Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent

Rating:
Summary: Difficult to stop reading
Review: If we could travel back in time, and our machine landed in 16th century Venice, what would you like to see? Grand palaces, and the people who lived in them? Carnival time in the Piazza of San Marco? Perhaps life on the streets? What about life in a convent? Too dull, you think? Then, you have not read Mary Laven's Virgins of Venice, a remarkable journey into the lives of the women who lived in the fifty or so convents that existed in Venice at the time.
Nunneries were not only spiritual houses, but also end stations for noble women who could not be given away in marriage by their families. By using reports of investigations and trials, together with statements that came from the nuns themselves, Laven opens a world of suffocating oppression and enforced chastity, but also a world of determination from the nuns to lead a life as normal as possible. Contact with the outside world might have not been allowed, but the courts were full of incidents where both outsiders and nuns had breached the law. For instance, we learn that Zuana, a "gossip", kept hens for Madonna Suor Gabriela, and that in exchange, Suor Gabriela provided Zuana with wine and other commodities.
This and many other stories make this book impossible to put down, since we feel anger, sadness, despair and sympathy for those women whose lives were condemned from the moment they entered the convent. On the other hand, we can't help but to feel glad that the nuns did everything they could to fight back. From being petty to actually engaging in sexual acts, these nuns will forever be a remainder that no matter time and place, human beings will do the impossible to lead dignified lives. Bravo, Leven!

Rating:
Summary: Behind Convent Walls
Review: In the wall of the Arsenal in Venice is an arch of the demolished convent Santa Maria delle Vergini. The convent had been one of the grandest of thirty-odd Venetian convents. There is a plaque below the arch that reads, "Hope and love keep us in this pleasant prison." Convents were like prisons, in many ways, and many of the inhabitants were reluctant prisoners, rather than volunteers for God. In an amazing account of convent existence and day-to-day life within, _Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent_ (Viking), Mary Laven has expanded upon insights hinted at in Dava Sobel's _Galileo's Daughter_, wherein the daughter showed herself interested in science and in sending her father shirts and cookery. Some of the nuns may have been devoted to God, but even they had to be busy with laundry, cooking, and herbal remedies to keep the convent going. They were also not immune from gossip, laughing, friendship, and sexual intrigue. The convents in the 16th and 17th centuries were supposed to be islands of sinlessness walled away from the outside world, but Laven shows that sinless or not, the nuns had to participate in a larger society, and inescapably took on that society's characteristics.

Convents were supposed to keep nuns from the outside world and vice versa. There were veiled and grated communion windows where the nuns could line up and receive the host from the priest, without actually entering the church. There were walls to keep nuns from public view, and to keep them from looking out upon the sinful world. For passing things in and out of the convent, there might be a _ruota_ or wheel, a sort of revolving door that would prevent glimpses in and glimpses out. Convents were vital to the Venetian nobility. If a daughter could not be married, or could not be put on the marriage market with the enormous dowries Venetian law required, the convent was the one place she could go. Most of the nuns had the "forced vocation" of the convent imposed upon them, and others were tricked into it by relatives, some within the convent, who had misrepresented the benefits of such a life. There was stratification within the convents that mirrored society without. The aristocratic nuns could dress as they were used to, and they kept their family names, indicating a secular identity.

Of course there were sexual violations; Boccaccio's tales of convent hanky-panky might have been satire, but he knew that sexuality would show itself. _Virgins of Venice_, despite its lurid subtitle, is certainly not about sensational sex stories. This is a work of serious scholarship, but it is humorous and compassionate. Laven has drawn from contemporary sources, including the reports of inspections of the state magistracy that had been set up "to enforce the new laws that aspired to obliterate all contact - from the most innocent and inconspicuous to the flagrantly sexual - between the city's nuns and the outside world." Laven cannot support the feminist view that these enclosed women had resourcefully found a means of self-expression within their society; they were prisoners, who although they might be making the best of a bad situation, were under life sentences. The convents were brought to an end by Napoleon; one of the remaining ones had just the architecture to serve even now as a women's prison.

Rating:
Summary: Enough Already
Review: The topic of this book - a look into the convents of medieval/Renaissance Venice - is intriguing enough that I bought it in hardcover, something I rarely do. The first few chapters lived up to my expectations, providing well-researched and documented information about the life of these nuns, those with a vocation and those with little choice. The writer's style is also very readable. My problem with this book is that it became heavily redundant, to the point that it became a chore to reach the last page. Managed to finish it, with determination.