Female monasticism and the conversion of the Jews were both major concerns for the ecclesiastical establishment, as well as for Italian ruling elites, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563).Footnote 1 Thus, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the monachization of baptized Jewish girls in central and northern Italy acquired a unique symbolic significance.Footnote 2 Moreover, during this period, which has been described as “the golden age of the demoniac,” cases of demonic possession were on the rise, and so were witchcraft accusations.Footnote 3 What follows is an analysis of a case from the last years of the sixteenth century, in which the elements of Jewish conversion, female monachization, demonic possession and witch-hunting all came into play in a violent and tragic drama.
Notwithstanding its symbolic importance, the phenomenon of nuns who were former Jews is not an easy one to explore.Footnote 4 This is due to the paucity of sources that attest to the ways in which girls reared in the Jewish tradition, in which no option of female celibacy was available, experienced monastic life. This article draws on archival documents that, when studied in conjunction with chronicles from the northern Italian city of Mantua, shed light on the significance that Christian contemporaries ascribed to a baptized Jew's entrance into a monastic community. It then elucidates the mental toll that conversion and subsequent monachization took on the Jewish girl Luina—who later became known as Sister Margherita—as well as the repercussions that her anguish held for her erstwhile coreligionists.
The article focuses on a singular case, whose examination highlights some of the tensions typical of premodern religious conversions. Whereas sixteenth-century writers, including neophytes themselves, stressed the transformative nature of baptism as an event that signaled a complete break from a convert's past, historians have lately begun questioning the totalizing experience of conversion. Instead, conversion is now commonly understood as a lengthy, gradual process of multiple transformations.Footnote 5 These transformations included not only a convert's fundamental spiritual reorientation, but also the alteration of her or his social standing, and the creation of a profound rupture within the convert's family.Footnote 6 As demonstrated below, tracing the vicissitudes of Luina/Sister Margherita reveals both the incomplete experience of her conversion and the disruptive effect that it had on her family.
The article first delineates Luina/Sister Margherita's life, which culminated with her diagnosis as a demoniac. It then analyzes the significance that this etiology held for the energumen—whose affliction was attributed to her ongoing contacts with her Jewish relatives—as well as for her fellow nuns and for the Jews of Mantua. As argued in the third section of the article, the anxiety provoked by suspicions that a formerly Jewish nun reverted to Judaism was so profound, that it led to the condemnation to death of the only known Jew ever to be burned at the stake as a witch in the Italian peninsula. Like other forms of ritualized violence against minorities, the gruesome execution of a Jewish woman convicted of having attempted to undo a nun's conversion reinforced the social cohesion of Mantua's Christian majority. Complementing the earlier ceremonies of the baptism and monachization of Luina/Sister Margherita, it was also aimed at showcasing the truthfulness of Jewish conversion to Christianity. The article's last part turns to Sister Margherita's eventual healing and reintegration into her community. It expounds the tradition of female exorcism that may have come into play in the neophyte's case, as it did in an earlier case of possession in the same convent and in the liberation of another possessed nun who was a baptized Jew in 1609.
I. From Jewish Girl to Bride of Christ
Luina grew up in Ferrara, where her father Gentilhuomo da Norsa, whose Hebrew name was Aminadav, was a member of the Ferrarese guild of dealers in used clothes (“strazzaroli”).Footnote 7 She was baptized shortly before the devolution of Ferrara following the death of Duke Alfonso II d'Este (1533–1597) in October 1597, but the reasons for her conversion to Christianity remain unknown. The duke's consort, Margherita Gonzaga d'Este (1564–1618) was the one who presented the Jewish girl at the baptismal font, and Luina was christened Margherita in honor of her godmother.Footnote 8 Duchess Margherita's mother Archduchess Eleonora of Austria (1534–1594), had founded the Catechumen House in Mantua in 1588 and was known for her particular interest in female neophytes, for whom she occasionally provided marital or spiritual dowries as well as other kinds of support.Footnote 9 Eleonora encouraged her daughter to engage in conversionary activities, and Duchess Margherita collaborated with her mother in the attempts to prevent the baptized Jew Violante da Modena from fleeing to the Levant in order to revert to Judaism.Footnote 10 After Eleonora's demise in 1594, her daughter Margherita continued to follow in her footsteps, by sponsoring the conversion of Luina da Norsa.
When Duchess Margherita's consort passed away three years later, her brother Vincenzo I Gonzaga (1562–1612), the duke of Mantua, invited her to return to her hometown, where she subsequently exercised a considerable influence on the duke's decision-making.Footnote 11 Margherita Gonzaga arrived in Mantua in December 1597, and the baptized Jew numbered among the damsels who came to live in her Mantuan palace. As the neophyte's godmother, the duchess was responsible for helping her in the attempts to retrieve her share in her family's estate.Footnote 12 Like other girls who embraced Christianity against their parents’ wishes Margherita sued her father, most likely in order to force him to pay her dowry.Footnote 13 Nonetheless, neither the conversion nor the lawsuit entailed a complete break with her Jewish past. A divided soul—to borrow Elisheva Carlebach's apt term for early modern converts from Judaism—Margherita continued to have ties with at least some of her Jewish relatives.Footnote 14 Her sister Perna married the Mantuan Jew Josef Finzi, and the two resided in Mantua.Footnote 15 Notwithstanding the conversion to Christianity of his sister-in-law Luina, Josef came to visit her in Margherita Gonzaga's palace, and gave her certain gifts.Footnote 16
The neophyte's benefactor, Margherita Gonzaga, devoted herself to charitable deeds. In 1599, she founded a new female religious community, which was later named Sant'Orsola, and provided the endowment for the monastic profession of twelve impoverished girls who joined it.Footnote 17 Even before the foundation of Sant'Orsola, though, Margherita Gonzaga was involved in acts of piety. Like her mother Eleonora, she sought to ease the transition of female converts to Christian society by securing their respectable dowries.Footnote 18 Hence, she supplemented the spiritual dowry of Luina/Margherita, so that she could enter the Dominican convent of San Vincenzo in Mantua.
