Behind Closed Doors

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

Venice in the late Renaissance was a city of fabulous wealth, reckless creativity, and growing social unrest. It was also a city of walls and secrets, ghettos and cloisters. In this captivating book, Cambridge historian Mary Laven uncovers the long-hidden stories of the "Virgins of Venice" and the surprising lives they led. Laven has created a detailed and dramatic tapestry of resourceful, determined, often passionate women who managed to lead fulfilling lives despite their virtual imprisonment. Far from being precincts of piety and silence, the convents were hotbeds of political scheming, colorful pageantry, and illicit love. Rich in intrigue and gossip, eye-opening in its revelations, Virgins of Venice brings to life a culturally vibrant period in Venice and the hidden residents who dwelled behind its walls.

To the sound of the organ, a procession of clerics files into the church, ushered in Cardinal Francesco Vendramin, successor to Matteo Zane as patriarch of Venice. Hidden from view in the choir, ninety-six nuns wait in anticipation while the priests celebrate mass below. Just one week ago, the women of San Zaccaria learned that their convent was to be subject to a new patriarchal visitation.

The abbess, Suor Andriana Gradenigo, and her deputies had hurriedly prepared the necessary documentation: the financial accounts of the convent, a register of all the nuns, noting their family names and ages, and a list of the priests who served in the church. We can be sure that they also toured the convent's extensive premises, quickly taking in the refectory, workroom, gardens and cloisters, as well as the dozens of private cells occupied by the aristocratic nuns, and sought to remove any obvious evidence of poor order. But seven days were scarcely enough time to accomplish major reforms, and in surveying the buildings, the convent superiors must have recalled with discomfort the instructions Patriarch Priuli had issued thirteen years earlier, which had somehow never been effected.

Now, in October 1609, San Zaccaria had been selected as the first convent to be inspected by the patriarch in a series of "pastoral visitations," which would take the best part of ten years to complete. Like Lorenzo Priuli, who had performed his own thorough inspection of the convents during the years 1592 to 1596, Vendramin took his duties as shepherd to the city's nuns most seriously. After mass, he made his way to the chapter, the room in which all the professed members of the community met regularly to discuss the business affairs of the convent. Occupying the abbess's throne, the cardinal preached to the nuns on "the heavenly dignity of being Christ's brides." There then followed the visita oculare, a full visual inspection of the convent church and living quarters, which ranged from checking the grates on the windows and the bolts on the doors to conducting a book-by-book examination of the library. Once Vendramin and his men had taken in as much as they could with their eyes, they prepared to continue their investigations using their ears. Every one of the nuns came before the patriarch in order to answer questions regarding life in the convent and, as often as not, to air grievances against one another.

The cacophony of tale telling that emerges from these records is ironic, for if there was a single issue that dominated the patriarch's questions, it was the maintenance of the common life. Enshrined in the three self-denying vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, this was the principle governing every detail of the monastic existence. The nun was supposed to live a life unencumbered by property, ambition and personal ties, and to love each and every one of her sisters equally. She was expected to eat from the common table in the refectory, to take her garments from the convent clothes store, to work alongside her sisters in the workroom and, of course, to participate in all the communal acts of worship. And yet, in reality, this ideal of community was honored chiefly in the breach. Time and again, the prelates who visited the convents found nuns asserting their individual and familial interests and fashioning their identities in willful opposition to the common life.

What would the patriarch have encountered once he had passed through the heavy gates of a Venetian convent? Judging from repeated remarks in the visitation records, it seems that his senses may first have been assailed by chickens. This in itself was not a matter of complaint. Just as convents had orchards and gardens in which fruit and vegetables were cultivated for the nuns' consumption, so they were encouraged to keep poultry in order to supply the community with eggs. The demand ran high, especially on Wednesdays and Saturdays, which were commonly fast days, but not fish days, when nuns were supplied with two eggs in the morning and a third in the evening, as an alternative to meat. Thus a community of one hundred nuns would need to garner at the very least six hundred eggs every week.

