Abstract
Sharon Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence, Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore MD, 2009; 280 pp., 11 halftones, 1 line drawing; 9780801892929, $52.00 (hbk)
In her new book, Sharon Strocchia argues convincingly that religious women and their institutions were central figures within the political culture and economic life of Renaissance Florence. The main aim of Strocchia’s book is to examine how nuns and nunneries (defined as broadly as possible) helped shape the Florentine state and economy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In Chapter One, Strocchia tracks the ‘spectacular but uneven’ growth (37) and changing social status of Florentine convents and their inhabitants between the mid-fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries. Forced monastic profession, in which families required some of their daughters to join a monastery rather than marry, was in part responsible for this expansion. Contrary to common assumptions, Strocchia argues that forced professions were not solely governed by a family’s desire to find a home for girls who could not marry. They were also the product of political motivations, since when heads of households attached their daughters to significant convents their own political and social status was enhanced. Strocchia also challenges Samuel Cohn’s claim that female monasteries received fewer testamentary legacies in the post-plague period as testators shifted their focus to other areas, pointing out the ‘lively stream’ of inter vivos donations to female monasteries which continued throughout the period. Wills, she reminds us, are only one source of information about the support offered for nuns.
Chapter Two, ‘Nuns, Neighbors and Kinsmen’, locates convents within the geography of the early modern city. Strocchia is alert to changes to the position of convents within the cityscape over the course of the Renaissance. She notes that as neighbourhoods became less politically significant in the city, convents, too, became less locally-focused, drawing their members from a broader area and buying up properties across the city.
Chapter Three, ‘The Renaissance Convent Economy’, traces the growing connections between the economies of female monasteries and the Florentine government in the fifteenth century, as nuns and their convents became ‘fully enmeshed’ in ‘the ebb and flow of urban economic life’ (73). The chapter also includes a close examination of convents’ financial strategies for survival, drawing together sources including tax reports and donation records to discover how convents managed their finances. Strocchia notes that Florentine nunneries were much poorer than the houses of their male religious counterparts, and even than nunneries in other cities, especially Venice. But institutional poverty did not necessarily mean individual penury. Nuns could and did receive allowances from family members which covered the cost of food, medical supplies, and luxuries such as books. Nuns who received such allowances – sometimes in the form of land – were thus in close connection with the outside world, since they had to receive rents from tenants. But since the convents were closely tied to the civic economy, when that economy weakened in the later fifteenth century, convents also fell into financial difficulty and had to be bailed out by civic authorities. Strocchia argues that this support demonstrated the fact that by the end of the fifteenth century nuns were perceived as belonging to ‘the city writ large’ rather than to any one political or social faction (109).
Chapter Four, ‘Invisible Hands’, examines the work done by nuns within their convents, and argues that nuns’ work was crucial to the economic survival of their institutions, but also to the development of particular urban industries, especially in the case of silk and gold thread production. Historians of women’s work should pay attention to Strocchia's conclusions here, since she identifies convent records as a useful alternative to guild records for information about women’s work in the Renaissance.
In Chapter Five, ‘Contesting the Boundaries of Enclosure’, Strocchia examines the history of nuns’ reclusion across the Renaissance, tying changes to the concept of reclusion to shifting ideas about public morality. Strocchia argues that until the sixteenth century, conflicts around claustration were often about ‘control of religious resources’ (153), and she argues that views of nuns as sexual libertines have been formed by politicized records which did not necessarily reflect the realities of the women’s lives.
The book makes valuable contributions to the history of religious women and to the historiography of the early modern city. Strocchia’s nuanced view of female agency and her insistence that we examine the rapport between religious women and urban institutions are particularly important. A few more reflections on the source base for the work would be useful. Strocchia has worked extremely thoroughly with a vast range of materials including notarial records, ecclesiastical documents, the records of Florentine municipal offices, and texts written by nuns themselves. In several cases she has corrected the data of earlier scholars, but I would also have liked to see more discussion of the nature of the records and how they were created, organized and saved. All in all, however, this is an important volume which deserves to be read and re-read not only by historians of the Renaissance church, but also by those interested in the histories of women, work and early modern urban culture.