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

1. Forced Monachization, 1668–1793: An Overview

1  Chapter 1 Forced Monachization, 1668–1793 An Overview Sometime in the late 1750s or early 1760s, the Venetian painter Pietro Longhi executed the group portrait on the facing page. It depicts an elite family of six—husband and wife, three daughters, and a son—with two servants. Since Longhi had patrons in Verona, where the painting has apparently always been, the family may have lived in that city.1 Their identity is unknown, which allows us the liberty to perform a thought experiment. The four children in the family portrait are young. The eldest girl may not yet have reached puberty,2 and the boy in the female servant’s arms is still a baby. Whether all, some, or none of them will survive into their midteens and whether other offspring will join the family the parents cannot know. Still, the father and mother, serenely sipping chocolate, are already making tentative plans for the children’s futures. If the son survives,they will arrange his marriage so that he can carry on the family line; he will inherit the bulk of the patrimony. Marrying all three girls appropriately would require a large, probably unaffordable, outlay for dowries. It is likely, therefore, that 1. Moschini, 182–83; Pietro Longhi, 182–83. 2. For some unexplained reason, the Museo del Castelvecchio’s official description, kindly supplied by Arianna Strazieri of the Archivio Fotografico, does not include the eldest girl among the couple’s children. I follow the latest exhibition catalogue, which does. Pietro Longhi, 182–83n82. 2 BY FORCE AND FEAR the father has in mind disposing of one or two of them less expensively by making them nuns, regardless of whether they have any inclination for life in religion—a plan to which their mother may object. Should more sons be born, life as monks or friars, willy-nilly, may await one or more of them; the same will be the case with additional daughters. Besides obviating the need to assemble large marital dowries for the girls, monachization will entail the important advantage of removing these offspring from the inheritance stream.3 Among neither the boys nor the girls will those selected for monastic life necessarily be the younger ones. Indeed, if one spouse dies, the other remarries, and the four children depicted here acquire stepsiblings and/or half siblings, a new set of calculations will have to be made, probably involving acrimonious negotiations about whose children from previous marital unions will be destined for the cloister. It is virtually certain that at least some of those born in one, the other, or both first marriages will be consigned to religious houses. Argument of This Book Calculations of this sort regularly occurred in elite and middling families all over Catholic Europe. Not infrequently, as just suggested, they led to elders’compelling unwilling adolescents to become professed religious. This book sheds new light on forced monachization, a phenomenon of the early modern period to which historians have hitherto accorded only sporadic, unsystematic attention. Unlike previous studies, it focuses not on a single instance but on 978 petitions for release from monastic vows submitted to the pope and adjudicated by the Holy Congregation of the Council between 1668 and 1793. As the maps in chapter 9 show, petitions arrived from Roman Catholic regions across Europe. Given multiple difficulties in conducting litigation from a distance, the farther a region was from Rome, the smaller the number of petitions generated there. A very few originated in Latin America. None came from New France (Canada) or Asia,to which European religious went by choice and the acceptance of indigenous members was long in coming. The scope of this book is therefore transnational but not global. 3. “Monachization” is the only appropriate word for becoming or being made a religious. Two other nouns often used by Anglophone writers, “monacation” and “monachation,” are not to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary or any other English dictionary I have consulted. “Monachization ,” referring to both men and women, is more appropriate for my purposes than “claustration,” because only women were cloistered. For the sake of variety, I alternate the adjectives “coerced,” “forced,” and “involuntary.” FORCED MONACHIZATION, 1668–1793 3 I certainly do not mean to suggest all or most of inhabitants of religious houses were compelled to enter them. As Gabriella Zarri, speaking of nuns, has rightly observed: The idea that all nuns considered the convent...