The choice of this particular convent was certainly not incidental. The Dominican order played a pivotal role in the endeavors to convert the Jews in post-Tridentine Italy, and when the convent of the Santissima Annunziata was established in Rome in the mid-sixteenth century specifically for baptized Jewish girls, it was founded as a Dominican institution.Footnote 19 Moreover, the Dominican convent of San Vincenzo in Mantua was closely associated with the city's ruling family. Throughout the sixteenth century, members of the Gonzaga family had made their monastic profession in this convent, and they and their lay relatives also commissioned important works of art for San Vincenzo.Footnote 20 When Margaret of Austria (1584–1611)—who according to rumors had originally wished to become a nun herself—journeyed through northern Italy in the last months of 1598 on her way to marry Philip III, King of Spain (in 1598–1621), San Vincenzo was one of the two Mantuan convents deemed worthy of her visit.Footnote 21
In the post-Tridentine era, ecclesiastical authorities ascribed a unique propagandistic value to the monachization of girls who had converted from Judaism, encouraging aristocratic men and women to provide spiritual dowries for neophytes who agreed to take the veil.Footnote 22 Like Margherita Gonzaga, her husband's cousin Cesare d'Este (1562–1628), who at the time of the devolution of Ferrara succeeded him as the duke of Modena and Reggio, also supplemented the dowry required for the monastic profession of a baptized Jewess in Finale. He expressed his desire to do so in order to have a part in such a pious deed, emphasizing in writing the religious significance of supporting the monachization of a former Jew.Footnote 23 Margherita Gonzaga evidently shared this view, and her financial support enabled the Ferrarese convert Luina/Margherita to enter one of the two most prestigious monastic communities in Mantua.
Two contemporary sources refer to the baptized Jew as Margherita after her monastic profession.Footnote 24 Thus, it seems that she was allowed to keep the name Margherita, and was not given a new religious name upon vestition, as was usually the case in sixteenth-century Italy.Footnote 25 A change of name was prescribed neither in the constitutions of the Dominican order nor in the Augustinian rule that Dominican nuns followed, but the assumption of a new name was aimed at detaching a nun from her previous secular self and from her old network of filiation. After all, entering a monastery was also perceived, since late antiquity, as a conversio—though one experienced through an intensification of faith in the pursuit of spiritual perfection, rather than in the much more radical transition from one religious community to another.Footnote 26 The neophyte Margherita, however, had already been detached from her previous self as the Jewish girl Luina da Norsa, and had assumed the new identity of a Christian upon her conversion from Judaism, not long before joining the convent. The patrician, honor-conscious nuns of San Vincenzo in Mantua therefore allowed her to retain the baptismal name that she had received in honor of the duke's sister, who was an important patron of their community.Footnote 27
Yet the daughter of a humble Jewish used clothes’ dealer from Ferrara, who took her vows in San Vincenzo shortly before Margaret of Austria's visit in this convent, did not adjust to life in the elite Dominican community. Like other Jews for whom conversion initially served as a liberating act that cut off old entanglements (such as an undesired betrothal imposed by parents) and opened up new prospects, after a short period as the cherished protégé of Margherita Gonzaga Sister Margherita was left to her own, and sank into loneliness. Experiencing a profound sense of alienation within a female community dominated by old Christian, Mantuan-born, aristocratic girls with whom she had little in common, the formerly Jewish nun met up with her brother-in-law Josef Finzi.Footnote 28
Notwithstanding the repeated injunctions after the Council of Trent against the entrance of Jews into convents, they continued to have contacts with nuns in northern Italian cities well into the eighteenth century.Footnote 29 Jewish men and women also maintained emotional ties with neophytes who became nuns. Thus, in a testament drafted in Sister Margherita's hometown of Ferrara in 1559, a Jewish woman bequeathed a modest sum to two nuns of the Clarissan convent of Corpus Domini, who were presumably converts from Judaism, as a token of her affection towards them.Footnote 30
While having contacts with members of the local Jewish community might have helped converts cope with a living environment that was radically different from that in which they had grown up, it concurrently exacerbated the other nuns’ suspicions of them. The fate of Sister Rosa Geltrude Monti, who joined a convent in Modena in 1699, is a case in point. As Marina Caffiero has shown in her reconstruction of Sister Rosa Geltrude's life, fourteen years after she had taken the veil a dozen of her fellow nuns denounced this baptized Jew to the Holy Office, claiming that she maintained ties with several Jewish men. In her interrogation, Sister Rosa Geltrude confessed that she had indeed reverted to Judaism, and was hoping that the Modenese Jews who came to visit her would help her escape from the nunnery. Fearful of the outcome of her trial, she committed suicide by throwing herself into the convent's well shortly after the beginning of her inquisitorial examination.Footnote 31
As the agonized monastic life of Sister Rosa Geltrude makes clear, the psychological effects of a Jew's conversion to Christianity could add to the mental distress that many Italian nuns experienced in the post-Tridentine era.Footnote 32 Even Jewish girls such as Luina/Sister Margherita, who did not accept baptism following the conversion of another relative but converted on their own initiative, sometimes found it difficult to adjust to monastic life.Footnote 33 Indeed, in 1562 another baptized Jewish girl who had initially expressed her intent on entering a Dominican convent, that of San Vincenzo in Prato, changed her mind after spending some time in this community but before receiving the religious habit. Once the neophyte affirmed that she wished to get married rather than take the monastic vows, the nuns asked her to leave their convent, and she was sent to the charitable institution of the Misericordia.Footnote 34 By the time Sister Margherita started having second thoughts about becoming a nun, however, she had already taken her vows and could not leave her community. In the fall of 1598, shortly after the ceremony of her monastic profession, the neophyte began showing signs of deteriorating mental health that were interpreted in terms of demonic possession.Footnote 35
II. Jewish and Christian Spirit Possession in Northern Italy
Sister Margherita's case was not the only case of early modern converts from Judaism, whose sense of personal loss and the disappointment of unrealized expectations aroused doubts about the veracity of their adopted faith or their suitability for life as Christians. Since the results of baptism could not be reversed, these led to what today we would recognize as a nervous breakdown of the neophyte in question or to recurrent states of stress and anxiety that were expressed in physical symptoms.Footnote 36 In northern Italy, baptized Jewish girls who suffered such mental agonies in the post-Tridentine era sometimes behaved in ways that their Christian contemporaries interpreted as signs of diabolic possession. Having been reared in the Jewish tradition, these neophytes were doubtlessly familiar with the oral and written accounts of spirit possession and exorcism that, albeit quite rare during the Middle Ages, were disseminated among the Jews of central and northern Italy from the 1540s onwards.
