In the last ten years, there have been a number of monographs about women in religious houses in late medieval and early modern Europe. And recently, we have seen a new depth of research and quality of analysis as scholars have uncovered and analyzed previously untapped archival resources pertaining to nunneries, especially in Italian cities. The studies of Jutta Sperling in Venice, Gabriella Zarri in Bologna, and Renee Baerenstein in Milan come to mind. Building on the perspectives gained through these seminal studies of women and their lives within the cloistered world that tended to focus on spiritual life, mysticism, and literary and artistic achievements of nuns, scholars are now formulating new questions and finding other areas to explore within the cloister. This book sets a new standard in its examination of nunneries in relation to the economic, political, and social issues of life in a Renaissance city. Strocchia examines sources of investments in convents; manufacturing of textiles, ribbon, and silk within convent walls; the strategies of economic survival of the nunneries; the relationship of convents to the neighborhood; kinship patterns within the walls; and enclosure struggles deriving from demands of the city magistrates and the Church authorities and social relationships outside the convent. According to Strocchia, convents in Florence served the economic, social, and political needs of the city beyond accommodating families with “surplus” daughters.
In this brilliant study, Strocchia brings us a deftly crafted analysis of Florentine convents and life within them based on her long experience in the state, city, and church archives in Florence and the Archivio Segreto in Rome. Her mastery of the archival material and past and current scholarship is impeccable. Her bibliography, for example, could serve as a guide, indeed, a handbook to any graduate student or scholar coming to the field. The combination of Strocchia's scholarship and engaging narrative sets a new standard for future studies of nunneries in other Italian cities. This is a superb book!
Studies have already shown that many nuns could attain a rich spiritual and cultural life within the cloister. Religious life could and did form a rare opportunity for female literary and artistic expression and creativity. Stocchia's study goes way beyond this and brings forth communities that intersect directly with the political, economic, social, and cultural life of Renaissance Florence. Far from being stereotypically dead to the world, Florentine nuns played an active role in the life of the city, for example, in furthering silk production and providing opportunities for elite patronage and influence either directly through patronage and financial investment in the convent or indirectly through family connections. Nunneries also depended on city institutions in times of economic hardship. Throughout the book one finds examples of symbiosis between convent and neighborhood, patrons, businessmen, and leaders in the city. Clearly, these were not women who were cloistered and forgotten.
The book covers five large topics. In chapter 1, Strocchia examines the rapid growth of convents from small institutions struggling to survive economically between 1350 and 1430 followed by fifty years of rapid growth between 1430 and 1480. “Florence was in the forefront of the movement toward forced professions driven by the marriage market that eventually characterized the entire peninsula” (3).
In chapter 2, “Nuns, Neighbors and Kinsmen,” Strocchia examines the relationship between convents and their neighborhoods where there appears to have been a close relationship as the presence of a convent influenced the neighborhood and the neighborhood influenced the convent. This was both a geographic and social phenomenon as kinship ties reached across the convent walls and into the streets. Recruitment and kinship patterns influenced patronage and control of secular and ecclesiastical property as nuns became family agents and negotiators in the financial and social world outside the convent.
Chapter 3, “The Renaissance Convent Economy,” demonstrates the growing entanglement of convents in economic and political affairs in the city. For example, even the nuns' allowances came from the city treasury. One of the major factors was the financial crisis that beset Florentine convents in the mid-fifteenth century and provided ample opportunity for the commune to extend its largesse and with it oversight of convents at the same time it was subtly extending civic power over church affairs. Thus convents in their time of financial need were drawn into dependent relations with patrons, political leaders, and city institutions. In fact, it appears that Medici patronage of convents was part of a strategy to shore up support within Florence and in the surrounding dependencies.
Charity, favors, and exemptions from taxes were regularly granted to religious houses whenever they formally petitioned the signoria or begged for Medici support. Charity from outside the convent walls led inevitably to regulation inside at the same time it enhanced Medici and civic power.
In chapter 4, “Nuns at Work,” the author examines the sources of convent income. Handwork, teaching, management of property income, and dowries were traditional sources of convent income across Europe. Nevertheless, as Strocchia points out, “we lack a clear understanding of the prevalence and significance of work in female religious communities” (111). The documents for this information: tax records and guild statutes hide the significance of the contribution of all women to the Florentine economy, and especially nuns. Moreover, only with the new scholarship on nunneries have economic pursuits within the convent walls been studied sufficiently, if at all. Strocchia's research suggests new ways that reveal a deeper understanding of the economy within nunneries. She demonstrates the nuns' resourcefulness in finding and implementing new sources of income, for example, in book production, expansion of teaching, and, especially, textile manufacture. None of these, she argues, required large capital investment or risk. The silk industry in particular provided work and income, especially in the fifteenth century. “Tucked away behind the convent walls, the nuns helped advance the city's growing international stature grounded in this entrepreneurial industry” (151). Moreover, in addition to much needed income, silk manufacture, like property management, opened opportunities for some nuns to develop business and decision-making skills and for the nunnery to establish commercial relationships with merchants in the city.
In the final chapter, “Contesting the Boundaries of Enclosure,” Strocchia takes on the ever popular topic of nuns' imagined licentiousness and the challenges of claustration. While this became an issue for religious and secular authorities across Europe, it appears to have had special meaning in cities like Florence where civic intervention in the lives and morality of its citizens had always existed but increased in the fifteenth century. One issue became the regulation of the internal life of the convent by limiting contact with the outside world. Authorities saw to the installation of the grille at the convent entrance and monitored the nuns' correspondences with the outside world. These policies may have raised the moral high ground, but they created contradictions. The creation or reinforcement of barriers between the nunneries and the outside world threatened the city's dependency on their contribution to the Florentine economy. Furthermore, restrictive policies challenged relationships that were crucial to their management of their businesses and property.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the combination of civic control and ecclesiastical reform undermined the power of nuns and convents to do business and manage their affairs. Indeed, as Strocchia points out, “the clearest sign of eroding institutional autonomy was nuns' inability to negotiate new enclosure provisions as the sixteenth-century Italian church gained potency” (195).
In every way this is a superb book. In vision, research and scholarship, and narrative it establishes a new standard for monographs in the field. Strocchia's book is for accomplished scholars and graduate students.
