Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View [Reprint ed.] 0754653374, 9780754653370

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Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

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Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe An Interdisciplinary View

Edited by

Cordula van Wyhe University of York, UK

First published 2008 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Cordula van Wyhe 2008

Cordula van Wyhe has asserted her moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women – Europe – History. I. Wyhe, Cordula van 255.9’094’0903 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View / edited by Cordula van Wyhe. p. cm. – (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5337-0 (alk. paper) 1. Monasticism and religious orders for women – Europe – History. I. Wyhe, Cordula van. BX4220.E85F46 2008 271’.9004–dc22

ISBN 9780754653370 (hbk)

2007045484

Contents Series Editor’s Preface List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Cordula van Wyhe

vii ix xiii xv xvii 1

Part I: Femininity and Sanctity 1

2

3

Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Naples Helen Hills

11

Clara Hortulana of Embach or How to Suffer Martyrdom in the Cloister Ulrike Strasser

39

How to Look Like a (Female) Saint: The Early Iconography of St Teresa of Avila Margit Thøfner

59

Part II: Convent Theatre and Music Making 4

5

6

Music and Misgiving: Attitudes Towards Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Spain Colleen Baade

81

Traditions and Priorities in Claudia Rusca’s Motet Book Robert L. Kendrick

97

The Wise and Foolish Virgins in Tuscan Convent Theatre Elissa B. Weaver

125

vi

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Part III: Spiritual Directorship 7

8

9

Soul Mates: Spiritual Friendship and Life-Writing in Early Modern Spain (and Beyond) Jodi Bilinkoff Barbe Acarie and her Spiritual Daughters: Women’s Spiritual Authority in Seventeenth-Century France Barbara B. Diefendorf The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ (1687): The Teresian Mystic Life and its Visual Representation in the Low Countries Cordula van Wyhe

143

155

173

Part IV: Community and Conflict 10

11

12

‘Little Angels’: Young Girls in Discalced Carmelite Convents (1562–1582) Alison Weber

211

Securing Souls or Telling Tales? The Politics of Cloistered Life in an English Convent Claire Walker

227

Writing the Thirty Years’ War: Convent Histories by Maria Anna Junius and Elisabeth Herold Charlotte Woodford

245

Selected Bibliography

261

Index

275

Series Editor’s Preface The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of ‘reformation’ with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as nonconfessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the ‘Catholic’ variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly. The period covered, 1300–1700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesus’s return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayle’s notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment. Thomas F. Mayer, Augustana College

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List of Illustrations 1.1 Luca Giordano, The Basilian nuns bring the relics of St Gregory of Armenia to Naples, Naples, S. Gregorio Armeno, 1684 (Photo: Massimo Velo). 1.2 Naples, Santa Maria della Sapienza, façade of convent church (copyright: the author). 1.3 Naples, San Gregorio Armeno, view from the nuns’ terraces (Photo: Massimo Velo). 1.4 Naples, Gesù Nuovo, the reliquaries in the chapel to left of choir (chapel of St Francis of Geronimo, formerly of the Madonna) (copyright: the author). 1.5 Frontispiece to Paolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia Vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli (Naples: Francesco Saverio, 1643) (copyright: The British Library, London). 1.6 Leonardo Carpentiero, Reliquary bust of St Patricia, 1625, Naples, Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro (Photo: Massimo Velo). 1.7 Naples, Cathedral: Treasury Chapel, looking towards the altar (Photo: Massimo Velo). 1.8 Naples, San Gregorio Armeno, convent church looking west, with nuns’ lower choir and frescoes by Luca Giordano (upper choir just visible through the grille) (Photo: Massimo Velo). 1.9 Naples, Seventeenth-Century Silver Reliquaries from San Gregorio Armeno (copyright: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano). 1.10 Pietro Miotte, The City of Naples with Thirteen Patron Saints (Rome: G. B. Rossini, 1648). San Gennaro is immediately to the left of the Virgin and Child, and St Patricia is 3rd from the right. 1.11 Stefano Maderno, St Cecilia, marble, 1600, Rome, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere (copyright: the author). 2.1 Carl Gustav Amling, Portrait of Clara Hortulana, in: Barnabas Kirchhueber, Der Gnaden=und Tugend= reiche Anger [...] (Munich, 1701, p. 59) (copyright: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich). 3.1 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstacy of St Teresa, marble and gilt bronze, 1647–52, Rome, Cornaro Chapel, Sta Maria della Vittoria (copyright: University of East Anglia).

12 14 14 19

22 27 28

35 36

37 38

55 61

 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 3.13 3.14 3.15 4.1

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Frontispiece, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Anonymous, ‘The Hearing of Confession’, [Willem de Pretere], Het Hantboexken der Sodaliteyt oft Broederschap van de H. Maeghet Maria inghestelt inde Societeyt IESV (Antwerp, 1615) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 2, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 3, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 4, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 6, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 8, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 17, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 5, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 12, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 21, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 29, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 23, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613); (copyright: the author). Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 24, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author). Portrait of Alfonsa González de Salazar, in: Miguel Toledano, Minerva sacra (Madrid, 1616) (copyright: Real Academia Española).

64

67 68 68 69 69 70 70 71 71 72 72 73 73 93

List of Illustrations

5.1 Giovanni Battista Riccardi, Iconografia della città e Castello di Milano, 1734, detail, façade of Santa Caterina in Brera (copyright: Civico Raccolta delle Stampe ‘A. Bertarelli’, Milan). 5.2 Francesco del Cairo, Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (with a Prelate) Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (photo: Daniel Martin).  5.3 Anonymous, Portrait of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo (copyright: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, authorisation no. F.112/06). 5.4 Cairo, sketch for Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (with a Prelate) (copyright: Polo Museale Fiorentino/Musei degli Uffizi, Florence).  6.1 Jacopo Robusti, Il Tintoretto, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).  6.2 Copy after Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Upton House, The Bearsted Collection (The National Trust) / NTPL / Angelo Hornak). 6.3 Copy after Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection).  9.1 ‘Voorbeelt van den inwendigen mensch’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26626). 9.2 ‘Pratyck van de verstervinge’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26637). 9.3 ‘Volherdinge in de verstervinge’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26640). 9.4 ‘Pratyck van de deugden’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26649). 9.5 ‘Gaven, end vruchten van den H. Geest’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26672). 9.6 ‘Tegenwoordigeyt Godts’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26682). 9.7 ‘Voorbeeldt der passien van der ziele’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26627). 9.8 ‘Tria, deum ad Misericordiam flectentia’, Plate 33, in: Jan David, Christeliicken waerseggher, de principale stucken van t’Christen geloof en leuen int cort begrijpende (Antwerp, 1603) (copyright: Cambridge University Library, Lib. 6.60.2.).

xi

100 104 105 106 126 127 128 179 184 185 187 188 191 194

195

xii

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

9.9 ‘Geestelycke Lesse voor het ghebet’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26691). 9.10 ‘Ghebet van ruste’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26705). 9.11 ‘Vereeninge des Herte met Godt’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26706). 10.1 Attr. to Juan de la Miseria, Portrait of Teresita de Cepeda holding the tiny figure (of Christ?) (copyright: Convent of Discalced Carmelite Nuns, San José, Seville).

200 204 206 218

Contributors Colleen Baade (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA and Concordia University, USA) Jodi Bilinkoff (University of North Carolina at Greensboro, USA) Barbara B. Diefendorf (Boston University, USA) Helen Hills (University of York, UK) Robert L. Kendrick (University of Chicago, USA) Ulrike Strasser (University of California, Irvine, USA) Margit Thøfner (University of East Anglia, UK) Claire Walker (University of Adelaide, Australia) Elissa B. Weaver (University of Chicago, USA) Alison Weber (University of Virginia, USA) Charlotte Woodford (Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK) Cordula van Wyhe (University of York, UK)

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgement is due to the British Academy, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and the Humanities of the University of Cambridge, the Macaulay Trevelyan Fund and Wolfson College, Cambridge, all of which generously supported the conference which led to this book. Thanks are also due to the attendees, chairs and other speakers of this conference whose participation benefited this book in many ways. I also wish to thank the publisher, Thomas Gray, for his support, and Prof. Jodi Bilinkoff, who assisted this publication with kind advice and comments. Finally, I wish to thank the contributors for their efficiency and patience during the course of preparing this publication. I am indebted to Ulinka Rublack, David Clifford and Paul Arblaster for their helpful suggestions on early drafts of the introduction.

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Abbreviations AAM

Archdiocesan Archives of Mechelen-Brussels.

AN

Archives nationales de France, Paris.



Archivio Diocesano, Naples.

ASM

Archivio di Stato di Milano.

ASN

Archivio di Stato, Naples, Corporazioni religiose soppresse.

ATSG

Archivio della Deputatzione della Cappella del Tresoro di San Gennaro, Naples.

Benedictine Statutes

Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation the Holy Rule of … S. Benedict … Delivered the English Religious Woemen of the Monastery Our Blessed Lady of the Perpetuall Virgin Mary Bruxelles and to all their Successours.

BNN

Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.

CWST

St Teresa of Avila, Complete Works, ed. and trans. by E. Allison Peers (3 vols, London, 1946).

Gnaden=Anger

Barnabas Kirchhueber, Der Gnaden=und Tugend=reiche Anger/Das ist: Die sonderbare grosse Gnaden/tugendsame Leben/vnd andere denck= vnd lob=würdige Begebenheiten/So in dem Uhr=alten vnd hochberühmten Gotts=Hauß/vnd jungfräulichen Closter S. Clarae Ordens in München bey S. Jacob am ANGER biß in die 480. Jahr verschlossen/vnd verborgen gelegen/nunmehr angemerckt vnd eröffnen. Getruckt zu München/bey Maria Magdalena Rauchin/ Wittib. Im Jahr 1701.

Herold

Oberschönenfeld, Klosterarchiv, ‘Die Chronik der Äbtissin Elisabeth Herold’, fol. 1−237.

ASDN

of to of in

xviii

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Junius

Maria Anna Junius, ‘Bamberg im Schweden-Kriege’, in Friedrich Karl Hümmer (ed.), Bericht des Historischen Vereins für die Pflege der Geschichte des ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg, 52 (1890), 1−168, 53 (1891), 169−230.

Procès apostolique

Archives du Carmel de Pontoise, ms. Procès apostolique de Marie de l’Incarnation.

ST

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica.

Introduction Cordula van Wyhe

Monasticism denotes an ascetic mode of living that demands removal from the world, subjection to religious vows, and the pursuit of its primary aim, perfecting one’s love of God. However, the monastic ideal has frequently been portrayed as a misconceived ideal. Denis Diderot, for example, characterised female monasticism in his novel La Religieuse (published 1796 and written 1760) as a compelling manifestation of a misunderstood Catholicism. Only family pressure and psychologically cunning strategies can lure young girls into the unnatural environment of an enclosed community of women who are victims of their own maliciousness, sexuality and rivalry, contorted and exacerbated by the oppressiveness of convent life. Diderot’s heroine Suzanne writes about her novitiate: ‘If one observed all its austerities one would never survive …. A novice-mistress … subjects you to a course of the most carefully calculated seduction. Her function is to darken still more the shades of night which surround you, to lull you into slumber, to throw dust into your eyes, to fascinate you’. Indeed, the failures, betrayals and falsities of convent life have long attracted the attention of scholars. The monastic experience, however, was not mere convent routine, stifling rather than energising the spiritual ideal, but was an integral part of the rich and diverse fabric of Catholic life. The complexity of European monasticism was not only contingent to time, locality and orders, but also to individual convents and abbeys and the range of individuals within them and belonging to the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies connected to them. The Protestant attempts to eradicate monasticism as a papist aberration had only encouraged a widespread revival and reform of the monastic ideal. There were, of course, several reform initiatives prior to the Protestant Reformation which continued to be significant after the  The argument that Denis Diderot does not take issue with Christianity in general, but merely with monasticism as ‘misunderstood Christianity’, was put forward by Leonard Tancock in his introduction to Denis Diderot, The Nun (London, Folio Society, 1972).  Ibid., p. 23.  Judith Brown, Immodest acts: the life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy (New York 1986); Craig Harline, The burdens of Sister Margaret: inside a seventeenth-century convent (New Haven and London, 2000).  Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 195–203; Patricia Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe (New York, 1996), pp. 95–111; Gabriella Zarri, ‘Gender, Religious Institutions and Social Discipline: The Reform of the Regulars’, in Judith Brown and Robert Davis (eds), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1998); Craig Harline, ‘Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries Before and After Trent’, Catholic Historical Review 581 (1995), 541–67; Anne Jacobson Schutte, ‘Religion, Spirituality and the Post-Tridentine Church’, in John Marino (ed.), Early Modern Italy. 1550–1786 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 125–42.



Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Council of Trent (1545–1563), such as St Colette’s (1381–1447) reforms of the Poor Clares (a branch still known as the Colettines) and the Franciscan friars. However, the Catholic response to Protestant criticism of the monastic ideal generated a confluence of political factors and economic resources which bolstered the unprecedented restoration and revitalisation of female monasticism in the second half of the sixteenth century. This revitalisation, however, should not be understood as a continuation of medieval conditions. As Kathryn Norberg put it: ‘Trent and the host of reformers who followed in the Church’s wake changed Catholicism and with it the position of women both within and outside the Church’. The surge of scholarly interest in religious women in early modern Europe during the last two decades has generated a more nuanced and detailed picture of post-Tridentine monasticism. One direction of studies, for example, focuses on the activities of the nun as writer and author of chronicles, letters and autobiographies, as artist, pedagogue, political activist, saint and mystic. The methodology of this strand of scholarship is based on sociological models and investigates the limitations and potentials created by religious, national and gender-specific perceptions and mentalities for the formation of individual and communal identity. While collections of most recent scholarship in early modern religion are available, a broader synthesis of studies in post-Tridentine female monasticism is still lacking. In this respect, the present collection of twelve essays addresses the multifaceted nature of female religious identity in early modern Europe from a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary viewpoint. By dismantling the boundaries between individual academic disciplines of history, art history, musicology and literary studies, this book produces new

 Élisabeth Lopez, Culture et sainteté: Colette de Corbie. 1381–1447 (Saint-Étienne, 1994).  For an overview of these processes, see R. Po-Chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 2005), esp. chs 1 and 2; for a collection of essays focusing on religious orders as disseminators and initiators of the Catholic Reform, see Richard L. DeMolen (ed.), Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation (New York, 1994).  Norberg, Kathryn, ‘The Counter-Reformation and Women: Religious and Lay’, John O’Malley (ed.), Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (St Louis, 1988), p. 134.  See, for example, Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (eds), Untold Sisters: Hispanic nuns in their own works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque, 1989); Silvia Evangelisti, ‘Art and the Advent of Clausura: The Convent of Saint Catherine of Siena in Tridentine Florence’, in Jonathan Nelson (ed.), Suor Plautilla Nelli. 1523–1588. First Woman Painter of Florence, Proceedings of the Symposium Florence, May 27 (Cadmo, 2000); Craig Monson, Disembodied voices: music and culture in an early modern Italian convent (Berkeley and London, 1995).  Recent studies on literature and female monasticism can be found in Marta V. Vincente, Luis R. Corteguera, Women, Texts and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World (Aldershot, 2003); a collection of essays with a strong focus on Italy is Craig Monson (ed.), The Crannied Wall. Women, Religion and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, 1992); a collection which contains a section on the early modern period is Gabriella Zarri and Lucetta Scaraffia (eds), Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge/ Mass., 1999).

Introduction



cross-cultural readings essential to a more comprehensive understanding of female spirituality in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The religious and cultural aspects of female monasticism in early modern Europe is an immense field. The essays therefore focus on four key areas of the female religious experience which have only recently come to the forefront of research, namely ‘Femininity and Sanctity’, ‘Convent Theatre and MusicMaking’, ‘Spiritual Directorship’ and ‘Community and Conflict’. Although, several important studies of these areas have appeared, the essays in this collection address aspects still needing primary investigation. Each section assembles case studies from various national contexts allowing the reader to examine specific local expressions of these aspects of convent life, while also observing transnational similarities. Moreover, the European perspective of the book corrects the over-emphasis on Italy in previous publications by presenting contributions on countries which have received much less scholarly attention, in particular France, the Low Countries and Germany.10 Owing to the multidisciplinary commitment of this study, a particularly wide variety of cultural artefacts are placed at the centre of individual discussions. Contributors investigate art and architecture, as well as writings and music commissioned or produced by or on behalf of early modern nuns. The contributors, however, also transcended disciplinary boundaries in order to achieve a genuinely interdisciplinary and integrated investigation of these cultural artefacts. Elissa Weaver, to choose only one example, draws on textual, musical and visual sources in her discussion of early modern convent theatre and thus illustrates that music and painting complemented and enhanced the theatrical experience. In such a manner, this book aims to picture the early modern nun not only as a ‘creator and purveyor of culture’ (Hufton) through her writings, but also through the visual and musical rhetoric she employs for the communication of her spirituality.11 A cluster of important studies which materialised in the new field of femininity and sanctity have shown that multiple models of holiness existed for women, even within the same locality. The first section of the present volume explores 10 For recent publications on non-Italian topics, see Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal and Kingston, 1990); Anne Conrad, Zwischen Kloster und Welt: Ursulinen and Jesuitinnen in der katholischen Reformbewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1991); Laurence Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life. French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism (Aldershot, 2005); Craig Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth-Century Convent (New Haven, London, 2000); Merry E. Wiesner, Gender, church, and state in early modern Germany: essays by Merry E. Wiesner (London, 1998); Amy Leonard, Nails in the Wall: Catholic Nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago, 2005); Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2003). 11 Olwen H. Hufton, Whatever happened to the history of the nun? (Egham, 1999), p. 8; Kate Lowe, ‘Nuns and Choice: Artistic Decision-Making in Medicean Florence’, in Eckhardt Marchand and Alison Wright, With and Without the Medici: Studies in Tuscan Art and Patronage. 1434–1530, (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 129–55; M. Dunn, ‘Nuns as Art Patrons: The Decoration of S. Marta al Collegio Romano’, Art Bulletin, 70 (September, 1988), 451–77; G. M. Radke, ‘Nuns and their Art: The Case of San Zaccaria in Renaissnce Venice’, Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2001), 430–59; Jeryldene Wood, Women, art, and spirituality: the Poor Clares of early modern Italy (Cambridge, 1996).



Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

the various strategies and media that nuns and clerics devised in pursuit of spiritual authority. Helen Hills investigates how the aristocratic nuns of the Santa Patrizia convent in Naples competed with the spiritual prestige of cults at other religious institutions in the city through the management and control of their relics. Relics were synonymous with the incorruptibility of the saintly body which has already been restored to its prelapsarian, divine state during life. As such they were tangible tokens of the doctrine of resurrection and the transience of physical decay. Combining a wealth of visual and textual primary sources in her analysis, Hills establishes intriguing parallels between architecture, relics and nuns. Nuns, according to Hills, were viewed themselves as living relics and their convent architecture as the reliquary in which they were displayed. Margit Thøfner and Ulrike Strasser then consider two other models of sanctity operating within seventeenth-century European culture. Ulrike Strasser introduces the female, charismatic sanctity of the Poor Clare Clara Hortulana (1662–1689) from the Angerkloster in Munich, whose visionary powers and ultimate martyrdom were promoted by dedicated male reformers after her death. Strasser investigates the adaptable, verbal conventions of hagiographic arguments with which Hortulana’s visionary experiences were made acceptable. The fact that various cultural models of female charismatic spirituality continued long after Trent should, according to Strasser, caution us not to regard the Tridentine reforms merely as an institutionalised infringement of the miraculous and mystical aspects of female monasticism. Thøfner then examines the visual construction of female sainthood in print by looking at the first visual hagiography of St Teresa of Avila, published by Collaert and Galle in Antwerp, as a celebration of her imminent beatification in 1614. Thøfner cogently illustrates that these images make the unusual aspects of Teresian sainthood publicly acceptable by rendering it with conventional patterns of sanctity. This visual strategy, according to Thøfner, aided the recognition of St Teresa’s form of sancity under post-Tridentine rules and helped to dispel the arguments against the compatibility of femininity and sanctity which her supporters faced in the quest of her canonisation. Theatre and music-making in early modern convents evidence the profusion of artistic expressions, yet also reveal the frictions generated by the social and artistic norms within which nuns operated. Colleen Baade introduces some of these fundamental polarities by investigating attitudes towards nuns’ musicmaking in more than two dozen constitutions of orders active in the almost one thousand houses present in seventeenth-century Spain. Music, often perceived as possessing a celestial beauty, could be conducive to pious edification and the devotional quality of the Divine Office and was even believed to bring about visions. Yet Baade emphasises that public performances in convents which were renowned for their musical expertise frequently compromised the observance of self-effacement and humility. Furthermore, polyphony or plainchant were regarded as a danger to monastic austerity, the preservation of meditation and contemplation. Robert Kendrick observes similar frictions in his examination of the relation between music-making and the institutional and spiritual identity of the Santa Catarina convent of the Humiliate order

Introduction



in seventeenth-century Milan. Kendrick points out that the convent’s most important musical manifestation, the publication of Sister Claudia Francesca Rusca’s (c. 1603–c. 1676) motet book in 1630, may have been aimed to give the convent a more prestigious musical presence, yet would also have compromised the public recognition of the Humiliate’s house as a model of the monastic ideal. In Kendrick’s view, the motet book is primarily reflective of Rusca’s own conservative musical education and the devotional and ritual peculiarities of the convent, rather than the episcopal, devotional and aesthetic priorities of the convent’s patron, Cardinal Frederigo Borromeo or an urban audience. Elissa Weaver augments this argument in her examination of the extent to which convent plays not only entertained and diverted, but also educated and strengthened the commitment to shared values. Weaver focuses on the particularly popular play of the five prudent and the five foolish virgins, based on Matthew 25, in its various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century versions. Weaver argues that the foolish virgins are anti-types of monastic virtues and as such thematise actual communal problems and individual failings such as pride, vanity and the inability to sever oneself from worldly things. The story and its staging could be reformulated and reinterpreted by various convents to fit their specific objectives and occasions and concerns. In this way, as Weaver points out, theatrical activities could function as a malleable forum for communal problem-solving. The spiritual guidance and direction of nuns, or pious women in general, was a vital part of the female religious experience in early modern Europe and forms the subject of the penultimate section of the book. Jodi Bilinkoff is concerned with the way in which spiritual ties between exemplary penitent women and their confessors were cultivated, conducted and recorded in the bibliographic life-writings of such women. These widely translated and disseminated texts were written by their spiritual directors to record these intimate and passionate, yet chaste, friendships, but also to promote the Catholic faith. Bilinkoff’s essay complements the focus of this book by investigating womens’ religiosity outside the convent. In her comparative approach, Bilinkoff looks at memoirs from across the Iberian Peninsula, France and Italy and some of Europe’s colonies. She investigates not only conventions of gender which informed these friendships, but also the motivations each partner had in seeking and fostering these bonds, and the erotic literary topoi through which they were represented. Barbara Diefendorf and Cordula van Wyhe then focus on spiritual directorship in Discalced Carmelite convents after St Teresa. Diefendorf is concerned with Barbe Acarie, mystic and foundress of the French branch of the Teresian order, whose example and teaching had a significant impact on the roles of prioresses and mistresses of novices in second-generation Carmelite communities. Acarie was formative in reinforcing the authority of the mother superior as spiritual director, which ultimately led to a wider acceptance of women imparting spiritual counsel nationwide. Acarie, according to Diefendorf, not only preserved and realised the Teresian ideas on spiritual directorship, but also the incarnational quality of Discalced Carmelite mysticism which was directly opposed to objectless prayer and



Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

abstract mysticism aimed at an immediate dissolution into the divine. Van Wyhe complements Diefendorf’s analysis by investigating how these Discalced Carmelite spiritual ideals were imparted visually to the ever-growing number of novices in convents after Teresa. The focal point is an anonymously authored emblem book entitled Idea Vitae Teresianae, published in 1686 in Antwerp, which also circulated in the Teresian convent in Pontoise, France, founded in 1605 by Barbe Acarie. Van Wyhe shows that the conceptual framework of this book combines the genuine incarnational and affective emotivity of Teresian mysticism as promoted by such women as Acarie with more Thomisticintellectual doctrines on the human mind, its faculties and the acquisition of virtues. In this way, this devotional book has to be regarded largely as a visual interpretation of the popular manual for the instruction of novices by Teresian friar Juan de Jesús María, the Calagurritan (1564–1615). The final section of this book is dedicated to the manifold causes of conflict and strife in female monastic communities and to the processes of resolution employed there. Alison Weber illustrates how the role of boarders (doncellas) in Discalced Carmelite convents could lead to a coalescence of interior and extraneous conflicts within the convent community. The presence of these young girls could clash with the monastic virtue of emotional detachment, but also potentially violated the Tridentine guidelines on the freedom of vocations and the minimum age of legal consent (which was sixteen). By focusing in particular on St Teresa’s attachment to her niece, Teresita de Cepeda, Weber unravels larger dissensions with regard to inter-convent controversies and family rivalries the saint accepted or actively attempted to circumvent. Ultimately, St Teresa’s perception of little girls allows for intriguing conclusions regarding ideas of childhood in early modern Europe. Claire Walker, on the other hand, looks at the strategies with which nuns could air dissent, negotiate power struggles and challenge authorities beyond the immediate convent community. On the basis of her investigation into the factional rivalries and rebellions in the English Benedictine convent in Brussels, as recorded in correspondence and missives, Walker illustrates that gossip can generate divisiveness and disunity in a monastic community, but can also be conducive to spiritual and political cohesion. Walker looks in particular at the gendered nature of gossip, the centrality of female spaces and networks and their formative role in constructing the desired identity of the individual nun and the community of which she is part. In the collection’s final essay, Charlotte Woodford is concerned with the way in which German monastic communities attempted to avert displacement, loss of land, exile and the resulting internal strife brought about by the Thirty Years War. Focusing on the recordings of these historical events by two abbesses, Woodford not only gives an account of the practical means by which the nuns coped with their ordeal and trials, but also examines a range of formulaic language such as literary tropes aimed to strengthen belief in divine providence and protection. In this way, Woodford argues, the historical chronicles were a means to impart trust in the durability and survival of the monastic community and reveal the nuns’ sense of their own history.

Introduction



The contributors share the belief that the early modern nun has to be viewed as an active agent rather than a passive receptor of social dictates and ecclesiastical wishes. Indeed, the idea that post-Tridentine Catholicism was a monolithic movement administered by a top-down enforcement of religious and institutional control has been replaced by a more nuanced picture which foregrounds the reciprocity, and adaptiveness, of the Roman Catholic belief system.12 The studies in this volume illustrate how nuns actively negotiated these reciprocal processes in response to their individual or communal needs. For example, Robert Kendrick argues that the personal musical proclivities and pedagogical concerns of the Italian nun Claudia Francesca Rusca primarily motivated the concept and publication of her motet book rather than the episcopal and devotional priorities of the convent’s patron. Alison Weber, furthermore, shows how St Teresa herself gave exception to the rule of her order and Tridentine decrees by admitting little girls to her convents who were not suitable for the austere way of life. Lastly, Ulrike Strasser, Jodi Bilinkoff and Margit Thøfner demonstrate the inherent malleability of visual and verbal conventions through which various forms of female sanctity could be appropriated and made to fit officially sanctioned models of holiness. In a different context, Barbara Diefendorf and Cordula van Wyhe illustrate the religious independence of Teresian nuns, who understood spiritual progress as a self-governing activity in a convent where the prioress was largely granted authority in spiritual matters above the male confessor. The Council of Trent’s demand for compulsory claustration had profound effects on female monasticism. This innovation has become a major focus of scholarly studies and is also a recurrent theme throughout this volume.13 Helen Hills, Colleen Baade, Claire Walker and Charlotte Woodford illustrate that the Tridentine enforcement of claustration has to be understood as a flexible schema which was constantly manipulated in response to local conditions rather than as a universal, seamless implementation of Roman legislation. Helen Hills, for example, illustrates how Neapolitan nuns circumvented the limitations of their claustration by deploying their portable and mobile relics within and beyond the convent walls, while Ulrike Strasser shows how intercessory prayer could transcend convent walls and create an ‘imagined 12 Simon Ditchfield, ‘Tridentine Worship and the Cult of Saints’, in Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 6, Reformation and Expansion, 1500–1600, R. Po-chia Hsia (ed.) (Cambridge 2007), pp. 201–24; see also Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700 (Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p. 2. 13 See, for example, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999), 1009– 30; Francesca Medioli, ‘Dimensions of the Cloister. Enclosure, Constraint and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, in Anne Jacobson Schutte, Thomas Kuehn and Silvana Seidel Menchi (eds), Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, 2002), pp. , 640–43; Silvia Evangelisti, ‘Art and the Advent of Clausura: The Convent of Saint Catherine of Siena in Tridentine Florence’, in Jonathan Nelson (ed.), Suor Plautilla Nelli, pp. 67–82; Katherine Gill, ‘Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman Examples’, in Craig Monson (ed.), The Crannied Wall, pp. 15–47; Jutta G. Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in late Renaissance Venice (Chicago, 1999), pp. 115–70.



Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

community’ of cloister and city, heaven and earth. Colleen Baade, meanwhile, argues that the public quality of music-making in Spanish convents and the practice of polyphony or plainchant caused frictions with the prescription of enclosure. Moreover, Claire Walker investigates the ‘verbal permeability’ of English convents through the communication of internal conflicts to the outside world via legitimate and illegitimate talk, while Charlotte Woodford shows how war disrupted enclosure either by intrusion of enemies or exile. The historiography of early modern nuns is a thriving and continuously expanding field of research. This collection of twelve essays is both an introduction to and a progress report on the field. I hope it will help stimulate further debates, revise old assumptions and forge new approaches.

Part I Femininity and Sanctity

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Chapter One

Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Naples Helen Hills

On the parapet of the nuns’ choir on the entrance wall of the convent church of San Gregorio Armeno in Naples three frescoes painted by Luca Giordano in 1684 show the arrival of the Greek Basilian nuns in Naples (Figs 1.1 and1.8). The central scene, with God above, shows the nuns holding the urn containing St Gregory of Armenia’s relics (Fig. 1.1). The subject of the relic’s arrival, not an easy one for a painter, must have been stipulated by the convent. Why were the nuns of San Gregorio intent on the depiction of their relics? What did relics mean to female enclosed orders at this date? In Counter-Reformation Europe, the central struggle was over spiritual authority – how conceived, constituted, and wherein vested. Recent scholarship has usefully examined how dynasties, such as the Savoy in Turin, exploited relics to advance their spiritual authority, but their deployment by women and especially by enclosed nuns remains relatively unexplored. As Jean-Claude Schmitt has emphasised, Incarnation  I am pleased to thank the British Academy for a Research Readership and a Small Research Grant which hugely facilitated research for and writing of this piece. In Naples I am indebted to the staff of the Biblioteca Nazionale, the Archivio di Stato, and P. Antonio Illibato, Director of the Archivio Diocesano, for their professional assistance. Special thanks to the Eccellentissima Deputazione della Cappella del Tesoro di San Gennaro, to Conte Alessandro d’Aquino dei Principi di Caramanico, to Dottore Ciro Giordano, General Secretary, and to the staff of the Archive of that institution. Provocative questions from participants at the conference at Wolfson College helped shape this paper, and Cordula van Wyhe’s attentive editing has improved it. Sarah Cormack and Alice Sanger made helpful suggestions at an early stage of rewriting. My thanks to colleagues in the Department of History of Art at York for a stimulating and congenial environment in which to write.  For an exemplary treatment of the dynastic exploitation of a relic, see John B. Scott, Architecture for the Shroud: Relic and Ritual in Turin (Chicago, 2003). For women’s use of relics, particularly the avid collector of relics Maria Maddalena of Austria, see Alice Sanger, ‘Women of Power: Studies in the Patronage of Medici Grand Duchesses and Regentesses 1565–1650’ (Unpublished PhD Diss., University of Manchester, 2002), pp. 143–69; Ulrike Strasser, ‘Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, decorated relics and the contest over women’s place in the public sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1999), 90. For the Discalced Carmelites’ exploitation of their relics, see Cordula van Wyhe, ‘Reformulating the Cult of Scherpenheuvel: Marie de’ Médicis and the Regina Pacis Statue in Cologne’, The Seventeenth Century Journal, 22, no. 1 (2007), 41–74. For the church and convent of San Gregorio Armeno, see Roberto Pane, Il monastero napoletano di San Gregorio Armeno (Naples, 1957), p. 86; and for an account of the frescoes by Giordano, 52 in all, most of which were executed in 1684,

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was not only a peculiar dogma, but a way of thinking, which marked all practices of Christianity. The Eucharist and the relic enjoy a complementary and contradictory coupling. Although women’s special relationship with the Eucharist has been explored with some energy, their relationship with relics remains neglected.

