Abstract
Reviewed by: Liise Lehtsalu, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Hubert Wolf writes at the end of The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio, ‘what had sounded like an outrageous fantasy turned out to be a true story of a convent in scandal’ (371). The story that Wolf presents to his readers has all the components of a good scandal: a dominating novice mistress, innocent novices, false saints, broken confessionals, violations of monastic enclosure, murders, sexual encounters between nuns, and a priest exchanging French kisses with a nun. When the German princess Katharina von Hohenzollern entered the Regulated Franciscan Third Order convent of St Ambrogio in Rome in 1857, she did not expect having to escape the convent in summer 1859, fearing for her life. What had happened in St Ambrogio during the princess’s novitiate and the preceding decades became the subject of a trial by the Holy Office. The inquisition trial lasted until spring 1862 and concluded with the convictions of the abbess, the novice mistress and both confessors of St Ambrogio, as well as the dissolution of the convent and the suppression of the cult of the convent’s founder, Agnese Firrao. Wolf follows the inquisition trial from preliminary investigations through to the verdict and its aftermath. He quotes extensively from the trial records, which are part of the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and have only been accessible to researchers since 1998.
A historian of the Roman Inquisition and the Church in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Wolf provides a detailed overview of the inquisition process and contextualizes the case of St Ambrogio in the history of nineteenth-century German Catholicism and curial politics in Rome. Wolf’s analysis focuses on the second confessor of St Ambrogio, the Jesuit theologian and philosopher Joseph Kleutgen, aka padre Giuseppe Peters. Kleutgen played a leading role in the nineteenth-century revival of scholasticism and supported the dogma of papal infallibility. Wolf relates the outcome of the inquisition trial that saw Kleutgen receive minimal punishment, even though he had broken the confessional and his priestly vows, to the favourable position the Jesuits held in the Roman curia in the later-nineteenth century and the political victory of the Ultramondists in German Catholicism.
Wolf’s focus on the political and theological contexts surrounding St Ambrogio’s trial, and its sentencing in particular, underplay the fascinating history of convent life that emerges from his extensive citations of the trial record. Wolf uncritically adopts the term ‘lesbian’ to discuss sexual acts between nuns in St Ambrogio and leans on present-day psychology of childhood sexual abuse to interpret these acts. Unintentionally, perhaps, the story of the nuns of St Abrogio acquires a sensationalist tone, which recalls Denis Diderot’s famous La Religieuse and has also been the focus of the popular press reviews of Wolf’s book. Wolf fails to follow his own suggestion that ‘gender studies research is especially helpful’ for understanding the motivations of the novice mistress and the case of St Ambrogio (440, fn. 76). The tantalizing references in the quoted trial records to gendered practices of piety, mysticism and power are dismissed as feminine ‘manipulation’ (256) and ‘lust for power’ (267). Yet, the testimonies from St Ambrogio do reveal that the eighteenth-century feminization of religion and the early-nineteenth century resurgence of Marian devotion in Italy were still current in mid-nineteenth-century Rome. Moreover, the nineteenth-century spaces of female monasticism were not dissimilar from Italian convents before the Napoleonic suppressions. Marina Caffiero, in the introduction to her volume on the Church and modernity in Italy in the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, has stressed a continuity across this period in Italian history. The case of St Ambrogio should not be considered without reference to the history of female monasticism in early modern Italy, or the history of the Italian peninsula in the early-nineteenth century, especially the aftermath of the Napoleonic period and the developments of the Risorgimento. Unfortunately, Wolf presents the story of St Ambrogio as a German story, with limited regard to the physical and temporal context of the convent in Rome. Nevertheless, and even with these shortcomings, The Nuns of Sant’Ambrogio is a pleasurable read that has the character of a crime novel while also providing a detailed overview of the procedures of the Roman inquisition and access to extensive excerpts of a fascinating trial record.