Unlike their Catholic and protestant contemporaries, many early modern Jews conceptualized spirit possession as possession by the soul of a dead human being (dybbuk), and not by a demon. Nonetheless, there were apparent similarities between the symptomatic behavior of Jewish dybbuk victims and Christian demoniacs—both of whom were predominantly female—as well as between the rituals of exorcizing the spirits possessing Christians and Jews. Furthermore, while the city of Safed remained the epicenter of possession stories in the Jewish world, in the last decades of the sixteenth century cases of dybbuk were also reported in several Italian cities, namely in Venice, Turin, Pesaro, and Ancona. The most famous Italian case of a Jewish woman's spirit possession occurred in Sister Margherita's hometown of Ferrara in 1575.Footnote 37
The Ferrarese Jew's possession was noted in Ma'asei Adonai (Deeds of the Lord), a commentary on the Torah that Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi (1513–1586) published in Venice in 1583.Footnote 38 Ashkenazi reported the story that he had recently heard about a Jewish woman in Ferrara from whose mouth a dead gentile's spirit used to speak, providing information about his identity and about the way in which he had entered the woman's body.Footnote 39 While Ashkenazi's account was based on hearsay, Rabbi Gedaliah ibn Yaḥia (1515-c. 1587) described a firsthand account of his meeting with the possessed woman in his work Shalshelet ha-Kabbalah (The Chain of Tradition), which was first printed Venice in 1587.Footnote 40 Ibn Yaḥia had studied in Ferrara's Yeshiva and returned to this city after the expulsion of the Jews from the Papal States in 1569.Footnote 41 In 1575, he went to see the twenty-five year old possessed Ferrarese Jewess, and tried to interrogate the spirit that possessed her, which identified itself as the spirit of a Christian man who had been hanged for theft. The spirit affirmed that it has been trying to force the woman to abstain from eating meat on Fridays and to pray Christian prayers upon hearing the church bells ring every evening—that is, to coerce her to behave like a Catholic.
Ibn Yaḥia described the possessed woman “lying on her back, like a body without soul. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was open, and her tongue was very thick from the lip inward.” He first interrogated the spirit itself, and then implored it “that he leave the girl quiet” so that he could interrogate her. The spirit agreed, but Ibn Yaḥia remarked, “In his movement to his place, we saw the throat of the woman swell greatly. The woman felt great pain in all of her limbs and shook and quaked with difficulty and wondrous strangeness, prompting great compassion among all observers.”Footnote 42 In short, the woman looked and behaved just like a contemporary Christian demoniac.
Although there was no single model of possession, manifesting more than a couple of signs from the repertory of symptoms associated with diabolic possession served to indicate that an afflicted person was, in fact, possessed. The most common signs of demonic possession included the swelling of the throat or of the tongue, bodily convulsions, behaving in a way that conveyed a rejection of the accepted religious conduct in one's community of faith and the ability to speak in two voices, that of the malevolent spirit and the possessed individual's normal voice—all of which were manifested in the case of the Ferrarese Jewess.Footnote 43 Indeed, Abraham ben Hananiah Yagel (1553-c. 1623), another Jewish intellectual who discussed the Ferrarese case, regarded it as a case of possession by demons rather than by the souls of deceased human beings, and argued that the possessing demons merely acted as if they were the spirits of the dead.Footnote 44
Yagel, a native of Monselice in the Venetian mainland, spent most of his life in the Mantovano region, and often visited both Ferrara and Mantua. His incorporation of the Ferrarese case into the work Beit Ya'ar ha-Levanon (House of the Forest of Lebanon),Footnote 45 an encyclopedia on which he worked from 1578 until his death in 1623, attests to the enduring resonance of the Ferrarese possession story on Jews in Ferrara and its vicinity.Footnote 46 In the early 1580s, Eliezer Ashkenazi affirmed that the possession of the Ferrarese Jewess was “a famous story” related by “men and women, and by children and infants, who all told the same story,” Footnote 47 and descriptions of the episode continued to feature in the works of Jewish authors well into the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote 48 The episode associated the possessed woman's rejection of major Jewish tenets—exemplified in her adoption of Christian practices such as praying Catholic prayers upon hearing the church bells ring, and in her abstinence from meat on Fridays—with evil spirits. It thus provided a supernatural confirmation for the veracity of the Jewish faith, in the same manner in which contemporary Catholic polemicists used cases of demonic possession for religious propaganda.Footnote 49 Just as Christian possession stories with a religious moral were often disseminated in preaching, the Ferrarese case may very well have also featured in the sermons of Jewish preachers.Footnote 50
Although the year of Sister Margherita's birth remains unknown, since she was still unmarried at the time of her conversion she must have been in her mid or late teens in 1597. During her childhood and adolescence years in Ferrara, the memory of the Ferrarese Jewish woman's well-publicized possession was still very much alive. Ferrarese Jews of all walks of life talked about it; it was narrated in works published in nearby Venice and was, perhaps, also propagated in the sermons that Jewish preachers delivered in Ferrara. As in other cases involving the dissemination of information about psychosomatic disorders, these discussions of the behavior and the appearance of the possessed Jewess may very well have influenced the ways in which the psychic distress of Luina/Sister Margherita was manifested after her conversion and monachization. Later on, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other baptized Jewish girls and women in northern Italy were also diagnosed as demoniacs; but the diabolic possession of Sister Margherita is the earliest known documented case of this kind.Footnote 51 That the possession of a Ferrarese-born girl was the first in a series of demonic possessions involving individual female converts from Judaism in northern Italy supports the hypothesis that the nun was familiar with the story of the possessed Jew from her hometown of Ferrara, and that it shaped the peculiar expression of her own mental agony.Footnote 52
In the months that followed her baptism, Luina/Margherita may have also heard descriptions of the diabolic possession of contemporary Catholics such as the Mantuan Cecilia Guerini, who was diagnosed as a demoniac shortly after the neophyte's arrival in this city.Footnote 53 Moreover, some of the female relatives of Margherita Gonzaga's late husband, including the wife and daughter of Cesare d'Este, the duke of Modena and Reggio, were supposedly victims of diabolic assault. Like the former Jew Luina/Margherita, one of the Este energumens was a professed nun;Footnote 54 in fact, in the second half of the sixteenth century nuns became the main protagonists of possession episodes in the Catholic world.Footnote 55
