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  • Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents by Isabella Campagnol
  • Patricia Allerston (bio)
Forbidden Fashions: Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents. Isabella Campagnol. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2014. xv + 160 pp. $27.96. ISBN 978-0-89672-829-5.

Nuns are a subject of perennial fascination, not the least within Protestant countries. Over the past twenty years, and reflecting the widening interest in women’s history, academic research on the lives of nuns within the Italian Peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has burgeoned. The implementation of [End Page 172] monastic enclosure throughout the Italian states has attracted particular attention. Key works include Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis, Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (1998) and, more recently, Sharon T. Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (2009). Those on Venice include Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (1999) and Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (2002). Isabella Campagnol’s book takes an original approach to this increasingly mainstream historical topic and aligns it with another dynamic area of early modern studies: the history of material culture.

Forbidden Fashions explores the relationship between early modern Venetian nuns and their clothing against the background of the widespread practice of “enforced monachization.” This bleak societal custom, whereby the unmarried daughters of high-status Venetian families were placed in the city’s convents as young, temporary “boarders” and eventually obliged to take up permanent residence as nuns, was common in the period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. It created an anomalous situation in which considerable numbers of women who did not have a genuine religious vocation were expected to spend most of their lives according to strict monastic schedules and rules.

Campagnol’s book has four principal chapters. The first introduces the limited options facing young aristocratic Venetian women: they might marry or, more typically, become a nun, but in either case had little say about the path chosen for them by their families. The second chapter compares the range of material effects, including clothes, required for secular and religious marriages. In chapter three the author considers nuns’ personal wardrobes, highlighting the differences between the religious habits prescribed for these putative “Brides of Christ” and the variety of items actually adopted by nuns. This chapter helpfully sets out the diverse groups of women, in addition to nuns, who could be found in early modern Venetian convents. The last full chapter, the fourth, considers nunneries and other pious institutions for women and girls as places where textiles, embroidery, and lace were made as well as consumed, exploring the reasons for such industry and the opportunities this work presented to non-monastic women. The book ends with a lengthy appendix containing translated transcriptions of documents mentioned in the text.

The main argument of Forbidden Fashions is that Venetian nuns consistently flouted the established rules on monastic attire, preferring to dress like their lay relatives beyond the convent walls instead of as members of pious communities [End Page 173] who had publically renounced all worldly goods. Campagnol associates this adherence to forbidden clothing with the nuns’ ambivalence about their religious situation, explaining the unruly activity as an attempt by these women to maintain their pre-monastic identities within the convent walls. She proposes that the nuns used secular clothes and accoutrements both as a means of expressing their individual identities and of reinforcing their families’ social standing within their enclosed environments, basing these arguments on evidence drawn from institutional archives, secondary sources, religious records, and images produced in the era.

Forbidden Fashions highlights an intriguing subject and in so doing makes a useful contribution to the literature on Venetian religious institutions. The author’s grounding in the history of Venetian dress and textiles is evidenced in the lengthy appendix. Her analysis is also enriched by this familiarity with the textiles, clothes, and trimmings worn by early modern Venetian women, including nuns. This knowledge of historical dress, which is informed by the important work of her mentor, the doyenne of Venetian dress history Doretta Davanzo Poli, also informs chapter four, on the fabrication of...

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