Fig. 1.1 Luca Giordano, The Basilian nuns bring the relics of St Gregory of Armenia to Naples, 1684, Naples, S. Gregorio Armeno (Photo: Massimo Velo). This chapter investigates how aristocratic nuns deployed relics to extend their spiritual presence across the city of Naples and to negotiate recognition of their spiritual authority when they were bound, at least in theory, by enclosure. It examines how post-Tridentine convents used holy relics to negotiate relative status, both social and devotional, within the city. Might relics have represented a spiritual authority for convents both within and outside their own walls? I consider these issues here alongside an exploration of the relationship between relics and conventual architecture. The exterior architecture of enclosed convents, unlike the architecture of other institutions, such as hospitals, had to represent its inmates in their absence (not alongside them). If it represented nuns’ virginal aristocratic bodies metonymically, might the relics owned and

see Vincenzo Rizzo, I Cinquantadue affreschi di Luca Giordano a S. Gregorio Armeno (Naples, 1992), esp. pp. 8, 52–3.  Jean-Claude Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, in E. Bozóky and A.-M. Helvétius (eds), Les reliques: Objets, cultes, symbols (Turnhout, 1999), p. 148.

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displayed by convents have functioned partly as its spiritual counterpart, representing in their absence both saints and nuns? This chapter, therefore, explores the ways in which female convents in postTridentine Naples sought to use the currency of relics to establish authority, when other claims to authority were either directly or indirectly denied them. It investigates the ways in which enclosed female orders sought to capitalise on spiritual resources, both centripetally, by attracting devotion to relics inside their churches and, more unusually, centrifugally, by mobilising relics outside their enclaves to extend their urban presence and spiritual authority. Although, at first sight, architecture and relics appear to be counterparts, functioning in radically different ways, this chapter investigates their inter-relationship, and it ends by suggesting that nuns themselves functioned as relics within their convent reliquaries. Beyond the Limits of Enclosure Architecture was the principal mode by which enclosed orders were able to announce their urban presence. The Dominican nuns at the convent of Santa Maria della Sapienza, for instance, constructed an impressive façade, raised above the rest of the city, which draws on the vocabulary of aristocratic palaces (Fig. 1.2). Urbanistically, too, convents drew attention to their power by creating squares in front of their church façades in a densely populated city, or by aggressively constructing ‘the vertical city’ with towering belvederes, soaring campanili, and commanding terraces, such as at the convent of San Gregorio Armeno (Fig. 1.3). Conventual architecture and urbanism were articulate modes of presence in an urban environment in the teeth of enclosure. Although strict enclosure was rarely adhered to, and although nuns frequently maintained close relationships with their blood families outside convents and enjoyed remarkable privileges within their convents, nevertheless – or indeed because of these irregularities – conventual architecture articulated a different story: the official narrative of enclosure, fortification, and regularity, in which apparent uniformity and regularity, proclaimed an absence of hierarchy within. Relics offered a flexibility which architecture did not. Unlike architecture, authenticated relics were recognised as inherently holy – and indeed were one of the most potent forms of authority. Unlike architecture, relics were only intermittently on display – the time and mode of that display lay under the aegis of the convent and could be strategically exploited. And, unlike architecture, relics were portable. As we shall see, they could be processed strategically into the city to occupy key sites during feasts, to make the presence of absent nuns  For a discussion of post-Tridentine Neapolitan convent architecture, see Helen Hills, ‘“Enamelled with the Blood of a Noble Lineage”: Tracing noble blood and female holiness in Early Modern Neapolitan convents and their architecture’, Church History, 73, no. 1 (March 2004), 1–40 and Invisible City: The Architecture of Devotion in Seventeenth-century Neapolitan Convents (Oxford and New York, 2004).

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Fig. 1.2 Naples, Santa Maria della Sapienza, façade of convent church (copyright: the author).

Fig 1.3 Naples, San Gregorio Armeno, view from the nuns’ terraces (Photo: Massimo Velo).

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felt urbanistically – even prosthetically – in what Patrick Geary, in a slightly different context, has called the ‘restructuring of sacred geography’. What Was a Relic? A relic was a trace which guaranteed aura. Theology bases the legitimacy of the cult of relics on the sacred character of the body of Christ destined to transmit a message of spiritual health through his incarnation, the Eucharist, his death, his resurrection, and guarantee of the resurrection of bodies on the day of the Last Judgement. God became incarnate and died for the sins of others; therefore all bodily events (including the terrible wounds of martyrs) were possible manifestations of grace. The belief in the authenticity of Christ’s corporal relics is logically contradicted by the Ascension and the Eucharist, as Guibert of Nogent made clear, since all the body of Christ mounted to Heaven. But the corpus sacramental, the host, is not a relic, a dead body, but a living body. The bodies of saints and brandia (objects that had been in close contact with saints’ bodies) became in the west a central focus for veneration. Relics were frequently regarded not merely as prompts to holiness, but as the saints themselves, already living with God in the incorrupt and glorified bodies that ordinary mortals would achieve only at the end of time. Some viewed saints’ bodily remains as pignora, or security deposits, left by the saints on their deaths as guarantees of their continuing interest in those living on earth. At the end of the world the saint’s body would rise and be glorified; in the meantime, the saint continued to live and to work through it. Either way, the cult of relics emphasised the body as the locus of the sacred. In the West the cult of relics began theologically with St Augustine, but was further defined in the Middle Ages under the pressure of heretical movements which denied their value. Augustine represents a fundamental stage in the confirmation of the cult of relics. In De Civitate Dei he proposes in effect the power of the saints and their relics, based on the resurrection of Christ,  Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978).  On the cult of relics, see especially Peter Dinzelbacher and D. R. Bauer (eds), Heiligen Verehrung in Geschichte und Gegenwart (Ostfildern, 1990); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995) and ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages’, in Michael Feher, R. Naddaff and N. Tazi (eds), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part I (New York, 1989), p. 163; Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994), p. 202; Alain Joblin, ‘L’attitude des Protestants face aux reliques’, in Bozóky and Helvétius (eds), Les reliques, pp. 123–41; JeanClaude Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, pp. 145–68; F. Scorza Barcellona, ‘Le Origini’, in A. Benvenuti et al. (eds), Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome, 2005), pp. 52–61; S. Boesch Gajano, ‘La strutturazione della cristianità occidentale’, in A. Benvenuti et al. (eds), Storia della santità, pp. 105–8; E. Bozóky, ‘Voyages de reliques et demonstration du pouvoir aux temps féodaux’, in Voyages et Voyageurs au Moyen Âge (Paris, 1996), pp. 267–80; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London, 1994), esp. p. xxi.

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as capable of accomplishing miracles of healing and resurrection of bodies, as sign and guarantee of the possibility of the final resurrection of all bodies through analogy with the resurrection of Christ. Gregory the Great suggested that the saints’ virtus works through their living bodies and through their mortal remains, sanctifying the places marked by their contact; but this virtus, which seems to work spontaneously, is always related theologically to God and to faith in God. Thomas Aquinas justified the cult of relics as a normal consequence of the cult of saints, ‘temples and organs of the Holy Spirit which lived in them and which worked in them’. God shows his agreement by multiplying miracles in their presence. For Aquinas, as for Gregory, there is no relationship of cause and effect between relic and miracle, the relic does not possess power to execute miracles: through the miracle God reveals the virtues of the saint. Aquinas attributes dignity and sanctity to saints’ bodies only ‘because of the soul which once was united with them and now enjoys God, and because of God, of whom the soul and the body were servants’.10 But the relic is important, because it is the body. The human person for Aquinas is a tight and integral union of soul and body; indeed, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body seems to require a theory of the person in which body is integral. According to Aquinas, the soul survives the death of the body, but the full person does not exist until matter (the body) is restored to its form at the end of time. ‘The soul ... is not the full man and my soul is not I.’11 What is temporary is not physical distinctiveness – including gender – but decay of material being. It is this conception of body as integral to personhood that helps explain why relics were treated as if they were the saints. Historical and heavenly imaginaries are combined in the relic: bodies not only reflected the glory of their souls in God’s presence, but were also the  St Augustine, De Civitate Dei, xxii, 8; S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Reliques et pouvoirs’, in Bozóky and Helvétius (eds), Les reliques, pp. 260–61; S. Boesch Gajano, ‘Verità e pubblicità: i racconti di miracoli nel libro XXII del De Civitate Dei’, in E. Cavalcanti (ed.), Il ‘De Civitate Dei’. L’Opera, le interpretazioni, l’influsso (Vienna, 1996), pp. 367–88.  Gregory the Great, Dialogues, ii, 38, A. de Vogué (ed.) (Paris, 1979), pp. 246–8. See also John M. McCulloh, ‘The Cult of Relics in the Letters and Dialogues of Pope Gregory the Great’, Traditio 32 (1975), pp. 145–84.  He argues that no form of veneration should be paid to dead saints, but that they should be accorded religious honour. ‘quae fuerunt templa et organa Spiritus Sancti in eis habitantis et operantis’, St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3a, 25, art.6, trans. and ed. by C. E. O’Neill (London, 1965), pp. 202–3. 10 ‘sed propter animam quae fuit ei unita, quae nunc fruitur Deo; et propter Deum, cujus fuerunt ministri’, St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, pp. 204–5. 11 ‘anima ... non est totus homo et anima mea non est ego’, St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on 1 Cor. 15, lect. 2. The body was necessary for Aquinas, but he tended to telescope body into form by seeing soul as sufficient to count for individual continuity and soul as the forma corporeitatis. Soul thus accounts for the ‘whatness’ of body; any matter that soul informs at the end of time will be its body. Aquinas’ opponents gave even greater positive significance to the body, holding that there is a separate forma corporeitatis, and material continuity in the resurrection. In Bonaventure’s view, the blessed in heaven pray for sinners more intensely because they will only receive their bodies when the number of the elect is complete and Judgment comes. Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, p. 192.

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place where persons were rewarded in their specificity. Relics were signs of the non-putrefaction of the saintly body. Each fragment keeps the virtus of the integral whole body. Hence, there is a relationship between the crucial place of female virginity in female sanctity and the emphasis on the intactness of female saints’ bodies long after burial.12 Relics occupy an ambiguous position at the crossroads of the mundane and the divine. The saint’s relic is at once historical, bearing the gesta of the saint, but it is also celestial, representing someone invisible, omnipresent, and eternally alive. It is this ability to look in both directions simultaneously, forward and back, into heaven and onto life on earth, and (unlike Christ) to be still unequivocably embodied, that gives saints’ relics their authority and power.13 In the face of Protestant criticism of relics as superstitious and idolatrous, spearheaded by Calvin’s Traité des reliques (Geneva, 1543), the 25th Session of the Council of Trent reaffirmed that bodies of saints were members of the Church and could be intermediaries.14 A great effort of ecclesiastical historiography conferred on relics a theoretical and historical legitimation. Cesare Baronio’s Martyrologium Romanum (Rome, 1584, 2nd edn 1586) and the monumental work of the Bollandists, Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (published from 1643) were fundamental.15 Relics became an object of investigation, objects capable of confirming the ancientness of a cult but also of belying or betraying it, depending on historical evidence. The holy bodies, Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice’, p. 195. Not all relics were equal. Whole bodies (corpora) were most valued and were usually distinguished from reliquiae, or fragments. All objects that came into contact with Christ, the Virgin and Saints were ‘real relics’, such as fragments of the Cross, instruments of the Passion, etc. ‘Representative relics’ were objects which had touched the bones of the saint or his or her tomb, such as oil of the lamp burning on a tomb, pieces of cloth or flowers left there, dust, rosary or flowers that touched the corpse, or cloth imbued with blood or sweat. The most valued relics usually included whole body limbs, the heart and tongue; ‘peripheral’ relics included hair, skin, and clothes. Most images, unlike relics, were not objects of veneratio. They are, in this context, inferior to relics and to sacred objects, such as the Eucharist and the Cross (which is the signum of Christ – not an imago). 14 ‘Those who maintain that veneration and honor are not due to the relics of the saints, or that these and other memorials are honoured by the faithful without profit … are to be utterly condemned’, Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (St Louis, 1960), p. 215. From the sixteenth century on Reformers criticised the cult of relics as superstitious, idolatrous, and corrupting to the Church. Martin Luther criticised the veneration of relics, which he associated with indulgences and pilgrimages, in the 1537 Schmalkaldic Articles. To Luther the cult of relics led people to place their faith ‘elsewhere’ than in God. See Alain Joblin, ‘L’attitude des protestants face aux reliques’, in Bozóky and Helvétius’ (eds), Les reliques, pp. 123–41. But Calvin’s attack was more radical. He did not want relic practices to be corrected but to be abolished altogether, and he firmly rejected a religion of ‘display which affords bodies great significance’ (‘l’ostentation qui donne une grande place aux corps’), Jean Calvin, Traité des reliques ou advertissement très utile du grand profit qui reviendrait à la chrestienté s’il se faisoit inventaire de tous les corps saints et reliques qui sont tant en Italie qu’en France (Geneva, 1543). 15 This extraordinary effort of historical erudition found official recognition in the work of Prospero Lambertini, future Pope Benedict XIV, in his Benedictus XIV, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Bologna, 1734–38). See Simon Ditchfield, ‘Leggere e vedere Roma come icona culturale’, in Luigi Fiorani and Adriano Prosperi (eds), Storia d’Italia: Annali 16 Roma, la città del Papa (Turin, 2000), pp. 33–72. 12 13

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as bodies of saints who had really existed, were consequently objects endowed with a power capable of shining outwards and of impregnating not only the place of burial but also all objects coming into contact with them.16 Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) argued in De ecclesia militante that relative doulia (veneration) was due to relics and absolute doulia was due to the saints. Saints’ relics were marshalled as proof of the saints’ power during their life and after their death, and as guarantees of the afterlife of the soul and of the resurrection of the body at the end of time. While they remained anonymous, one bone was the same as another. What made one a relic was its authenticity, a social recognition of its origin and its power.17 This required a staging that was material, ritual, and imaged, in which the ostensio played a crucial part. A relic is therefore a social product. Relics might become precious objects, capable of confirming prestige on their possessors and donors, but, like any currency, their value was never fixed: even an authenticated relic, without a cult, becomes just a bone. This collective and material dimension does not preclude a spiritual and individual one. The play of power resides in the management and control of the sacred, as the Jesuits understood when they proudly displayed their amassed relics in a bank of spiritual capital in the Gesù Nuovo in Naples (Fig. 1.4) and as Cardinal Federigo Borromeo famously acknowledged in a sermon in Milan Cathedral to celebrate the translation of a grand collection of relics, displayed for the occasion in a pyramid at the altar in 1609.18 Such relic treasuries nicely mingled signs of sanctity and benefaction. I explore below how the nuns of Santa Patrizia in Naples sought to organise the cult of their prized relics, and to transform the relic from a passive object into a ‘site’, recognised as possessing holy authority, and to use that authority to enhance the standing of their own convent. This capacity could not be effected once and for all; it had to be constantly renegotiated and maintained. Thus conventual power always depended in part on the successful promotion of their relics. 16 Boesch Gajano, ‘Reliques et pouvoirs’, pp. 255–69. Most literature concentrates on relics in the medieval period, but for Carlo Borromeo’s famous procession of relics, see Carlo Bescapè, De vita et rebus gestis Caroli Borromaei, trans. G. Fassi (Milan, 1965), esp. pp. 300–306, 554–61, 564–7, and for its impetus see G. Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, Rivista di storia di letteratura religiosa (1985), vol. iii, pp. 383–418. Filippo Neri often descended into the Roman catacombs where he became enraptured by the presence of early Christian martyrs. Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes: Gregory XIII (1572–1585), R. F. Kerr and E. Graf (eds) (35 vols, London, 1930), xxx, p. 164. 17 Although the power of relics might seem to be an interior immanent power, or virtus, a sort of mana, recognisable in itself, beyond the manifestations which served to confirm it, nevertheless, that power had, of course, a social dimension. 18 ‘Sei tu peccatore?... Sei tu terra? Ecco che avanti a te è il Paradiso. Ecco i corpi de’ Martiri e de’ Confessori’, he announced. Quoted by Signorotto, ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, p. 401. The relics at the Gesù Nuovo are listed in ‘Catalogus Sanctorum Quorum Corpora, vel Reliquiae’ of 1681, a long document, held in the archive and library of the Gesù Nuovo, Naples (shelfmark 8.b.33). The logic which presides in the enumeration of each item indicates the reservoir of their unlimited powers, as well as furnishing a litany of saints’ names which could be invoked for intercession. For the reliquaries of the Gesù Nuovo, see R. U. Montini, La chiesa del Gesù (Naples, 1956), pp. 66–7; A. Gonzalez-Palacios, ‘Un adornamento vicereale per Napoli’, in Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli (2 vols, exh. cat. Naples, 1984), ii, p. 286.

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Fig. 1.4 Naples, Gesù Nuovo, Chapel of St Francis of Geronimo (formerly of the Madonna). Reliquaries.

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How Did Nuns Use Relics? Seventeenth-century sources reveal a hunger for relics, for their possession, for close contact with them by touching and kissing.19 Relics promised a relationship with the sacred that was unusually direct and personal, potentially bypassing ecclesiastical machinery. But the desire to see, to touch, to eat was opposed the refusal to have frequent communion, the enclosure of relics, the closure of the retable.20 From the sixth and seventh centuries, attempts were made to ensure that relics – res sacrae – could be touched only by priests or subdeacons (although practice shows that there were numerous exceptions).21 The Church was anxious that women should not appropriate the authority of relics. The Congregation of Bishops and Regulars decreed on 7 March 1627 that saints’ relics should not be kept inside female convents, but should be conserved decently in their exterior churches.22 In spite of this decree, Marc’Antonio Boldetti observed in his Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterj de’ Santi Martiri (Rome, 1720) that relics continued to be kept in the enclosed area of many convents in Rome, including San Silvestro in Capite, Regina Coeli, Santa Teresa on the Quirinale, since in their churches, there ‘is no place suitable for their more secure and more decent conservation’.23 Opposition to nuns’ holding relics in their enclosed convents was similar to seculars holding relics in their private homes. The issue was one of access to the authority of holiness. Boldetti reminded his readers that antique Christians had not allowed saints’ remains to be kept in private houses and that when St Paul wanted to keep holy relics in his father’s house, he first had it consecrated as a temple.24 Keeping bodies of saints and illustrious relics in private houses was not fitting and not to be tolerated. Instead they should be kept in holy places, such as churches, for the public benefit of all worshippers. And, referring to the authority of the Church Doctors, Boldetti adds that lay people may not properly exercise any control over relics.25 Opposition to nuns’ holding relics in their enclosed (inner) churches stemmed from a sense of power improperly abrogated. Thus, in spite of the high social standing of the nuns at Santa Maria in Campo Marzio in Rome, Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85) justified removing the body relic of St Gregory of Nazianzus (329–89) from their convent on the grounds that ‘it did not seem fitting to him that such a sacred relic should be kept locked up in such a humble place’.26 In 1580 it was deposited with all due I explore this in my forthcoming book. Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, p. 149. 21 A. Dierkens, ‘Du bon (et du mauvais) usage des reliquiares au Moyen Âge’, in Bozóky and Helvétius (eds), Les reliques, p. 246. 22 ‘Reliquiae non in Monasteriis monialium, sed in exterioribus Ecclesiis asservari debent, ut de locis decentibus provideatur’, Marc’Antonio Boldetti, Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterj de’ Santi Martiri (Rome, 1720), p. 729. 23 Ibid., p. 727–8. 24 Ibid., pp. 726–7. 25 ‘reliquiae non possunt esse Laicorum, nec in dominio eorum’, ibid., p. 727. 26 Giuseppe Vasi, Delle Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna Libro Ottavo che contiene i Monasteri Conservatori di Donne […] (Rome, 1758), p. viii. 19 20

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ceremony in the Cappella Gregoriana in St Peter’s basilica. The Pope, however, magnanimously left the convent one of the saint’s arms, since it was, after all, the nuns who had brought the saint to Rome.27 From their point of view, however, holding relics in their inner churches allowed nuns to form and assert more exclusive and tighter relationships with their saints. Centripetal and Centrifugal Uses of Relics: The Case of Santa Patrizia, Naples A particularly interesting example of a convent’s exploitation of relics in order to extend its spiritual authority occurred at the aristocratic convent of Santa Patrizia in early seventeenth-century Naples, which held the body and prized relics of St Patricia. It is worth dwelling on this example, to which we now turn. Born in c. 340, grand-daughter of Constantine and raised by St Helena, who had discovered the True Cross and thereby become the first relic collector, Patricia showed particular affection for the church of Santi Nicandro e Marciano in Naples, declaring that here would be her resting-place (‘haec est requies mea’); and when in 365 the oxen pulling her coffin stopped there, it was decided to bury her there. Her followers’ reluctance to leave the monastery thereafter led to the foundation of the convent of Santa Patrizia.28 The nuns kept St Patricia’s body and other prized relics inside their inner church, which was larger than the outer one, and of greater sacred value, since it was the ancient church of Santi Nicandro e Marciano. The Neapolitan historian Carlo Celano describes the reliquary for St Patricia’s body, kept in the altar of the nuns’ church: ‘In this altar there is a silver casket, seven palmi long, and gilded in many places, with very fine glass windows, where the body of the holy virgin Patricia is conserved, who, for the many graces received by Neapolitans, is inscribed in the number of protector saints’.29 St Patricia is marked as a 27 Giuseppe Vasi, Delle Magnificenze di Roma [...] Libro Ottavo, p. viii; F. Borsi, ‘L’Antico Convento di Santa Maria in Campo Marzio’, in Franco Borsi, P. B. Storoni et al. (eds), Santa Maria in Campo Marzio (Rome, 1987), p. 18; Luca Beltrami, La Roma di Gregorio XIII negli “Avvisi” alla Corte Sabauda (Milan, 1917), p. 36; Louise Rice, The Altars and Altarpieces of New St. Peter’s (Cambridge Mass., 1999), pp. 289–91. 28 Carlo Celano, Notizie del Bello dell’Antico e del Curioso della Città di Napoli, G. B. Chiarini (ed.) (4 vols, Naples, 1858), iii, p. 78. The convent and church were partly built with money left by Patricia. Soon many aristocratic women, inspired by her name, took the veil there. Paolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli, Descritta già da Monsignor Paolo Regio, Vescovo di Vico Equense, e poi rinovata, & ampliata da Cleonte Torbizi, ad istanza delle molte Reveren. Monache del Monasterio di S. Patricia di Napoli (Naples, 1643), p. 40. For the absence of a regular order and rule at the convent of S. Patrizia before Trent, see A. Facchiano, ‘Monasteri Benedettini o Capitoli di Canonichesse? L’esempio di S. Patrizia di Napoli’, Benedictina 38 (1991), 35–60. After Trent it was Benedictine. 29 ‘In detto Altare vedesi una cassa d’argento sette palmi lunga ed in molte parti dorata, con finissimi vetri, dove si conserva il corpo della Santa Vergine Partizia, quale per le molte grazie ricevute dai Napolitani sta ascritta al numero dei Santi Protettori’; Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol.

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Fig. 1.5

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Frontispiece to Paolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia Vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli (Naples: Francesco Saverio, 1643) (copyright: The British Library, London).

iii, p. 80. The report of the Visitation of the convent of Santa Patrizia made in 1617 notes the many relics, including those of St Patricia, around the main altar of the nuns’ church. Archivio Diocesano, Naples (hereafter ASDN), Vicario delle Monache, mss 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1617), n. fol.; the report of the Visitation of 11 July 1642 expressly refers to the exposition on the altar in the inner church of the relics and blood of Saint Patricia and relics of other saints. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache, mss 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita, 1642), n. fol.

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special model for the nuns at the convent dedicated to her. Her body, her relics, are kept in particularly intimate, exclusive association with the nuns, through the privileged space of their inner church. St Patricia was as possessive of the convent as its inmates were of her. That relationship, at once jealous and proud, emerges clearly in Paolo Regio and Cleonte Torbizi’s Vita di S. Patricia vergine (Naples, 1643), a vita produced at the insistence of the nuns of the convent of Santa Patrizia. The frontispiece’s illustrated vignettes demonstrate the closely woven relationship between saint, place, and relic (Fig. 1.5) and the text reveals how the holiness of St Patricia and her relics was contagious. First, the authors suggest that the celebratedly noble blood of the convent’s virginal inmates was due to St Patricia herself: ‘one could expect no less from the presence and name of St Patricia, who conjoined nobility of blood with holiness of spirit, to the point that one could not say which in her was greater’.30 Indeed, by the seventeenth century Santa Patrizia was amongst the most socially exclusive of Naples’ many convents. Most of its inmates were from the aristocratic families, the prestigious Seggi of Nido and Capuana, from which number the four protectors or governors of the convent were also drawn.31 Indeed, the convent’s nobility was exalted by the preacher Francesco Porcelli, who described it in 1625 as ‘rather like a rich and exclusive exchequer, which does not admit jewels except from the fine nobility of the Seggi, and no rubies apart from daughters of noble blood’.32 Noble blood and dead saints’ bones formed the dual critical currencies of this exclusive exchange. Second, just as St Patricia and her relics set the tone for the convent socially, so the nuns’ religious life was stimulated there by the relics which St Patricia had brought with her from Constantinople. These included the real relics of fragments of the Cross, and a blood-stained nail, as well as the Virgin’s hair and milk, and St Bartholomew’s skin and blood, which the nuns kept in their church and ‘just as they are reverently kept and honoured by the … nuns, so in return they protect from Heaven those devoted [nuns], and constantly encourage them to reach every sort of perfection’.33 St Patricia herself had worn on her right Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, pp. 41–3. The Seggi were five district subdivisions of the aristocracy of the city of Naples, with closed membership after the early sixteenth century. For a more detailed discussion of the relationship between the Seggi and convents, see Hills, Invisible City, pp. 35–44. In 1585 the convent of Santa Patrizia held, amongst others, members from the socially distinguished Brancaccio, Caracciolo, della Tolfa, de Tocco, Piscicello, Galeotta, Bozzuto, de Loffredo and Capece families, Archivio di Stato, Naples, Corporazioni religiose soppresse (hereafter ASN, Corp. relig. sop.), S. Patrizia, ms 3459, O. Maz. III n. 13, n. fol. The protectors supervised the accounts and administration of the Procurators of the convent, see A. Facchiano, ‘Monasteri Benedettini o Capitoli di Canonichesse?’, p. 36. 32 ‘quasi ricco e serbato erario, non amette altri gioielli che de fina nobiltà de piazza, e non altri rubbiuni che figlie di cavallerscho sangue’. Francesco Porcelli, Breve discorso nel quale si narrano i motivi della città di Napoli in reintegrare alla sua Padronanza la vergine s. Patrizia (Naples, 1625), appendix to Torbizi, Vita di s. Patricia vergine (Rome, 1633). 33 ‘le quali […], come dalle dette Religiose sono riverentemente custodite, & honorate, così all’incontro proteggono le loro divote dal Cielo, e le sollecitano continuamente ad’esser in ogni sorte di perfettione compite’; Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, pp. 41–3. 30 31

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arm four particularly precious real relics, of impeccable genealogy (‘probably inherited from St Helena’), as a sign that she was not only Christ’s spouse but also his slave, just as she wanted her daughters to be. These relics prompted both Patricia and the nuns to a more virtuous life. The thorn that had pierced Christ’s temples was to be ‘a constant thorn in their hearts’, the fragment of Christ’s clothing was to remind them that they should always strive to dress like Christ; and the nail invited them to nail themselves perpetually to the cross of perfect mortification of the senses, affect, and emotion.34 In his Vita di S. Patricia of 1633 Cleonte Torbizi, referring to St Bernard’s teaching, emphasises that teaching women about the angelic life of female saints was just as useful as writing about male saints: ‘female saints who, with their purity have ennobled the weaker sex, and who have so exalted it with the breadth and generosity of excellent deeds, that they have raised the doubt whether they [the female saints] in the field of sanctity and perfection have surpassed men, or whether they may have been outdone by them’.35 Close identification with St Patricia allowed the nuns to make significant claims for their own spiritual status, as equal to, if not greater than their male counterparts. The close identification of nuns with St Patricia through her relics was echoed elsewhere. The Dominican nuns at Santi Domenico e Sisto in Rome, for instance, pursued their special devotions to the apostles and other saints by securing large numbers of their relics, which they conserved in special reliquaries. The nuns themselves often assumed the names of these apostles and saints, better to make clear their close identification with them.36 Nuns and relics mutually protect each other, and enhance each other’s spiritual capacities: possession, closeness, touch and display were intrinsic to that relationship. On a daily basis, therefore, a close relationship between the relics and the Benedictine nuns was forged through intimate proximity in the nuns’ inner church. But twice a year on feast days the nuns threw open their church and put their relics on public view. In his 1692 description of this exhibition of relics in the nuns’ church, Celano draws a suggestive parallel between the nuns and these relics, between the viewing of nuns’ dedicated spaces during their absence and the worship of relics, which represented both the absence and presence of saints: And it is notable that this place has two churches. One is that which is seen every day and is called the outer church, where the nuns recite divine office. 34 ‘Una parte d’una delle spine, che trafissero le tempie del Signore, affinche servisse à lei, e serva alla figliuole sue di continua spina nel cuore’; ibid., p. 42. It is, incidentally, worth noting a certain gendered quality to these relics and their uses. On Good Friday the nail oozed drops of sweat like blood. When the nuns immersed the nail in holy water while praying, the water assumed miraculous properties, particularly efficacious for women in childbirth. Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol. iii, p. 80. 35 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di s. Patricia, p. 7. 36 For instance, Sister Taddea Giovanna assumed her particular monastic names ‘per meglio raccordarsi che à detti nomi doveva accompagniare una vita Apostolica et Santa’, Archivio di S. Maria del Rosario, Rome, ms: Domenica Salamonia, ‘Memorie del Monastero di SS Domenico e Sisto’, vol. xi (1653), fol. 110. See Helen Hills, ‘The Housing of Institutional Architecture: searching for a domestic holy in post-Tridentine Italian convents’, in Silvia Evangelisti and Sandra Cavallo (eds), Domestic and Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe, Ashgate, 2008 (forthcoming).

