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2. Literary and Historiographical Contexts
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23 Chapter 2 Literary and Historiographical Contexts Over the past decade, when someone has asked what I was doing research on, I have replied, “Forced monachization.” “Oh, you’re working on nuns,” my interlocutor has invariably responded. “Not only on nuns,” I have retorted. Therein lies one of the arguments I intend to make in this book. To frame it, this chapter traces through imaginative literature and expository prose the long history of the traditional assumption, almost universally held,that only women were coerced into entering monastic life. As I show,a minority view with just as venerable a pedigree—that the lives of men, too, were blighted by involuntary monachization—never managed to gain much of a foothold, either in literature or in modern historical writing. The chapter concludes by considering the reasons why. Sixteenth-Century Descriptions and Critiques Ah! Relish the words Of these poor girls. Don’t be surprised To see us outside the convent. It wasn’t our intention To wear this black veil. 24 BY FORCE AND FEAR We’ve always wanted To be adorned like other women. We’d like to be married. This is what hurts us the most. We’ve been in penitence, In fasting and in troubles. We were naive When we put on these habits. Now that we’re older, We recognize our error, And we feel our hearts burning With a heat other than the sun’s. How gravely it torments The poor little nuns To see all the adornments Of these other pretty women! And seeing them, they think: “If only I looked like that! I curse my father, Who wants me confined like this!” How many consecrated nuns Curse day and night The one who put them in such a place And they go around weeping! Come on, come on, no more delay! Let us too seek our fortune [euphemism for male member]. To satisfy our natural inclinations Requires more than words.1 Like many another Italian canzone (song), this one, composed by the Florentine poet Bernardo Giambullari (1450–1529),2 was designed for perfor1 . Trionfi e canti carnascialeschi toscani, ed. Bruscagli, 257–58. “Black veil” (line 5) denotes professed choir nuns; lay sisters and novices wore white veils. On the double entendre in the antepenultimate line, see Trionfi, 4. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. Many thanks to Elissa Weaver for providing expert help on this one. 2. The “Canzona delle monache” was first published anonymously in Canzone per andare in maschera facte da più persone, B3v-4r. (One of the “several people” whose work was included was Lorenzo de’ Medici.) Neither of the first two editions is an incunable, as once assumed; they were published sometime before mid-June 1515. D. E. Rhodes, “Notes on Early Florentine Printings,” [3.237.186.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:12 GMT) LITERARY AND HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXTS 25 mance during Carnival. At that festive season of the year, when transgressive words and behavior were temporarily permitted, groups of male singers moved on wagons through the streets of the city delivering provocative messages . Listeners must have been titillated not only by the spectacle but also by the manifest content of the songs. In this case, costumed as female religious and shifting between the nuns’ voice and their own, the singers made public a widespread social phenomenon known to all but not often openly articulated : many young women went unwillingly into convents, impelled not by spontaneous religious vocation but by compulsion exerted by members of their families. “The Nuns’ Song” contains all the elements in the notion of forced monachization commonly held until the present day. First, according to this view, it was exclusively a female problem. Second, women consigned to the convent, bitterly regretting that they had been precluded from marriage ,burned with sexual desire. Many sought and some found opportunities to break their vows of chastity. In several literary forms and languages, sixteenth-century writers—most of them religious dissidents—penned critiques of coerced monachization, mainly of women but in some cases of both sexes or exclusively of men. Let us sample several such works.3 Il sommario della Santa Scrittura e l’ordinario dei cristiani—an Italian adaptation, via a French translation, of a book perhaps written by one Hendrik von Bommel in the Netherlands4 —came out around 1534, probably in Genoa.5 Strongly critical along Erasmian lines of the contemporary Church, the author presents a succinct version of evangelical doctrine and gives readers practical advice...