It was the manner in which the chickens were kept, rather than the chickens per se, that attracted the criticisms of the patriarch. At several convents, hens were to be found wandering around upstairs in the dormitory. An anonymous letter from a nun at Sant'Andrea de Zirada in 1609 complained that she could not proceed through the convent without walking in chicken shit. Vendramin's concern, however, was not hygiene but property. For the birds that strutted through the living quarters of the convent belonged to individual nuns. The point was clearly made by the patriarch in 1610, following his visitation to the convent of Ogni Santi, when he instructed the abbess to have slaughtered all chickens kept on an individual basis and ensure that the meat was consumed communally in the "public refectory." For the same reasons, nuns were not allowed to keep "either bitches or dogs" as pets. At San Biagio e Cataldo in 1593, the women were given twenty-four hours to get rid of their dogs; as for "birds, doves, hens and other poultry," kept privately for profit or as pets, these were to be put into common use within three days.

The issue of chicken ownership encapsulated the struggle between individuality and community that marked every aspect of the convent life. The patriarch would have seen the very same struggle being played out in the physical appearance of the nuns. The rules governing the dress and appearance of women in convents aimed at a modest and somber uniformity. Patriarch Vendramin exhorted the Sant'Andrea nuns to eschew fine and colored fabrics, especially silks; to wear a long wimple and a high-cut habit; and to cover their shoulders and breast with abundant veils. Their hair was, of course, to be cropped short, and "locks on the temples, and curls on the head" were expressly forbidden. Only flat shoes were allowed. The overclothes and underclothes of all the nuns were to be identical. In writing this detailed set of prohibitions and instructions, Vendramin was reacting to the transgressions he had witnessed at that convent. Elsewhere, he chastised nuns for wearing low-cut dresses and commented on their locks, curls and frizzes as "inventions of the devil."

Through their self-adornment and engagement with fashion (elaborate coiffures, gold jewelry, silk stockings, lace and those notorious high-heeled clogs for which the gentlewomen of Renaissance Venice were renowned), nuns expressed their opposition to the ideal of uniformity invoked by the prelates who inspected them. For some, the thrill of dressing up was intensified when they gained access to a mirror, or even a pane of glass, which allowed them the forbidden luxury of seeing their own images. Although the patriarch and his men urged the nuns to adopt a more modest style of dress, they were probably resigned to the fact that these women treasured their every item of clothing as an expression of personal identity and material status, and those who could afford to do otherwise would rarely consent to dress from the communal wardrobe. Many of these women had, after all, grown up in palaces; they came from the highest ranks of Venetian society. Small wonder that they took pleasure in the trappings of wealth and that they shared in their lay sisters' propensity for sumptuous self-adornment. When visiting San Biagio e Cataldo, Patriarch Priuli satisfied himself with instructing the nuns to use the vestiario (clothes store) as a repository for the garments of deceased nuns, thereby prohibiting items from being passed between nuns as personal bequests. But he acknowledged the perceived right of the women to have their clothes tailor-made from their own supplies of cloth. In contravention of the vow of poverty, personal possessions were an institutional reality, and an accepted fact of convent life.

The convention whereby nuns were allowed to have their own possessions and dispose of their own financial resources was neatly worked into the rules governing convents. Thus Patriarch Vendramin told the women of Sant'Andrea:

Since the nuns are prevented by their vow of poverty from having property, they are exhorted to follow the convention of other convents, that is to place their money in the safekeeping of the Mother Prioress... requesting that she put it aside until such occasion arises that they need to buy clothes... And they shall have only the use, not the dominion of such money.

By such reasoning, nuns' spending habits were legitimized. It was common for noble nuns to receive from their relatives extensive annual allowances, which would be placed in the hands of the convent superior but made readily available for their "needs" and "necessities."

The patriarch would also have been struck by evidence of personal property in the nuns' cells, which were viewed by many as private apartments to be furnished and adorned at their own expense. At Sant'Andrea in 1596, Patriarch Priuli urged the convent superiors to carry out unannounced inspections of the cells at least four times a year, and to search inside the chests, cupboards and desks of each to ensure that there was nothing in the way of "books, clothes, writings, dishonest paintings, dogs, birds, nor other animals" that did not conform to the rule. Again, the list of prohibitions gives us a fair indication of what might in fact be found in a nun's cell. The vow of poverty was contravened yet more brazenly when nuns saw fit to bequeath such fripperies to one another in their wills. Indeed, at San Daniel in 1604 the patriarchal visitors reported that the nuns made legacies not just of their clothes and furnishings, but of the cells themselves.