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And here on the main altar is to be seen a very beautiful painting, known as Tutt’i Santi [...] The other is called the inner church, a most beautiful and magnificent structure. This one opens to the public only twice a year, from the first vespers until the morning after the day following the birthday feast of the saint, and on Ash Wednesday until the evening of Good Friday, and on that day all the holy relics, which are special and admirable there, are displayed.37

In other words, when the nuns’ church was opened to public view, it displayed, not the nuns’ bodies directly, but the convents’ precious relics, which represented them metonymically. Displaying their relics within their church allowed the nuns not only to receive directly the blessings secured by them, but also to draw the faithful (with alms) into their inner church on special occasions, and to associate the relics’ holiness directly with the nuns themselves. The cult of public devotion enhanced the holiness both of St Patricia’s relics and of the nuns, her patrons. The opening of their inner church to display the relics began in 1583.38 After 1642 the nuns combined this centripetal exploitation of their relics with one that was centrifugal, and more ambitious and urbanistic in conception. Although they could not leave their enclosure, their sacred relic could do so prosthetically on their behalf. It could cross the city, draw acclamation, and accumulate spiritual and social capital for the convent. This parading of their relic was prompted by an order from Rome, to centralize all patron saints’ relics in the Treasury Chapel of Naples Cathedral, but it was continued after that occasion, as we shall see. Thus the convent entered directly into competition with the cult of the Theatine Blessed Andrea Avellino and that of San Gennaro (St Januarius), principal patron saint of Naples.39 An account of the procession, in the form of a letter from Maria Agnese Carafa, Abbess of Santa Patrizia, dated as if written on 3 April 1642, addressed to Cardinal Ascanio Filomarino, describes in detail the transport of the ‘statua’ of St Patricia to the Treasury Chapel.40 Such an idealised account, probably 37 Celano, Delle Notitie del Bello, vol. iii, pp. 79–80. Domenico Antonio Parrino gives the dates when the inner church stood open as Holy Thursday to Good Friday and from prime to second vespers on St Patricia’s feast day, Domenico Antonio Parrino, Napoli Città Nobilissima, antica e fedelissima esposta à gli occhi, & alla mente de’ Curiosi (Naples, 1700), p. 345. 38 The nuns’ inner church was conventionally open on 24 and 25 August each year, as well as on Good Friday and the preceding Thursday. In what seems to have been episcopal effort to exercise control over the nuns’ spiritual ambitions, Cardinal Boncompagno attempted in 1641 to prevent the nuns from opening their church on 24 August. ASN, Corp. relig. sop., S. Patrizia, ms 3459, O. Maz. III, n. 37, Copy of document of 18 March 1583, n. fol. 39 Relics of other patron saints of Naples which belonged to male religious institutions were also centralised in the Treasury Chapel at around this date, which occasioned comparable processions. See, for example, Giulio Cesare Carpaccio, Descrittione della Padronanza di S. Francesco di Paola nella Città di Napoli e della Festività fatta nella Traslazione della Reliquia del suo Corpo Dalla Chiesa di S. Luigi alla Cappella del Tesoro nel Duomo (Naples, 1631). 40 ‘Relazione della Festa fatta nel portar la statua di S. Patrizia al Sacro Tesoro del Vescovato fatta al Cardinale Ascanio Filomarino’, in Niccolò Rispoli, Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli Principali di S. Patrizia, raccolta del Cav. Manzo Naopolitano e stampato nel 1611 ad istanza delle Signore Dame Monache del Monastero di S. Patrizia in Napoli. Ristampata ora a divozione e spese delle

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written in advance of the celebrations it purports to describe, is itself part of the strategy to elevate St Patricia and her relics in urban terms. Precisely for these reasons, it is invaluable in revealing how the nuns of Santa Patrizia hoped to deploy their prized relic to their convent’s advantage. The gilt silver and copper bust or ‘statua’, made by Leonardo Carpentiero in 1625, which was transferred to the Treasury Chapel and is still kept there today, is referred to in the letter in a number of ways – as ‘statua’, ‘venerando corpo’, but mostly simply as ‘la Santa’ – indicating the degree to which relic, reliquary, and saint were inextricably entwined.41 In this exported object, which belonged simultaneously to convent and to Treasury Chapel, nature, artifice, and the holy were combined and refracted. The reliquary bust, containing a bone of St Patricia’s arm, was commissioned by the convent of Santa Patrizia in 1625 at a cost of 1,000 ducats (Fig.1.6).42 St Patricia is represented as a nun in a simple habit; the crown with crossed sceptre and lily on the base testify to her imperial descent. In the bust, gilt silver assumes the place of flesh and skin, resplendent with the bones that it covers. It is anticipation incarnate, the glory of the saint’s body transfigured for eternity, reunited with its happy soul, on earth and in heaven. The bust of St Patricia, modelled on that of San Gennaro (St Januarius) famously donated to Naples Cathedral by Charles II of Anjou in 1305, was part of a process of establishing the significance of St Patricia as one of the key patron saints of Naples, itself a formidable task for a relatively small convent albeit rich and well-connected.43 We now turn to consider the procession of 1642 which brought the bust to the cathedral Treasury Chapel and thus put it onto Naples’ holy map. The Procession of 1642 While it is well known that nuns frequently processed their relics within conventual enclosure during times of crisis, that they organised also their transportation beyond closed doors is not well established.44 However, the medesime con distinta relazione delle Reliquie insigni, che si conservano nella loro Chiesa (Naples, 1741). 41 Celano states clearly that while the body of St Patrizia was kept in the church of St Patrizia, her silver statue (‘la sua statua d’argento’) was kept in the chapel of the Tesoro. Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol. iii, p. 80. 42 The reliquary bears the consular stamp of Orazio Scoppa; its hallmark is attributed to Leonardo Carpentiero. A. Catello, The Treasure of San Gennaro: Baroque silver from Naples (exh. cat. London, Accademia Italiana delle Arti e delle Arti Applicate, Naples, 1987), p. 11. 43 Santa Patrizia was a relatively small convent, with only 28 professed nuns, 6 novices and 22 laysisters in 1607. Nine of these nuns did not participate in communal life. ASDN, Vicario delle Monache, mss 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita), 1607, n. fol. 44 For example, during plague in Rome, the nuns processed precious relics given by Anna Barberini around the convent of Regina Coeli. See P. Fra Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione Carmelitana Scalza: Fondatrice del Monastero di Regina Coeli. Nel Secolo Donna Vittoria Colonna Figlia di Don Filippo Gran Conestabile del Regno di Napoli (Rome, 1681), pp. 223, 244.

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Fig. 1.6 Leonardo Carpentiero, Reliquary bust of St Patricia, 1625, Naples, Chapel of the Treasure of San Gennaro (Photo: Massimo Velo). procession of the silver reliquary bust from Santa Patrizia in 1642 was not at all the first procession of such a reliquary organised by a female convent in Naples. In 1561, following the discovery at San Gaudioso of the relics of St Fortunata during rebuilding of an altar dedicated to her, Abbess Laura Piscicelli arranged for the ‘infinite’ bones of martyrs, including the relics of St Fortunata’s brothers, to be processed around Naples, and then replaced in

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the altar, apart from the saints’ heads, which were placed in silver reliquary busts.45 The nuns at Santa Patrizia took advantage of the requirement to centralise relics by adding to their repertoire of centripetal exploitation of their relics a public display that was more ambitious and urbanistic in conception, involving a grand procession. St Patricia’s procession started at her convent and ended at the Treasury Chapel in the Cathedral, and it seems to have been conceived directly to emulate the procession of Naples’ principal patron, San Gennaro.46

Fig. 1.7 Naples, Cathedral: Treasury Chapel, looking towards the altar (Photo: Massimo Velo). On the morning of the procession, 6 April 1642, the ‘heads of the protector saints’, including that of San Gennaro, were transferred, by torchlight, to the church of Santa Patrizia.47 Our Saint went out to receive ‘her dear companions’, encircled by priests and cavalieri carrying torches. When Patricia met San 45 Camillo Tutini, Notizie della Vita e miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, l’Uno Vescovo di Bittinia, e l’altro di Salerno: e del martirio di S. Fortunata, e Fratelli, e del loro culto, e veneratione in Napoli (Naples, 1634), p. 122 (an account prompted by the nuns of S. Gaudioso). 46 Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli. San Gennaro, bishop of Benevento, was martyred in Pozzuoli in 305. His body was later buried in the catacombs of Naples, later removed to Benevento, thence in 1159 to Monte Vergine, and in 1497 definitively to Naples. 47 ‘le teste dei Santi Protettori’; ibid., pp. 151–2.

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Gennaro himself, Abbess Carafa proudly records that he ceded to her, thereby claiming relative spiritual superiority for her saint. The street leading to the convent was bedecked with decorations, apparati, and a triumphal arch, festooned with eulogies in her honour. ‘The public piazza’, writes Carafa, ‘had become almost a temple, in which both religion and the worship of God and of our honoured little virgin triumphed’. Thus, with all appearance of modesty, Carafa suggests that Patricia dominates the entire city: ‘the public square was almost transformed into a church to St Patricia’, the city ‘almost subsumed to her devotion’.48 Next all the patron saints were arranged within the nuns’ inner church, expressly open and richly adorned, ‘which could only just be done for the multitude of people gathered there’.49 A special mass was sung by the ‘signori Cappellani’ of the Royal Chapel of Palermo. Remarkably, therefore, the interior nuns’ church of Santa Patrizia assumed a role analogous to the Treasury Chapel in the cathedral itself, formally accommodating all the patron saints of Naples, during this special church service. It was the solemn procession, drawing a line through the city itself, which linked the two sites, like two shrines on a pilgrimage, visibly and phenomenologically together. That procession, headed by trumpets, followed by street captains, drew crowds ‘from every quarter’ of the city. Carafa emphasises that all social groups, aristocratic Seggi, principal religious orders, male and female, and dominant religious institutions of the city, including Oratorians, Dominicans, Jesuits, Theatines, were united in their support of St Patricia, thereby emphasising St Patricia’s capacity to unite the city across social and religious institutional divides. Even the rivalrous nuns of San Gaudioso hung a beautiful image of the Saint on their altar. The participation of each religious institution and Seggio was marked urbanistically by decorated piazzas, outdoor altars, and posted eulogies.50 And they transformed the city orally and visually to put St Patricia at its heart. Delight was urbanised: ‘almost so that with loquacious echo each corner, each church resonated [with] joy and celebration in honour of our patron saint’. The celebrations by the gentlemen of Capuana, one of the most powerful Seggi, were particularly distinctive. Their entire Seggio building was decorated and an altar erected, which ‘in its richness and grace resembled heaven, resonating with many voices, so sweet that even those of hardest heart in such surroundings could be swayed’. At last, the procession reached the Archiepiscopal palace, the saint entered with such majesty, that it was a ‘joyous sight to see her amongst those sacred heroes, as she, too, took up the protection of the city; there was singing of praises in her honour to heaven, adulation received, vows and prayers accepted from those who begged her protection, and finally she was set up amongst the glorious patron saints of the city’.51 Ibid., p. 152. ‘lo che a pena per la moltitudine della gente concorsa potè eseguirsi’; Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, p. 152. 50 For instance, the Seggio of Montagna created a beautiful altar and organised music; ibid., p. 153. 51 Ibid., pp. 153–4. 48 49

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The procession embraced both ecclesiastical and aristocratic centres within the city. It thus combined elements of both the older pre-1525 processions for San Gennaro, focused on churches, with the current processions which rotated from Seggio to Seggio.52 In short, the Benedictine nuns were aggrandising the cult of Saint Patricia in direct emulation of the most celebrated patron saint of Naples. The Treasury Chapel The magnificent Treasury Chapel (Fig. 1.7) in Naples Cathedral was the endpoint of the procession and the destined resting place for the reliquary bust of St Patricia. Built between 1608 and 1637, to the design of the Theatine architect Francesco Grimaldi, the chapel boasted an accumulation of spiritual treasure, second to none in Naples. The chapel, ‘sumptuous and magnificent’, was built to honour vows made on 13 January 1527, the feast of San Gennaro, by representatives of the city, to provide a fitting place for the relics of San Gennaro, ‘whose protection was the most effective shield against public calamities’, as thanksgiving for safe delivery from the plague.53 It was not only Naples’ most important repository of spiritual treasure, but, in spite of being housed in the cathedral, it was institutionally independent of archiepiscopal power, run by a largely aristocratic Deputation, representing the city’s Seggi.54 Architecturally, the Chapel functioned as a splendid teatro for the proud biannual miracle of the liquefaction of San Gennaro’s blood and for the impressive array of reliquary busts of the city’s rapidly multiplying patron saints.55 The centralised plan, an octagon, with alternating long and short sides, with a large, almost square choir, two subsidiary side-altars and entrance, the central space crowned by a dome on a high drum (frescoed by Lanfranco, 1641–43) lent itself readily

52 The current procession for San Gennaro comprised the saint’s head in the morning and the miraculous blood in the afternoon, preceded by all the patron saints of the city. The Seggi of Montana, Nido, Capuano, Portanova, Porto, and the Piazza of the Sellaria were all involved. Ibid., p. 154. The nobles of each Piazza engaged in fierce emulation of devotional display with elaborate apparati: see Chiarini in Celano, Notizie del Bello, pp. 114–15. The Seggi of Montana, Nido, Capuano, Portanova, Porto, and the Piazza of the Sellaria were all involved: Rispoli, Vita, Virtù e Miracoli, p. 154. In 1646 on an occasion similar to the 1642 procession for St Patricia, the relics of San Gennaro were carried in solemn procession from the church of Sant’Angelo a Nido to the Tesoro in the Duomo, by order of the Pope. Chiarini in Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol. ii, p. 107. For further details of the processions for San Gennaro, see Franco Strazzullo, I Diari dei Ceremonieri della cattedrale di Napoli (Naples, 1961). 53 The foundation document, 5 February 1601, records that the chapel was to be ‘sontuosa e magnifica’. Archivio della Deputatzione della Cappella del Tresoro di San Gennaro, Naples (hereafter ATSG), AB/1 fasc. 10n. 25 (166), fol. 1r. 54 For the Seggi, see above, note 30. 55 For the startling multiplication of Naples’ patron saints, see Jean-Michel Sallmann, Santi barocchi: Modelli di santità, pratiche devozionali e comportamenti religiosi nel Regno di Napoli dal 1540 al 1750 (Lecce, 1994), 83–107.

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to celebration and display. Nine niches within the choir became particularly prized positions for occupation by reliquary busts.56 In 1625 and 1626 four new patron saints of Naples were created: Blessed Andrea Avellino, St Patricia, Blessed Giacomo della Marca, and St Francesco di Paola.57 Immediately, hot dispute erupted between the nuns of Santa Patrizia and the Theatines over whose reliquary bust should occupy the coveted ninth position both in processions and in the Treasury Chapel itself. The Theatines’ espousal of Blessed Andrea Avellino was well established and intense. A series of letters written between 1625 and 1641, now in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples, illuminates this struggle.58 The controversy focused on whether Blessed Andrea Avellino, merely beatified but recognised as ninth patron saint on 6 October 1625, should receive precedence over the fully sanctified Patricia, recognised as eleventh patron saint in February 1626.59 In 1626 the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti in Rome found in favour of Andrea Avellino, on the grounds that precedence in becoming patron saint mattered more than relative sanctity. But a great deal was at stake, not least the ninth niche in the Treasury Chapel, the only remaining position in the choir, so the nuns of Santa Patrizia shunned this decision, and continued to petition Rome. In early 1641 the Theatines had reason to hope that the ruling of the Sacra Congregazione dei Riti would be upheld. The Theatine Father Giovanni Antonio of San Paolo in Naples had word from Rome that Cardinal Pamphilj, responding to a petition from Santa Patrizia, had reminded the nuns that the fact that Patricia was fully canonised, while Andrea Avellino merely beatified, was irrelevant, because in their patronage they did not compete in terms of dignity, but in priority of election as patron saints.60 Nevertheless, the issue gathered heat. By 18 May 1641 the Royal Councillor Di Marco C. R. admitted to Father Giovanni Antonio that, although ‘the City’s letter to Cardinal Barberini is excellent’, the Cardinal doubted that the nuns would regard it as binding, and

56 For the building and decoration of the chapel, see Antonio Bellucci, Memorie storiche ed artistiche del Tesoro nella Cattedrale (Naples, 1915), esp. pp. 55ff; N. Faraglia, ‘Notizie di alcuni artisti che lavorarono nella chiesa di S. Martino e nel Tesoro di San Gennaro’, Archivio Storico delle Province Napoletane (Naples, 1885), n. 10; Franco Strazzullo, La Real Cappella del Tesoro di S. Gennaro (Naples, 1978); Giovanni Battista Chiarini in Carlo Celano, Notizie del Bello, vol. ii, pp. 104–5; E. Nappi, ‘Pittori del Seicento a Napoli: Notizie inedite dai dopocumenti dell’Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli’, Ricerche sul ‘600 napoletano (Milan, 1983), p. 77. The magnificent bronze door which closes the chapel was designed by Cosimo Fanzago (the design was received in 1630, but work lasted until at least 1681). 57 Sallmann, Santi barocchi, p. 85. 58 ‘Lettere originali scritte dalli Deputati di questa Città di Napoli da Cardinali e da altri Persone concernanti la Padronanza di S. Andrea Avellino di questa Città, e la lite che verté tra la casa di S. Paolo, ed il monastero di S. Patrizia per la precedenza della statua del detto Santo a quella di S. Patrizia’. Bibliotheca Nationale, Naples (herafter BNN), S. Martino, ms 523. For the Theatines’ espousal of Andrea Avellino, see for instance G. A. Cagiano, Successi Maravigliosi della Veneratione del B. Andrea Avellino Chierico Regolare Patrone, e Protettore delle Città di Napoli, di Palermo, e d’altre molte (Naples, 1622). 59 BNN, S. Martino, ms 523, fols 10r; 20r. 60 Ibid., fol. 30r.

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added darkly, ‘the business requires some considerable assistance’.61 The nuns continued to lobby Rome, through Cardinal Pamphilj. And finally their efforts paid off. In 1641 Pope Urban VIII issued a Brief awarding the coveted ninth place to St Patricia.62 Simply securing a place in the Treasury Chapel was not, however, the end of the Benedictine nuns’ ambitions for urban visibility for their saint. Each year, the abbess petitioned the Archbishop for permission to process the reliquary bust out of the cathedral Treasury Chapel and into the convent church of Santa Patrizia, and back again.63 These processions, highly unusual in seventeenth-century Italy, but not unique in Naples, both announced annually that the owners of the relics were the nuns of Santa Patrizia and advertised the symbiotic relationship between the Treasury Chapel in the cathedral and the nuns’ inner church at Santa Patrizia. And, in recognition of St Patricia’s urban significance, in 1649 the Eletti (the representatives of the Seggi) agreed to present torches and a silver chalice every year on her feast.64 The nuns had pulled off a tour de force. Nuns as Relics As citizens walked through seventeenth-century Naples, they knew they were observed from on high by nuns, out of sight on their craning belvederes. Was this at all comparable to being looked down on by the patron saints of the city, who line the skies in representations of Naples in this period, such as in the engraving by Miotte (Fig. 1.10, p. 37)? Could it be that nuns, regarded as intercessors on behalf of the city, were thought of rather like saints, or as potential saints? Convents themselves were seen as bulwarks, physically protecting the city from divine disgrace. In his ecclesiastical treatise on the role of women, Agostino Valier, Bishop of Verona, describes cloistered virgins as playing an important role in reconstituting the discipline of their city, by furnishing through their well-ordered respected convents a bulwark (‘baluardo’) against evil. A city’s safety could be strengthened by the intercessive prayers of religious, which depended on the strength of its religious institutions. Nuns’ bodies functioned like relics in that, like them, they enhanced the spiritual significance of the place where they were housed and functioned extrovertedly to benefit those in contact with them. If we now return to Luca Giordano’s frescoed image of the nuns of San Gregorio Armeno (Figs 1.1 and 1.8), we better understand their wish to have their arrival in Naples represented alongside that of their most treasured ‘Il negozio ha bisogno di grande aiuto’, BNN, S Martino, ms 523, fol. 40r. ASN, Corp. relig. sop., S. Patrizia, ms 3460, O.IV, n. 53, n. f. The ninth niche is still occupied by St Patricia’s reliquary bust. Controversies about the relative position of the various protector saints’ relics throughout the chapel continued all through the seventeenth century. 63 ASN, Corp. relig. sop., S. Patrizia, ms 3460; ATSG cb/15; ATSG CB/16. 64 ASN, Corp. relig. sop., S. Patrizia, ms 3460, O.IV.n. 58, n. fol. By 1761 there were 29 such annual processions of saints’ busts. ATSG, CB/25 fasc. 129 bis n. 4 (2760). These processions continued until the 1880s at least. ATSG, CA/124 fasc. 5021(d). 61 62

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relics, key to their their spiritual identity, and claim to civic fame. Just as they validated the relics, so they were the nuns’ most vital spiritual currency and authentication. The painting fronts the nuns’ choir: the depiction of the convent’s precious relics and the architectural housing specifically for its nuns in the public church are conjoined. Moreover, the splendid wooden ceiling, by Teodoro d’Errico and his collaborators (1580–82), which covers the nave and this same nuns’ choir, is inserted with paintings which celebrate the convent’s precious relics. The nuns, gathered beneath this ceiling or glimpsed through a grille just above it, thus are part of this celebration of relics, in ceiling and fresco, part of the fabric of the convent church itself.65 ‘If an authenticated relic requires a reliquary, it can be said that it is the reliquary that makes the relic’, suggests J.-C. Schmitt.66 Visually and publicly the container predominates over the bones it holds; indeed, as the latter often cannot be seen, their presence is generally only made implicit through the reliquary, which separates the bones from their original context, transforms them, and makes them distinctive. This suggestive relationship parallels exactly that between enclosed nuns and the architecture of their convent. In theory, invisible to the outside world, the nuns’ presence was made tangible and present through the architectural carapace of the convent, which adumbrated and amplified it, both externally in the city and internally especially through the nuns’ church. After Trent, it was the convent, their enclosure, which made nuns holy. Just as reliquaries represented the relics they held both metaphorically and metonymically, so conventual buildings represented nuns’ bodies. The austerity of their outer walls paralleled the austerity of monastic habits, while the richly decorated interiors represented the precious balsam of virginity. Architecture and the body of the nun occupied mimetic fields, while the denial of the corporeal endlessly evoked it. The internal organisation of conventual churches, such as that of San Gregorio Armeno, was particularly redolent of the dialectic of screening and revealing, and the temptation and fear of sight, their architecture emphasising separation from the laity and ambiguously both consolidating and fragmenting the religious body (Fig. 1.8). The coverings of walls, grilles, habits, pyx that revealed and concealed the bodies of nuns and Christ functioned metonymically and metaphorically in a system of mutual representation.67 In a sense, nuns were living relics, their convent their gorgeous reliquary. It is tempting to push further this parallel of identity between nuns and relics. Nuns functioned like relics in that they were regarded as enhancing the spiritual significance of the cities and churches which housed them. Indeed, 65 For a wonderful account by Abbess Fulvia Caracciolo of the history of San Gregorio Armeno, and especially of the changes demanded by enclosure, see ‘Esemplare delle nobili memorie della reverenda D. Fulvia Caracciola’ (1577), ASN, corp. relig. sop. S. Gregorio Armeno, ms 3435. 66 J.-C. Schmitt, ‘Les reliques et les images’, p. 151. 67 This is to go further than to argue simply that convents articulated the habitus of the nuns. Architecture as metaphor produced nuns, not simply as aristocratic and worthy, but as something they were not and could not be anywhere else. See for an opposing view John Beldon Scott, ‘Review of Invisible City’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 67, no. 2 (June 2008), 284–50.

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the gilded grilles behind which nuns sheltered inside their churches celebrated them in a mode analogous to that by which the pierced precious metal of a reliquary protected and celebrated its treasures (Figs 1.8 & 1.9). The nuns’ inner church at Santa Patrizia, which housed their prized relics of St Patricia and other saints, was separated from the outer church by just such a window, secured by a double grille, through which the nuns listened to mass, and by an iron-grilled communion window.68 Thus from outside they appeared like sacred objects behind grilled windows, like relics themselves. A special door with window was opened on the feast day of St Patricia, and on Good Friday.69 Here the opening of the nuns’ inner church functioned as a public reliquary chapel twice a year and served both to foment the holiness of the church, and that of the nuns who daily frequented this privileged space. The dialectical movement between being shown and being hidden, between rituals of veiling and unveiling, common to relics and to nuns, is at the heart of the dual nature of holiness. Nuns occupied the place of relics in other terms, too. That nuns were regarded as martyrs was almost a commonplace in seventeenth-century conventual writings. The founder of the Regina Coeli convent in Rome, Vittoria Colonna (1610–75), often told her sister nuns that in the early centuries of the Church, holy virgins suffered torment and bloodshed as a result of espousing Christianity, while nuns now dedicated to divine service in convents should through their exacting observance ‘confess the same faith, the religious life being a continuous and prolonged martyrdom’.70 Similarly, in his Vita of St Patricia, produced at the insistence of the Neapolitan convent, Paolo Regio reminds his readers that according to St Jerome the name of martyr is due not only to those who spill their blood, but to nuns also, since ‘the immaculate service of the devout mind should be called a daily martyrdom’.71 It was but a short step from there to thinking of nuns as potential saints, or even as saints, equivalent to those saints they supposedly honoured. Vittoria Colonna’s response to her spiritual advisor, who had reminded her that all nuns could not be perfect, is telling in this respect. She replied that having persuaded her sister, Anna Colonna and Barberini, Princess of Palestrina and Prefect of Rome, to build the new convent of Regina Coeli, and having herself left that of San Egidio to be its founder, her intention was ‘not to increase the number of monasteries by one, or to multiply nuns of ordinary virtue, but so that they could all be saints, and that was the aim for which she had undertaken such efforts and care’.72 Nuns, saints, and their relics refracted each other’s holiness and enhanced it. 68 This arrangement is described at some length in ASDN, Vicario delle Monache, mss 471–22, S. Patrizia (S. Visita), 1607, n. fol. 69 The Visitation of 1711 ordered the window in this door to be barred; ibid. 70 ‘non pure allo spargimento del sangue si dia il nome di martirio, ma la servitù immacolata della mente divota ancora si debbia chiamar cotidano martirio’; Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione (Rome, 1708), p. 347. 71 Regio and Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia, p. 8. 72 Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione, pp. 381–2.

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Fig. 1.8 Naples, San Gregorio Armeno, convent church looking west, with nuns’ lower choir and frescoes by Luca Giordano (upper choir just visible through the grille) (Photo: Massimo Velo). We can usefully think of nuns as living relics, akin to saints, their convents as reliquaries that produced them as such, but which always failed to contain them. Conclusion It is instructive to compare Santa Patrizia’s exploitation of its relics with the way Cardinal Paolo Camillo Sfondrati used the relics of St Cecilia and her two brothers in Rome.73 Keeping Cecilia’s skull for his own splendid relic collection, Cardinal Paolo Camillo sent his sister Agata Sfondrati, abbess of the convent of San Paolo, Milan, fragments of the saint’s remains. At San Paolo, as Renée Baernstein has shown, the relics were kept in Agata’s chapel, dedicated to the virgin martyrs, and became part of her concerted strategy to 73 The relics were found in excavations commissioned by Cardinal Paolo Sfondrati at the cemetery of Calistus. A. Bosio, Roma Sottoterranea. Opera postuma di A. Bosio Romano Antiquario Ecclesiastico Singolare de’ Suoi tempi compita, disposta, & accresciuta dal M. R. P. Giovanni Severani da Severino sacerdote della Congregatione dell’Oratorio di Roma (Rome, 1632), 18D, p. 186. See also Josephine von Henneberg, ‘Cardinal Caesar Baronius, the arts and the early Christian martyrs’, in Franco Mormando (ed.), Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (Chestnut Hill/MA, 1999), pp. 136–50.

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Fig. 1.9 Naples, Seventeenth-Century Silver Reliquaries from San Gregorio Armeno (copyright: Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Napoletano). position herself centrally in conventual devotional life.74 Meanwhile at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Stefano Maderno’s sculpture assumed the form of a relic, representing the martyred saint, supposedly just as she had been found, in the centre of the main axis of the public church (Fig. 1.11). Whereas Cardinal Sfondrati used the relics to confirm his family status and to enhance the spiritual authority of his titular church, the nuns at Santa Patrizia in Naples used their relics to bring reverentia to their convent, to confirm themselves as the family of St Patricia, and to affirm their centrality to Neapolitan spirituality throughout the city. The nuns of Santa Patrizia used the relics of St Patricia to ‘occupy’ the city, to convert parts of it to her cult, and to magnify their own spiritual profile in Naples. They also entered into a competitive relationship with San Gennaro himself, which by implication made grand claims for their inner church as a ‘tesoro’ (treasury-shrine-destination) like that at the Duomo. The relics not only 74 P. Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A century of sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York and London, 2002), p. 6.

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Fig. 1.10

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Pietro Miotte, The City of Naples with Thirteen Patron Saints (Rome: G. B. Rossini, 1648). San Gennaro is immediately to the left of the Virgin and Child, and St Patricia is 3rd from the right.

represented a person but also were treated like a person, being worshipped, or carried from place to place in ritual processions: in short, they served in the symbolic exchange of power and, finally, embodied the public claims of a community. Edward Muir has argued that just as the idea of Christ as the head of the body-church became eventually, through a series of ideological and ritual borrowings, the relationship between the king and his kingdom, so in a parallel development cities came to represent themselves as body or corporation.75 Here we have seen how an enclosed convent could develop a sense of itself as a spiritual urban body, in this case via the saintly body. Much has been made of how Counter-Reformation Rome was enriched through its catacombs and soil, soaked in the blood of saints and martyrs. In Naples, nuns’ exploitation of relics reminds us of the fluidity of relics, of their contagious qualities, of their ability to transport holiness, to spread it through a city, while amplifying the holiness of their resting places. Their very fluidity made relics particularly valuable to static enclosed convents. Just as Bosio’s Roma sotterranea conjured up a subterranean holy city, so the Neapolitan nuns and their publications chased a holy city above ground through the transport of relics, tracing processionally a map of a spiritual city which put them and their relic at its heart. The nuns of Santa Patrizia used the relics with which

75

Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981), p. 232.

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they most closely identified to draw visitors to their inner church shrine, and to send them out again across the city, and back in annual processions from the dazzling Treasury Chapel, mapping a network of holiness in which their convent and the Treasury Chapel were cardinal points. If we return to the letter of Maria Carafa, written in advance of the ceremony she purported to describe, the imaginings of the relics of St Patricia out in the city streets receiving the blessings of gentlemen of the Seggi and religious orders alike, were enablements, the relic like a prosthetic extension. The convent was not merely drawn into another context, a spectator of other worlds, but was made able to act.76

Fig. 1.11

Stefano Maderno, St Cecilia, marble, 1600, Rome, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere (copyright: the author).

76 For a stimulating discussion of cultural prosthetics, see Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections (Savage/Md, 1991), p. 116.

Chapter two

Clara Hortulana of Embach or How to Suffer Martyrdom in the Cloister Ulrike Strasser

On October 14 1689, the nuns in Munich’s cloister of Poor Clares watched Sister Clara Hortulana fall down from the choir onto the floor of the convent church where she drew her last breath amidst a pool of blood. Convent sources describe Hortulana as an ecstatic mystic who long felt a burning wish that was difficult to fulfil in monastic enclosure: she wanted to suffer literal martyrdom. Opinions about the specific circumstances of Hortulana’s fatal tumble from the choir differed. Yet the surviving accounts all concur that the nun ultimately had her way and indeed died like a true martyr, shedding blood for Christ. This essay explores the case of Clara Hortulana for what it reveals about female charismatic spirituality in late seventeenth-century Germany. The setting for our story is the Catholic stronghold of Munich, capital of Bavaria. Bavaria’s zealous rulers had been in the forefront of Counter-Reformation and Catholic reform in the sixteenth century and through the stormy days of the Thirty Years War. Although the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to violent religious conflict and to virulent confessional rivalries between Germany’s Protestants and Catholics, Bavaria’s secular and ecclesiastical authorities undertook Trent-inspired religious reforms long after this political settlement. At the time of Hortulana’s life and death and when her story began circulating more widely, another wave of Tridentine renewal and reform in Bavaria was cresting and would not subside until the mid-eighteenth century. In light of the long afterlife of the Council of Trent in Bavaria, Clara Hortulana’s case also raises broader questions about the nature and temporality of Tridentine reforms in different parts of Europe. Literature on female spirituality after the Council of Trent has been a growth area of scholarship on early modern women, producing a truly impressive array of studies. The findings of these works, however, have been based primarily on Italian and Iberian examples and many of their generalisations still need to be tested for other regions of Europe.  I would like to thank Frank Biess and Silvia Evangelisti for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft and Sabine John for her useful bibliographic suggestions.

