Locking up your daughters
Sarah Bradford VIRGINS OF VENICE: ENCLOSED LIVES AND BROKEN VOWS IN THE RENAISSANCE CONVENT by Mary Laven Penguin, £20, pp. 198, ISBN 0670896357 Readers seduced by the title into expecting salacious tales are in for a disappointment. This scholarly study of Venetian convents highlights one of the more unpleasant aspects of that glorious but introspective and claustrophobic city: the increasing control freakery of its governments. After the disastrous defeat at Agnadello in 1509, the once omnipotent Serene Republic found itself pushed back within the confines of its lagoon, its energies turned in upon itself. Decadence and lax discipline were blamed for the city's fall from grace; Venice was ahead of its time in the severity with which it imposed iron rules of enclosure on its numerous convents, preceding by some 50 years the new austerity of the Counter-Reformation. A
state magistracy was set up to supervise the city's convents: 'it fell to them,' Laven writes, '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,'
Feminists have seen the convent as a laudable space in which women could operate independently: the quasi-Stalinist efforts by the Venetian authorities to reduce convents to compulsory, often exaggerated, enclosure undermines this view. Yet ironically, as Mary Laven says, embedded in the records forged by male officials, acting on behalf of the institutions of church and state, are the lost voices of women in convents. One of the most heartrending was that of Sister Arcangela Tarabotti, aged 50, lamenting her 'enforced vocation' after 30 years of unhappy seclusion. Economics were a defining factor in these women's incarceration. Aristocratic families regarded convents as convenient dumping-grounds for their supernumerary daughters (Tarabotti, one of six sisters, was born lame and therefore unlikely to find a husband), a solution which would enable them to avoid not only the crippling expense of providing the girls with marriage dowries but also the lifelong costs of supporting spinsters who had no respectable means of earning their own living. The males of the Venetian aristocracy (it was unthinkable to marry outside the closed patrician circle) left the costs and responsibilities of marriage to their oldest brother, preferring the cheaper and more pleasurable alternative of sharing all-male households, thus further reducing the marriage options for Venetian girls for whom the stark future was `maritar' or 'monacar'.
Strenuous attempts were made not only to prevent men going in or nuns going out but even to prevent them catching a glimpse of the world outside. Windows were walled up, doors sealed, gardens put out of bounds. Religious women were to be not only physically but emotionally cut off from the world. Even innocent affection was condemned as 'the occasion and the root ... [of] all disorders'. Naturally women — and men — broke the rules; there was dancing in the nuns' parlours and during carnival masked men visited the convents for music and refreshments. Occasionally priest-confessors abused their privileged position; in 1561 one Padre Lion was publicly beheaded for 'living like a great Turk in his seraglio' surrounded by subservient nuns who looked after him and gratified his sexual desires. He even held nude beauty parades to pick the best of his flock.
Napoleon finished off the convents with his decree of 1810; their treasures were ransacked, the nuns expelled, the buildings turned to secular use as military barracks and, in one case, ironically, a women's prison. Mary Laven has provided a fascinating glimpse into the life which once existed behind those empty walls.
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