regarding a Piedmont nun who awoke one morning to find male sex organs hovering mysteriously over her female ones). Monson, a musicologist, describes how decades ago he first searched the Sacred Congregation’s archives for his study of convent music and its contested place in convent life, particularly in the sixteenth century. Amid his findings, he came across other stories—the “Holy shit!” kind uttered in the silent, humorless space of the Vatican Archive reading room (7). Five of these stories are the basis of Nuns Behaving Badly, which contains a dizzying array of characters and details culled mainly from correspondences and eyewitness testimonies relegated to the Sacred Congregation’s dusty archives. That much of the paper trail in the archive, particularly the testimonies gathered during investigations into wrongdoings, was recorded by male clerics is critical for Monson, who argues that “the constrained circumstances in which the nuns speak, whether in formal written petitions to their male superiors or in testimony before interrogators of the church hierarchy, affect what they say and how they say it” (21). Still, Monson’s assiduous research goes a long way in breaking the silence of these long-forgotten nuns—the singers, the conjurers, the fire-starters, the needleworkers, the escape artists, and the opera lovers—who return to life so admirably in his text.

In the tales found in chapters 2 and 4, Monson is in familiar territory, writing about nuns whose musical talents are suppressed by a Church hierarchy determined to keep the nuns safely focused on their spiritual lives. Although they come to the attention of the Sacred Congregation for different reasons, the Bolognese convents of San Lorenzo (chapter 2) and Santa Maria Nuova (chapter 4) were both renowned for their musical artistry, in the mid–sixteenth century for San Lorenzo and in the mid– seventeenth century for Santa Maria Nuova. At San Lorenzo, the problem was black magic; at Santa Maria Nuova, an uppity conversa or servant nun who tried to out-embroider a professa or professed nun, the very professa who had designed and paid for the rebuilding and outfitting of her convent’s chapel. In both convents, the more moderate line of the Council of Trent’s sixteenth-century reforms that prohibited “lascivious” or “impure” music in churches evolved into even tighter crackdowns that ultimately suppressed the musical talents in both places—though, as Monson makes clear, the wealth and prestige of the Malvezzi females who inhabited Santa Maria Nuova allowed their convent certain licenses— or...