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One powerful image of the Catholic Reform and Counter-Reformation that emerges from the existing literature is that of an era that placed growing restrictions on women’s religious lives and was particularly inimical to female charismatic spirituality. Gabriella Zarri has sought to capture this process with the memorable shorthand ‘from prophecy to discipline’. In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, so the story goes, an understanding of women’s sanctity as connected to a porous, spiritually permeable body gave way to a new emphasis on female bodies whose claim to holiness rested on the very containment of the corporeal by means of cloister and confessor. The same charismatic spirituality that brought religious women respect in society and a reputation for sanctity in the Later Middle Ages, now threatened to incur inquisitorial scrutiny. To be sure, there is persuasive evidence in support of this declension narrative. Trent ushered in the strict enforcement of monastic enclosure for women and tighter control of women’s religious expressions by male superiors. It also brought new standards for hagiographic truth that devalued the miraculous and mystical and thus eroded the main foundation of female claims to holiness. Culminating in the revision of canonisation procedures under Urban VIII, these shifting ideals of sanctity led to a steep decline in the number of officially recognised saints in general and of female saints in particular. Of the fifty-five Counter-Reformation saints that Peter Burke profiled many years ago, a mere twelve were women (none of them German). But this compelling line of argument, focused as it is on male-dominated ecclesiastical high politics, also runs the risk of typecasting the Tridentine reform movement as a movement carried out by men and against women. It becomes easy to lose sight of the extent to which women partook, of their own accord and often quite enthusiastically, in the ascetic renewal and disciplining of spiritual life that was under way in society at large. It becomes equally easy to overlook the contradictions of the Tridentine reform programme and divisions within the Tridentine Church, which curtailed some forms of female religious practice at the same time as it reinvigorated and inspired others. The story of Clara reflects the complexities of women’s spirituality after Trent, as well as the ripple effects of Tridentine reforms that spilled over into the Baroque. On the one hand, strict enclosure and a watchful confessor stifled Hortulana’s piety, particularly her desire for a true martyr’s death. On the  Gabriella Zarri, ‘From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650’, in Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (eds), Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge/Mass., 1999), pp. 83–112.  Peter Burke, ‘How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, in Kaspar von Greyerz (ed.), Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (London, 1984), pp. 45–55, esp. p. 49.  See, among others, Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004).  A case in point is the flourishing of female communities dedicated to an active apostolate. They derived inspiration and support from the Tridentine encouragement of educational work and charitable deeds even as they clashed with the Tridentine enclosure norm. For the German context, see Anne Conrad, Zwischen Kloster und Welt: Ursulinen und Jesuitinnen in der katholischen Reformbewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1991).

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other hand, Tridentine dictates, such as the need for intercessory prayers for suffering souls, provided Hortulana with a site for cultivating charismatic sanctity and intimate ties beyond the confines of the cloister. Further, Clara Hortulana’s mystical feats and even her unconventional death enhanced rather than undercut her reputation of holiness among influential clergymen who were engaged in two projects that might seem to preclude one another: they sought to revive the spirit of Trent and simultaneously valorised the experience of female mystics. Hortulana’s case hence suggests that female charismatic sanctity continued to be valued in Catholic German lands not only in spite of but also long after the Council of Trent. Charismatic Women, a Saint-Maker and a Bishop: Tridentine Revival in Baroque Bavaria In 1701, Barnabas Kirchhueber, former provincial of the Franciscan order and current confessor of Munich’s Poor Clares, published the community’s first chronicle. Founded in 1284 in the outskirts of the city and named the Angerkloster after its location on a pasture, the convent of Poor Clares was Munich’s oldest nunnery as well as its most renowned female religious house. The convent had undergone extensive restructuring at the time of the fifteenth-century monastic reform movement. But unlike other female religious communities in Munich, the Poor Clares did not experience dramatic changes during the Tridentine reform movement, which first reached the Bavarian capital in the 1580s and then again in the 1620s. It is a telling indication of the convent’s reputation as a bulwark of Tridentine Catholicism that Munich’s authorities chose the Angerkloster as the place of imprisonment for Mary Ward when they arrested her in 1631 on behalf of the Roman Inquisition. Barnabas Kirchhueber certainly did his best to paint the picture of a religious community of great discipline, ardent devotion and willing retreat from the world. Dedicating the work to the Bavarian Elector Max Emanuel, the convent’s most significant patron, Kirchhueber covered the entire history of the Angerkloster, discussing the special clerical and secular privileges as well as the important indulgences it had acquired. The heart of the text, however, was a long middle section in which Kirchhueber presented the life histories of particularly saintly nuns. The parade of pious women featured some rather  See Barnabas Kirchhueber, Der Gnaden=und Tugend=reiche Anger/Das ist: Die sonderbare grosse Gnaden/tugendsame Leben/vnd andere denck= vnd lob=würdige Begebenheiten/So in dem Uhr=alten vnd hochberühmten Gotts=Hauß/vnd jungfräulichen Closter S. Clarae Ordens in München bey S. Jacob am ANGER biß in die 480. Jahr verschlossen/vnd verborgen gelegen/ nunmehr angemerckt vnd eröffnen. Getruckt zu München /bey Maria Magdalena Rauchin/Wittib. Im Jahr 1701. Hereafter cited as Gnaden=Anger.  Caroline Renate Weichselgartner, Kloster und Stadt: Das Angerkloster in München im Mittelalter (Remscheid, 2004); Johannes Gatz, ‘Klarissen-Kloster St. Jakob am Anger in München’, in Bayr. Franziskanerprovinz (ed.), Bavaria Franciscana Antiqua (Munich, 1957), pp. 195–272; Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Politics and Religious Reform in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, 2004), esp. pp. 68–70, 159–60.

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formidable figures, such as the daughters of a German Emperor or that of a Bavarian Duke. But the most detailed vita of all was that of a patrician woman – Clara Hortulana who had entered the convent in 1680 at the age of eighteen and died there in 1689 at the age of 27. Even if she did not have noble blood pulsing through her veins, Sister Hortulana came from an influential family, the Empachers. Another Empacher, Veronica Bonaventura, was to rule the Angerkloster as abbess in the early seventeenth century. More important still, Joachim Empacher, Clara Hortulana’s father, held the office of one of the city’s mayors between 1674 and 1685 and then again between 1692 and 1704. His first time in office overlapped with Hortulana’s stay in the convent. His second time fell into the period of the preparation and publication of the convent chronicle that celebrated his daughter’s saintly life. At least one of Joachim Empacher’s appointments as a mayor was made by the Elector in opposition to the magistrate, indicating close ties between the Empachers and the Court. Joachim Empacher’s connection to the ruling dynasty and his power of office surely advanced his daughter’s standing as a holy woman. But the driving force behind the cause of gaining Hortulana recognition was another man: Kirchhueber, the chronicler and an aspiring saint-maker. Surviving documents from the convent archives indicate that the community and Kirchhueber were assembling materials about Hortulana with an eye towards her official recognition as a holy person.10 These efforts give vivid testimony to the deep and lasting effect that Clara Hortulana’s short life as a nun had had on those around her. Kirchhueber further mentioned in the chronicle that a longer hagiography of Clara Hortulana was in preparation but it apparently never saw the light of day.11 Kirchhueber also had a hand in contemporary attempts to obtain beatification for one of the famous Anger-nuns: Sister Agnes, daughter of Emperor Ludwig IV. Agnes had entered the convent as a four-year-old in 1352 to die a premature death from the plague at the age of seven. Kirchhueber was engaged in the preparation of her official case as well and was present when Agnes’ tomb was opened in the early eighteenth century to search for additional evidence of her saintly status.12  Wilhelm Liebhart , ‘“Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren …” Die “gottseelige” Klara Hortulana Empacher im Münchner Angerkloster’, Amperland 31 (1995), 36.  Anton Fischer, Die Verwaltungsorganisation Münchens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Unpubl. PhD Diss., University of Munich, 1951), p. 26. 10 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50. 11 ‘Much could be said about the life of the blessed sister, but will be omitted for the sake of brevity here and filled in somewhere else.’ Von dem Leben diser Gottseeligen Schwester wäre vil zuschreiben/wird aber Kürtze halber allhie unterlassen/und anderwertig ersetztet werden. Gnaden=Anger, p. 65. For an outstanding analysis of the practice of female ‘life-writing’ by male hagiographers, which peaked in the seventeenth century, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, NY, 2005). 12 Gatz, ‘Klarissen-Kloster St. Jakob am Anger in München’, pp. 208–10. See also Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, Angerkloster, Fasz. 18, ‘Versuchte Seeligsprechung Agnes und Barbara, 1702–1705’.

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The broader context for Kirchhueber’s hagiographic undertakings was a climate of religious reform and spiritual renewal in Bavaria that boosted the reputation of female mystics past and present. With Johann Franz Eckher, who held the office of Prince-Bishop from 1696 to 1727, a man was in charge of ecclesiastical matters who embodied the values and ideals of the Council of Trent more fully than any other bishop before or after him. Eckher’s every reform measure – and there were many – breathed the spirit of Trent; often he made explicit reference to specific Tridentine decrees as he went about reshaping ecclesiastical institutions and pious practices in his diocese. The zealous bishop moreover surrounded himself with a circle of like-minded men in his Ecclesiastical Council. Virtually all of them came from burgher families that lacked noble titles but brought outstanding academic credentials to the table. The faith and actions of these men too were shaped by the legacy of Trent.13 Yet the most striking aspect of this group of reform-hungry men is not their harkening back, on the eve of the Enlightenment, to the great reform Council of the sixteenth century, but their simultaneous valorisation of the experiences and advice of female mystics. There is significant evidence of a web of connections between the male reformers and various saintly women that begs for systematic scholarly exploration. In Freising itself, where the Prince-Bishop had his residence, the tertiary Klara Reischl (1669–98) comes to mind. The pious virgin garnered public attention and support on account of her visionary powers; notably, she foresaw Eckher’s election to the bishopric. Reischl’s elaborate tomb in the Church of St George bespeaks her standing in the city as well as her ties to the centre of episcopal power.14 The lines of connection between reformers and mystics also reached into the Bavarian capital. There, the Carmelite tertiary Anna Maria Lindmayr (1657– 1729), sister of one of Eckher’s councillors, Dr. Philipp Franz Lindmayr, and a frequent correspondent with her brother, was quickly building a reputation as an unusually gifted mystic and political prophetess. She offered her advice to high-ranking members of the Bavarian Electoral Court and to Prince-Bishop Eckher, to whom she wrote letters and whom she visited in Freising during the War of the Spanish Succession.15 The lines of connection did not stop at the walls of Munich’s cloisters either. For many years the nuns in the Angerkloster and the Prince-Bishop in Freising indeed shared the same Franscisan confessor, Sigmund Neudecker.16 Also, Eckher’s niece Maria de Victoria entered the Angerkloster where she rose through the ranks to become abbess in 1720.17 It makes sense that Prince-Bishop 13 Benno Hubensteiner, Die geistliche Stadt: Welt und Leben des Johann Franz Eckher von Kapfing und Liechteneck, Fürstbischofs von Freising (Munich, 1954), pp. 207–10. 14 Ibid., p. 214. 15 Ulrike Strasser, ‘Una Prophetessa in tempo di guerra; il caso die Maria Anna Lindmayr (1657–1729)’, in Gianna Pomata and Gabriella Zarri (eds), I Monasteri Femminili Come Centri Di Cultura Fra Rinascimento E Barroco (Rome, 2005), pp. 365–87. 16 Hubensteiner, Geistliche Stadt, p. 218. 17 Ibid., p. 214.

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Eckher would throw his support behind Kirchhueber’s project of publicising the spiritual riches in the Angerkloster and promoting its saintly inhabitants. Particularly so since the Franciscan chronicler had a sound understanding of post-Tridentine norms of sanctity, including the requirement that ultimate judgment in such matter belonged to the proper authorities. Kirchhueber explained his use of word ‘holy’ in a preface: Because in the following description numerous miraculous things, revelations and apparitions and exceptional graces and gifts of the male and female servants of God will be introduced, I make it known in obedience to the papal decrees of Urban VIII (…) that no more than human faith should be had in all these things. Just as the attributes and praises of holiness, beatitude and sanctity are not used in the particular sense in which the canonical approbation of the church uses them but only in the shape and form in which writers of history and people in general usually talk.18

While Kirchhueber reserved the final judgment of holiness to the papacy, the vitae of holy women in his chronicle show how attuned he was to the saintly ideals of his time and the conventions of hagiographic argument. Many of his saintly subjects are exemplars of female obedience and humility, steadfast in their faith and devotion to God in the face of the most debilitating illnesses and other tribulations. To support his more daring claims, Kirchhueber offered the blend of scientific evidence and faith-based verification that is typical of post-Tridentine hagiography. When he discusses how Sister Agnes received the stigmata when she died from the Black Death, Kirchhueber first tells the reader that a professor from Ingolstadt had verified the occurrence in the fourteenth century but also records a vision of Clara Hortulana who, in Kirchhueber’s own time, saw a glorified Agnes in the habit of a Poor Clare with five diamonds shining from her hands, feet and side.19 Invoking the visionary powers of one nun to establish the sanctity of another, Kirchhueber accomplished a two-fold purpose in a single rhetorical move: the alleged vision underwrote the saintly reputation of both women whose cases he had taken on.20 To know something of sanctity as a pre-modern cleric meant to know something of its corollaries, feigned holiness and demonic possession. Hence it comes as no surprise that Kirchhueber would also be called upon as an expert 18 ‘Dieweilen in folgender Beschreibung etliche wunderbahre Sachen/Offenbahrungen und Erscheinungen und sonderbare Gnaden und Gaben der Diener und Dienerinnen Gottes eingeführt werden: also protestire ich (zu gehorsamber Gefolg der Päbstlichen Decreten Urbani VIII. Sub dato Anno 1625. den 12. Martij/und Anno 1624/den 5. Julie) und will/daß allen diesen Sachen mehr nit/als Menschlicher Glauben beygemessen werde. Wie auch/daß die Praedicar, und Lobsprüch Heylig/Seelig/Heyligkeit/nit in aigentlichen Verstand/wie dieser in der canonischen Approbation der Kirchen gebraucht wird/sonder nur allein in Form und Weiß/wie die Geschicht-Schreiber/ und die Menschen ins gemain zureden pflegen/aufgenommen werde; Gnaden=Anger, Protestatio Auctoris. 19 Gnaden=Anger, pp. 35–36. 20 Hagiographers of saintly women also used this strategy of reporting visions to promote male saints in the same text. See Bilinkoff, Related Lives, pp. 70–75.

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when sanctity was in question. Such was the case in 1704 when Bishop Eckher requested his services and appointed Kirchhueber to a panel of four clerics in charge of examining the visions and political prophecies of the abovementioned Anna Maria Lindmayr. Lindmayr herself had set the proceeding in motion with a letter to Eckher in which she asked for an examination of her spirit because parts of Munich’s citizenry resisted her latest political prophecies and spread rumours of heresy. Kirchhueber and the other examiners attested Lindmayr’s orthodoxy and divine inspiration.21 Kirchhueber’s powers of discernment no doubt also had to be brought to bear on the manifold and occasionally puzzling manifestations of Clara Hortulana’s supernatural gifts. Hortulana displayed a dazzling charismatic sanctity at the same time as she was most intensely afflicted by demonic forces. There was a tremendous physicality to her reported interactions with the devil that left the early modern hagiographer perplexed and searching for words, while it has led at least one modern scholar to speculate about a severe pathology on Hortulana’s part.22 And there was her sudden and strange death that required accounting. What then were the main features of Hortulana’s piety? And how did Kirchhueber present them to his readership? Of Poor Souls, Guardian Angels and the Devil: Charismatic Spirituality in Baroque Bavaria Several primary sources are available for the reconstruction of the life, piety and death of Clara Hortulana. Aside from Kirchhueber’s lengthy published vita, the archival materials assembled to gain public recognition for Hortulana contain important documents. Most relevant are an anonymous Latin vita of Clara Hortulana, a hand-written German account that was part of a larger document compiled in preparation of the chronicle, and a report on the opening of her grave.23 A fourteen-page letter by Anna Spizer, a Franciscan nun from another convent in Munich, also outlines Clara Hortulana’s life history but this document is housed in the Bridgettine convent of Altomünster because Spizer sent it to a sister in that community.24 21 Strasser, ‘Una Prophetessa in tempo di guerra; il caso die Maria Anna Lindmayr (1657– 1729)’, pp. 380–82. 22 Liebhart’s article includes a section entitled ‘Symptoms of a Disease’, in which the author speculates about a psychotic condition. Liebhart, ‘Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren’, 38. 23 ‘Compendiosa Relatio de Vita et Morte Devotae Sororis Clarae Hortulanae Empacherin Clarissae in Virgineo Asceterio Clarissarum Monachij ad S. Jacobum in Anger’; ‘Eröffnung des Grabs ao 1698 Lateinische und deutsche Attestation’. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, ‘Khurtzer Inhalt Der denkwürdigen Sachen, welche in den Gottshaus und Clarissen-Kloster bey S. Jacob am Annger zu Münnichen von Anno 1221 bis Anno 1700 da ist inerhalb 479 Jahren seind angemerkt worden.’ Bayerisches Haupstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, München, Angerkloster, 4, fols 24r–26r. 24 Source excerpts are provided in Liebhart, ‘“Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren”’. A full-length copy of the original was requested but could not be obtained from the convent for this article.

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The picture of Clara Hortulana that emerges from these sources is that of a passionately pious and mystically gifted yet somewhat troubled soul. Both published and unpublished German versions report that Hortulana dedicated her time to ceaseless prayer and contemplation, and that she was graced with many visions. Often the other nuns would find her in a state of heightened ecstasy that made Clara completely unresponsive to outside stimuli.25 At least on one occasion her confessor hit her with his ‘fist very hard on her nose’ to see whether he could get a reaction.26 The Latin Life links her moments of intense interiority to the reception of the Eucharist: ‘after the holy communion she was frequently rapt in ecstasy in the presence of all sisters’.27 Such motifs of charismatic sanctity are familiar from the hagiographies of medieval women, most notably the topos of Eucharistic devotion.28 But the seventeenth-century narratives about Clara Hortulana embed these older themes into discussions of practices that more recently had come to typify piety in baroque Bavaria: first, intercessory prayer for the poor souls suffering in purgatory, and second, belief in a guardian angel and his protective presence in people’s life. Intercessory prayer on behalf of poor souls had received a strong boost from the Council of Trent. In countering the Protestant attacks on the Cult of the Saints, the council fathers reaffirmed the existence of purgatory as a distinct place between heaven and earth, and they listed the efforts of the faithful to deliver souls from purgatorial pain among the ‘works of piety’.29 These pronouncements resonated strongly in Bavaria where the dead suffering in purgatory came to represent a forceful and tangible presence in every-day life. Popular folktales had it that poor souls roamed the land in search of someone to perform good works on their behalf.30 But who could perform intercessory labours better than cloistered nuns? Premodern communities deemed virginal religious women particularly potent channels of divine grace and hence a collective spiritual resource to be called upon in times of need. More recently, the Tridentine monastic reforms, especially the strict enclosure requirement, had turned nunneries further inward, directing them towards prayer and mysticism and away from a socially active apostolate. Intercessory prayer for suffering souls in fact became a defining dimension of pious life in all of Munich’s nunneries.31 Clara Hortulana, who was rumoured to have saved at least one thousand souls, represents a spectacular product of this trend, as well as a galvanising Gnaden=Anger, p. 60. Ibid. 27 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, Compendiosa Relatio de Vita et Morte’, n. fol. 28 See the by now classic works of Caroline Walker Bynum, especially Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987). 29 Wilhem Smets (ed.), Die hochheiligen, ökumenischen und allgemeinen Concils von Trient Canones und Beschlüsse (Bielefeld, 1869; rpd Sinzing, 1989), p. 65. 30 Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993), p. 121. 31 Strasser, State of Virginity, pp. 119–48. 25 26

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force thereof. Kirchhueber’s chronicle and the unpublished document he drew on contain words to this effect: Among other special graces which Hortulana received from God there was also the grace to liberate poor souls from purgatory for whose redemption she prayed day and night, often carried out strict fasts, sharp disciplines, stayed awake all night, and bore great and lengthy pain on their behalf due to her manifold illnesses, earned indulgences, donated communion, had masses read, and many other works of penance done, and this and much more she also begged the other sisters to do through which she saved many souls from purgatory during the last couple of years.32

A virtual prayer broker, Hortulana apparently not only carried out her own spiritual labours but also mobilised other nuns to say prayers and do penance on behalf of poor souls. Since 1681, the year after Hortulana’s entry, there was actually a structure in place to coordinate the spiritual efforts of the nuns in the Angerkloster with Munich’s laity. The Angerkloster had founded a ‘Seelenbund’ (Confraternity for Souls) dedicated to setting free poor souls trapped in purgatory. The confraternity counted around 1,000 members at the time of the foundation, including the cloistered nuns but reaching deeply into the homes of Munich’s inhabitants.33 Likewise, Hortulana’s individual efforts did not stop at the walls of her own convent community. Presumably using a confessor as a go-between, Hortulana gave lengthy spiritual assignments to the Franciscan sisters in the so-called Pütrich and Ridler cloisters across town. She ordered them to pray for the delivery of dead community members as well as family members in the world, often in response to apparitions of particular poor souls. One of the souls who entreated Hortulana to facility his rescue from the pangs of purgatory was Mathias Barbier, who had been mayor together with her father Joachim Empacher. Like Empacher, Barbier had been appointed to office by the Electoral Court against the will of the magistrate. Hortulana assigned the lion’s share of the prayers on Barbier’s behalf to the sisters in the Pütrich community whose abbess happened to be Barbara Barbier, Mathias Barbier’s sister.34 The intercessory labors of cloistered nuns like Clara Hortulana thus radiated both upward into the realm of purgatory and heaven and outward into the urban community. The coordination of prayers offered nuns an opportunity 32 ‘Under anderen sonderbaren Gnaden/welche Hortulana von Gott empfangen/ist auch gewesen die Gnad die arme Seelen aus dem Fegfeur zu erlösen/für deren Erlösung sie dann Tag und Nacht gebettet/vilfältig streng gefastet/scharpffe Disciplinen gemachet/gantze Nächte gewachet/ in ihren vilfältigen Kranckheiten schwäre und langwürige Schmertzen auffgeoppfert/Ablaß gewunnen/Communionen geschenckt/H. Messen lesen lassen/vil andere Bußwerck verrichtet/und dise und noch anders mehrers von anderen ihren Schwestern erbettlet/durch welches sie die letztere zwey Jahre sehr vil Seelen aus dem Fegfeur erlöset’; Gnaden=Anger, p. 63. See also Bayerisches Haupstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, München, Angerkloster, 4, ‘Khurtzer Inhalt Der denkwürdigen Sachen’, fol. 24v–25r. 33 See the extensive archival documentation on this confraternity in Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/42. 34 Strasser, State of Virginity, pp. 133–5; Liebhart, ‘Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren’, 36, 38.

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for forming a powerful imaginary community that spanned the otherwise unbridgeable distance between one female convent and another, between cloister and urban community, this world and the next. With its doctrinal discourse on purgatory, the Council of Trent had encouraged and continued to validate this type of ‘good works’. In so doing, it ironically created a potent vehicle for transcending cloister walls for the same nuns that it otherwise ordered to live in enclosure. For Hortulana it worked the other way as well: poor souls came to her, offered company and support in the solitariness of the cloister, and entered a mutual aid society of sorts with a mystic who was troubled by frequent demonic assaults. Kirchhueber and the German archival source both remark on the ‘unspeakably great persecutions of the devil’ Hortulana had to suffer.35 This went beyond attacks on her soul to physical assaults on her body: ‘the evil spirits externally bound, hit, beat and threw her to the extent that one could see visible marks of beatings and strikes on her body’.36 The Latin vita resorts to a metaphor of organic contamination and speaks of her being ‘infested with the most frequent and gravest diabolical temptations’.37 During some of her battles with this mighty darkness, poor souls came to Hortulana’s rescue while the convent community was watching helplessly or was absent altogether. On one occasion the devil hit her so forcefully with a wooden mallet on her chest that a pint of blood started spewing out of her mouth. She was soon on the verge of bleeding to death when a poor soul took pity and responded to her call for help. The helpmate from purgatory brought a glass of ‘heavenly water or liquid’ to rub onto Hortulana’s wound. After she received the heavenly transfusion, Hortulana’s health was immediately restored.38 On another occasion, Hortulana faced off with devils in the middle of the night during prayer in a chapel. After four hours of continuous assault, with the devils pushing her to succumb to ‘the temptation of despair’, Hortulana resolved that she had to enlist poor souls ‘because no-one was around her’. She begged that one of them call the confessor to the convent at this unusual hour. A poor soul responded promptly to her plea and left purgatory to ring the convent bell that summoned the confessor. Hortulana’s temptation passed upon his arrival. The poor soul allegedly left a memento of the event: a deep burn mark on the bell’s handle that ‘can still be seen’.39 In Kirchhueber’s chronicle, however, Clara Hortulana is not only aided by poor souls but she has an even more powerful helpmate at her side: a guardian 35 ‘Entgegen hat die Schwester Clara Hortulana von dem Teuffel unaussprechliche grosse Verfolgung gelitten’; Gnaden=Anger, p. 62. 36 ‘ist sie von denen bösen Geisteren äusserlich hinweg geführt/ (wie erst gemeldet) gebunden/ geschlagen/geprigelt/und geworffen worden/also zwar/daß man die Schlag und Streich sichtbarlich an ihrem Leib gesehen’; ibid., pp. 62–3. 37 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, ‘Compendiosa Relatio De Vita et Morte,’ n. fol. 38 Gnaden=Anger, p. 64. 39 Ibid., pp. 63–4.

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angel. This sets the published record apart from the archival documents in which her guardian angel is barely mentioned. Fervent belief in the powers of guardian angels, just like belief in intercessory prayers for poor souls, is another hallmark of baroque piety. Kirchhueber played upon this theme in promoting Hortulana as a saint to a broader reading public. In the chronicle only, the guardian angel instructs Hortulana in how God wants her to go about saving poor souls and keeps her on the path towards spiritual perfection when other forces threaten to pull her away. The following incident provides a good illustration: Once on a Sunday when Sister Clara Hortulana walks through the crosswalk into the choir with the other sisters to hear mass and then take communion, there comes the devil and takes her around her waist to lead her from among the sisters high up under the roof where he left her lying entirely helpless in order to keep her from taking the holy communion. Thus abandoned Sister Hortulana sought the help of the Mother of God and her guardian angel, and she received it: the mother of mercy came with her holy angel to her soon, bringing with her the holy cross, which the devil had taken from Sister Hortulana and which he had thrown away to where who knows, blesses her with the cross, and returns it into her hands, telling her that this holy angel will be your protector after which she disappears. The holy angel then takes Sister Clara Hortulana by the hand, helps her from the floor and while she is filled with fear, horror and shakiness, he leads her by the hand down the stairs and via the dormitory towards the choir […] the Holy Angel accompanied Sister Hortulana all the way into the choir to the holy communion to which she still made it right on time.40

Interestingly, Hortulana appears neither as a model community member nor paragon of sacramental devotion in this incident. Rather, without the intervention of the angel, she would have missed, in the company of the devil, not only mass but also Holy Communion. In this passage and others, Hortulana’s relationships with supernatural forces, good and bad, are described as extremely intense. This more generally sets her story apart from the other vitae of holy nuns in Kirchhueber’s chronicle. None of the other sisters is said to have cultivated such close contact with poor souls and the 40 ‘Als einsmahl an einen Sonntag die Schwester Clara Hortulana mit andern Schwestern durch den Creutzgang in den Chor gienge/allda die H. Meß zuhören/und hernach zu communizieren; kombt der Teufel/nimbt die Schwester Hortulana bey der Mitte/und führet sie mitten aus den Schwestern hoch unter das Tach hinauff/allwo er sie ganz hilflos ligen lassen/mithin sie von der H. Communion zuverhindern. Schwester Clara Hortulana also verlassen/suecht Hülff bey der Mutter Gottes/und ihren H. Schutz-Engl/und erlangt dise: indem die Mutter der Barmhertzigkeit mit ihren H. Engl alsobald zu ihr kommen/mitbringend das H. Creutz/welches der Teuffel der Schwester Hortulana genommen/und wais nit wohin geworrfen/seegnet sie darmit/und gibt ihr dieses widerumb in die Hand/mit disen Worten/diser H. Engl wird dein Beschützer seyn/und verschwind gleich darauff. Der. H. Engl nimbt alsdann die Schwester Clara Hortulana bey der Hand/und hülfft ihr von Boden auff/und weilen sie voller Forcht/Schröcken/und Zittern war/führet er sie an der Hand die Stiegen hinab/und über das Zell und Schlaff-Haus dem Chor zu/ (…) Nach welchem der H. Engel die Schwester Hortunala biß in den Chor hinein zu der H. Communion beglaitet/zu welcher sie noch gantz recht kommen/’; ibid., pp. 60–61.

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guardian angel, neither did any of them require heavenly emergency because of uncontrollable demonic afflictions. Kirchhueber, it seems, used the extreme nature of Clara Hortulana’s conflicts with the devil as an inverse gauge of her exceptional sanctity, a rhetorical device familiar from the lives of renowned mystics from Spain and Italy.41 The more severe the struggle with demons, the more triumphant and credible was the saint who prevailed. Yet the truly distinguishing feature of Hortulana’s piety – what sets her apart not only from other women in the chronicle but, to my knowledge, also from mystics in other lands – is her supposedly literal martyrdom within the safe confines of a nunnery. A closer look at this most unusual dimension of her life is now in order. Of Mystics and Martyrs: Clara Hortulana between Male and Female Models In his short but influential article on the making of Counter-Reformation saints, Peter Burke remarked some time ago on the surprising scarcity of martyr-saints in the post-Tridentine period. Given the greater likelihood of martyrdom in this conflictive age and the celebration of martyrs in early modern culture at large, it is intriguing to note the relative absence of martyrs among canonised saints.42 But while the Church turned few martyrs into saints, stories and images of exemplary martyrs circulated widely in early modern society, creating a virtual ‘culture of martyrdom’ in Peter Burschel’s phrase. These tales of heroic suffering, Burschel argues, shaped collective memories and selfunderstandings of conflicting religious groups and thus drove the emergence of distinct confessional cultures.43 Not surprisingly at a time of patriarchal retrenchment, the proto-typical new martyr-hero was a male. His embodiment in the Catholic world was that of the Jesuit missionary who was slaughtered by godless ‘Indians’ overseas or martyred on European turf by those ‘other Indians’ also known as Protestants.44 This paradigmatic mode of martyrdom was contingent on a freedom of movement and voluntary exposure to dangers that women could rarely engage in. More to the point, it was dependent on membership in an organisation that was the only early modern religious order to exclude women altogether. A cloistered nun like Clara Hortulana was highly unlikely to be killed by ‘Indians’ of either kind in a staunchly Catholic region of Central Europe at the end of the seventeenth century. Traditionally, a feminine mode of martyrdom had been available to women like her but it had recently been losing cultural ground. The mystical death was 41 For Iberian examples, see Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau (eds), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their own Works, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque, 1989). 42 Peter Burke, ‘How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, p. 51. 43 Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: Zur Kultur des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2004). 44 Ibid., esp. pp. 229–65; Adriano Prosperi, ‘Otras Indias’. Missionari della controriforma tra condatini e selvaggi,’ in Giancarlo Garfagnini (ed.), Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura (Florence, 1982), pp. 203–34.

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one medium through which charismatic women could experience martyrdom. It allowed at least for an imaginary reliving of Christ’s passion even if did not amount to a literal shedding of blood. Teresa of Avila in the sixteenth century still considered her transverberation as a form of mystical death and so did many of her contemporaries. Yet the declining legitimacy of charismatic sanctity in the wake of Trent eroded the validity of this interpretation over time to the point where seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German translations of Teresa’s Life dropped all references to the saint’s imaginary experience of martyrdom.45 Interestingly, several vitae in Kirchhueber’s chronicle of the Angerkloster contain hints of more imaginary forms of martyrdom, even if not of an explicit mystical death. Sister Anna Margaretha von Brandis (1588–1603) was known for her strict asceticism and her mystical gifts, which had enabled her, among other things, to have a vision of Christ on the Cross. After her death, she appeared to another nun to relate how ‘she had been allowed to join the martyrs and blood witnesses of Christ and was honored with the crown of martyrdom for eternity’.46 Similarly, Ursula Kahlhart who died in 1658 returned one more time to tell a tale of being rewarded posthumously with the ‘crown and glory of a holy martyr’. During her lifetime she had longed to join the ranks of holy martyrs and received spiritual assurance that this was possible. When she subsequently came down with cancer, she bore her long suffering with patience. Kahlhart’s final apparition showed that her efforts had paid off and gained her the status of a martyr. She even wore a ‘shining crimson dress’.47 These examples suggest that female modes of martyrdom remained available to cloistered women yet that they veered increasingly towards the metaphorical. Martyrdom here marks less the end of a life than the beginning of a new existence after death: a post mortem event and extra bonus for a lifetime of piety in monastic enclosure. Above all these are stories of longing. They illustrate how desirable the martyr’s crown was for women religious but also how difficult it was for them to find acceptable cultural forms for claiming this honour. It is therefore the more remarkable that Clara Hortulana stepped outside the feminine mould of martyrdom altogether and pursued, as a cloistered nun, the kind of death religious men suffered in the world. Every account of her death, published and archival, insisted that she died a martyr in her nunnery. To be sure, the nuns had all watched her fall from the choir and bleed to death on the floor. In all likelihood, they also all knew that Hortulana had wanted to die just this kind of literal martyr’s death. But how could they explain that she had received her wish in the sheltered milieu of a convent? 45 Peter Burschel, ‘Männliche Tode – weibliche Tode. Zur Anthropologie des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit’, Saeculum 50/I (1999), 75–97, esp. 76–9; Peter Burschel, ‘Einleitung’, in Peter Burschel and Anne Conrad (eds), Vorbild Inbild Abbild: Religiöse Lebensmodelle in geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive (Freiburg/Breisg., 2003), 9–15, esp.14. 46 Gnaden=Anger, p. 51. 47 Ibid., p. 54.