In the decades preceding Sister Margherita's monastic profession, episodes of mass possession broke out in various female communities in northern Italy, including the Benedictine convents of Santa Margherita in Bologna (in 1562) and Santa Grata in Bergamo (in 1577).Footnote 56 In these outbreaks and in the better-known seventeenth-century mass possession in the Clarissan convent of Santa Chiara in Carpi (1636–1639), a group of nuns accused other members of their communities of having caused their possession by means of maleficium.Footnote 57 In less spectacular cases of individual nuns who were treated as demoniacs in northern Italy in the late sixteenth century, though, the diagnosis of possession was the outcome of an examination prompted by suspicions of the energumens’ own meddling in heterodox pursuits. This was the case in the Inquisition's proceedings against the novice Angela Tossignani of San Lorenzo in Bologna (in 1583–1584), and against Sister Mansueta of the convent of Santa Croce in Venice (in 1574).Footnote 58
Although the Church did not hold demoniacs culpable for their behavior while under the devil's influence, their standing usually remained rather ambiguous, and they were often regarded as morally suspect.Footnote 59 This was especially true of professed religious women, whose diagnosis as demonically possessed implied a religious failing on their part, because they had not done all within their power to resist the assaults of the Evil One.Footnote 60 Contemporaries regarded a person's despair as one of the main causes of demonic possession, and devout nuns were not supposed to despair of God's mercy.Footnote 61
As the brides of Christ, religious women were the preferred targets of the devil's attacks, but convent chronicles and hagiographies alike made it clear that pious nuns withstood demonic temptations, and remained unshakable in their faith.Footnote 62 In the early seventeenth century, the Franciscan friar and Mantuan historian Ippolito Donesmondi (d. c. 1630) praised the saintly life of Sister Marcella Passini (d. 1599), a Clarissan in the convent of Santa Paola—the second convent in Mantua to be visited by Margaret of Austria in 1598—precisely for having resisted the devil's constant efforts to “lead her to despair.” Notwithstanding the persistent diabolic vexations that she suffered, Sister Marcella remained steadfast in her faith. She died a good death in 1599, only a few months after the profession of Sister Margherita in Mantua's other patrician convent of San Vincenzo.Footnote 63
III. Jews and Witchcraft
Whereas Sister Marcella's fellow nuns admired her heroic resistance of demonic attacks, the sisters in religion of the neophyte Margherita—like the fellow nuns of Angela Tossignani in Bologna and Sister Mansueta of Santa Croce in Venice—suspected her of unorthodox conduct. Sister Margherita's Jewish origins and her humble social background, which set her apart from the other women in her convent, must have contributed to the nuns’ preexisting suspicions, and these exacerbated as soon as the baptized Jew began behaving strangely. She was subject to judicial examination by a special tribunal appointed by Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, which comprised of three judges: Alessandro Donesmondi, the president of Mantua's ducal senate, the avvocato fiscale Carlo Bordeloni, and Mantua's chief of justice, Ascanio Rasi.Footnote 64 Unfortunately, the trial's proceedings were destroyed in a fire in the late eighteenth century.Footnote 65 Nonetheless, an extant letter pertaining to the case suggests that Sister Margherita was initially held suspect of reverting to Judaism, because of her ongoing ties with her Jewish acquaintances.Footnote 66
According to this letter, which Ascanio Rasi sent Vincenzo Gonzaga on April 17, 1600, during her interrogation the nun affirmed that coming into physical contact with the objects that she had received from her brother-in-law Josef Finzi, and especially with a lock of hair that he had given her, provoked her diabolic fits. After consulting contemporary demonological literature, the judges were convinced that this in itself sufficed to prove Finzi's responsibility for Sister Margherita's affliction, by means of maleficium.Footnote 67 When Finzi was questioned under torture, he confessed to having paid the elderly Jewish widow Judith (Iovadith) Franchetta (or Franchetti, 1523–1600) for bewitching the lock of hair and all the other presents that he had subsequently given the convert Margherita in order to set off her demonic ordeal.Footnote 68 His alleged motive for doing so was to get back at the neophyte for the legal action that she had taken against her father, Gentilhuomo da Norsa.Footnote 69
Another Jew, named Jacob Fano, was accused of conniving with Josef Finzi and of procuring malevolent charms from Franchetta, from whom he had purportedly learned the magical arts. Judith Franchetta's daughter Ricca was also implicated in the case, since the extension of suspicion from an alleged witch to her daughter was common in many parts of Europe, including the Mantovano.Footnote 70 Judith and Ricca Franchetta, as well as Jacob Fano, had already been arrested before March 19, as noted in a notarial act referring to their crimes that was drafted on that date. Together with Josef Finzi, these Mantuan Jews were charged with collaborating in a Jewish conspiracy aimed at “causing the demonic possession of Christians.”Footnote 71
Ricca Franchetta's name appears solely in one known document, and it seems that she was either absolved or was punished only leniently.Footnote 72 Although Ascanio Rasi opposed the harsh punishment of Josef Finzi, and especially of Jacob Fano, who he deemed to be mentally incompetent (“mentecatto”), the other two judges insisted on their capital punishment.Footnote 73 Franchetta, Fano, and Finzi were convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death by burning.Footnote 74 On April 22, Franchetta was indeed burned at the stake, while the execution of her two alleged male accomplices was deferred.Footnote 75 Franchetta perished in the fire lit in Mantua's main square, at the presence of Duke Vincenzo and his sister Margherita Gonzaga, the aristocratic patron of her purported victim. According to the contemporary ducal official Giovanni Battista Vigilio (1561–1602), the public execution was attended by “a crowd so great that it was impossible to turn one's head . . . it was estimated that from ten to twelve thousand people were present.”Footnote 76
Franchetta was not the first woman to be sent to the pyre for witchcraft in Mantua, where convicted witches had been sentenced to death in 1493, 1494, 1505 and 1507.Footnote 77 The repression of witchcraft in the Mantovano region was renewed after Vincenzo Gonzaga's ascension to the ducal throne in 1587. The first witch burning during his reign took place in 1595, and witchcraft prosecution continued for eight more years.Footnote 78 The Mantuan witch trials of 1595–1603 constituted one of the most vigorous episodes of witch-hunting in the Italian peninsula in those years, and in 1601 induced the Congregation of the Holy Office to warn Mantua's inquisitor to exercise caution when prosecuting presumed witches, and to refrain from proceeding against more than one witch at a time.Footnote 79
Judith Franchetta's public execution was significantly different from the earlier burning of women as witches in Mantua, though, because she was also a Jew. Despite the association of Jews with both demonism and illicit magic in premodern Europe, Jewish women hardly ever figured in the witchcraft trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote 80 Those Jewish healers and fortune tellers accused of meddling in superstitious magical practices were usually exculpated, or received solely light punishments.Footnote 81 As a matter of fact, Judith Franchetta is the only known Jewish woman ever to be executed for witchcraft in Italian lands.Footnote 82 Thus, it is instructive that the main crime attributed to her was that of having caused the demonic possession of a nun who was a baptized Jew.
