By Force and Fear: Taking and Breaking Monastic Vows in Early Modern Europe

6. Witnesses to Forced Monachization

159  Chapter 6 Witnesses to Forced Monachization Had involuntary monachization remained a closely held secret, known only to alleged perpetrators and their victims, determining whether or not it had occurred would have been very difficult. Restricted to dealing solely with statements by petitioners and those charged with forcing them into religious life (inevitably of the “he said, she said” variety),the SCC would have had to make either/or judgment calls:that one party was telling the truth and the other was lying. In fact,except in the most fragmentary cases, evidence put before the cardinals came from a broader array of informed parties,whose testimony was gathered during the diocesan investigation. Relatives not directly involved in pressuring petitioners to enter monastic life, friends, neighbors, servants, and male religious appeared in the episcopal curia—and nuns at the grates of the parlors in their convents—to respond to statements and questions put to them by vicars general. For several reasons, analyzing witness testimony in SCC cases is a difficult enterprise. In the first place, as we saw in chapter 4, witnesses under interrogation in diocesan courts seldom had an opportunity to provide long, spontaneous free-form accounts of what they had seen, heard, and surmised. Instead, they had to conform to scripts composed by petitioners’ and opponents ’ procurators, which required them to provide answers and responses to questions and statements on specific points. “Full” testimony from witnesses, furthermore, is available only in some cases: where transcripts of diocesan 160 BY FORCE AND FEAR investigations survive in the cause papers;or when petitioners’attorneys opted to quote them directly and at length, as opposed to reorganizing what they said under topical headings. Still another limitation is lack of uniformity in notarial practice in dioceses across Europe. Neither in theory nor in practice were notaries serving vicars general held to a uniform, rigorous set of standards like those imposed on their counterparts in Roman Inquisition courts, who were expected to take down witnesses’words in full and verbatim,as well as recording their nonverbal gestures, facial expressions, pauses, and the like. Often, particularly outside Italy, diocesan notaries redacted direct discourse in indirect form—or translators and attorneys made that transformation at a later point. Attestations ( fedi ) furnished to notaries outside the courtroom, more common in Italian cause papers than in those from other regions,are a different matter: in them, witnesses could speak freely and without interruption. Despite these limitations,witness testimony can yield considerable insight, provided that the cases in which it is examined are carefully chosen. Not only can it show how members of various communities observed, evaluated ,and described what they saw and heard regarding involuntary religious. Occasionally,it can shed a few beams of light into a shadowy realm:petitioners ’ experiences and feelings once they were confined to religious houses. Publica Vox et Fama: Local Knowledge, Judicial Evidence In the premodern period,publica vox et fama (public talk and reputation),which was not merely idle gossip,served at least two very important functions relevant to this book. In the first place, as Chris Wickham has argued, it “established common versions of the relevant past inside the talking group”—those members of a community who exchanged information about people and events and reached consensus in their judgments about them.1 “Community”here should be understood in a multiple sense. In this chapter, we shall find ourselves in communities as varied as schools, workshops, religious houses, neighborhoods in large cities, and entire small towns. At least for a time, the members of such communities came together in a shared conviction about the “truth”of a particular something or someone. This conviction might not be temporary. When a similar situation arose at a later point,memory of the earlier one might foster the rapid formation of another publica vox et fama. In this way,what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu termed a habitus—a set of “dispositions” or quasi rules embedded in people’s minds—would be reinforced.2 1. Wickham, quoted phrase at 26. 2. Ibid. On the concept of habitus, see Bourdieu, chaps. 2 and 4. WITNESSES TO FORCED MONACHIZATION 161 Dealing with a period earlier than the one under consideration here, Wickham understandably did not explore a facet of publica vox et fama that was certainly present in the early modern centuries:the dovetailing of “popular ” common convictions about “truth” with their official articulations in printed...