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Moving from the most private to the most public communication of her life history one finds that they each credit different agents with the unfolding of the final events. Anna Sabina Spizer, the nun at Munich’s Pütrich convent who wrote a personal letter to the abbess of the Bridgettine convent at Altomünster, offered a fairly straightforward account of Hortulana’s death. Here Hortulana enters one of her states of divine rapture in the choir, then wants to say a prayer but falls over backwards screaming ‘Jesus and Mary’. Her confessor rushes to the bleeding nun and commands her to give him a sign. Displaying obedience towards her confessor one last time, Hortulana opens her mouth before she dies. This description suggests an accidental death triggered by an ecstatic condition. And while Spizer still claimed that Hortulana died ‘like a martyr’ she quickly offered a more metaphorical meaning of this martyrdom appropriate to a cloistered nun and ecstatic visionary: ‘because from the day when she came into the cloister she had very few healthy days (…) She had no peace, neither day nor night, because of the poor souls’.48 This storyline differs from the one in the Latin vita from the Angerkloster’s convent archive. Here one finds an explicit link between the dictates of enclosure for women and their thwarted desires for the literal martyrdom that had become coded as a male death in the post-Tridentine era. Hortulana is described as ‘inflamed with a desire for martyrdom and for shedding her blood for her love of Jesus’, so much so that her confessor continually tries to direct her towards more appropriate forms of martyrdom but in vain: ‘[He] always exhorted her to internal martyrdom, but still she in turn did not cease to ask God for the grace of external martyrdom as well’. In an interesting twist of events, Hortulana at last gets her wish and dies at the hands of the devil: [B]ecause such a grace could not be had from human beings on account of the impediment of enclosure, she obtained it by request through the devil, because with divine permission he threw the blessed virgin from a high place and because of this fall she began to shed blood copiously that not a drop remained in her veins but that she shed water in the end so that by God’s special grace she lived like a martyr and she also died like a martyr in a most holy manner.49

In this version, the devil functions like the only kind of ‘Indian’ who can penetrate enclosure and martyr a nun – of course, only with the permission of God whose omnipotence has to remain beyond question. Given Hortulana’s long history of struggle with the angel of darkness, this looks like a plausible cause of death, if not for all women religious at least for this particular nun. Another archival text in fact constructs the same causality. The Latin text by an anonymous eyewitness to Hortulana’s death includes a verbatim quote from the devil in German in which he declares his intention to her three days 48 ‘wie eine Märtyrerin, denn sie hat von dem Tag an, da sie in das Kloster ist kommen, wenig gesunde Tag gehabt (…) sie hat keinen Fried gehabt. Weder Tag noch Nacht, wegen der Armen Seelen; cited in Liebhart, ‘Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren’, p. 39. 49 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, ‘Compendiosa Relatio De Vita et Morte’, n. fol.

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prior to the fatal fall: ‘Soon I am going to give you a final blow that will finish you off’.50 By comparison with these unpublished documents, Barnabas Kirchhueber played it much safer in print, again couching the events into a baroque devotional idiom. His account of Clara Hortulana’s death puts the responsibility for her martyrdom squarely within the domain of divine forces and on the shoulders of her guardian angel: [B]ecause Clara Hortulana carried hidden in her heart for many years a burning desire for martyrdom and for shedding blood for her love of God, for which she prayed to God zealously for many years, she at long last was granted her wish in this wondrous and unexpected way and manner: when once after collation she had gone to the upper choir to say her prayers, the devil attacked her very strongly once again, and after she had conquered him, and he had given her a blow to her forehead, and with it a burn mark that remained imprinted into her death, Hortulana (as was revealed to a blessed person who also died with a reputation of sanctity) was handed over to her guardian angel so that he martyr her by throwing her down in the presence of three sisters from the upper choir against a desk in the lower choir so that she suffered a great wound on her temple from which she shed blood for the love of God, as she had asked, so much so that water flowed afterwards with which she concluded her saintly life and her soul was carried immediately by the angels of God into eternal joy as was revealed to the above mentioned person.51

Kirchhueber apparently still anticipated a degree of scepticism among his audience in the face of this storyline, or perhaps he also felt a need of his own to think through the deeper causes behind the unusual death of a woman he believed to be a saint. Thus he offered multiple proofs in the text to establish the veracity of this occurrence. In this passage, ‘a blessed person’ is cited as a witness of these ‘wondrous’ occurrences. Later in the text, Kirchhueber reports how another saintly person saw the dead Clara Hortulana wearing a martyr’s crown. But the chronicler also resorted to a more scholarly argument and

50 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, ‘Anonymes Zeugnis’, n. fol. 51 ‘Endlichen/dieweilen Clara Hortulana vil jahr in ihrem Hertzen verborgen getragen/ein inbrünstige Martyr-Begird/und wegen der Liebe Gottes ihr Blut zuvergiessen/wie sie dann umb dises auch vil Jahr Gott inbrünstig gebetten/ist sie endlich erhöret worden auff dise sehr wunderliche und unverhoffte Weis und Manier: also Hortulana einsmahls nach der Collation auf den Oberen Chor gangen/allda ihr Gebett zuverrichten/hat der Teuffel sie abermahlen sehr häfftig angefochen/ und nachdem er von ihr ist überwunden worden/ und er diser einen Straich an das Hirn gegeben/ und mit disem ein Brandt-Mahln/so sie bis in Todt behalten/eingetrucket/ist Hortulana (wie einer Gottseeligen Persohn/so auch mit Ruehm der Heiligkeit gestorben/geoffenbahret ware) iren H. Schutzengel übergeben worden/sie zu martyren/in dem er sie von dem Oberen Chor in Angesicht 3 Schwesteren/in den unteren Chor an ein Buldt geworfen/daß sie an dem Schlaff ein grosse Wunden bekommen/aus welcher sie ihr Blut aus Liebe gegen Gott/wie verlangt/alles vergossen/also zwar/ daß das Wasser hernach geflossen/mit welchen sie ihr heiligs Leben beschlossen/und ihr Seel/wie gemelter Persohn geoffenbaret wurde/gleich von den Englen Gottes in die ewige Freud ist getragen worden’; Gnaden=Anger, pp. 64–5.

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invoked precedent.52 He related a story that first appeared in a book by a Bavarian Jesuit and Professor of Theology, Georg Stengel. According to this tale, ‘a very pious hermit’ was brought on top of a high rock by his guardian angel and then pushed down to his death. Another hermit who had witnessed the event in a state of disbelief dared to complain to the angel. The latter explained how he had done the other hermit a great favour: My brother you must know that the loving God sent me to do this because your brother was inflamed with such burning divine love today […] that he would never reach such heights again in his lifetime; that he may receive a reward for his highness, our kind God called him in this way and manner, affirming His grace.53

Working hard rhetorically, Kirchhueber then proceeded to apply the lessons of this incident to Hortulana. Like the hermit, she too had been burning with holy desires, in this case a desire for martyrdom. In the end, God responded to her extreme zeal and sent the guardian angel to kill her because Hortulana ‘lived in strict enclosure’, her own hermit’s life, which precluded other forms of martyrdom. Kirchhueber completed his portrayal of Clara Hortulana with a piece of visual rhetoric that encapsulates the different facets of her sanctity that he emphasised in his vita (Fig. 2.1).54 Entitled ‘A truthful depiction of the blessed Sister Clara Hortulana (…) who died with a reputation of sanctity on October 14, 1689’, the work was produced by the artist Carl Gustav Amling. Hortulana, her eyes slightly downcast in an expression of humility, carries symbols of her capacity for suffering and her determination to follow Christ in his passion: a tool of flagellation in one hand and a simple wooden cross in the other. The open book too speaks to the theme of the passion. Referring to Paul’s letters to the Galatians, its text reads: ‘Only through the cross of our Lord Christ’. Presumably it is Hortulana’s guardian angel that holds the book for her and calls her attention to the passage with his pointed finger. For this mirrors the angel’s role in the written text: he is the force that kept the holy woman on the right path all the way to her passion (‘through the cross’).

52 Here Kirchhueber’s version differs from the unpublished German text that otherwise served as a basis for his chronicle. The German text includes the passage just quoted but otherwise does not contain stories about the guardian angel nor does it offer precedent for such divinely ordained killing. Kirchhueber clearly elaborated the theme of the guardian angel in his publication. Bayerisches Haupstaatsarchiv, München, Klosterliteralien, München, Angerkloster, 4, ‘Khurtzer Inhalt Der denkwürdigen Sachen’, fol. 25v. 53 ‘Mein Bruder du must wissen/daß mich der liebreiche Gott dises zuthun der Ursachen geschickt/weil diser dein Bruder des heutiges Tags mit solcher Inbrunst der Göttlichen Liebe/und anderen guten Begirden is angeflammet gewesen/daß er sein Lebtag nit mehr zu so hohen Staffel wäre kommen/auff daß er nun wegen diser Hochheit möchte Belohnung bekommen/hat ihne der gütige Gott auf dise Weis und Manier zu sich berueffen/und also seiner Gnad bestettiget’; Gnaden=Anger, p. 65. 54 Ibid., p. 59.

Clara Hortulana of Embach

Fig. 2.1

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Carl Gustav Amling, Portrait of Clara Hortulana, in: Barnabas Kirchhueber, Der Gnaden=und Tugend=reiche Anger [...] (Munich, 1701, p. 59) (copyright: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich).

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The image further alludes to death and martyrdom. The skull to the left of Hortulana with its haunting, empty eyes is no doubt a memento of mortality. Set against the written vita, the skull can also be read as a metonymy for the suffering souls whom Hortulana freed through her spiritual labours. That she herself avoided the pangs of purgatory and received the glory of martyrdom instead is evident in two other potent symbols. A crown is floating above Hortulana’s head while an angel at her side holds the carafe with her blood and a banner that plays on the saintly signifier of bodily incorruptibility. Referring to Hortulana, the inscription states: ‘Whose blood is still intact’. The latter was a direct reference to an examination of Hortulana’s corpse in 1698, nine years after her death. A team of examiners that included Kirchhueber and five nuns from the Angerkloster opened Clara Hortulana’s grave. They retrieved a carafe of blood which the ‘lay sister Maria Monica Schraffnaglin gathered from the earth when the blessed servant of God was shedding it copiously during her death or rather during her martyrdom’.55 Kirchhueber poured some blood into another vessel while the others were watching. The witnesses noted the unusual quality of Hortulana’s remaining bodily fluid, which was ‘fresh, alive, and liquid, as if it had just been bled from the veins, so beautiful and red, like red wine’.56 In the end then, it was not only the rhetorical treatment of Clara Hortulana by the male saint-maker that advanced her transmutation into a holy person but also the practical treatment of her body by the other nuns who had kept Hortulana’s blood in a carafe next to her corpse as was done often with martyr-saints. Clara Hortulana never joined the ranks of canonised saints but the story of the German nun is no less revealing. Scholars on early modern women’s spirituality have commented extensively on the shift from a medieval Christianity that emphasised asceticism and charismatic holiness to a postTridentine Catholicism that valued discipline and obedience. So too have they stressed the decline in the power of female saints, as well as in sheer numbers of women promoted to the ranks of the Church’s holy. These larger trends notwithstanding, a case like that of Clara Hortulana suggests that women still embraced older modes of female religious life and even reached for newer, masculine forms of martyrdom. Exemplars of female charismatic sanctity lived on inside convent cloisters and on the pages of convent chronicles, and they continued to find admirers among clergymen. Clara Hortulana indeed appears to have been part of a group of mystical women who exerted influence on some of the most powerful clerics in Bavaria, like Prince-Bishop Eckher and his group of reformers. Rather than suppressing female mysticism, these men continued to value it as a source of counsel and consolation. Of course, all of this does not preclude that new constraints and interpretation of women’s behaviour were put into place following the Council of Trent. The differences between the archival and the printed record reflect this 55 Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv München, Klosterliteralien, Fasz. 356/1/1/50, ‘Eröffnung des Grabs ao 1698 Lateinische und deutsche Attestation’, n. fol. 56 Ibid.

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development. It was for a reason that Kirchhueber deferred to papal authority in his discussion of saintly women. Likewise, the chronicler knew what he was doing when he refashioned the spirituality of an aspiring saint like Hortulana in a baroque mould by playing up her relationships with poor souls and her guardian angel to the point of crediting the latter with her unexpected death. But is this an unusual case or might we be dealing with a broader, specifically German phenomenon? Waltraud Pulz who has analysed a number of sixteenth-century charismatic women from German lands has raised the issue of a German tradition of charismatic female sanctity. Calling attention to the lack of research, she has argued that it is currently impossible to adjudicate the meaning of the isolated cases that have been discovered: did these German charismatic women resort to a medieval and essentially moribund model of holiness? Or were they part of a long tradition that reached back to the Middle Ages but kept reinvigorating itself, breathing new life into these older models after the Reformation?57 This much can be said: confessional conflict between Protestants and Catholics was more severe and lasted longer in Germany than in other regions of Europe. In these conflicts, as Pulz has shown, religious women and the types of sanctity they represented, were mobilised for propaganda by both sides.58 The propagandistic use of women religious may make it more difficult still to penetrate the social experience behind these stereotypes for the German context. But perhaps the confessionalisation of female models of sanctity also implied their consolidation and longterm survival as behavioural options for women religious in German lands. Only systematic research will tell whether an unbroken tradition of German charismatic sanctity existed and reached all the way to the early eighteenth century when Clara Hortulana’s life appeared in print and the Enlightenment was on the horizon.

57 Waltraud Pulz, ‘Imitatio – Aemulatio – Simulatio: Leibhaftige Heiligkeit und scheinheilige Leiber’, in Peter Burschel and Anne Conrad, Vorbild Inbild Abbild: Religiöse Lebensmodelle in geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive (Freiburg/Breisg., 2003), p. 35. 58 Ibid., pp. 23–47.

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Chapter three

How to Look Like a (Female) Saint: The Early Iconography of St Teresa of Avila Margit Thøfner

In the last two decades or so, the steady trickle of scholarly writings on St Teresa of Avila has turned into a flood. For example, there are careful analyses of Teresa’s writings by Alison Weber, Carole Slade and Gillian Ahlgren; there are thoughtful reassessments of her theological position by Deidre Green and Edward Howells; and there are thorough historical studies of the society in which the saint worked and lived, most notably by Jodi Bilinkoff. Moreover, it is not only scholars who are interested in the holy woman of Avila. Recently, the fashion journalist Cathleen Medwick published a volume on Teresa perhaps best described as an amateur biography if one takes that to mean a carefully compiled work. A little more than four centuries after the original Saison Carmelitaine – when Teresa’s Discalced Carmelites were fêted for their sanctity across Europe – there has been a most welcome revival of interest. This is perhaps because St Teresa remains the best known and most prominent representative of female monasticism in the early modern period. Nevertheless, there is something of a gap in this plethora of writings. Although Teresa’s life and writings have been examined in great detail, there is precious little recent work on the pictorial representation or visual hagiography of St Teresa. Bar a few exceptions, historians, art historians, biographers,  The full details of these publications are as follows: Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, 1990); Carole Slade, Saint Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley, 1995); Gillian Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca, 1996); Deidre Green, Gold in the Crucible: Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition (Shaftesbury, 1989); Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York, 2002); Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca, 1989).  Cathleen Medwick, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (London, 2000). The phrase ‘amateur biography’ is adapted from a perceptive review: C. S. Scalise, ‘Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul’, Church History 69 (2000), 890–92.  There are a few honourable exceptions to this, the best of which are: Yves Rocher (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle dans les carmels de France (exh. cat., Petit Palais, Paris, 1982), pp. 43–68; M. T. Ruiz Alcon, ‘Santa Teresa en los monasteries de El Escorial y de las Descalzas Reales’, Reales sitios 19, no. 74 (1982), 17–24; Christopher C. Wilson, ‘Saint Teresa of Avila’s Martyrdom: Images of Her Transverberation in Mexican Colonial Painting’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 74–5 (1999), 211–33.

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psychoanalysts and literary scholars alike collude in the lazy assumption that the most important, indeed definitive, representation of St Teresa is that by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Fig. 3.1). For example, in the very first paragraph of Medwick’s biography there is a description of the Cornaro chapel. This then fades imperceptibly into a discussion of Teresa’s own mystic experiences, as if the two were simply commensurate. An otherwise highly sensitive historian, Carlos Eire, falls into a similar trap when he describes Bernini’s St Teresa as: ‘the monument to the mystic enraptured unto death seems a lesson in stone about the values of the Catholic Reformation’. These are but two instances of a pervasive tendency. Bernini’s sculpture is certainly a compelling work of art. Yet it does not necessarily offer a privileged insight into the life, times and experiences of Teresa herself. For the Cornaro chapel, completed in 1652, is in fact a bit of a latecomer as far as the depiction of Teresa of Avila is concerned. Teresa’s life and experiences had been shaped into a visual hagiography already in 1613. In that year, in the city of Antwerp in present-day Belgium, there appeared a series of 25 beautifully designed folio prints depicting scenes from her life and certain of her visions. By 1630 the print-series had been issued in at least another two editions. Evidently, there was a keen demand for it. Moreover, it is an undisputable fact that the print-series of 1613 came to form the basis for all subsequent depictions of St Teresa, including the Cornaro chapel. So Teresa’s mystical experiences had received definitive visual form long before Bernini began his work. The sculptor’s relationship to Teresa was absolutely not unmediated, he did not have some sort of special insight into her life. Instead, he was working within a set of already established if also highly flexible visual conventions. Yet, despite the obvious importance of the print series of 1613, it has not been studied in detail by any recent scholars. For example, Cecile Emond touched upon it only as part of a much larger study of Carmelite iconography. In a similar vein, Irving Lavin simply plundered it as an iconographical source for Bernini’s work, ignoring those aspects which did not serve his purpose. The aim here is to remedy this. It is important to do so because we will not understand how St Teresa came to be so popular in the early modern period if we do not examine how she was depicted and why. It should be noted, however, that the print-series of 1613 would seem to represent only a small if extremely influential fraction of Teresian imagery. There is some evidence Medwick, Teresa of Avila, pp. ix–x. Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in SixteenthCentury Spain (Oxford, 1995), p. 392.  Rocher (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle, p. 47.  Ibid., pp. 43–4 and 47–8. See also Cecile Emond, L’Iconographie Carmélitaine dans les anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux (2 vols, Brussels, 1961), vol. ii, pp. 109–29 and 155, and Irving Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (2 vols, Oxford, 1980), vol. i, p. 100 and pp. 161–2.  There is one old and rather uncritical study: Théodore de Saint-Joseph, Vie iconologique de sainte Thérèse (Courtrai, 1928).  For these sources, see note 7. 



How to Look Like a (Female) SainT

Fig. 3.1

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstacy of St Teresa, marble and gilt bronze, 1647–52, Rome, Cornaro Chapel, Sta Maria della Vittoria (copyright: University of East Anglia).

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to suggest that a truly staggering number of printed pictures of the saint were produced and circulated in the early modern period but research on this topic is still only in its infancy.10 Besides, as regards the theme of the present book, we will not understand early modern attitudes to female monasticism if we fail to consider the pictorial resources which helped those outside the cloister to imagine what life was like on the inside. Prints such as those of the life of St Teresa published in 1613 served an important purpose indeed: they were the public face of female monasticism during the early modern period. Given the date of its publication, the print-series of 1613 almost certainly formed part of the campaign for Teresa’s beatification and canonisation. The prints were issued only one year before her beatification in 1614 and nine years before she was finally admitted into the ranks of the saints in 1622. This means that, to explore what the prints are about, it is necessary first to reprise something of the process that eventually led to Teresa’s canonisation. The campaign for making her a saint began almost immediately after her death in 1582. But it soon ran into trouble. After the first publication of Teresa’s writings in 1588, the Dominican preacher Alonso de la Fuente vigorously denounced her in print. First, he considered her writings troublingly unorthodox because they advocated a profound personal relationship with God. In de la Fuente’s eyes, this amounted to a heretical denial of the importance of the Church and of its administration of the sacraments as the only tenable link between God and His faithful. De la Fuente was also concerned about Teresa’s visions, deeply suspicious that they were in fact delusions sent by the Devil, not revelations of the Divine. Finally, de la Fuente and other critics of Teresa also reasoned, with St Paul, that a woman could not and should not teach or impart Christian doctrine.11 To counter this, a valiant band of both secular and ecclesiastical pamphleteers sprang to Teresa’s defence. Their argument was that her sanctity was precisely demonstrated by her extraordinary personal relationship with God and by her unwomanly, indeed manly, ability to teach Christian doctrine with both orthodoxy and authority. This disagreement – over what Teresa really was – meant that the campaign for her canonisation was slow and difficult. And, as Ahlgren and others have argued, the chief stumbling block was Teresa’s sex.12 The male-dominated papal curia found it hard to admit women into the ranks of the canonised. So, in itself, the process leading to Teresa’s canonisation is of particular interest to historians of female monasticism. It shows only too clearly that, in the early modern period, sanctity and femininity were perceived as almost entirely incompatible. Even so, the future saint Teresa had a formidable coalition on her side. The initiator of this coalition was Don Fernando de Toledo, an affluent relative of the Duke of Alba, who left 14,000 ducados in his will to bankroll the beginning of the campaign for Teresa’s canonisation. In 1591 King Philip II 10 See E. Pernoud, ‘Les épreuves de sainte Thérèse: la collection de Manuel Navarro’, Nouvelles de l’estampe 133 (1994), 23–5. 11 My account of this is based on Slade, St Teresa of Avila, pp. 127–32 and Medwick, Teresa of Avila, pp. 247–9. 12 Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila, p. 29.

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of Spain threw his weight behind the campaign, in response to reports of the uncorrupted state of Teresa’s body.13 After this date and until 1622, the Spanish Habsburgs and the high nobility of Spain constantly pestered the Papacy to further Teresa’s cause. The 1613 print-series must have formed part of this campaign. For, as is evident from its frontispiece, it is dedicated to a prominent Spanish nobleman, one Rodrigo Lasso Niño, Count of Añover and majordomo major to the Archduke Albert of Austria, head of the Spanish Habsburg court in Brussels (Fig. 3.2). Albert and his wife, an Infanta of Spain, also formed part of the coalition promoting Teresa’s canonisation; they too sent letters to Rome in support of the campaign.14 From all this it follows that the print-series was commissioned to celebrate the imminent beatification of Teresa. And it was also to spur the campaign on to its final, triumphant completion. The history of the print-series is complicated by the fact that it was issued in several editions. It seems that two editions were in circulation already in 1613. There was one with the Latin title of ‘The Life of the B. Virgin Teresa of Jesus, Pious Restorer of the Order of Discalced Carmelites’ and another with an almost similar title, only the abbreviated ‘B.’ is replaced by an ‘S.’.15 This is all a little strange. The abbreviated ‘B.’ must surely stand for ‘Beatae’ or ‘Blessed’ even if that status would not be conferred on Teresa before 1614. The ‘S.’ is even more presumptuous since it can only stand for ‘Sanctae’ or ‘Saint’, a title that she only attained in 1622.16 In this manner, the two versions of the printseries proclaim with greater or lesser boldness that Teresa’s sanctity is simply self-evident, despite the misgivings of the curia and others. The audacity of this manoeuvre becomes evident if one recalls that, in 1601, the Jesuits of Rome had received a stern papal reprimand for circulating prints of ‘Beatus’ Ignatius Loyola and his miracles. The problem was that the curia had not yet properly considered his case for canonisation.17 This begins to explain why the ‘B.’ and the ‘S.’ are discreetly abbreviated in the frontispieces of the two editions of the print-series of 1613. Beyond the dedication, nothing further is known about how the Habsburg court of Brussels was involved in publishing the print-series. But its making must somehow be linked to the staunch support for the Teresian or Discalced Carmelites extended by that court during the first three decades of the seventeenth century.18 On a more practical level, it seems that the prints were Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, p. 388. John-Baptist Knipping, Iconography of the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands: Heaven on Earth (2 vols, Nieuwkoop, 1974), vol. i, p. 157. 15 ‘Vita B. Virginis Teresiae a Iesu Ordinis Carmelitarum Excalceatorum Piae Restauratricis’. For an example of a version with the abbreviated ‘S.’, see Fig. 3.2. 16 Here I depart from the chronology suggested by Rocher (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle, p. 47. The evidence represented by various versions of the print-series contradicts his tidy account but only a full inspection of all extant versions would clarify the question of dates and editions. 17 Michael Bury, The Print in Italy, 1550–1620 (exh. cat. British Museum, London, 2001), p. 131. 18 On this, see Margit Thøfner, The Bearing of Images: Religion, Femininity and Sovereignty in the Spanish Netherlands, 1599–1635 (Unpubl. DPhil dissertation, University of Sussex, 1996), pp. 206–43. 13 14

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Fig. 3.2

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Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Frontispiece, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

made on the initiative and under the supervision of Ana de Jesús, a friend of St Teresa, and from 1607 onwards the prioress of the Discalced Carmelite convent in Brussels. Certainly, in one of her letters she makes the following promise: ‘I shall send to you at the first opportunity the life of our holy Mother, represented by many images with her revelations and miracles. We have taken pains to have a complete series made.’19 The print-series should thus be understood as part of Ana’s broader efforts to disseminate in print both the written works and also the extraordinary life of her friend Teresa. Ana, for one, understood only too well that Teresa’s achievements had to be promoted in public, beyond the convent walls. But Ana’s involvement also points to another important aspect of the print-series. The version that it gives of Teresa’s life is informed by the needs and interests of the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Brussels and, most likely, of their archducal and noble patrons. Just like Bernini’s sculpture, the print-series of 1613 does not provide an unmediated insight into the life and times of Teresa. Rather, it shows how

19 ‘Je vous enverrai à la première occasion la vie de notre sainte Mère, représentée par plusiers images avec ses révélations et miracles. Nous avons soin d’en faire executer un ouvrage complet.’ Here cited after Rocher (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle, p. 47.

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certain individuals involved in promoting Teresa’s canonisation wanted her to appear. She was to look like a saint. Yet it is unlikely that the Discalced Carmelites of Brussels actually paid for the print-series. For 25 folio copper-plates made by Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, at this date two of the most prominent and experienced engravers in Antwerp, did not come cheap.20 Using the better documented business transactions between the Galle workshop and the Plantin-Moretus press also in the city of Antwerp, one may estimate the cost of engraving the copper plates at 70 florins a piece, which makes 1750 florins in total.21 This was a very large sum. In Antwerp in the early seventeenth century a skilled mason would earn around one and a half florins per day during the busy summer months. And the above sum does not include the fee most likely charged by the unknown designer of the plates, nor does it take into account the costs of paper, which were usually high, nor the costs of actually printing the plates.22 In short, the print-series was an expensive project. It was probably bankrolled by someone with very deep pockets, which excludes Ana de Jesús and her nuns, who had to live in strict poverty in obedience to the Teresian rule. One suspects that it was their friends at the Brussels court who supplied the cash. In any case, because of the high costs of its production, the prints of Teresa’s life were almost certainly sold as a luxury item. Only those with a certain measure of disposable income could have afforded to buy them. The Latin captions affirm this. They are obviously addressed only to those with a certain level of education. But then it was such persons who might bring influence to bear on the campaign for Teresa’s canonisation. The exceptionally high cost of this method of image-making begs the question of why it was chosen. The obvious answer is that engravings came with one marked advantage: they could be circulated widely. Therefore they were the ideal medium for disseminating knowledge about Teresa’s remarkable life beyond the convent walls. In this, they were very different from sculptures like Bernini’s, which are site-specific and, in a pre-photographic age, could therefore be seen only by a limited number of people. In contrast, once the initial investment into the making of the plates had been made, a relatively large number of engravings could be printed, usually over 1500 impressions, although this depended on how deeply the engraver had cut into the copper.23 To recuperate the initial investment, each set of prints obviously had to retail at a fairly high price. But they were eminently portable. As Lavin demonstrated, Bernini’s sculpture is definitely based on certain images from the print-series of

The involvement of the two engravers is documented on the frontispiece. See Fig. 3.2. This estimate is based on the average payment of 65–75 florins per engraved copper plate that Theodor Galle received for his work on a Breviary published by the Plantin-Moretus press in 1614. Dirk Imhof (ed.), The Illustration of Books Published by the Moretuses (exh. cat., PlantinMoretus Museum, Antwerp, 1996), pp. 125–6. 22 On the high cost of paper, see ibid. p. 174. 23 Ibid. p. 77. 20 21

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1613.24 In itself, this is evidence that the prints travelled as far away as Rome. And that, of course, was by far the most important destination. That the engravings were luxury products destined for an elite audience is also evinced in their high quality. For example, in nearly every plate there is a subtle play of light and shade conveyed by the judicious use of the engraver’s burin, although that is much more evident when viewing the original prints rather than mere reproductions (however, see, for example, Figs 3.4, 3.8 and 3.11). It takes considerable strength, skill, calculation and patience to achieve such effects.25 Note also the intricate interplay between the various figures and between figures and backgrounds (see, for examples, Figs 3.5, 3.6, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.12). Whoever the anonymous designer of these prints were, he or she must have received professional training in designing narrative imagery. The quality of the print-series of 1613 becomes particularly evident if one compares it with a truly cheap print from the seventeenth century (Fig. 3.3). Such prints often have fuzzy outlines and ink-smears and they are usually woodcuts rather than engravings. The first plate of the print-series gives its title and this is set in an architectural frame surmounted by the monogram of Christ and flanked by two allegorical figures (Fig. 3.2). These are identified as ‘Soul’s Peace’ and ‘Silence’ by inscriptions at their feet.26 Already one is given a sense of how one should think of Teresa. The figure of Silence is especially interesting, given that it was Teresa’s lack of silence which bothered those opposed to her canonisation. After the frontispiece there follows a portrait of Teresa, denoted as such by the text beneath it and also by the characteristic moles beneath her nose and on her cheek (Fig. 3.4). These lend a certain credence to the image. Through the inclusion of such idiosyncratic facial features, the portrait declares itself to be unadorned and thus somehow closer to the real. Moreover, as the Latin inscription below the image suggests, the portrait is in fact based on a much older picture of the Carmelite reformer painted from the life in 1576 by Giovanni Narducci.27 So, in the designing of the second plate of the printseries, great pains were taken to present Teresa as an actual human being. One can easily imagine that Ana de Jesús, who had known Teresa well, would have subjected the designs and first proofs of this portrait to particularly careful scrutiny. It simply had to look like Teresa. Moreover, the image sets the tone for the rest of the print series. What one is about to see, as one looks through the engravings, is an actual life, not a fiction. By means of the print-series, one is to be rendered into a witness of Teresa’s prodigious sanctity as if it were unfolding in front of one’s own eyes. This, of course, lends further support to the argument that the print-series was part of the campaign for Teresa’s canonisation. Lavin, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, vol. i, p. 100 and pp. 161–2. For an excellent account of what engraving on copper involves, see Bury, The Print in Italy, pp. 14–17 and 29–32. 26 ‘Pax Anima’; ‘Silentium’. 27 For an illustration and details of this image, see Rocher (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle, p. 43. 24 25

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Fig. 3.3

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Anonymous, ‘The Hearing of Confession’, [Willem de Pretere], Het Hantboexken der Sodaliteyt oft Broederschap van de H. Maeghet Maria inghestelt inde Societeyt IESV (Antwerp, 1615) (copyright: the author).