The Mantuan official Vigilio reports: “Iovadith Franchetta, a seventy-seven year old Jewess, was burned alive for being a witch and for casting her spells upon many people in her lifetime, and in particular upon a certain nun of the order of San Vincenzo in Mantua who was formerly a Jewess and was later converted to Christianity. Having made her profession, she found herself [demonically] possessed.”Footnote 83 Federigo Amadei (1684–1755), who in the eighteenth century consulted some of the Mantuan documents pertaining to the trial that have not survived,Footnote 84 affirms, “The witch Judith Franchetta, a seventy-seven years old Jewess, was tried and convicted for having, during the harvest season of 1598, cast a spell over a lock of hair that rendered demonically possessed a girl named Margherita, previously a Jew called Luina, who had been baptized and taken into court by the most serene Margherita Gonzaga, the widowed duchess of Ferrara, [and] then thanks to a pious deed of the latter became a nun in San Vincenzo in Mantua.” Footnote 85
The lock of hair that the formerly Jewish nun had received from her brother-in-law Josef Finzi, then, played a key role in Franchetta's condemnation for witchcraft.Footnote 86 Hair was closely connected to the identity of the person to whom it belonged in premodern society, and a lock of hair was frequently given as a keepsake.Footnote 87 The lock of hair that Margherita received from Josef may have been a keepsake from her sister Perna, or from other members of her family; Amadei asserts that Gentilhuomo da Norsa (the nun's father) was responsible for Josef's attempts to give her objects that supposedly set off her demonic affliction. That her extreme emotional reactions—eventually interpreted as demonic possession—were provoked by coming into contact with objects that reminded her of her Jewish kin attests to the loneliness, and possibly also to the remorse experienced by the neophyte who had broken with her family and taken legal action against her father.
Yet hair was also a common ingredient in charms that were used in popular magic in the premodern era. It was employed in magical healing, in love magic and in maleficent spells, and demonologists affirmed that giving a lock of hair amounted to the legal surrender of a witch's soul to the devil.Footnote 88 In the 1630s, locks of hair that were found in the monastic cells of some of the nuns in Santa Chiara in Carpi enhanced their identification as the witches responsible for having cast a spell of maleficium on the energumens in their convent.Footnote 89 The discovery of a lock of hair in Sister Margherita's monastic cell in Mantua would have similarly raised suspicions of her recourse to illicit magic which, like demonic possession, was perceived as one of the consequences of despair.
At the popular level, the boundary separating the demoniac from the witch was a blurred one and, beginning in the 1590s, women believed to be diabolically possessed were occasionally prosecuted for witchcraft.Footnote 90 In 1593, two demoniacs from the southern Italian town of Bitonto were also suspected of witchcraft. In the course of their interrogations, the energumens provided the names of accomplices who had supposedly participated at the witches’ sabbath with them. The trials of the demoniac-witches from Bitonto ended only in December 1596, less than two years before Sister Margherita's diagnosis as a demoniac. The much publicized Bitonto witchcraft scare, which required the intervention of high ecclesiastics including Pope Clement VIII (1592–1605) himself, made it clear that a woman's manifestation of the symptoms of diabolic possession did not preclude the possibility that she was also guilty of witchcraft.Footnote 91
Convicting Sister Margherita of witchcraft, though, would have not only tainted the reputation of her patrician convent but also caused a considerable embarrassment to the duke's sister, as it would have turned her into the patron who had sponsored the baptism and monachization of a diabolic witch. Even condemning the neophyte for judaizing was an undesirable outcome of the investigation, as far as Mantua's ruling family was concerned, because it would have exposed the inefficacy of Margherita Gonzaga's investment in the baptism of a Jewish girl. As a Jew who underwent a conversio, a “turn of the soul,” a neophyte was not supposed to have second thoughts about her decision to accept baptism, and was certainly not expected to cherish memories of her past life of perfidy and obstinacy among the Jews.Footnote 92 On the contrary, she was supposed to be a living witness of the righteousness of the Christian truth, and to represent the enduring victory of sight over blindness.
The revitalization of the Catholic Church following the outbreak of the protestant Reformation, which gravely harmed its claim to universality, featured a zealous campaign to convert the Jews.Footnote 93 After the Council of Trent, conversionary efforts directed at Italian Jews became more vigorous than ever before; but, at the same time, every case of a neophyte reverting to Judaism threatened to expose the intrinsic weakness of the conversionary campaign.Footnote 94 The relapse of a professed nun—who was allotted a symbolic role in the post-Tridentine economy of salvation—would have been particularly detrimental to the Catholic cause. In contrast, shifting the blame to unbaptized Jews, by arguing that they targeted Sister Margherita precisely because she had chosen to accept baptism and become the bride of Christ, could reinforce the claims regarding the depravity of Judaism.
