Nuns gone wild
Looking for music manuscripts, scholar Craig A. Monson uncovered surprising stories of what went on inside convents
Craig A. Monson, a music professor at Washington University in St. Louis, found this ribald ditty in a music manuscript he stumbled across in a museum in Florence 24 years ago. It seemed like a typical naughty lyric from the 16th century, the kind that might have been sung in a bawdy tavern. Except for one thing: The manuscript came from a convent.
We might think of nuns as deeply religious, quiet, and loath to cause trouble. But in the course of his research, Monson kept encountering a rebellious undercurrent in convent life: In 16th, 17th, and 18th-century Italy, nuns routinely sought loopholes in the edicts issued by local church authorities, and occasionally broke rules in spectacular fashion, giving local bishops and cardinals in Rome a huge headache.
The stories in his new book, “Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art & Arson in the Convents of Italy,” illustrate how much the role of religious communities like convents has changed over time. Entering a convent in Italy in this period was not always, as it is now, a voluntary lifetime commitment for especially pious women, Monson writes: Many upper-class women took the veil for practical reasons, or cultural ones. Convents offered security and respectability, and sending a daughter to a nunnery cost families less than marrying her off. Nuns also elected their own superiors, which gave them a certain degree of independence. And that is where the trouble began.
Poring through thick volumes of correspondence between the Vatican and local church authorities, Monson pieced together five of the most dramatic stories he found of misbehaving nuns in Italy during this period — nuns who plotted escapes, who burned down their own convent, and one who got caught sneaking out to the opera, disguised as an abbot. They are striking for the amount of detail and first-person testimony they include — the local bishops’ investigations of nuns’ misdeeds involved interviews, typically recorded word-for-word by church scribes.
Monson spoke to Ideas from his office in St. Louis. This interview was condensed from two separate conversations.
IDEAS: Where did convents fit into Italian society at that time, compared with convents in the United States today?
MONSON: I think we think today of convents as being a very marginal part of life, and kind of extraordinary, probably even exotic....But if you think for example in the city of Bologna...there were 24 convents....They were a central aspect of life, particularly for the upper classes.
IDEAS: Today we often think of nuns as being teachers, nurses, social workers. What was the function of convents in this era?
MONSON: They played such a wide variety of roles. On the one hand, they are an important social construction to provide for lots and lots of women when they can’t be provided with husbands....But they are also the parish churches in the neighborhood....One of their most important roles was as intercessors for the city and the neighborhood. These women were praying constantly....That was their main job, as intercessors with heaven.
IDEAS: And yet they didn’t always join for religious reasons.
MONSON: We’re talking about convents that were a bit like sanctified sorority houses. The reality for women of the upper classes was that normally a family might groom one daughter for the marriage market, but they didn’t want to give huge dowries for all their daughters, or they would squander all the family patrimony. So the other daughters were bound over to the nunneries.
IDEAS: Could they see family members or friends?
MONSON: You were excommunicated if you went outside the boundary of the cloister....The normal place that the outside world met the convent was in the room that was called the parlatorio....A double room, with a public room where the public could visit and then an inner room for the nuns, and there’s a grille that separates the two over the window.
IDEAS: So what are these tales you discovered about, essentially?
MONSON: These were women who were relatively well educated, from aristocratic families, locked up behind a wall where they are invisible, and they are given a certain amount of autonomy....One can see how they would have developed a certain amount of independence and created their own culture.
IDEAS: There’s one story about the nuns of San Niccolò di Strozzi who in 1673 burned down their own convent. Why arson?
MONSON: There are three ways of being released from obligation of monastic enclosure: pestilence, war and fire. Pestilence and war weren’t quite in the picture. So fire was the alternative. Apparently they voted...that they were going to do this.
IDEAS: These nuns eventually never did get to go home, though.
MONSON: No. They end up in another convent and ultimately came back to the rebuilt San Niccolò.
IDEAS: You also came across a convent in Pavia where a pair of nuns was investigated for running away from the convent. Why did they want to leave?
MONSON: A certain amount of laxity had developed within the house....The nun who fled describes herself as pious. When she was the prioress, she claims, she tried to reintroduce good behavior, but that had gotten her in such bad trouble that the other nuns had tried to poison her.
IDEAS: Because they were upset about restrictions on their freedom?
MONSON: Yes. So she said she left because she was disgusted. And of course leaving didn’t mean she ran off into the countryside. She went a few blocks away to another convent....At the same time one of her so-called disciples had been thrown out for bad behavior. And so she and this girl left together. And specifically, they were described as leaving hand-in-hand.
IDEAS: Why was that significant?
MONSON: It conveyed that they had what St. Teresa of Avila and others called a “particular friendship.” That meant that they had a...relationship that put their personal connection...above the relationships of the entire community.
IDEAS: So in convents, even very close friendships were suspect.
MONSON: Absolutely, because it might make people focus on each other rather than the wider community. Now the way it’s painted in the testimony of the other nuns, it is clearly a hyper-romantic relationship. There is a lot of talk about their having slept together, whatever that meant. But nobody says anything except they shared the same bed. Of course that was something the church hierarchy took an extremely dim view of. Nuns weren’t even supposed to share the same room.
IDEAS: What would you say surprised you most about these nuns, overall?
MONSON: I think it is how resourceful they were. I get troubled when people seem to regard them as victims....What interests me is the ways they manage to create lives for themselves that worked.
IDEAS: It seems like a really hard world for people today to appreciate.
MONSON: Absolutely. It is a different world. We have this idea that we deserve personal freedom and sexual fulfillment. Those are modern notions. They wouldn’t have thought that way....Your individual freedom might be less important than the good of the larger society, however it is perceived or constructed.
Lisa Wangsness is a Globe reporter. She can be reached at lwangsness@globe.com.
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