That Teresa was a person yet no common person is clearly indicated by the elaborate cartouche in which her portrait is set. Above her, there is a canopy reminiscent of that sometimes displayed within or hung above royal portraits in the early modern period.28 In addition, in Catholic Europe in this period, canopies were also carried in processions above royal persons, above relics and above the consecrated host during Corpus Christi.29 So, by this simple and highly recognisable visual device, Teresa is presented as much more than just an individual. Like the Corpus Christi wafer, the royal body or the relic of a saint, she is a sacred presence. 28 For a discussion of this in relation to the Spanish Habsburgs, see Rosemarie Mulcahy, Philip II of Spain: Patron of the Arts (Dublin, 2004), pp. 273–6. 29 For the use of canopies in royal processions, see Lawrence M. Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva, 1986), pp. 57 and 101–4; on the use of canopies during Corpus Christi processions, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: the Eucharist in late medieval culture (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 164–85 and 259.

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Fig. 3.4

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 2, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.5

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 3, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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Fig. 3.6

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 4, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.7

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 6, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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Fig. 3.8

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 8, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.9

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 17, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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Fig 3.10

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 5, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.11

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 12, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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Fig. 3.12

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 21, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.13

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 29, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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Fig. 3.14

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 23, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613); (copyright: the author).

Fig. 3.15

Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle, Plate 24, Vita S. Virginis Teresiae… (Antwerp, 1613) (copyright: the author).

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This yoking of personal identity with conventional signs of sanctity fits closely with the iconographic patterns established for other saints in the period immediately after the Council of Trent. For example, images of Ignatius Loyola tended to follow a type actually based on the death-mask of that saint.30 There was nothing essentially new about this; much earlier depictions of saints also followed certain conventions. For example, early Christian images of John the Baptist quite logically tended to supply the saint with an emaciated and heavily bearded face. What was new in the post-Tridentine period was perhaps the sheer detail of the portrayals, based, as they were, on actual likenesses rather than on a generic type. But this should not blind one to the fact that a certain emphasis on the individuality of a saint was a highly conventional part of visual hagiography. Nor should one be surprised that such conventions were mobilised in the formulation of an iconography for putative saints like Teresa. For, as one of Teresa’s first hagiographers Francisco de Ribera argued, one may prove the sanctity of an alleged saint by the degree of conformity between his or her qualities and those of already established and acknowledged saints.31 In keeping with this, de Ribera dedicated a great deal of time and energy to hunting down and discussing precedents for the various episodes of Teresa’s life in the lives of earlier saints. Thus, in the early modern period, sanctity was a paradox: it was made manifest by conventionally unconventional behaviour. Or, put differently, if Teresa could be made to look like a saint and behave like a saint then this would affirm that she really was a saint. To supply and disseminate such evidence must have been the chief purpose of the print-series of 1613. It was to serve as a compelling visual supplement to the already existing textual hagiographies. It was to make the holiness of Teresa seem vivid and manifest in the way only pictures can do. No wonder that, by her own account, Ana de Jesús took great pains over this project. In keeping with all of this and with time-honoured hagiographic tradition, in the print-series of 1613 plates three and four are dedicated to the precocious sanctity of Teresa’s early life. In plate three, young Teresa is shown with her brother (Fig. 3.5). The episode depicted is when the two children were prevented by a family friend from leaving Avila to offer themselves as exchanges for Christian hostages held by the Barbary corsairs. In plate four, young Teresa embarks on convent life, again supported by her pious brother (Fig. 3.6). After this, and in keeping with hagiographical precedents dating back as far as St Augustine, there are two plates dedicated to Teresa’s proper conversion to the service of God. Plate five shows the near-fatal illness during which God made clear to Teresa the punishment she would receive were she to die in her current state of sinfulness. Plate six then shows Teresa’s first moments of profound penitence and remorse, attained when praying in front of an image of the suffering Christ (Fig. 3.7). 30 For the development of St. Ignatius’s iconography, see Ursula König-Nordhoff, Ignatius von Loyola: Studien zur Entwicklung einer neuen Heiligen-Ikonographie in Rahmen einer Kanonisations-kampagne um 1600 (Berlin, 1982). 31 Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, pp. 382–4.

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All of these plates share a pictorial device that is particularly obvious in plate six. In the upper right corner a nun looks over a balcony, into the chapel where Teresa kneels. She is a witness to Teresa’s moment of remorse. Such devices work to affirm the reality of these scenes, lulling us into the fiction that what we see is not a carefully contrived image but rather a scene directly from the life of St Teresa. We, too, become witnesses to her sanctity. After the initial sequence of images, which trace the early life and conversion of Teresa, there is a change of narrative logic in the print-series. It now becomes a judicious mixture of visions, miracles and exemplary deeds in order to make manifest Teresa’s holiness. For the sake of brevity, the discussion below covers only a few typical examples. The engravings of Teresa’s visions are especially interesting since the ecclesiastical hierarchy greeted her mystical experiences with particular suspicion. Consequently, in the print series, various pictorial devices are deployed to give an air of orthodoxy and authority to these experiences. Consider, for example, plate eight (Fig. 3.8). It shows Teresa’s most famous vision, her transverberation. Above the scene, one sees Christ in glory together with the dove of the Holy Spirit. The outspread arms of Christ and the extended wings of the dove serve as a kind of visual rhyme; they repeat the shapes described by the wings and the outspread arms of the angel who is about to plunge his flaming arrow into Teresa’s entrails. This suggests that Teresa, the angel and Christ are all locked together in some sort of spiritual embrace. But, at the same time, this affirms that the vision comes straight from Christ, not from a demonic source. Note also the location of the vision which is, to my knowledge, not described at all in the textual hagiographies of Teresa nor in her own writings.32 The putative saint appears to be standing in front of an open communion bank, immediately in front of an altar, which is just visible to the left of her. Repeating a visual strategy already deployed in plate six, the altar in plate eight reaffirms Teresa’s position within the sacramental life of the Church. Her transverberation is thus represented in a carefully balanced manner. On the one side, the plate acknowledges her intense personal relationship with God, figured in the vision itself and also in the lack of any witnesses such as those included in the previous plates. On the other hand, Teresa’s orthodoxy is affirmed by the location of the vision at the communion bank. We are to imagine her transverberation as a peculiarly intense version of the physical reception of Christ, the literal taking within of His presence, that every good Catholic should learn to experience when taking communion.33 The miracles depicted in the series often feature the rather heavy-handed pictorial emphasis on eye-witnessing already noted in the opening scenes of 32 See, for example, E. Allison Peers (ed.), The Complete Works of St Teresa of Jesus (3 vols, London, 1946), i, pp. 192–3. 33 For an example of this, see the prayers and instructions for how to behave during and after having taken communion supplied for the lay members of the Sodality of the Virgin run by the Jesuits in Antwerp. They were published in [Willem de Pretere], Het Hantboexken der Sodaliteyt oft Broederschap van de H. Maeghet Maria inghestelt inde Societeyt IESV (Antwerp, 1615), pp. 199–201.

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Teresa’s life. Notice for example the amazed group of Jesuits on the right side of plate 17 and the kneeling nun in the left foreground (Fig. 3.9). All of these figures bear witness to Teresa’s levitation after taking communion, again affirming her commitment to the sacramental Catholicism of the postTridentine era. Similarly, in plate 15, in the company of several well-dressed ladies, Teresa heals a child accidentally hurt during the building of one of her convents (Fig. 3.10). In fact, according to the textual sources, this miracle was not witnessed directly, since Teresa was alone with the child at the time.34 But here there are several seemingly respectable witnesses. Note also, again, how both of these scenes take place in front of altars, affirming Teresa’s orthodoxy and her conformity with the sacramental life of the Church. But there are also more unorthodox scenes. In plate 12 Teresa is shown performing what is in effect a priestly office, the driving out of demons (Fig. 3.11). Here no altar is included, perhaps because that would be too controversial, but the cross suspended above a bench in the background is at least altar-like. Meanwhile, in plate 21 Teresa is shown at communion, at a moment when she recognised that the officiating priest was consecrating this most central of sacraments in a state of sinfulness (Fig. 3.12). Both of these plates might be perceived as undermining priestly authority. But, in plate 21, Teresa remains kneeling, apart from the altar, in the proper pose of someone taking communion. This assures the viewer of her belief in the Catholic doctrine that the holy nature of the sacrament derived not from the person instituting it but from the actual act of institution. And, as the Latin text below the image affirms, on Teresa’s prayers, the poor priest was forgiven for his sins. Thus she used her saintly powers to bolster rather than undermine the role of the priest, although the forgiveness of sins was, of course, also a priestly prerogative. Therefore images like these negotiate a delicate balance between feminine sanctity and male ecclesiastical authority. They affirm Teresa’s commitment to the Church as well as her exceptional status: she, a mere woman, was granted by God powers normally reserved for men. The plates devoted to Teresa’s life and work are especially tied into conventional pictorial hagiography. For example, the image celebrating her Discalced Carmelite Reforms show her in the traditional position of the Mater Misericordia, the Virgin Mary hiding her devotees beneath her cloak (Fig. 3.13). Note the Discalced Carmelite Friars on the left. Here Teresa’s controversial activities as female teacher of religion are defused by placing her in the eminently respectable role of the Virgin Mary. Note also the cloisterlike space and the church or chapel building in the left background. Here, architectural detail assures the viewer that Teresa always worked within the precincts of the established Church. Special care was taken to make Teresa’s writings appear orthodox. Diplomatically, they are not referred to before plate 23, the third-last in the series (Fig. 3.14). By this point, the repeated references to established forms of visual hagiography would have planted the notion that Teresa was a saint in 34



For an account of this event, see, for example, Medwick, Teresa of Avila, p. 75.

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the mind of any viewer with the slightest awareness of hagiographic pictorial conventions. Then, when Teresa is finally figured in the act of writing, she is given the pose and setting usually deployed for a male scholar saint such as, for example, Jerome.35 Here, at least, Teresa’s usurpation of male privileges is made quite explicit. Yet this is mitigated by a pictorial insistence on the fact that Teresa is writing under divine inspiration. For the engraving also follows the standard iconography of an evangelist at work, pen in hand but eye firmly fixed on the heavens.36 Moreover, there is a bright shining light in the upper left corner and the inscription running along one of the rays extends from this light to the writing Teresa. To underscore the point further, the aureole of the dove of the Holy Spirit is linked up with the halo of Teresa. Thus it is made absolutely clear that she wrote under God’s direct inspiration. Should a woman thus inspired be silenced just because she was a woman? It is surely not coincidental that, eventually, the papacy was persuaded that Teresa’s writings were indeed written under divine inspiration. In the early seventeenth century, this seemed to the curia the only way of explaining the intelligence and theological sophistication of Teresa’s literary works.37 The penultimate plate of the print-series shows Teresa’s exemplary death (Fig. 3.15). Again, one could be forgiven for confusing the scene with an image of the Death of the Virgin.38 So, here as elsewhere in the print-series, the particularities of Teresa’s life are made to fit within the highly conventional if also quite flexible tradition of pictorial hagiography, especially but certainly not exclusively Marian hagiography. The attempt to make the end of Teresa’s life seem like that of the Virgin Mary was quite successful if the many sermons preached to celebrate Teresa’s beatification in 1614 are anything go to by. To cite Eire again: Several of her beatification sermons likened her to the Virgin Mary. One compared her death to Mary’s and went so far as to say that only Mary’s assumption could rival the reception that Teresa received in heaven. Two others identified Teresa as the woman described in the Book of Revelation,

35 This becomes evident if one compares the print with, for example, the images of St Jerome made by Albrecht Dürer and Vittore Carpaccio. For short discussions of these two images, see Colin Eisler, ‘Maximilian and Dürer’s major engravings’, in Juliusz A. Chróscicki et. al. (eds), Ars Auro prior: studia Ioanni Bialostocki sexagenario dedicate (Warsaw, 1981), pp. 297–300; and Alessandro Tosi, ‘La Scienza Dipinta: modelli rinascimentali di arte et di scienzia’, in Fabrizio Miroi and Claudio Pogliano (eds), Immagini per conoscere: dal Rinascimento alla rivoluzione scientifica: atti della giornata di studio, Firenze, Palazzo Strozzi, 29 ottobre 1999 (Florence, 2001), pp. 113–23. 36 For examples of this type of image, see Leo Steinberg, ‘Pontormo’s Capponi Chapel’, Art Bulletin 66 (1974), 385–99, and H. Saalman, ‘Form and Meaning at the Barbadori-Capponi Chapel in S. Felicita’, Burlington Magazine 131 (1989), 523–39. 37 Slade, St Teresa of Avila, pp. 129 and 131. 38 For a recent discussion of the iconography of the Death of the Virgin see, for example, R. S. Field, ‘A fifteenth-century woodcut of the Death of the Virgin in a manuscript of Der Stachel der Liebe’, Studies in iconography 24 (2003), 71–137.

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Chapter 12, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars – a profoundly Marian image.39

Of course, this direct association of Teresa and the Virgin should not be attributed to the print-series alone. But, together with the work of Teresa’s many textual hagiographers, the print-series of 1613 formed part of a campaign to affirm her sanctity by inserting her into the already established traditions of pictorial hagiography. The print-series of 1613 circulated quite widely. For example, the prints were used as a pattern book for decorating various types of church furniture across Europe, ranging from carved choir-stools to antependia.40 A particularly fine example of such an antependium, made either in Spain or the Low Countries some time in the early modern period, may be found in Salisbury Cathedral in the south of England. The nuns or other devout women who embroidered that antependium would probably have visualised Teresa’s life on the basis of the printed images which they so painstakingly copied. Thus it seems that the print-series of 1613 came to inform the imaginations of those both inside and outside the convent wall. This, of course, was the point. The print-series was a revision of Teresa’s life in the most literal sense of the word. Whilst insisting on the reality of her life, the print-series actually remade her persona, refashioning her to conform with conventional patterns of sanctity. Each plate is thus a carefully calibrated manifestation of the paradox that governed sainthood, of unconventional behaviour rendered conventional. Finally, it is worth returning to one recurrent feature of the print-series. A great many of the plates have scenes set within convent walls, as appropriate to the strict enclosure which Teresa herself had stipulated for her nuns. But these scenes normally contain a vista into a subsidiary space or an open door or a window to connect life inside the convent with life in the world at large (see, for example, Figs 3.6, 3.10 and 3.13). For the very success of the campaign for Teresa’s canonisation depended on more than proving that she combined the feminine sanctity of the Virgin Mary with the capacity to write under divine inspiration of an evangelist or a St Jerome. It also depended on making visible the cloistered and therefore mostly unseen life of a nun. This life had to seem heroic and thus important and relevant to the world at large.

39 40



Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, p. 394. Emond, L’Iconographie Carmélitaine, vol. ii, pp. 109–29

Part II Convent Theatre and Music Making

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Chapter four

Music and Misgiving: Attitudes Towards Nuns’ Music in Early Modern Spain Colleen Baade

‘The convent has a good courtyard, and in it the nuns enjoy a variety of feastday celebrations. On diverse occasions large altars have been erected there, and from the windows (which are high up and have blinds) the nuns have sung sonorous words during the processions, and at times they have been heard in alternation with and complemented by the Royal Chapel, which comes to this city for this [very] effect, and in this way one enjoys two harmonious and skilled music chapels at the same time. The [music chapel] of this house is so perfect that it can be said that they are marvels of melodiousness and divine sirens, for with the tenderness and sweetness of their music they cause even the coarsest of spirits at once to pause and admire. According to the judgment of great and impartial musicians, these ladies are foremost in skill and harmony over all other women’s music chapels that exist on the globe, such that the convent has become the most fortunate of all the convents in Castile, because in it Heaven is comprised. (Happy are they who frequent it and extol its virtues.) Moreover, the nuns are so humble and wise, that this applause does not fill them with conceit or disquiet them, nor is it for this reason that they have achieved perfection in music. It is the glory and praise of their Spouse that most inspires this holy exercise, so that in this way the Divine Worship is more befitting and proper. The female religious who at this time are most outstanding in voice and ability are the following: Doña Antonia de Toledo, Doña Margarita Zimbrón, Doña Isabel de Aguilar (clever poet), Doña María de Arellano, Doña Antonia de Olivares, Doña María Clavijo and her sister Doña Ana María – great composers and instrumentalists – Doña Juana Martínez and her sister Doña Francisca, Doña María Mantilla, and Doña Antonia de Contreras, and twenty-six more nuns belonging to this chapel, in which there is a variety of instruments.’  ‘Tiene el combento un buen patio, y en él gozan las monjas algunas fiestas diferentes. En barias ocasiones se han hecho allí grandes altares, y desde las ventanas (que están altas y con celosías) han cantado las religiosas en las procesiones sonoras letras, y tal vez han sido alternadas y correspondidas de la Capilla Real, que para este efecto viene a esta ciudad, y de esta suerte se goza a un tiempo de dos acordes y diestras capillas. La de esta casa es tan perfecta que se puede dezir son prodigios de suavidad y sirenas divinas, pues al espíritu más bronco con lo tierno y dulze

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Francisco de Torres’s mid-seventeenth-century account of music-making by the nuns at Guadalajara’s Monasterio de la Piedad offers a useful point of departure for the present survey of attitudes towards nun musicians and nuns’ music-making in early modern Spain. One of nearly a thousand houses of female religious known to have existed in Spain by the end of the seventeenth century, the Monasterio de la Piedad was founded in 1524 by Doña Brianda de Mendoza y Luna, daughter of the Duke of Infantado, Iñigo López de Mendoza, and his wife María de Luna. Originally established as a beaterio housing a community of twenty beatas, la Piedad became a regular monastery of the Third Order of Saint Francis following the Council of Trent, and by the early seventeenth century it was home to sixty professed nuns. Contemporary descriptions of la Piedad emphasise the grandeur of the monastery’s buildings (its church was designed by architect Alonso de Covarrubias) and the richness of its furnishings. Twentieth-century historian Francisco Layna Serrano’s portrait of a ‘fashionable’ religious community populated by daughters of the Spanish nobility, whose feast-day observances were frequented by ‘the most select element of the population’, whose plazuela was the site of social encounters for caballeros and damas, and in whose locutorio visitors gathered for afternoon tertulias, likely paints an accurate picture of life at the Monasterio de la Piedad during its heyday. de sus azentos a un tiempo suspenden y admiran. A juicio de grandes músicos desapasionados se lleban estas señoras la primazia de diestras y suabes de todas las capillas de mugeres que ay en el orbe, conque viene a ser el más feliz este combento de todos quantos tiene Castilla, pues en él está abreviado el cielo; dichosos los que le frecuentan y celebran. Mas las religiosas son tan modestas y entendidas, que este aplauso no las desbaneze, ni ynquieta, ni por él han subido a la perfección de la música, que lo que más las alienta a este sagrado exercicio, es la gloria y alabanza de su Esposo, pues así el culto divino está más dezente y autorizado. Las señoras religiosas que en este tiempo más se señalan en voz y destreza son las siguientes: Doña Antonia de Toledo, Doña Margarita Zimbrón, Doña Isabel de Aguilar (aguda poeta), Doña María de Arellano. Doña Antonia de Olivares, Doña María Clavijo y su hermana Doña Ana María grandes compositoras e instrumentistas. Doña Juana Martínez y su hermana Doña Francisca, Doña María Mantilla, y Doña Antonia de Contreras, y más otras veintiséis de capilla donde ay variedad de instrumentos.’ Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional, ms 1689, Francisco de Torres, Historia de la muy noble ciudad de Guadalaxara por Don Francisco de Torres Alcayde, y Regidor perpectuo de la misma ziudad, y Capitán de Infantería española, por su magestad (1647) fols 128v–129r. The English translation above and all subsequent translations are mine.  Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La sociedad española en el siglo XVII, vol. 2: El estamento eclesiástico (Madrid, 1970), reports that at the end of the seventeenth century the total number of female monasteries in Spain was probably around 976 (p. 70).  A description of the Monasterio de la Piedad appears in Pedro de Salazar, O. F. M., Corónica e historia de la fundación y progreso de la Provincia de Castilla de la orden del bienaventurado padre San Francisco (Madrid, 1612), facsimile ed. Antolín Abad Pérez, O. F. M. (Madrid, 1977): ‘Este Convento es de muy suntuoso edificio, y muy galano y vistoso, tanto que la Iglesia es una de las más lucidas de nuestra Provincia, y los dormitorios, y claustro son muy grandes y muy bien edificados…Y para el culto divino dexó mucha plata y ornamentos muy ricos, y otras muchas cosas convenientes para este ministerio’ (p. 468).  ‘La suntuosidad de la casa e iglesia de la Piedad, riqueza de la fundación y el hecho de que casi todas las beatas en ella acogidas pertenecieran a familias hidalgas siendo no pocas las allegadas a la del Infantado, dieron pronto al beaterio cierto matiz aristocrático que le hizo el preferido por la nobleza de Guadalajara…[L]o cierto es que todo lo relativo a la casa de la Piedad púsose ‘de

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In the face of Torres’s account of the musical goings-on at la Piedad it may be surprising to learn that in her last will and testament the monastery’s founder instructed that her beatas ‘not sing in their choir [neither] at Mass nor at Vespers nor at any of the other Offices’, instead restricting their daily performance of the Divine Office to monotone chanting (in Spanish, called chanting en tono or sin punto). Bans against various kinds of music-making appear not infrequently in the constitutions that governed women’s religious communities in early modern Spain. In fact, around half of the two dozen or so constitutions consulted in preparation for this essay contain prohibitions against any kind of singing except monotone chant, effectively barring not only the singing of polyphony (canto de órgano) but also plainchant (canto llano). Many constitutions mandated that the Divine Office be spoken, except on important feast days, when it could be chanted en tono or sin punto, a practice associated particularly (though not exclusively) with the reformed communities whose members called themselves descalzas or recoletas. Franciscan chronicler Pedro de Salazar conveys the high esteem with which the austere religious observances of reformed houses were regarded; his report that the nuns at Madrid’s Monasterio de las Descalzes Reales ‘never sing except en tono’ clearly is meant to boast the spiritual superiority of the monastery’s inhabitants. Less charitable perhaps is Tirso de Molina’s comment about the singing at Madrid’s ‘las Góngoras’, a community of Discalced Mercedarian nuns whose chanting, he says, was ‘more devout than pleasing’. Constitutional proscriptions against nuns’ music-making owed to a variety of concerns. The introduction of ‘mental prayer’ (oración mental) into the daily schedules of monasteries of reformed orders certainly affected the way in which ‘vocal prayer’ (oración vocal) was performed in such communities. moda’ en Guadalajara; sus fiestas religiosas eran las más concurridas por muy solemnes y por acudir a ellas lo más selecto de la población…[P]referíase también oír misa mayor los domingos en la Piedad, y si durante los oficios el hermoso templo ofrecía magnífico golpe de vista, no era menos grato el aspecto de la plazuela formada por la iglesia y el antiguo palacio de doña Brianda, pues numerosos grupos de elegantes y engolados caballeros dábanse cita en ella para chismorrear un poco o rendir pleitesía a las encopetadas damas llegadas al templo…[C]ongregábase a menudo por la tarde en el locutorio buen número de aristocráticas damas y caballeros que así gozaban un rato de distraída tertulia….’ Francisco Layna Serrano, Los conventos antiguos de Guadalajara (Madrid, 1943), pp. 194–5. Layna Serrano’s colourful description is verisimilar, but one wishes it were supported by documentation.  ‘Quiero que no canten en su coro a misa ny a bísperas ny a otros ofiçios mas de que los digan en tono y no por punto.’ Claúsula 25 of Brianda de Mendoza’s last will and testament (19 February 1534) in Layna Serrano, Los conventos antiguos, p. 246.  ‘Son estas señoras monjas de la primera Regla de santa Clara, que es de grandíssima y alta perfección. Llámanse Descalças, porque siempre lo andan, y el vestido es muy áspero, y toda la vida que hazen es muy rigurosa y penitente, y el encerramiento es muy grande, y el recogimiento es mayor. Nunca cantan sino en tono. Viven en grandíssima conformidad, muy humildes y espirituales, muy dadas a oración, y santas meditaciones, y donde ninguna ocupación ay que no sea endereçada, y encaminada para la consolación del espíritu y regalo del alma’; Salazar, Corónica, p. 352.  ‘…el modo de cantar de estas madres es más devoto que apacible….’ Gabriel Téllez [Tirso de Molina], Historia general de la orden de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, ed. by Manuel Penedo Rey, O. M. (2 vols, Madrid, 1973–74), ii, p. 532.

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The seventeenth-century General Constitutions for discalced and recollect Franciscan nuns explain that its ban on the singing of the Divine Office was designed to allow the nuns more time to devote themselves to ‘holy prayer, contemplation and other penitential exercises’. Some unreformed houses elected to abstain from singing as well as from other sorts of music-making: witness the constitutions for the Calced Carmelites at Madrid’s Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, which instruct that the Divine Office be chanted sin punto, and prohibit ‘any kind of polyphony, and plainchant, and any other instrument or organ’. Even the more relaxed Franciscan General Constitutions for unreformed houses, which permit the singing of plainchant and (by special permission) occasional vocal polyphony, are careful to caution that piety is more important than the display of musical ability. In fact, the General Constitutions advise unreformed convents in which plainchant is not sung to continue the ‘good practice’ of reciting the Office en tono.10 It is important to emphasise that prohibitions against music were not levelled exclusively against female religious, nor did such prohibitions occur solely in the wake of the Council of Trent. Pedro de Salazar’s history of the Franciscan province of Castile relates that his order attempted to ban polyphony for the entire order (i.e., for both monks and nuns) as early as the General Chapter celebrated in Padua in 1310. Salazar goes on to say: The same has been prohibited many times in the Chapters-General, and recently it was decreed at the Chapter held in Rome in the year 1600, owing to the many troubles that otherwise result. Because even though it has been resolved and determined as a certain thing that music – plainsong as well as polyphony and musical instruments – is lawful in the Divine

 ‘Aunque la costumbre de cantar el Oficio Divino es santa, y piadosa, introducida por los santos Padres; pero porque las Monjas Descalças, y Recoletas tengan más lugar de darse al exercicio de la santa oración, y contemplación, y demás exercicios penitenciales, se ordena, y manda, que el Oficio Divino no se cante, aunque sea en canto llano, sino que se diga en tono, o rezado, con pausa devota, clara, y distinta, comenzando todas juntas, y pausando unánimes hasta el fin.’ Constituciones generales, para todas las monjas Descalzas de la primera Regla de Santa Clara, y para las Recoletas…in: Constituciones generales para todas las Monjas, y Religiosas, sujetas a la obediencia de la Orden de nuestro Padre San Francisco…recopiladas de las antiguas; y añadidas con acuerdo, consentimiento, y aprobación del Capítulo General, celebrado en Roma a 11. de Junio de 1639 (Madrid, 1642), p. 167.  ‘…lo que del oficio divino se cantare, ha de ser sin punto, en tono conveniente, grave, y con pausa declarada, que dé muestra de la reformación y devoción interior con que se celebra…y prohibimos en el coro todo género de canto de órgano y llano por punto, y otro algún instrumento, o órgano, porque todo ha de ser en tono como dicho es.’ Regla y Constituciones del convento de las Carmelitas Calçadas de la Regular observancia de la Virgen María del Monte Carmelo de Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas de la villa de Madrid (Madrid, 1630), fols 8v–9r. 10 ‘Item, ordenamos, que el Oficio Divino se diga en canto llano, simple, y unifrome, y no en Canto de Órgano ni Contrapunto, y creemos, que sea cosa más devota leer, y Psalmear con voz quieta, clara, y distinta, con atención de alma, que ocuparse en la Música, y Canto. Podrá empero el Prelado General, o Provincial, aviendo causas bastantes, dar licencia para que se cante en algunos Conventos Canto de Órgano…Item, los Conventos donde huviere costumbre de decir el Oficio Divino en tono, y no cantado llano, se conserve tan buena costumbre’; Constituciones Generales, p. 90.

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Office, this pertains to cathedrals and collegiate churches and other places where there are estates and revenues by which it can be supported.11

If strict observance of rule and constitution brought with it a certain spiritual prestige, austerity did not preclude the desire in female monasteries for elaborate musical celebrations, especially on feast-days. At two of the most prestigious female houses in seventeenth-century Madrid – the Poor Clares at las Descalzas Reales and the Recollect Augustinians at la Encarnación – public polyphony was performed by a chapel of salaried male musicians. But strict observance also argued against the hiring of outside musicians, partly because of the expense involved, but also because of the danger of contact with the outside world. The constitutions for the Recollect Bernardines at Alcalá de Henares are especially clear on this point, forbidding nuns to ‘bring music of singers, or organ, or shawms, or any other [kind] in any circumstance, neither for any solemnity of any kind or condition’ so that the nuns might thereby avoid ‘any dealings or communication with seculars’.12 The Franciscan General Constitutions advise similarly that, instead of hiring outside musicians, nuns’ communities should rely on internal resources; the same constitutions also warn against excessive spending associated with feastday celebrations (echoing Salazar’s assertion that music required money), and prohibit the singing of vernacular romances and villancicos, especially in those monasteries where rivalry between the devotees of John the Baptist versus John the Evangelist sometimes resulted in things getting out of hand.13 Fray 11 ‘Prohibióse en este Capítulo con rigor, que en el Coro no huviese contrapunto, ni canto de órgano, sino que el canto fuese el ordinario y común de la Orden. Esto mesmo se ha prohibido muchas vezes en Capítulos generales. Y últimamente se mandó en el Capítulo que se celebró en Roma el año de 1600 por los muchos inconvenientes que de lo contrario se sigue. Porque aunque está resoluto y determinado por cosa cierta, que el canto, ansí llano, como de órgano, y instrumentos músicos, es lícito en el oficio divino: esto se entiende en las Iglesias Catedrales, y Colegiales, y en otras partes adonde ay haziendas y rentas con que poderlo sustentar’; Salazar, Corónica, p. 66. 12 ‘Y por la misma razón, y que no tengan trato ni comunicación con seglares, mandamos, que las dichas Religiosas no puedan pedir, ni pidan atavíos, ni colgadura, ni otra cosa alguna para adorno de las fiestas, ni monumento, aunque sean imágenes, o reliquias, ni por otra razón, ni causa. Ni puedan traer música de cantores, ni órgano, ni chirimías, ni otra alguna en ningún caso, ni por ninguna solenidad, de qualquier calidad, o condición que sean.’ Constituciones y estatutos…para las Religiosas del Monesterio de S. Bernardo…en su villa y Corte Arçobispal de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, 1625), fol. 35v. 13 ‘Y por quanto en algunos Conventos, la celebración que se hace a los Santos San Juan Bautista, y Evangelista, se haze con tan excesivos gastos, y Músicas de Villancicos, y Romances, que no son de edificación, sino antes de disensión entre las Religiosas, y de escándalo al Pueblo, y aún esto mismo se origina muchas vezes de los Sermones que se predican en las dichas Festividades. Por tanto, ordenamos, y mandamos, que en las dichas festividades, ni en sus Octavas, ni Infraoctavas, no se canten Villancicos, ni Romances, ni se predique, ni celebren las Fiestas con más gastos de cera, y otras cosas que quando la Comunidad celebra las fiestas de Pasqua de Christo Nuestro Redentor…Y si en alguna ocasión, por urgentísima causa, le pareciere ser conveniente dar licencia para solo predicar, sea en los Conventos, donde no haya emulación, y competencia entre Bautistas, y Evangelistas. Y por quanto también suele haver exceso grande en celebrar otras Festividades, que hacen Monjas particulares, se ordena, que no se pueda poner más cera, que la que se acaba de decir, y se celebrarán con las músicas de los Conventos, sin traerla de fuera, y podrán tener Sermón’; Constituciones Generales, p. 93.