By casting Sister Margherita in the role of the victim of malevolent Jews, her interrogators turned her spiritual and psychological woes into religious propaganda. Whereas in some parts of Europe the devils who spoke through the mouths of energumens during the Reformation era sided with a specific confessional group, the use of possession as religious propaganda was not restricted to the confessional conflict between protestants and Catholics. As a matter of fact, in the Italian peninsula the idiom of possession did not form part of the church's campaign against protestantism, but it did occasionally serve to reassert Catholicism's superiority over Judaism.Footnote 95 Hence in 1554, shortly before the establishment of the Roman ghetto (in 1555), a French monk began propagating the account of his successful exorcism of more than eighty girls from an orphanage in Rome, many of whom were baptized Jews.Footnote 96 According to the exorcist, during the neophytes’ demonic fits they accused the entire Jewish community of Rome of having caused their possession as a punishment for their conversion to Christianity, and called for the banishment of the Jews.Footnote 97 Although influential ecclesiastics at the papal court did not take the demoniacs’ allegations seriously, and did not heed to the request to expel the Jews from Rome, the episode was publicized in the writings of the era's major demonologists, including Jean Bodin (c. 1529–1596).Footnote 98
In 1616, less than two decades after Sister Margherita's diagnosis as the possessed victim of a Jewish witch, the Venetian priest Giovan Battista Bellaver published a manual for exorcists in which he described the liberation of a male energumen at the presence of both Christians and Jews. Bellaver described the devil who, speaking through the possessed man's mouth, refuted the Jews’ rejection of the main tenets of Catholicism by corroborating their veracity. The exorcism culminated with the conversion of one of the Jews who were witnessing it, and immediately upon the latter's decision to embrace Christianity the evil spirit departed from the demoniac's body.Footnote 99
IV. Burning the Witch
Just like the theatrical exorcism described in Bellaver's tract, the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta was recounted in Mantuan chronicles as a “spectacle,” which reaffirmed the triumph of Catholicism over Judaism.Footnote 100 While convicting Sister Margherita of heterodoxy would have disclosed the superficiality of the previous spectacles of Catholic victory—that of the convert's baptism and of her entrance into the convent of San Vincenzo—identifying the obstinate elderly Jew as the source of the nun's torments reinforced the message that these earlier public ceremonies had conveyed. As David Nirenberg has convincingly shown for medieval Iberia, such forms of violence lay at the heart of Christians’ relations with those whom they perceived as Christ's killers, not only at times of cataclysmic large-scale massacres or expulsions, but also at times of apparent Jewish-Christian coexistence.Footnote 101
In the same vein as other forms of ritualized violence directed at Mantua's Jews, such as the institution of compulsory sermons that they were required to attend every week during the 1590s, the public execution of the Jewish witch Judith Franchetta thus served a stabilizing function, enhancing the social cohesion of the Christian multitude that came to witness her horrific burning.Footnote 102 The throngs of spectators who came to watch the capital punishment of the Jewish widow saw how “the ropes that held her hands burned immediately, whence the witch tried to protect herself from the flames with one hand, and to blow on it with her mouth, as if she was hoping to extinguish it; but she ultimately paid the punishment for her impiety, when inch by inch she was consumed by the fire.”Footnote 103 Judith's perishing in the flames was perceived as the city's ritual purgation from Jewish impiety, and three other Jews were ordered to kindle the fire that was to annihilate the demonic presence in Mantua.Footnote 104
Franchetta's burning was clearly not understood solely as the just punishment of one sinful, straying Jew. Although her gender, age, and marital status conformed to the archetype of the diabolic witch, Franchetta was not a marginal figure within Jewish society but rather the widow of a prominent member of her community.Footnote 105 Her late husband, Rabbi Abraham ben Moses Franchetta (or Franchetti) of Provence, was one of the two rabbis who, back in 1563, signed a document authorizing a delegation that was to address the Council of Trent in the matter of the expurgation of the Talmud and other Jewish books. Rabbi Abraham left his books to Judith, and they were listed as belonging to his widow when all the books in Jewish hands were registered in Mantua in 1595. Moses Franchetta, who was later ordained as a rabbi in this city, can probably be identified as the couple's son.Footnote 106
That Judith Franchetta was a known and respected member of Mantua's Jewish community is attested by the support that she continued to receive from her fellow Jews until the last moments of her life. The Mantuan chroniclers Vigilio and Amadei both remarked that the three men who lit the fire tried to comfort her, remaining with her until the very last minute. One of the Jewish men was even heard saying that he was willing to die with the convicted witch. His life was saved only thanks to the other two men, who pulled him out of the fire before he, too, was consumed by the flames.Footnote 107 In stressing the enduring ties of solidarity of the Mantuan Jews with the convicted witch, Vigilio and Amadei both created the impression that Franchetta formed part of a broader Jewish conspiracy to harm Christendom and that her fellow Jews, those who strove to comfort her in her last moments, were also guilty of abominable misdemeanors.
Despised by local Christians as the embodiment of Jewish evil, the elderly widow was not only never forsaken by her coreligionists, but also refused to incriminate other Jews in witchcraft, even when subject to ruthless torture. In his letter to duke Vincenzo, Ascanio Rasi noted that Jacob Fano's meddling in witchcraft had been “denied by Judith with much persistence in the course of [her undergoing the torture of] the corda [namely, three jerks of the rope], when her feet were placed in iron casing, and when her thighs and lower legs were burned with lit torches.”Footnote 108 A female defendant's unswerving refusal to reveal the names of her supposed accomplices notwithstanding the application of such painful torments was rather unusual, and convinced Mantua's Captain of Justice of Fano's innocence.Footnote 109
Although Fano's precise connection to Sister Margherita's case is not clear, the Mantuan judges evidently associated his supposed crimes with Josef Finzi's alleged instigation of the nun's demonic possession. Moreover, the ducal tribunal connected both Finzi and Fano to the figure of Judith Franchetta. It is therefore worth turning our attention to Fano and looking at his case more closely, before returning to Sister Margherita's fate.
