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

9. Continuity and Change in Forced Monachization

235  Chapter 9 Continuity and Change in Forced Monachization As noted earlier (chapter 3),forced monachization in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries requires a primarily synchronic treatment. Let me recapitulate what I have shown. From the 1660s to the early 1790s, parents and other relatives compelled adolescents in their families to enter religious life. Their main reason for doing so, preserving as much of the patrimony as possible to pass on to a single (almost always male) heir, remained the same. So did the means used to accomplish this objective: treating offspring destined for the monastery or convent much more harshly than their siblings selected to remain in secular life; employing verbal and physical threats of various kinds designed to alienate adolescents from their homes and kin; making them eat apart from the family or depriving them of food; incarcerating them in locked rooms; conniving with and bribing religious to secure their vestition and profession. Involuntary entry into a religious house was not predicated on the young person’s junior position in the birth order. Often, force and fear thrust elder children into religious houses in the hope that resources would become available so that those lower in the birth order could marry. In blended families formed by second marital unions, offspring of a first marriage were frequently warehoused against their will in monasteries and convents in favor of stepsiblings,younger half siblings,or both,who were allowed to marry and remain in the inheritance stream. 236 BY FORCE AND FEAR Throughout the period covered in this book,numerous elders disregarded the dictum that monastic and marital contracts must be made voluntarily, a principle enunciated by many theologians and canonists and frequently reiterated by ecclesiastical writers and confessors. The proportion who survived long enough to heed confessors’ adjurations and admit and repent of their fault seems to have remained constant. Some fathers continued explicitly to voice their adherence to the opposing principle of patria potestas: responsibility for disposing of their offspring, they defiantly claimed, lay entirely in their own hands. Nor can change over time be discerned in the behavior of unwilling religious. Virtually all remained so rooted in the ingrained habitus of reverential fear that neither before nor after vestition and profession did they dare resolutely to oppose the will of those who exerted force on them. To be sure, most voiced their disinclination to become religious. Yet on the eve of their consignment to religious houses, not many had the courage and/or prescience to seek out notaries in order to make formal protests in the presence of witnesses. Chapter 17 of the Tridentine decree De regularibus et monialibus mandated that young women be interrogated about whether they were entering religious life of their own accord. Since more often than not, those who were compelling them to enter the convent hovered nearby to make certain that they answered in the affirmative, they had no alternative to saying yes. In the early 1740s, Maria Antonia Cappella, who was about to be thrust into the Carmelite house at Somma Vesuviana in the diocese of Nola, voiced a sentiment that other victims of forced monachization kept to themselves. In a probable mixture of cynicism and despair, she inquired of the ecclesiastical official who put the question to her: “What am I supposed to do?” (Che debbo fare?).1 During the ceremony of profession, some young men and women mumbled the required formula so indistinctly that no one could be certain that they had actually pronounced the required words. Because others were rendered mute by weeping, someone else had to make the binding promises in their stead. At least two, Anne-Marie Fauque and Giuseppe Felice Cavalli (both in chapter 5),cleverly substituted formulae of their own,very different from the words of profession. These facts,however,came to light only much later, when they petitioned for release from their vows. For many years or decades after profession, hundreds of unwilling religious endured undesired monastic reclusion. Ignorance about the procedure to be followed and lack 1. ThR 26: 55 (19 November 1757). CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN FORCED MONACHIZATION 237 of the funds and support necessary to initiate it played some part in their inaction. More important, many considered it out of the question to seek restitutio in integrum and nullitas professionis until those who had forced them had disappeared from the earthly scene. Throughout the period 1668–1793, the...