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Juan Sendín’s instructions issued in 1673 to nuns in the Franciscan province of Castilla reiterate the ban on singing in the vernacular, and specify the particular feast-days each year upon which nuns’ music chapels should perform, since, as the provincial minister observes, ‘the continuation of music causes great effort and disquiet in the convents’; the friar also charges that music rehearsals should not be conducted during the community’s periods of silence nor when the entire community is assembled in the choir for the Divine Office.14 Clearly, proscriptions such as those cited above serve to confirm that at many Spanish convents female religious did in fact participate in various kinds of musical activity, some of it sanctioned and some of it not. Several observers remarked on the nuns’ music at the Dominican Monasterio de San Blas at Lerma, a foundation financed by the first Duke of Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval. According to chronicler Pedro de Herrera, the Duke himself was responsible for assembling at San Blas ‘so excellent a chapel of nuns, eminent voices and instruments, that in number and quality (exceeding many), it is equal to the best.’15 Dominican friar Pedro de Ortega was equally enthusiastic in his assessment of the capilla at San Blas, calling it ‘the most excellent [chapel of nun musicians] currently known in Spain’, and reporting that it was composed of ‘the best voices in the kingdom’, as well as an organist, a harpist, and skilled players of the bajón, cornet, cello, violin and shawm, all under the direction of a female maestra de capilla.16 Lope de Vega appears to have 14 ‘Deseando la observancia de nuestras constituciones, que con tanto acierto se hizieron para la mayor conservación, y decencia del estado, y comunidades de Religiosas, mandamos, lo que dichas constituciones tan repetidamente han mandado, que ninguna Abadesa pena de privación de su oficio, permita, ni consienta se cante ningún género de música en romance vulgar, sino que si quisieren usar de la música ha de ser cantando solamente Psalmos, o cosas de la Sagrada Escritura en latín…porque otras canciones desdicen la pureza de su estado. Y porque la continuidad de la música trae grande ocupación, e inquietud en los conventos, ordenamos, que no cante la capilla, sino en los días de Pasquas, fiestas de Nuestra Señora, de San Iuan Baptista, de los patrones de los Reynos, y de las Iglesias, la Semana Santa, y la octava del Corpus. Y porque no se impidan a las religiosas las horas de quietud, y de la oración, ordenamos, que quando se huviere de probar alguna música, no lo hagan en tiempo de silencio, ni mientras la comunidad está en el Coro.’ Fr. Joan Sendín, 23 July 1673, Archivo del Convento de La Concepción Francisca [Toledo], sig. CC_Doc_121_02, Archivo Digital de la Real Fundación de Toledo. 15 ‘Enriquezió el Duque [de Lerma] esta insigne casa de religión no menos de ornamentos, y plata, para los ministerios de altar, con tanta grandeza en todo que corresponde a lo demás, y por aventajarle, en quanto fuese posible, de diversas partes, a costa de grandes expensas, y solicitud, ha juntado en ella tan excelente capilla de religiosas, eminentes vozes, e instrumentos, que en número y calidad (excediendo a muchas) es igual con las mayores.’ Pedro de Herrera, Translación del Santíssimo Sacramento a la iglesia colegial de San Pedro de la villa de Lerma (Madrid, 1618), fol. 9r. 16 ‘Era el Excelentísimo Señor Duque [de Lerma] grandemente aficionado al culto Divino, y para eso puso música en este Convento insigne, año de mil y seyscientos y treze, que sin hazer agravio a las demás Capillas de mugeres músicas, es la más aventajada que aora se conoce en España. Por que anduvo buscando las mejores vozes que se hallavan en el Reyno, y las traya luego a este Convento, y lo mismo digo de instrumentos. Y así ay tañedoras de harpa, baxones, baxoncillos, cornetas, violones, y violines, y juego de chirimías. Al presente quando esto se escrive son insignes músicas Soror Petronilla de S. Antonio, Soror Ana María del Rosario, Soror Ana de Christo, Soror Damiana de S. Christoval, Soror María de Santo Thomás de Aquino, Soror María de San Francisco, Soror María de la Natividad, Soror Iuana de S. Gerónimo, eminente organista, Soror Ana de Santa María harpista celebre, y la que rige y govierna la Capilla con destreça grande,

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been aware of the music at San Blas, which, he relates, compared favourably to nuns’ music at the Franciscan Monasterio de Constantinopla at Madrid, a foundation whose ‘subtle music’ (música sutil) is mentioned in a romance by poet Miguel Rojo.17 Similarly suggestive, though rare, are references to the musical abilities of individual nun musicians, the most-often cited being the letters exchanged in 1633 between Granada chapelmaster Diego de Pontac and Manuel Correa de Campo, then a contralto at the Seville cathedral. Pontac’s praise of the virtuosic ‘Doña Serafina,’ a nun at Seville’s Cistercian Monasterio de San Clemente, whose singing, he claims, surpasses that of any he has heard at Madrid, Saragossa or Valladolid is countered by Correa’s preference for ‘Doña Margarita’, a nun from Seville’s Hieronymite Monasterio de Santa Paula, whose talents exceed those of female singers he has witnessed in Lisbon, Seville and elsewhere in Spain.18 What is perhaps more instructive than the typically hyperbolic descriptions offered by witnesses (Francisco de Torres claimed that the capilla de monjas at la Piedad surpassed not only all other such chapels in Spain, but on the entire planet) is the inference that there were more than a few Spanish nun musicians and nuns’ music chapels whose performances commanded public notice. Even religious constitutions demonstrate an awareness of the prospect of a public presence at nuns’ celebrations of Mass and Divine Office, urging nuns to perform the liturgy in such a way that listeners will be edified.19 Conceptionist constitutions advise the Vicaress of the Choir when arranging the weekly duty roster to select the nuns with the best voices for the duty of cantora – especially on the most solemn feast- days – in order to ‘avoid annoying the listeners and to increase their devotion’.20 The constitutions for Discalced Mercedarians, es Soror Ana Iacinta, a cuyo cargo está el traer la música de los mejores y más afamados Maestros de Capilla, que aora se hallan en España.’ Pedro de Ortega, Fundación del insigne convento de S. Blas de Lerma, de Religiosas de la Orden de Sto. Domingo (Burgos, 1630), p. 14. 17 ‘Lo nuevo de [Lerma] es excelente; los monesterios, de los mexores que he visto, y más bien servidos, y de notables ornamentos y plata, y alguno, con música que no tiene que envidiar a Constantinopla.’ Félix Lope de Vega Carpio, letter to the Duke of Sessa (12 October 1613) in Lope de Vega en sus cartas. Introducción al epistolario de Lope de Vega Carpio, ed. by Agustín G. de Amezua, 2nd ed. (3 vols, Madrid, 1989), iii, p. 127. See also Miguel Rojo, ‘Relación muy verdadera…Con un romance a la postre del sentimiento grande que hizo la Villa de Madrid…el día que se despidió de sus Conventos de Monjas para yr a ser Reyna de Francia’ (Barcelona, [1615?]), in: Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid de 1541 a 1650, ed. by José Simón Díaz (Madrid, 1982), p. 100. 18 The letters are published in Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles (Legado Barbieri), Emilio Casares (ed.) (2 vols, Madrid, 1986–88), i, pp. 381–3. 19 ‘Ordenamos, que conformándose en el Oficio Divino con el Breviario Romano, y estilo de la Santa, y Universal Iglesia, le rezen con tal devoción, y pausa, que edifiquen a los que le oyeren.’ Regla propia y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas del Orden de la Santísima Trinidad, Redempción de Cautivos (Madrid, 1699), p. 28. See also Regla de la Bienaventurada Virgen Santa Clara (Madrid, 1620): ‘…en todo tiempo y lugar digan el oficio divino enteramente, atentamente, reverentemente, y religiosamente, aquietando devotamente su conciencia, para que el pueblo quede bien edificado’; fol. 37r. 20 ‘…la Vicaria del choro por evitar fastidio a los oyentes y por aumentarles la devoción vaya mudando las cantoras y poniendo siempre las de mejores vozes, y que más bien lo saben decir

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whose performance of the Divine Office was restricted to chanting en tono, instruct nuns to avoid singing unless a sufficient number of nuns with good voices – no fewer than eight – are present.21 Similar advice is given in La religiosa instruida, an early eighteenth-century instruction book for nuns by Franciscan friar Antonio Arbiol: ‘When those who are skilled at solfège are absent from the choir, it will be fitting not to sing because it is better to recite well than to sing poorly.’22 Nuns themselves were, of course, aware of the potentially public nature of their music-making. Written communications to Spanish chapelmasters requesting compositions for performance at feast-day celebrations give voice to individual nuns’ observations about the response of their audiences to the musical undertakings of their religious communities. In one such letter, María Pinel y Monroy (†1707), who during her life served five turns as abbess at the Carmelite Monasterio de la Encarnación at Ávila, relates the anticipation with which the townspeople awaited the music at the convent’s up-coming celebration of the Octave of Corpus Christi. Pinel writes: ‘I am looking forward to an excellent Octave, and the city awaits it so anxiously that it seems they hear nothing else in the whole place that gives them any pleasure.’23 In a similar letter, a nun named María Josepha Morras writes that nuns’ music sometimes played to extremely enthusiastic audiences: ‘I had the best fiesta I’ve had in all my life. The crowd was enormous, and everyone applauded the villancicos and cheered loudly….’24 Neither of these letters indicates whether nuns shared the kind of concern over propriety hinted at in Torres’s account of the music-making at la Piedad. Torres’s description of the convent’s courtyard – with its high, shuttered windows from behind which nun musicians could be heard but not seen – implies that the sisters’ musical performances did not violate clausura, at least not in the most literal sense of the word. And, Torres insists, the adulation their music earned

conforme a las solemnidades de las fiestas.’ Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, ms 1111, Regla de la orden de la concepción de Nuestra Señora, fol. 30r. 21 ‘Y si huviere falta de vozes, o indisposición en las Cantoras, o por aver pocas Monjas, podrán rezar más, o menos, consultándolo a la Prelada con el Padre Comendador. Por lo menos ha de aver ocho Religiosas, que puedan cantar, para que obligue a todo lo que en este capítulo se manda.’ Regla, y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas de Nuestra Señora de la Merced (Madrid, 1683), p. 36. 22 ‘Quando faltan del Coro las que son diestras en la Solfá, será conveniente no cantar; porque más vale rezar bien, que cantar mal.’ Antonio Arbiol, O. F. M., La religiosa instruida con doctrina de la Sagrada Escritura, y Santos Padres de la iglesia cathólica, para todas las operaciones de su vida regular (Madrid, 1734), p. 288. 23 ‘… yo me prometo una exçelente octava, y la çiudad la espera con tanta ansia que pareçe no oyen en todo el lugar otra cosa que les dé gusto, y para él de las señoras cantoras, en teniendo música de Vmd. está la fiesta cumplida del todo….’ Letter from Doña María de Monroy Pinel to Miguel Gómez Camargo (10 May 1656), in Miguel Querol Gavaldá, ‘Corresponsales de Miguel Gómez Camargo,’ Anuario Musical 14 (1959), 171. 24 ‘…Tube la mayor fiesta que e tenido en mi bida. El auditorio, grandiosísimo y todos a una boz alabaron muchísimo los billanzicos y echaron grandes bítores…’ Letter from María Josepha Morras to Miguel Gómez Camargo (16 December [16??]), in Carmelo Caballero FernándezRufete, ‘Miguel Gómez Camargo: correspondencia inédita’, Anuario Musical 45 (1990), 97–8.

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them did not affect the modesty and humility of the nuns at la Piedad, who were motivated solely by the desire to glorify their heavenly Spouse. It is difficult to know the extent to which nuns’ music-making was motivated by zeal for appropriate worship versus the expectation of possible benefits (prestige? continued financial support from patrons?) that may have been associated with public performances. The nuns at the Franciscan Monasterio de San Antonio de Padua at Toledo, for example, justify their request for license to receive a nun organist with reduced dowry by saying that she is needed ‘so that the Divine Offices and praises be performed and executed with full authority, decorum and [to the] edification of the faithful’.25 María Pinel rationalises the lavishness of the music at Ávila’s la Encarnación by offering what she must have hoped would be a satisfactorily spiritual defence of her monastery’s musical practices: ‘…although the poverty of the convent was considerable, they have always endeavoured to excel in divine worship, dedicating more nuns to the divine praises than is customary in very wealthy convents, desiring more that the nuns themselves should be in want, than that anything should be lacking in the praises of God.’26 Vidas de monjas – biographical and autobiographical accounts of nuns’ lives, of which Pinel’s manuscript is just one example – are occasional sources of information about the musical activities, abilities and attitudes towards music of individual Spanish nuns. Descriptions such as the one appearing in a manuscript account of the life of María de Santa Cruz (†1604), a Dominican nun at Valladolid’s Monasterio de Corpus Christi, suggest that musical ability (like modesty, meekness, devotion, self-denial) may have figured among the attributes considered desirable in the ideal female religious: Our sister and mother María de Santa Cruz was endowed with many gifts of nature: a beautiful face, serious, benign and modest, a clear mind, a docile and affable temperament, a good voice, and many other natural graces that made her amiable. And since she desired to return [these gifts] to her creator, from whose powerful and liberal hand she had received them, she tried always to use them in his service. Because of this desire she learned to sing and play the organ in order to be able to praise him with sonorous music and concerted harmony seven times each day. She was

25 ‘…aya de entrar por religiosa de coro y velo negro Dª María González Zaldo…con el dote de trescientos y cinquenta ducados…en atención a que la susodicha no se ha de escusar de cantar y tocar el órgano quando hubiere necesidad y las señoras religiosas lo pidieren para que los divinos oficios y alabanzas se hagan y ejecuten con toda autoridad, dezencia y edificación de los fieles….’ Escritura de recepción for María Gonzaldo y Zaldo, Archivo Histórico Provincial, Toledo, Protocolo 4083 (17 November 1736). 26 ‘Y aunque era tanta la pobreza del convento, siempre han procurado esmerarse en el divino culto, dedicando a las divinas alabanzas más religiosas que suelen en los conventos muy sobrados, queriendo más que les falte a las demás religiosas a sí mismas, que no que falte nada a los loores de Dios.’ María Pinel y Monroy, Retablo de Carmelitas, Nicolás González (ed.) (Madrid, 1981), p. 200. See also the characterisation of Pinel’s argument as ‘perhaps overly spiritual’ in Alfonso de Vicente Delgado, La Música en el Monasterio de Santa Ana de Ávila (Sociedad Española de Musicología, 1989), p. 15.

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so skilled in both [singing and playing organ] that she left disciples who honored her at the organ and the choirbook stand.27

The author of Sor María’s vida – a fellow nun at Corpus Christi – presents the account of her sister’s musical activities in the cloister alongside descriptions of her spiritual disciplines: Sor María’s feast-day observances included fasting and flagellation; during the Octave of Corpus Christi she ‘sang and played villancicos with great enthusiasm’, but afterwards she left the choir and returned to her cell in silence; at Matins on the Feast of the Assumption, she played the organ on her knees.28 Apparently some nuns experienced tension between the recognition their musical talent brought them and the modesty and self-effacement their religious state required of them. Madre Micaela de Aguirre, another Dominican nun who lived for a time at Lerma’s Monasterio de San Blas and later at the Convento de la Madre de Dios at Valladolid, had a very pleasant voice and entertained the other nuns with her singing, but later was said to have applied an iron to her chest in an attempt to destroy her beautiful voice, thereby avoiding ‘wasted time spent on foolish entertainment’ and escaping the ‘vanity that those with good voices tend to have when they sing’.29 Similarly, the biographer and confessor of María Vela (1561–1617) – singer, organist and mystic at the Cistercian Monasterio de Santa Ana at Ávila – reported that the nun often whipped her hands and fingers with a cord, so as not to be distracted by their

27 ‘Fue nuestra sorora y madre María de Santa Cruz, dotada de muchos dones de naturaleza, hermoso rostro, grabe, apacible, y modesto, entendimiento claro, y dócil, afable condición, buena voz, y otras muchas gracias naturales, que la hacía amable; y como pretendía volberlas a su criador, de cuia poderosa y liberal mano las havía recivido, procuraba siempre emplearlas en su servicio, con el qual deseo aprendió a cantar y tañer órgano para poder con sonorosa música, y concertada armonía, alabarle cada día siete veces y fue en uno, y otro tan diestra que dexó discípulas que en órgano y fasistol la bendijesen.’ Sor Violante de la Ascensión, Brebe relación de la vida y muerte de Soror María de Santa Cruz (1643), copied late eighteenth century by Rafael de Floranes, Apuntes para la historia de Valladolid, Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, ms 11283, iii, fols 151r–v. 28 ‘La fiesta de Corpus Christi, celebraba con particular devoción, aiunando la víspera, y toda la octaba a pan, y agua, no comiendo sino una vez, y era después de haver encerrado el Santísimo Sacramento, y era con mucha templanza esta comida; tomaba disciplina las más noches desta octaba, y cada tercer día de ella comulgaba. Los días pasaba desde prima sin salir del coro, estando de rodillas muchas horas con un silencio perpetuo. Cantaba, y tañía villancicos con tan grande espíritu como si estubiera descasada, y en saliendo del coro se hiba a su celda sin ablar palabra, deseando amaneciese ya otro día para emplearlo como el pasado, animándose de nuebo a maior perfección.…La fiesta de la Asumpción celebraba aiunando quinze días antes, los más que podía, y así mismo tomaba disciplina los más que podía dellos.…La víspera aiunaba a pan y agua, tañía en los Maitines el órgano de rodillas’; ibid., fols 160v–161r. 29 ‘Tenía voz, quando moça, muy agraciada para cantar. Gustaban las Religiosas de oírla; y previniendo los inconvenientes, que de esto podían seguirse; ya de perdimientos de tiempo, empleándole en entretenimientos escusados; ya de la vanidad, que suelen tener en cantar los que tiene buena voz, para huirlos, procuró enronquezerla, para cuyo fin hizo otra penitencia, aplicando a su pecho una plancha de hierro, para que con la se enronqueziese, y fuese saltando lo sonoro de su voz, y a las monjas el apetito de oírla.’ Alonso del Pozo, Vida de la Venerable Madre doña Micaela de Aguirre (Madrid, 1718), p. 165.

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beauty when she played the organ. It is difficult to know for certain whether most nuns really suffered misgivings about their musicianship, but authors of vidas de monjas clearly thought it prudent to say so. María Vela’s own writings sometimes express exasperation at the interruption that her musical duties in the convent imposed upon her interior life. She writes of trying to resist a spiritual experience in order to be able to carry out her musical duties and describes playing the organ during Mass while in the throes of a vision.31 For Madre Micaela, however, music appears to have been a trigger for mystical experience: her biographer and confessor relates an episode in which the nun was ordered by a superior to sing and to accompany herself on the harp. ‘She obeyed’, he writes, ‘and singing a very devout villancico, she arose with the harp and everything up into the air so that her feet did not touch the ground.’ Madre Micaela’s willingness to bring this experience to a halt when ordered to do so was interpreted as proof of her great obedience.32 In direct contrast to reservations that nuns and their biographers sometimes expressed about the appropriateness of nuns’ music-making was the notion that favoured nuns’ singing as an earthly manifestation of the celestial music of angels. The nuns’ choir at the Monasterio de la Asunción at Castil de Lences (Burgos), for example, is described by chroniclers as ‘a rival of the heavenly [choir], for the devotion, the sweet harmony of its singing, for the delicate voices and the beauty with which they sing, giving glory to God, and edifying the hearers’.33 In similar (though less eloquent) language, Francisco Fernández de Caso – another observer of Lerma’s San Blas – describes the nuns’ music at that monastery as a ‘piece of heaven … a portrait made of the image we 30

30 ‘…tenía muy lindas manos, y como se las vía tañendo el órgano devía reparar en ello, y muy de ordinario dava garrotes con un cordel en las manos, y en los dedos.’ Miguel González Vaquero, La muger fuerte. Por otro título la Vida de doña María Vela, Monja de San Bernardo, en el Convento de Santa Ana de Ávila (Barcelona, 1640), fol. 9r. 31 ‘Mucho me llevó el Señor tras sí en esta comunión, que con haber de asistir depués en el coro y acudir al canto de órgano, que distrae harto, me parecía que el espíritu se estaba en su soledad sin que le estorbase la ocupación exterior’; ‘El viernes, habiendo estado toda la mañana muy distraída, estando en misa, mientras alzaban el Santísimo Sacramento, me comencé a recoger y por ayudarlas a cantar, resistí y perdí de gozar aquel bocado que me ofrecían’; ‘…estando muy suspendida y abrazada con el Señor, me vinieron a decir que fuese a tañer el órgano para misa. Híceme fuerza y fui al punto, mas el Señor se lo tañó como hacía lo demás, que yo no estaba en lo que hacía, ni perdí de vista la merced de que gozaba.’ María Vela y Cueto, Autobiografía y libro de las Mercedes, Olegario González Hernández (ed.) (Barcelona, 1961), pp. 133, 170 and 250, respectively. 32 ‘Allí, después, entre otros estupendos favores, tuvo las llagas exteriores, y visibles. Como un Provincial las examinó; y procediendo con cautela, para hacer que las mostrase, la mandó tocar el Arpa, y cantar algo (porque dicen que tuvo entonces estas habilidades.) Obedeció; y cantando un Villancico muy devoto, se elevó con Arpa, y todo en alto sin tocar la tierra. Entonces el Provincial la mandó cesar en todo, volver en si, y que se le cerrasen las llagas; y todo sucedió como se lo mandó, quedando solo las señales de las cicatrices. Esta fue una de las pruebas extraordinarias de su obediencia’; Pozo, Vida de la Venerable Madre, p. 329. 33 ‘…pagan las divinas alabanças en aquél sagrado Coro, émulo del Celestial, por la devoción, por la acorde harmonía de su canto, por sus delicadas vozes, y primor con que cantan, dando a Dios la honra, y edificando a los oyentes.’ Domingo Hernáez de la Torre and Joseph Sáenz de Arquíñigo, Chrónica de la provincia de Burgos (Madrid, 1722), Antolín Abad Pérez, O. F. M. (ed.) (Madrid, 1990), p. 410.

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conceive of a choir of angels’.34 Religious constitutions likewise make mention of the commonly held association between nuns’ performance of the Divine Office and the occupation of the angelic host in attendance at the throne of God: ‘The primary occupation of the religious state is that of divine worship, to which belongs the Office of the Canonical Hours. They must participate in it devoutly, with great attentiveness, diligence and purity, imitating that of the angels, for together with them the nuns are admitted into the divine praises.’35 Even the formulaic language of the legal documents authorising dowry waivers for nun musicians alludes to the connection: over and over one encounters in the lists of nun musicians’ duties the phrase asistencia al coro (‘attendance at choir’), words that express more than the mere physical presence of nuns in their choir stalls.36 A petition to the Papal Nuncio from Toledo’s Monasterio de Santa Clara elucidates the deeper sense of the term asistencia as it was understood in the minds of seventeenth-century religious: the nuns justify their need for a new organist to replace the one who is currently ill and indisposed, lamenting that ‘for a long time they have been unable to celebrate the Divine Offices with customary asistencia and solemnity, to the great anguish and sorrow of the entire community’.37 Individual nun musicians were also likened to their celestial counterparts: ‘Doña Serafina’ was almost certainly a pseudonym for the nun about whose voice Diego de Pontac proclaimed: ‘…there is no one outside of Heaven who can imitate it.’38 In his dedicatory sonnet for a Franciscan nun named Alfonsa González de Salazar, Miguel de Cervantes evokes the image of the/a singing

34 ‘…este pedazo del cielo, en que con varios instrumentos cantavan a coros las Religiosas sagrados Hymnos, con tan nueva dulçura, que parecía que en pureza, y armonía, era un retrato sacado de la imagen que podemos conjeturar de un coro de Angeles.’ Francisco Fernández de Caso, Discurso en que se refieren las solenidades, y fiestas, con que el excelentíssimo Duque celebró en su villa de Lerma, la Dedicación de la Iglesia Colegial, y translaciones de los Conventos que ha edificado allí (n.p., n.d.), fols 11v–12r. 35 ‘La Primera obligación del Estado Religioso, es la del culto divino, a quien pertenece el Oficio de las Horas Canónicas. Hase de asistir a ellas devotamente, con gran atención, puntualidad, y pureza, imitando la de los ángeles, pues con ellos son las Religiosas admitidas a las alabanzas divinas.’ Constituciones propias del convento del Santíssimo Sacramento de Monjas Recoletas Bernardas de la villa de Madrid (Madrid, 1656), fols 1r–v. See also the instructions to the vicaresses of the choir in the manuscript Regla de la orden de la concepción: ‘Aya una vicaria del choro a la qual se dé otra compañera para que la ayude y entrambas con toda paz y cuydad hagan el oficio pues es de ángeles’; Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, ms 1111, fol. 29r, emphasis mine. 36 See The Catholic Encyclopedia., s.v. ‘Angels’ (online edn, 2003), http://www.newadvent. org/cahten/01476d.htm (8 June 2005). The article notes that the essential nature and function of angels is ‘that of attendants upon God’s throne in [the] court of heaven’ and that ‘[the] function of the angelic host is expressed by the word “assistance”’. 37 ‘La abadesa y religiosas deste comvento de Nuestro Padre Muy Reverendo de Santa Clara desta ciudad de Toledo dizen que Sor María Cathalina Castel relijiosa del y organista a mucho tiempo está enferma e ympedida de una mano con muchos achaques por cuia razón a mucho tiempo no se celebran los divinos oficios con la asistenzia y solenidad que se acostumbra con gran mortificazión y sentimiento de toda la comunidad….’ Petition requesting dowry waiver for organist María de Miranda, Archivo Histórico Provincial, Toledo, Protocolo 416 (? 1700). 38 ‘…no es posible haya fuera del Cielo, quien la imite’; Legado Barbieri, i, p. 382.

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Portrait of Alfonsa González de Salazar, in: Miguel Toledano, Minerva sacra (Madrid, 1616) (copyright: Real Academia Española).

nun as an angel, capable of transforming earth into heaven with her voice (and her beauty!): En vuestra, sin igual, dulce armonía, Hermosísima Alfonsa, nos reserva La nueva, la sin par Sacra Minerva Cuanto de bueno, y santo el cielo cría. Llega el felice punto, llega el día En que si os oye la infernal caterva Huye gimiendo al centro, y de la acerba Región suspiros a la tierra envía.

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En fin, vos convertís el suelo en cielo, Con la voz celestial, con la hermosura, Que os hacen parecer Ángel divino. Y así conviene, que tal vez el velo Alcéis, y descubráis esa luz pura, Que nos pone del cielo en el camino.39

Cervantes’s sonnet was first published in 1616 in Miguel Toledano’s volume of villancicos entitled Minerva sacra; both the book and the sonnet are dedicated to the nun who was said to have sung Toledano’s verses.40 The volume contains an illustration depicting a nineteen-year-old Alfonsa, dressed in a Franciscan habit, playing the harp and singing words from Psalm 138 (V137): ‘…in conspectu angelorum psallam tibi.’41 (Fig. 4.1) That Doña Alfonsa sings this particular text, which belongs to the propers for the Votive Mass of the Holy Angels and the Mass for St Raphael Archangel, also appears intended to underscore the association between nuns’ music and angels’ song. Elsewhere, I have elaborated upon the story of Doña Alfonsa, evidently a singer of some renown whose parents paid a full dowry (and perhaps even turned down the offer of a dowry waiver?) for the entrance of their musically-talented daughter into Madrid’s Monasterio de la Madre de Dios de Constantinopla (the same monastery whose music is mentioned in Lope de Vega’s letter and Miguel Rojo’s romance).42 I have argued that nuns who accepted dowry waivers in exchange for their musical services were considered socially inferior to their sisters in religion who paid full dowries, because their situation was analogous to that of the lay sisters who paid smaller dowries and performed manual chores in the convent. But perhaps Alfonsa’s rejection of a musician’s dowry waiver was also motivated by spiritual concerns. Art historian Mindy Nancarrow Taggard argues in her article on Spanish nun artists María de la Santísima Trinidad and Estefanía de la Encarnación that [p]rivileged nuns who were free to paint or sculpt when they were not otherwise engaged in prayer because their dowries had been paid in full at the time of their profession were honored by their peers who interpreted their motive as love of God…. Obligated convent artists … on the other 39 The italicised strophe (emphasis mine) translates as follows: ‘In sum, you transform earth into heaven with your celestial voice, with your beauty, which make you appear as a divine angel’. The sonnet is published in modern edition in Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Obras completas, Ángel Valbuena Prat (ed.) (Madrid, 1970), pp. 60–61. 40 Miguel Toledano, Minerva Sacra (Madrid, 1616), Ángel González Palencia (ed.) (Madrid, 1949). The image of singing nun as angel is also repeated in Toledano’s dedication and in dedicatory poems written by José de Valdivieso and by Alfonsa González de Salazar herself. 41 Ps. 138.1 (V137.1): ‘Confitebor tibi Domine in toto corde meo quoiam audisti verba oris mei in consectu angelorum psallam tibi’ (‘I will praise thee, O Lord, with my whole heart, for thou hast heard the words of my mouth. I will sing praise to thee in the sight of his angels’; trans. Douary, revised Challoner). 42 See Colleen R. Baade, ‘“Hired” Nun Musicians in Early Modern Castile’, in Thomasin La May (ed.), Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many–Headed Melodies (Burlington, VT, 2005), pp. 287–310.

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hand, labored for a price equivalent to a dowry at the time of their profession. Their art works expressed the collective will of the community they pledged to serve, rather than the quality or condition of their souls.43

Likewise, Alfonsa González de Salazar, having paid the full dowry upon final profession, remained free to offer her musical gifts as an expression of her devotion to her heavenly Spouse, her social and spiritual status untainted by any association with financial obligation. We can only wonder whether the public recognition she appears to have earned as a singer and the temptation to vanity that certainly came with it jeopardised her eternal salvation.

43 Mindy Nancarrow Taggard, ‘Art and Alienation in Early Modern Spanish Convents’, South Atlantic Review 65 (Winter, 2000), 28.

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Chapter five

Traditions and Priorities in Claudia Rusca’s Motet Book Robert L. Kendrick

Since presumably she believed in miracles, perhaps Claudia Francesca Rusca would have been more surprised at the reasons for which her motet book survived into the twenty-first century than at the almost incredible preservation of the edition itself. Her Sacri concerti, pieces for one to five voices plus a basso continuo (i.e., a bass line for an accompanying chordal instrument), were published in her city, Milan, by the up-and-coming music printer Giorgio Rolla in 1630, probably appearing just a few months before the famed plague of that year (immortalised by Alessandro Manzoni in I promessi sposi) devastated the city. This was the first of several misfortunes to befall the book, and its chequered history seems to parallel what we know of this nun’s life, most of which was spent in the house of Santa Caterina in Brera, of the order of the Humiliate. This essay first traces the reception history of a musical edition whose content was largely unknown, then explores some of the complicated background to the book, a context seemingly troubled for a female monastery otherwise characterised, during Rusca’s lifetime, by a strict Milanese archbishop as being particularly exemplary in its devotional and moral life. It concludes by considering the composer’s textual choices for musical setting in this light. In 1903, Robert Eitner’s standard bibliography of pre-1850 musicians noted the one surviving copy of the edition in Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and recorded the dedication of the book to the important archbishop who both had founded the library twenty years before the edition’s appearance and was famous for his pastoral care of the numerous nuns in his diocese, Federigo Borromeo (1564–1631). Thus, the copy that survived in the library’s collection of seventeenth-century books might well have been the presentation volume for the prelate himself, the last in a long and distinguished series of musical editions inscribed to Borromeo. There is no record of any other copies, and  Earlier versions of the work on Rusca can be found in Robert L. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996), pp. 80 and 258–67, and (after the rediscovery of the original), Robert L. Kendrick, ‘I motetti di Claudia Rusca’, in Maurizio Padoan, Arrigo Colzani, and A. Luppi (eds), Barocco Padano 3: Atti dell’XI convegno sulla musica italiana nei secoli XVII–XVIII, Brescia, 2001 (Como: A.M.I.S., 2004), pp. 425–53.  Robert Eitner, Biographisch-bibliographisches Lexikon der Musiker und Musikgelehrten (Leipzig, 1903), vol. 8, p. 363.