Fano was charged with having learned the diabolic arts from Franchetta, and was convicted of having caused the demonic obsession of Don Nicola de’ Federici, a priest of the ducal church of Santa Barbara, by giving him a bewitched fruit that rendered him “full of infernal spirits.”Footnote 110 In theory, diabolic obsession involved only an external assault on the victim's body and not an internal manipulation of a person's mental faculties. It was therefore regarded as a less severe form of demonic attack.Footnote 111 Nonetheless, in practice the symptoms of possession and obsession were often very similar and the distinction between the two was primarily a gendered one, which reflected the reluctance of male exorcists and theologians to admit that the possession of one's internal faculties could occur in men. Friars and priests such as Don Nicola were therefore diagnosed as the victims of obsession, rather than possession.Footnote 112
Like the mental distress of the nun Margherita, the psychological torments of the priest Nicola were construed as the outcome of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Catholic faith by instigating the demonic affliction of an individual who had dedicated his life to serving Christ.Footnote 113 The demonic assault on Don Nicola—once again, like the diabolic anguish of Duchess Margherita Gonzaga's protégé—was also perceived as an attack on the house of Gonzaga, because the victim was a priest in the ducal church of Santa Barbara. The crowning jewel in the Gonzagas’ endeavors to transform their duchy into a model Catholic state by means of architectural, artistic, and musical patronage, Santa Barbara was meant to represent both the piety and the grandeur of the ducal family throughout the reign of Duke Vincenzo, who had all his children baptized in this basilica.Footnote 114
In his letter of April 17, Ascanio Rasi referred to Don Nicola as “the little priest” (“il Pretino”), and noted that he had already “made peace” with Jacob Fano.Footnote 115 Notwithstanding these circumstances, or Franchetta's insistence that she never taught Fano the diabolic arts, two of the judges on the ducal tribunal initially refused to reconsider Jacob's death sentence. Despite Rasi's attempts to intervene on his behalf Fano continued to languish in Mantua's prison—whose harsh conditions in 1600 are known to have led to the death of one accused female witch, and to the illness of several other witchcraft suspects—for two more months.Footnote 116
On July 1, however, Duke Vincenzo finally agreed to commute Fano's original death penalty to service in the galleys.Footnote 117 On that very day, Franchetta's other presumed accomplice Josef Finzi wrote a letter to Vincenzo Gonzaga, affirming his intent on converting to Christianity.Footnote 118 The letter was apparently written at the instigation of Ascanio Rasi,Footnote 119 who on April 17 had advised the duke of Mantua to “have some mercy” on Finzi and afterwards continued to strive for revoking the Jew's death sentence.Footnote 120 In his letter of July l, Finzi thanked Duke Vincenzo for deferring the execution of the capital punishment, which he undoubtedly deserved for his past misbehavior. During his prolonged incarceration, Finzi asserted, he began reading the lives of the saints, and thanks to divine grace and to the miraculous aid of St. Francis, to whom he was particularly devoted, decided to convert to Christianity. He was eagerly awaiting his baptismal ceremony, which was scheduled to take place on the following day (Sunday, July 2) at the ducal church of Santa Barbara.Footnote 121
There can be little doubt about the real motivation for Finzi's resolution to accept baptism. He had evidently been given reading material aimed at inducing him to embrace Christianity, as well as the promise that he would be spared the death penalty if he agreed to be baptized. Absolving convicted Jewish criminals upon their consent to baptism was a widely accepted conversionary strategy in post-Tridentine Italy.Footnote 122 Yet, like other Jews who were compelled to become Christians Josef could not convert alone, and had to secure the baptism of his children. Catholic theologians increasingly placed their hopes in neophytes’ young children, assuming that their greater impressionability could result in a more complete conversion to Christianity. The prospect of securing the Christian upbringing of Jewish children served to justify the efforts to exert force and coercion in converting their parents throughout the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 123
Immediately upon agreeing to convert, Josef offered his five-year-old son Ben-Zion to the Christian faith, confirming in writing that he wanted the boy to be baptized together with him. As he explained in his later supplication to the duke, he did not initially offer his younger son, Moise, who was still nursing at that time, because he was hoping that the baby would be baptized together with his mother Perna. Josef affirmed that he had previously discussed the possibility of converting with Perna, and believed that she was favorably disposed towards embracing Christianity, but that she then fled from Mantua with the couple's baby in order to prevent his baptism. After her husband's arrest and the burning at the stake of Judith Franchetta, Perna—Sister Margherita's sister—clearly sensed the danger that she would be in if she remained in Mantua. She therefore returned to Ferrara, where she was hiding with her son in the house of her father, Gentilhuomo da Norsa. Josef asked for Duke Vincenzo's help in fetching Moise from his father-in-law's house, assuring him that he wanted to have this son baptized.Footnote 124
A sequel to the physical annihilation of the “Jewish witch” Judith Franchetta, the baptism of Josef Finzi and his son Ben-Zion on July 2, 1600 was orchestrated as the final stage in the public display of squashing the Jewish attempts to undo Sister Margherita's conversion to Christianity. The spectacular baptism of the nun's brother-in-law, who had reportedly tried to lure her back to Judaism, was meant to make publicly known not only his failure in achieving this supposed aim, but also his eventual recognition of the truth of the Christian faith—as Finzi, who knew that this was his only hope of evading Franchetta's fate, affirmed in his letter to the duke. Finzi's baptism ceremony was celebrated in Santa Barbara, whose priest Nicola de’ Federici had purportedly been the victim of a spell cast by another Jew and alleged disciple of Franchetta, signaling the triumphal reversal of the supposed Jewish conspiracy.