The private space of the cell posed fundamental contradictions to the communal ideal. Modesty required that every nun sleep alone, but the patriarchal authorities feared what might go on behind closed doors. Consequently, they insisted upon the removal of locks and bolts from cell doors and the burning of candles all night long throughout the sleeping quarters. As a further precaution, older nuns were appointed to check every cell after the night bell had rung. And yet the complaint was frequently made that nuns were sharing cells, a practice frowned upon not only because of the sexual temptations involved, but also because it constituted a violation of the common life. Conversely, the nuns of Corpus Domini were reprimanded for occupying more than one cell each. At Spirito Santo, nuns attracted criticism not only for their sleeping arrangements, but also for sewing and reading in groups of three or four in their cells.

The one private act within the cell that was sanctioned was prayer, but-as Patriarch Zane complained of the nuns of San Daniel-the time that was set aside for private devotions was too often given over to the pursuit of profit. For, in clear contravention of the ideals of poverty and community, nuns sewed and embroidered clothes, handkerchiefs and other accessories, which they sold outside the convent through intermediaries for personal gain. Such enterprises were sometimes combined with leisure and hospitality. Nuns kept personal supplies of food and wine (including leftovers taken from the refectory) in their chests and store cupboards to share among their friends.

The nun's cell offered a place of retreat from the common life. As well as being a repository of personal possessions, it was often the venue of selective sociability and a site for self-interested business activity. But the more public areas of the convent were also colonized by particular interest groups. The gardens of a nunnery were sometimes subdivided into a patchwork of individual plots in which nuns tended their own vegetables. And, despite repeated prohibitions, the parlors-where nuns received visitors from the outside world-were frequently the scene of private parties and family get-togethers. Even those members of the community who deigned to work in the convent workroom and eat in the refectory were apt to sit with their close friends and blood relations rather than adhere to the prescribed order of seniority. And groups of nuns who worked together-whether cooking in the kitchens, operating the looms or guarding the doors-often turned the place of their labor into a center for sociability where they ate, drank and made merry. At San Zaccaria the principal location of such "banquets" was the convent laundry.

Above all, convents were united and disunited along family lines. Nuns ate and slept with their sisters, cousins or aunts, and looked for chances to further their families' interests in the outside world. The custom of sending noble girls from the age of seven to board in the convents where their aunts were nuns reinforced the bonds of family and lineage that cut across the religious community.

Touring a convent in late Renaissance Venice, and speaking with its inmates, the patriarch and his assistant clergy became aware of a morass of alternative groupings and networks based on kinship, friendship, occupation and status. Such associations challenged the fundamental principles of convent life. Yet the institution itself was not without its formal hierarchies and divisions, and these could also be the source of tensions and enmities within the cloistered world.

To begin with, the convent population was made up of two distinct categories: monache da coro, or choir nuns, and converse, comparable to what we today call lay sisters. Technically, the difference between the two derived from the kind of vows they took. Choir nuns took full, solemn vows and progressed from the status of the novice to be first professed and then consecrated, whereas converse took simple vows once only. But if the technical distinction was somewhat subtle, the social distinction between the two groups was blindingly obvious. Converse were the social inferiors of choir nuns, and they were treated as such within the convent. They did not bring great wealth to the community, but they did bring their labor. It fell to them to carry out the menial chores, and they were excluded from privileges and power. The rationale behind this system was that the presence of converse liberated the choir nuns from the more mundane duties of convent life to enable them to devote themselves to the rigors of piety. But the custom whereby converse were employed by noble nuns as personal servants told another story. Choir nuns were not embarrassed to complain to the patriarchal authorities when the converse failed to act with sufficient deference or behaved "as if they were like us."

from Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent by Mary Laven, Copyright © 2003 Mary Laven, Published by Viking Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., all rights reserved, reprinted with permission from the publisher.

About the Author

Dr. Mary Laven is a lecturer in history at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College.