It is noteworthy that neither Finzi's baptism, nor the commutation of Fano's death sentence dispelled the prevalent fears of a wide-reaching Jewish conspiracy to harm Christian society by means of maleficium. Merely two years later, in 1602, the Observant Franciscan Bartolomeo Cambi da Saluzzo (1557–1617) preached to a large audience of Mantuans “about the sins that, according to what he had heard, were committed in Mantua, and especially regarding the Jews.” Cambi, an expert in casting out demons and in liberating the possessed, reminded his audience that alongside their other sins, quite a few Jews in Mantua also “engaged in witchcraft.”Footnote 125
V. Exorcizing the Nun
Let us now return to Sister Margherita. Vigilio reports that “she found herself [demonically] possessed and thanks to Our Lord Jesus Christ was eventually liberated,” but does not explain how or when this happened.Footnote 126 Since the involvement of an exorcist is not mentioned in extant sources, it is possible that no male ecclesiastic acted as her exorcist. At the close of the sixteenth century, exorcism was still a pretty routine and unregulated healing ritual, and was practiced by clergymen as well as by lay men and women.Footnote 127
Another nun of Jewish origins, who manifested the symptoms of demonic possession a few years later, was reportedly liberated from her torments thanks to her prioress. This neophyte had converted from Judaism at the age of thirteen, and joined the convent of the Santissima Annunziata in Genoa in 1605, as Sister Maria.Footnote 128 In 1607, she began suffering from acute pains, “incessant vomiting and epileptic convulsions” that her fellow nuns diagnosed as signs of diabolic possession. When no natural remedy alleviated her suffering, her sisters in religion wanted to have “an experienced priest enter [the convent] in order to exorcize her.” The prioress Maria Vittoria Fornari Strata (1562–1617) however was reluctant to do so, “fearing the consequences,” namely, the eruption of mass possession in the community, because the presence of an exorcist often led to the spread of spiritual woes from the energumen to her fellow nuns.Footnote 129
In 1609 Maria Vittoria Fornari Strata, who was reputed for sanctity, therefore undertook the task of treating Sister Maria herself. Although the neophyte often had violent fits, during which five other nuns had to hold her to prevent her from harming herself or others, the prioress ordered that no further medicine be given to her and insisted on spending a night with her in her monastic cell. Assured by a vision of the Virgin Mary that she would succeed in her mission, the prioress placed her trust in God and indeed, Sister Maria slept peacefully through the night, and by the time she woke up she had fully recovered and no longer experienced the convulsions that had “tormented her for so long and so violently.”Footnote 130
Interestingly, the convent of San Vincenzo in Mantua had, by the time of Sister Margherita's profession, its own history of a charismatic religious woman healing a possessed nun. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the local living saint Osanna Andreasi (1449–1505), a Dominican tertiary who had close ties with the nuns of San Vincenzo, often visited this convent.Footnote 131 According to her hagiographer, Andreasi once informed him:
I once went to a certain convent and these poor women had a sister who was demonically possessed, and they believed that her affliction was another malady. When they wanted to guide her towards me, she cried out: “I do not want to go there! I do not want to go there!”, but she was constrained by those who led her to me, and she immediately became meek, and when I hugged and kissed her she was liberated. And for this reason the devil has thereafter tried to trick me many times, and caused me many tribulations in many things, and caused a great clamor in my house, which frightened me very much.Footnote 132
The news of Osanna Andreasi's liberation of a demoniac soon spread in Mantua, and she became famous for her ability to cast out demons. Her victory over the evil one, who according to her own account began tormenting her after she had successfully exorcized the possessed nun, was commemorated around 1515 in an altarpiece painted by Francesco Bonsignori (1460–1519), which was displayed in the convent of San Vincenzo until its suppression in the Napoleonic era.Footnote 133 The painting shows Osanna, surrounded by a group of nuns and lay female members of the Gonzaga family, squashing the devil in the shape of a hybrid monster (see cover image).Footnote 134
Court prophetess to the Gonzaga during her lifetime, Osanna's cult was assiduously promoted by members of this family throughout the sixteenth century.Footnote 135 Although they did not succeed in securing her full canonization, in 1594 the Congregation of Rites conceded the request to have Andreasi's body publicly displayed on her annual feast day.Footnote 136 This concession bolstered the devotion to Andreasi around the time of Sister Margherita's monastic profession in San Vincenzo.Footnote 137 Once the neophyte began experiencing acute psychic distress, the portrait of Andreasi crushing the devil under her feet in the convent church of San Vincenzo, which served as a constant reminder of demonic assault on an earlier member of this community, may have helped to convince Sister Margherita's fellow nuns that she was suffering from demonic possession.Footnote 138
According to Vigilio's account, the symptoms that led to the diagnosis of possession eventually abated, and Sister Margherita was cured. One may wonder about the psychological effect of her knowing that her mental anguish had sparked off a turn of events that brought about the disintegration of her sister's family, with the flight of Perna Finzi to Ferrara with her baby and the conversion to Christianity of Perna's husband and older son, and that it led to the burning at the stake of an elderly Jewish widow. Be that as it may, Vigilio's affirmation that the neophyte was liberated at the end “thanks to Our Lord Jesus Christ” indicates that the Jewish girl's conversion and subsequent monachization were turned into yet another success story for the triumphant Catholic Church.Footnote 139 Rather than exposing the mental toll of a Jew's conversion to Christianity, the manifestation of Sister Margherita's psychic distress ultimately served to reinforce the belief in the need to facilitate the conversion of the perfidious Jews by any means necessary.
VI. Conclusion
That Sister Margherita's profession in San Vincenzo was remembered as a success story is suggested in the choice of this very convent as the ideal monastic community for another Jewess, whose baptism was sponsored by the ruling Gonzaga family. The unnamed Mantuan neophyte, whose fate is mentioned in Amadei's chronicle, had initially expressed her intent to be baptized but was later smuggled from Mantua with the assistance of local Jews, presumably because she had second thoughts about converting to Christianity.Footnote 140 Maria Gonzaga (1609–1660), Mantua's regent at that time, ordered a search to discover the girl's whereabouts. Once she was found, the girl was brought back to Mantua and was solemnly baptized in 1643.Footnote 141 Maria Gonzaga had been educated in Sant'Orsola, the convent established by her aunt Margherita Gonzaga, who had orchestrated the baptism and monachization of Luina/Sister Margherita more than four decades earlier.Footnote 142 Following the precedent of her aunt's support of Sister Margherita's profession in the Dominican community of San Vincenzo, Maria Gonzaga decided to sponsor the entrance of her own prized neophyte into this very convent.Footnote 143
The year of Sister Margherita's death remains unknown, but it is not implausible that she was still alive in 1643. Safe from the health hazards associated with pregnancy and childbirth and relatively protected from infectious diseases behind their convent walls, many Italian nuns in the post-Tridentine era reached old age.Footnote 144 If Sister Margherita was indeed not dead yet, her presence at San Vincenzo would have helped to smooth the other neophyte's assimilation into life in this Dominican house. We have no way to ascertain this, though, because like so many other baptized Jews who became nuns in premodern Italy, both Sister Margherita and the unnamed Mantuan convert disappeared from the historical record as soon as they were successfully integrated into their monastic communities. In writing about them, chroniclers such as Vigilio and Amadei were interested solely in recording the definitive success of their monachization, which epitomized the transformation of former Jews into the brides of Christ.