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perhaps the immediate distribution of the edition at the time of publication fell victim to the plague of summer 1630. The rise of Fascism and its ripple effects had remarkable impact on this seemingly innocent volume. In the wake of the 1929 concordat signed by Mussolini and the former prefect of the Ambrosiana, Achille Ratti (Pope Pius XI), and as a commemoration of the three-hundredth anniversary of the prelate’s death, the reputation of Borromeo (whose kind but ineffectual and intellectually unserious character had been codified for Risorgimento Italy by Manzoni’s novel) became open to reconsideration. This mini-revival of interest in the archbishop’s policies and cultural world also seems to resonate with a wider attempt to reclaim Milanese church history in light of the Pope’s own background and the greater cultural space provided for the Italian Church by the concordat. One such work on the prelate was Agostino Saba’s 1933 monograph on the close communication between Borromeo and nuns across the Italian peninsula. Among the many women with mystic and visionary propensities whose relations with the archbishop Saba chronicled (based on correspondence in the Ambrosiana), one, Angela Flaminia Confaloniera (1599–1665), had professed in Rusca’s house, just a few years before the composer’s own appearance in S. Caterina’s records. Confaloniera wrote long missives to the prelate about her internal devotional life, in which she also reported that she had learned at least the fundamentals of singing and playing (unspecified) musical instruments from Rusca while at the monastery, implying that she was previously unmusical. In what seems to have been an unparalleled case of episcopal support for sisters’ practice of polyphony, the prelate responded by sending Confaloniera both a lute (possibly a theorbo) on which to play as well as devotional music. Suor Angela Flaminia noted that Rusca and her music were ‘molto spirituale’, and that Claudia Francesca had composed many items which her brothers were planning to have printed. Confaloniera asked the archbishop, evidently on Rusca’s behalf (since the composer seems not to have known him), for permission to dedicate the musical edition to him. There is no record of a direct reply to the query among the minutes of the archbishop’s letters to the nun, but the appearance of the dedication with Borromeo’s name (and, as we shall see, coat of arms) on the title page speaks for itself. In the wake of Saba’s book, Rusca’s Sacri concerti had attracted other attention, for understandable reasons. As part of a wave of Swiss nationalism  Agostino Saba, Federico Borromeo ed i mistici del suo tempo (Florence, 1933), pp. 73– 84, recounts Borromeo’s relations with nuns in S. Caterina.  Confaloniera’s letter to Borromeo (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, G. 8 inf., fol. 469r–v) can thus now be dated to late 1629. The passage (‘Padre mio Carissimo . . . La cosa è questa: che vi è una Monicha, et è quella che a insegnato a me a cantare e sonare, et è sorella del Signor Antonio Rusca . . . questa Giovane è molto spirituale, credo che [her compositions] siano composte con molto spirto; e così vorebbe dedicarli a Lei perche il nostro Monasterio non a persona che più ama di Lei’) was first printed by Carlo Marcora, ‘Lettere del cardinal Federico alle claustrali’, Memorie storiche della diocesi di Milano 11 (1964), 183–424, and then by Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 453.

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in the late 1930s, as the mountain republic became encircled by fascist powers, a general interest in the history of specifically Swiss cultural products, among them early music, grew. It is unclear whether the violist and amateur scholar Walter Jesinghaus (1902–66), a Swiss German born in Italy, came upon Rusca’s name via Saba’s book or on his own in the course of his efforts to track down evidence for Renaissance music originating in the Ticino, the Italian-speaking canton of the country. Given the wide diffusion of her surname in the cities of Lugano and Locarno, Jesinghaus seems to have assumed that the composer must also have been from one of these cities, and thus added her to the canon of his ‘Musical Researches in the Ticino’ project. At some point in 1937–38, he likely went to Milan to look at Rusca’s volume, and certainly asked the prefect of the library, Monsignor Giovanni Galbiati, for permission to have the entire edition, four vocal partbooks plus a keyboard short score (partitura per l’organo), photographed. He took the pictures back to Switzerland with him and kept them in his personal possession, displaying one page from one of the part-books in an exhibition devoted to Ticinese art and music held in Locarno in 1938. Jesinghaus seems to have continued his study of Rusca, attempting in 1953–54 to find financial support for an edition of the music, an unsuccessful effort. Yet his efforts on behalf of Rusca’s music did not stop there. At some point between 1938 and 1952 he must have shown the photographs of the edition (or his transcriptions of some pieces from it) to the Italian composer Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892–1965). Ghedini, a leading figure in Italian musical life with a strong interest in early music, reworked eight motets, the two canzonas for instruments, and the setting of the Magnificat from Rusca’s volume, orchestrating the original basso continuo line in neo-Classical style for a chamber orchestra. These versions, never published, were performed in 1953 and later recorded by the forces of the Swiss radio in Lugano, and the scores are still preserved in the archives of the Radio Svizzera Italiana. In the meantime, World War II seemed to have put an end to any work on the original, as the 1943 bombing of the Ambrosiana destroyed the collection  Jesinghaus’s life and work is described in the unpublished typescript of Bruno Amaducci, Walter Jesinghaus. Genova 13 VII 1902 – Faido 17 IX 1966. Le opere, gli scritti, gli studi, la documentazione, le scoperte (1970), of which there is a copy in the Schweizerische Landesbibliothek in Bern, BAQ bq 3 br Jesinghaus.  Jesinghaus’s letters to Swiss music publishers in the 1950s attempting to have some version of the music published are in the Archivio Cantonale, Bellinzona. For the Locarno exhibit, see Mostra d’arte ticinese del ‘600 e ‘700 nel Castello di Locarno Maggio-ottobre 1938: Catalogo (Locarno, 1938), no. 56 (‘Suor Claudia Francesca Rusca, Fotografie dei “Sacri Concerti’’’; Jesinghaus’s assumptions about the Swiss provenance of the composer are also here, p. 38 (‘Il suo nome [Rusca] è strettamente legato al Ticino, sebbene non sia possibile stabilire con esattezza se Suor Claudia Francesca Rusca discenda dai Rusca di Lugano o di Locarno’).  Ghedini’s transcriptions, not listed in the only catalogue of his works, Guglielmo Barblan, Giorgio Federico Ghedini: catalogo delle opere (Milan, 1965), are preserved in the archive of the Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. Recordings (largely from the 1960s) of eight pieces in Ghedini’s version are available on the CD Lodovico Grossi da Viadana: Concerti ecclesiastici/Suor Claudia Francesca Rusca, Sacri concerti (1630) (Turin, Nuova Era Records, CD 1191 [1998]).

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Fig. 5.1

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Giovanni Battista Riccardi, Iconografia della città e Castello di Milano (1734), detail, façade of Santa Caterina in Brera (copyright: Civico Raccolta delle Stampe ‘A. Bertarelli’, Milan).

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of seventeenth-century printed books, among them Rusca’s volumes, and for fifty years the edition seemed lost, with no record of the actual contents: what the preface or dedicatory letter actually said, which texts Rusca had set, and least of all what the music was like. In 1992, as part of research for a festival and radio series on women composers, Lislot Frei and Marc-Joachim Wasmer finally came upon the scores of Ghedini’s transcriptions in Lugano, and thus a sort of distorted mirror could be turned on the volume. Apart from musical matters, the details of the institutional and cultural life of Rusca’s house were becoming more evident. Already in 1674, Carlo Torre’s guidebook to the city had noted the house’s simple but spacious single-nave public church, and related that the Humiliate had enlarged the monastery by acquiring property on the other side of the street and constructing what seems to have been a tunnel in order to connect this with the main buildings. The facade of the public church had been recorded in Giovanni Battista Riccardi’s 1734 map of Milan, prior to the monastery’s suppression and demolition in 1782 (Fig. 5.1). More recent scholarship cast light on the background of the monastery’s inhabitants. Anna Farè provided the first social history of the house, noting the middle-to-upper-class origin of most of its sisters, and its land holdings inside and outside Milan, along with the rise of the house’s population to a peak of about 50 over the seventeenth century. Danilo Zardin reconstructed the personal culture of someone not unlike Rusca, the organist (Prospera Corona Bascapè) of the Humiliate house of S. Maria Maddalena al Cerchio in Milan.10 The order’s ritual life also became more evident. Its liturgy was based on a preTridentine set of texts (originating with the male branch of the order, which had been suppressed in 1571), and this was one of the few pre-conciliar uses of a religious order to survive into the eighteenth century. The festal year of the Humiliate as an order was specific to its saints and the patronesses of its houses; it was codified in their breviary of 1620/21, published just when Rusca begins to appear in the list of the house’s inhabitants, and thus this seems to be the liturgy that she would have known. This order-specific version of the Daily Hours presumably formed the context for some of the music that she

 ‘Hanno queste Claustrali Vergini comodo Monistero, & a ridurlo a migliori agifacendo sotto terra occulto viale, ampliarono il sito della Clausura, anche dall’altra parte della strada a rimpetto allo stesso Monistero; la Chiesa benche sia in una sola Nave riesce assai capace di gente’, Carlo Torre, Il ritratto di Milano (Milan, 1674); I cite from the facsimile of the 1714 Milan edition rpd Bologna, 1973), p. 271.  Riccardi’s Iconografia della città e castello di Milano is in Milan, Civica Raccolta delle Stampe A. Bertarelli. I am grateful to Giovanna Mori and the staff of the Bertarelli for their help with this map. 10 A. Farè, ‘Storia di un monastero di Umiliate: Santa Caterina in Brera di Milano’ (Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi, Milan, anno accademico 1991–92); for S. Maria Maddalena al Cerchio, see Danilo Zardin, Donna e religiosa di rara eccellenza: Prospera Corona Bascapè, i libri e la cultura nei monasteri milanesi del Cinque e Seicento (Florence, 1992).

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composed, as well as the activity to which she would have devoted much of her adult life.11 In addition, S. Caterina’s necrology, the ‘Biografia delle monache umiliate di Santa Caterina in Brera’ (a modern title), compiled in 1684, was found and provided short retrospective biographies of both Confaloniera and Rusca, in addition to some thirty other sisters. Among Rusca’s contemporaries, six women – two sopranos, Confaloniera and Rusca; two ‘tenori’; and four (later five) altos – were noted as singers of polyphony (Appendix, Ex. 1).12 The anonymously compiled necrology detailed other cultural activity by the nuns; for instance, one of the altos, Mother Anna Maria Fogliani (1583–1663), both commissioned an (unnamed) altarpiece for the external church and rewrote the monastery’s chant antiphoner ‘tutto sotto una chiave’, all in one clef, presumably alto or soprano, so as to facilitate reading of the music of the chant items, as well as pitch orientation for the nuns. Fogliani, with her knowledge of the order’s history that she shared with the chronicler Giovanni Pietro Puricelli, her artistic commissions, and her activity for the other nuns, merited one of the longest entries in the necrology as one of the central cultural players in the house for a large part of the seventeenth century.13 The images commissioned by the nuns for display to the public in the exterior part of their church also began to be identified. It was possible to recognise the main altarpiece, Francesco del Cairo’s Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (with a Prelate) (now Toulouse, Musée des Augustins; Fig. 5.2), and to identify the figure in the foreground with a massive crozier as none other than Federigo Borromeo himself, an identification which resonated well with the time and effort the prelate devoted to the nuns of his archdiocese and in particular the inhabitants of S. Caterina (compare the depiction of the unidentified donor/ prelate in Fig. 5.2 with the portrait of the archbishop in Fig. 5.3).14 That the prelate was shown in half profile in the altarpiece suggested that he had died 11 I use the corrected edition: Breviarium romanum ad usum, et secundum ritum fratrum ordinis humiliatorum (Pavia, 1621), which (despite its title, unchanged from the time when the male branch still existed) contains certain items reflecting the all-female nature of the order. 12 The anonymous necrology (Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, Milan, ms Trotti 453) was begun on 24 September 1684, and a few later entries testify to some effort to update it. The text is discussed (independently) by Farè, ‘Storia di un monastero’, and Kendrick, Celestial Sirens. 13 The long entry for Fogliani, which details her commissioning of paintings and also notes her as a singer (as well as a beloved member of the house), is in the ‘Biografia’, fols 2v–4r. She ‘fece far quelli due quadri dove sono dipinti li santi del ordine (ma solo uno a sua spesa) e quello di S. Giovanni che si espone nella chiesa di fuori’, which suggests one (or two) paintings with the order’s saints for internal use, and one with an (unidentified) St John for the public church. Several paintings from the public church have been announced as preserved in the Villa Reale of Monza; these recent discoveries (reported in Corriere della Sera, 15 February 2002) consist of a Via Crucis (perhaps by G. M. Arduino), an Immaculate Conception (?Legnanino), and a Deposition with Saints (?of the order, possibly by Filippo Abbiati). If this last included the (legendary) founder of the order St John of Meda, this could be the altarpiece for the public church commissioned by Fogliani, although the activity of Abbiati only in the later seventeenth century speaks against either the dating or the attribution. 14 Without identification of the prelate, the altarpiece had already been noted by Torre, Il ritratto, p. 271. The modern literature on the painting, summarised and expanded in Odile

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by the time of the work’s completion. Interestingly, Cairo’s preparatory sketch (Fig. 5.4) had a different perspective on the figure with a crozier, in full profile; this suggests that the sketch was finished during Borromeo’s lifetime, before 18 September 1631, and then the actual painting (with the half profile suggestion that the prelate had passed away in the meantime) completed in late 1631 or 1632. Other information, of a more negative kind, emerged; despite all the renown of nuns’ singing in early modern Milan, S. Caterina’s music seems never to have attracted the public renown – and episcopal scrutiny – typical of music at the Benedictine houses twice its size. This suggests that its monastic musicians seem to fit in some sort of other anthropological category from that of the celestial sirens swooned over by visitors and worried about by clerics through the century. There are no disciplinary records that concern the house in the files of the Vatican’s Sacra Congregazione sopra Vescovi e Regolari, and its music is never mentioned in the accounts of foreign visitors who, during their stays in the city made it a point to hear nuns’ music-making, listening from the public church over the wall that marked off the cloistered part of the choir. In addition, S. Caterina was involved in feuds with other, physically adjacent, female foundations (its street was called the ‘Contrada dei Quattro Monasteri’) over property and sight lines. Its expanding population over the course of the seventeenth century led it to acquire property across the street, and to attempt to use it while obeying the norms of strict enclosure.15 A close reading of the necrology’s entry for Rusca highlights the mixed fate of the composer’s life before and after taking her vows (Appendix, Ex. 2). She was evidently given some kind of domestic education by her parents, which included not only singing but also composition. Unlike Fogliani and other nuns, she was not put for education in a female monastery. Her musical talent led her to be accepted in the monastery, possibly with a reduced (or waived) spiritual dowry, with the obligation of teaching music to the other nuns. This idea is corroborated by the absence of any dowry contract during the years around which she might have professed her vows, either 1610 or 1616–18.16 She was reported as having died at age eighty-three on 6 October 1676 (remembered as the date of Rosary Sunday that year), which suggests that she was born around 1593.

Menegaux’s entry in Seicento: le siècle de Caravage dans les collections françaises (Paris, 1988), pp. 141–3, does not identify the figure of the prelate. 15 The house was located at what is today the corner of via Brera and via Monte di Pietà, about halfway between the opera house of La Scala and the Brera National Gallery. For the social conflicts, see Farè, ‘Storia di un monastero’. 16 The list of dowry deposits and extractions for many nuns from Rusca’s generation, found in Archivio di Stato di Milano (hereafter ASM), Rubriche Notai, ms 1128 (the records of the archdiocesan curia), enumerates a number of her cohorts in S. Caterina (e.g., the 1613 deposit and 1615 extraction for Angela Confaloniera), but includes no record of any dowry for her.

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Fig. 5.2

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Francesco del Cairo, Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (with a Prelate) (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse) (photo: Daniel Martin).

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Anonymous, Portrait of Cardinal Federigo Borromeo (copyright: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, authorisation no. F.112/06).

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Fig. 5.4

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Cairo, sketch for Mystic Marriage of St Catherine (with a Prelate) (copyright: Polo Museale Fiorentino/Musei degli Uffizi, Florence).

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Yet, writing a decade after her death, the anonymous chronicler was quite sceptical as to the results of her teaching, and referred more to Rusca’s perseverance than to her success in imparting music to her cohorts. Possibly whatever level of musical proficiency that had been reached in the house around the time of the publication of Rusca’s book simply declined between 1630 and 1684, and the ageing organist did not or could not train a generation of younger women to follow in the footsteps of Fogliani and Confaloniera. A young woman without a dowry was recruited to replace her as organist in her failing years, around 1673, and no later records of polyphonic music-making survive from the house.17 Rusca’s social position at S. Caterina was also problematic. A model in the recitation of the Office and her other non-musical duties (including the rather humble tasks of being the doorkeeper, teaching the novices, and doing the books), she was delicate enough to be exempted from awakening in the middle of the night to say Matins. Her sister Antonia Lucia, also professed at the same house, was remembered as an unexceptional if pious nun. Claudia fought hard, probably using family connections, in the house’s (ultimately successful) efforts to lobby the archdiocesan curia to permit the expansion of its space by tunnelling under the street (‘il passo sotteraneo’, also mentioned by Torre) in order to provide a cloistered link to the acquired building across the way. Although she was nominated for mother superior three times, she never held that office or that of the prioress, testifying to a certain lack of popularity or family clout inside the house. Surprisingly, the necrology makes no mention of Rusca’s Sacri concerti, suggesting that it (unlike Fogliani’s liturgical books) was not in use and perhaps not even remembered at the house fifty years after its publication. Another problem of dating is given by the necrology’s listing of her age. She appears on no record of nuns who signed off on contracts before 1617, and thus if she really had been born in 1593, she would have professed at the extraordinarily late age of about twenty-five.18 It seems unlikely that her family would have kept her, unmarried and ‘un-monasticised’, at home for a decade (even if this would have allowed her a good deal of time to develop her musical talents). Although one might expect the necrology’s compiler to have known Rusca personally and thus have had her age right, it seems perhaps more likely that the writer of the ‘Biografia’ simply remembered incorrectly, and that Rusca died at the age of seventy-three, having been born around 1603 17 In summer 1673, the strict archbishop Alfonso Litta recommended a dispensation from the necessary dowry for Bianca Maria Sant’Agostino because of her organ-playing skills, and noted the exemplary nature of S. Caterina’s nuns (Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 112, citing the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Sacra Congregazione dei Vescovi e Regolari, giu-lug 1673). According to two contracts in ASM, Religione parte antica, ms 1813, Sant’Agostino was still alive in 1725 but is not present in a 1731 list of nuns. Still, over a century S. Caterina had only two organists. 18 Rusca appears on no surviving list of nuns until after 2 March 1617, but is first listed (in rough order of seniority) as 31st of 38 sisters on a contract signed 11 January 1620 (ASM, Religione, parte antica mss 1808 and 1807 respectively). If (a relatively high number) two nuns professed per year at S. Caterina, this suggests that Rusca took her vows in 1617 or shortly thereafter.

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and thus entering the house in her middle teens around 1618. In addition, the chronicler may have missed the year of death, as Rosary Sunday did actually fall on 6 October in both 1675 and 1686 (if we accept the 1676 year as correct, the Sunday would have been on 8 October). As we shall see, all the problems of dating have tangential interest for analysing her compositional style. The necrology also gives no clue as to the geographical location of her family, and so even if Jesinghaus had read the ‘Biografia’ in the Ambrosiana (where it has resided since the eighteenth century), her place of birth would not be clear. The evidence is indirect; the necrology and Confaloniera’s letters both mention Rusca’s brother Antonio, a cleric with an important career in Milan, and the author of a 577-page book on the nature and origin of devils (a notable text in early modern demonology). Antonio’s De origine et statu daemonorum (Milan, 1621), calls him clearly ‘Antonius Rusca Mediolanensis’.19 Hence if he was ‘from’ Milan, his sister must have been as well, and so Jesinghaus’s idea of her Ticinese origin is probably not correct. Another male Rusca, Carlo Francesco, a cleric in the archdiocese of Milan, left property in the city to S. Caterina in his will of 1687.20 Thus he may have been a brother or a nephew of the composer, further underscoring the idea of her Milanese origin. Another young woman from the family professed at S. Caterina around 1670; indeed, Cecilia Costanza Rusca continued to live at the house into the 1720s.21 Although the issue of the composer’s family may seem irrelevant, Confaloniera reported that Rusca’s brothers had the volume printed, i.e. they paid for the production expenses, which would have been substantial given the number of items in the vocal part-books, and the length of the keyboard short score. In addition, the idea of the dedication to Borromeo seems to have been theirs as well, and this seems to signal some distance between the composer and the eventual dedicatee.22 All this contextual evidence for the edition meant that the lack of its music during the 1990s was all the more frustrating. The next step was that of ‘detranscribing’ Ghedini’s versions, with results that seemed roughly right but 19 Whatever Claudia Francesca’s birthdate, Antonio was somewhat older than his musical sister: an entry in ASM, Popolazione, parte antica, ms 128 (1655) notes his death on 4 February 1655 at the age of 72. 20 Presumably it was these relatives whom Claudia would have used in the house’s efforts to win curial approval for the tunnel. 21 The dispensation of 24 December 1670 for Daria Rusca (monastic name Cecilia Costanza), and a will of 15 June 1690 mentioning Carlo Francesco’s bequest of 29 September 1687, are both in ASM, Culto, parte antica, ms 1806. Cecilia Rusca was still present on a document of 27 August 1725; ASM, Culto, parte antica, ms 1813. 22 Confaloniera’s letter of c. 1629 cited above noted that ‘gli suoi fratelli gli fano meter in stampa’. Although in the late 1620s there were actually two music printers in Milan, the other (Filippo Lomazzo) was in semi-retirement, and Rolla’s press issued the larger and newer musical editions, which is probably why Rusca’s book was produced in his shop. Rolla remained active until his death on 18 September 1651 (noted in ASM, Popolazione, parte antica, 126 (1651–52): ‘Georgius Rolla annorum 55 ex febre duplici tertiana continua defecit . . .’). The business then passed to his son Carlo Francesco, born (according to a note in ASM, Culto, parte antica, ms 1053) on 4 March 1634, who kept it going until his death or his liquidation of the business in the late 1650s.

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frustratingly vague around the edges. Finally, it was a relief to discover that Jesinghaus’s photographs of the four vocal partbooks plus the organ score/part had survived largely intact in his musical estate. Jesinghaus’s papers had been kept under lock in various libraries in Ticino, uncatalogued and inaccessible until 2002, when, thanks to the staff of the Archivio Cantonale in Bellinzona, the first notice of their survival was given by Swiss librarians.23 And this allows for a consideration of the contents, beginning with the prefatory material. Dedications of musical editions in early modern Italy run the range from the (few) very personal to the (many) entirely formulaic, and Rusca’s falls on neither extreme. The edition is one of the few in Seicento Italy to bear two inscriptions: one, to Cardinal Borromeo, dated 30 January 1630 (and hence suggesting that the book’s production antedated the plague, which broke out in late spring/summer) is fairly formal. This is prefaced by a poem by the composer to St Catherine of Alexandria on the occasion of the edition’s printing (Appendix, Ex. 3). Possibly Rusca made a conceptual connection between the martyr’s wheel and the mechanism of the printing press. In her poem, evidently the more personal of the two texts, Rusca calls on the saint to hear her prayer and to make the composer’s song worthy of their common eternal Bridegroom, Christ. She ends by asking that after her death, she may be the echo of the saint’s voice. For all the formality, the composer managed in this brief text to allude to her own order (‘umil ancella’, i.e. ‘Umiliata’), and to downplay the allure of earthly music with a reference to, not celestial, but terrestrial sirens. Her dedicatory letter to Borromeo touches on the familiar topoi of her humility (another reference to the order) and the weakness of her gender, while asking for her patron’s regard in the same way that a music master raised sweet sounds from a dead tortoise, an evident (and somewhat commonplace) reference to Hermes’ invention of the lyre from a tortoise-shell. Yet once the obligatory learned references are over, Rusca turns to the real care and concern that the archbishop showed to the nuns of her house: ‘All the more, then, that these sacred concerti should be addressed to you, who, with frequent visits and affectionate exhortations, have brought about in these sacred virgins that concord of virtue most pleasing to God and men’.24 And echoing, probably consciously, a favourite idea of Borromeo’s concerning the inadequate but still pleasing nature of earthly music, she continues, ‘Even the citizens of heaven, there among the sweetest melody of the angelic choir, are pleased by those humble and lowly concerti, which humans in their churches crudely prepare My thanks go to Pio Pellizzari and the staff of the Archivio Cantonale for all their help. The passage from the dedication to Borromeo (dated 30 January 1630) reads: ‘Tanto più, che a ragione dovevansi questi SACRI CONCERTI indrizzare a V. S. Ill.ma la quale con frequentissime visite, & affettuosissime essortationi hà causato in queste sacre Vergini quel concerto di virtù, che suole a Dio, & alli huomini esser gratissimo. Anche li Cittadini del Cielo trà la dolcissima melodia delli Angelici Chori aggradiscono que’ vili, & bassi concerti, che nelli tempii gli huomini rozzamente li apprestanto, all’animo più che all’opra riguardando’. Borromeo’s arms and his motto ‘Humilitas’ are printed on the edition’s title-page, linking the prelate to the book in the most direct way possible. 23 24

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for them, [the residents of heaven] paying more attention to the spirit [of the music] than to its handiwork’.25 The idea that the imagined music of the angels and saints transcended the imperfection of real earthly music obviously has a far longer history than simply its appearance in the archbishop’s writings. Thomas Connolly has pointed to its presence in early modern Italy (notably in Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia [Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale]), via the works of Jean Gerson (often recommended for nuns’ reading).26 To follow this line of interpretation, Gerson’s concept of the ‘mixed song’ of earthly life, which he viewed as partaking of both sadness and joy in different proportion depending upon the spiritual progress of the believer, resonates with Rusca’s characterisation of her own work. In a more practical way, the ancillary information of the edition is also highly suggestive. The book’s index lists five solo motets, six duets, a trio, a quartet, a quintet, two instrumental canzonas (the first instrumental music by a woman to be printed), three psalm settings (alternatim, i.e. with only every other verse set to polyphonic music) for four voices, and finally eight other items for eight voices: five motets, a Vespers versicle, falsobordone recitation formulae for psalm texts with doxologies, and a Magnificat (all pieces in the print are accompanied by basso continuo; Appendix, Ex. 4). Even though the eight-voice scoring of this last category of pieces suggested performance by two choirs (each in the standard combination of soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices), Rusca noted that in them ‘the tenor of choir one can be sung as a soprano [i.e. transposed an octave up in pitch level], as we do in our church, and we make it a choir unto itself, so that [the total musical forces] amount to three choirs’.27 This tradition of three choirs was widespread already in Rusca’s youth, as the local Franciscan church of S. Francesco Grande had used such forces since the turn of the century.28 Rusca foresaw three ensembles: one of a soprano; one of soprano, alto and bass [choir II]; and one of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass [choir III], possibly with basso continuo for each grouping. In correlating 25 It is unclear if this represents Rusca’s only direct communication with the prelate; Farè, ‘Storia di un monastero’, p. 181, reports a letter in which the composer related her sense of unease to Borromeo (‘quello che sento Padre mio carissimo è che non godo mai la conversazione in pace, non ricreatione, niente perchè il tutto mi rimorde la coscienza e pure non posso star sola, ma questa cosa non è solo adesso, ma è più di dieci mesi’). There is no citation of an Ambrosiana call-number for this missive and I have not been able to verify it independently. It does not figure in Card. Federico Borromeo, arciv. di Milano, Indice delle lettere a lui dirette conservate all’Ambrosiana (Milan, 1960). 26 Thomas Connolly, Mourning into Joy: Music, Raphael, and Saint Cecilia (New Haven, 1994), pp. 111–50 and 238–61; Gerson’s idea of the tripartite division of all music, and of an analogous structure for the ‘mixed’ music of the world, is found in his De canticis and explicated by Connolly, Mourning into Joy, pp. 142–3. 27 Rusca’s rubric in the ‘Tavola’ (index) of the part-books reads ‘Motetti, & Magnificat à 8 concertati. Il Tenore del Primo Choro si può cantare in Soprano, come facciamo nella nostra Chiesa, & lo facciamo fare un choro da per sè, si che vengono poi ad essere à tre Chori’. 28 For three-choir practice at S. Francesco Grande, see Robert L. Kendrick, The Sounds of Milan 1585–1650 (New York, 2002), pp. 63–8.

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this arrangement with the women singers mentioned in the house’s necrology (two sopranos, four altos, and two ‘tenori’ among Rusca’s generation; cf. Ex. 1), the only stumbling block seems to be the number of sopranos, assuming that the vocal parts appearing in the print to be for basses were taken up an octave and sung by altos (hence Rusca’s performance scheme would presume four real alto voices, which meshes well with the necrology figures).29 But the edition itself provides the clue; Sister Tecla Roma, a woman present in the house since 1604 but not listed in the necrology, is the dedicatee of a motet in Rusca’s book, Gaudete gaudio magno. The inscription calls her ‘dolcissimo soprano’, and so together with the information of the necrology the three sopranos necessary for Rusca’s performance suggestions can be traced as living in the house at the time of her publication. Her simple idea applies to other female houses with a good number of singers, and presupposes a desire for a certain sonic effect on an outside audience by S. Caterina’s musical forces. This latter is all the more striking given the curial perception of the house as being qualitatively different from the large Benedictine female foundations whose music was most decidedly – and, for the curia, dangerously – public. It is most revealing to turn first to the smaller-scale motets, and then to consider the complete psalms and the eight-voice items.30 Some of the generic texts among the small- and larger-scale pieces are taken from single psalm verses. These, commonly set by other composers in an earlier musical generation, and normally very short, are suitable for almost any joyous occasion. Since four of the five eight-voice pieces are similarly generic, these settings were probably meant for any major feast-day, certainly the 17 feasts listed as ‘principale’ in the 1621 Humiliate breviary. Two unifying points about them seem evident: (1) their highly laudatory and ‘optimistic’ nature, recalling Federigo Borromeo’s treatise on divine praise, I tre libri delle laudi divine, originally written for nuns and (2) the number of references in them to vocal speech-acts.31 Relatively few of the motet texts are found as discrete items in the texts which Rusca would have recited year in and year out, the breviary of the order (the liturgy is discussed below). But some of the festal pieces do echo the nuns’ liturgy. Consolamini, popule meus, for instance, combines the opening of a reading and responsory, from Christmas Matins with an antiphon from Lauds in order to form its text (one wonders how much oral familiarity Rusca might have had with these items, given that she was not able to rise for Matins; perhaps she perused the order’s breviary looking for a suitable combination of liturgical texts). But its words also are to be found in an informal musical ‘matinata’ performed on Christmas Eve, with instruments and voices in the 29 On the basis of other evidence from Milanese female houses, the ‘tenori’ seem to have been women with unusually low voices who sang the tenor vocal parts at something like written pitch; cf. Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 191–3. 30 In line with the conventions of music publishing, the motets appear in order of ascending number of voices; first solos, then duets, and so on. 31 On nuns’ music as spiritual recreation and paraliturgical celebration, Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 78–9; the best (and only) study and edition of Borromeo’s book is Alessandro Martini, ‘I tre libri delle laude divine’ di Federico Borromeo: Ricerca storico-stilistica (Padua, 1975).

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cloister, which Confaloniera reported to Federigo Borromeo.32 An Easter motet, Exultate caeli, seems to pick up on a practice noted in the Humiliate breviary, in which this text was sung in choir by all the inhabitants of a house in response to the prioress.33 The piece dedicated to Tecla Roma, Gaudete gaudio magno, is an address to multiple martyrs. Some possible occasions for its performance include the feasts of local Milanese martyrs Sts Gervasius and Protasius, and Nazarius and Celso. Closer to home, Giovanni Battista Carisio’s calendar of local liturgical celebrations, the Diario sacro of 1668, noted the Milanese commemoration on April 14 of the early Christian martyrs Sts Lucius and Mauritius as taking place only at S. Caterina.34 But in a wider world, the motet resonated with the celebration of the European Jesuits and Franciscans together with native Catholics martyred in Japan in 1597 and 1622, and with the beatification of some of these martyrs, an event celebrated in three sermons of 1628 written by the Milanese sacred orator and bishop of Tortona, Paolo Aresi. Even in the cloistered world, intercontinental events were clearly relevant.35 The motets addressed to specific objects of devotion are also tied closely (far more so than in a normal motet book) to the life of S. Caterina. The two solo motets and eight-voice piece (Tu filia Dei, Veni sponsa Christi; Ave virginum gemma Catharina) in honour of the house’s titular saint underscore the house’s veneration of her, and indeed there are no other pieces for named saints in Rusca’s book. The solo motets for St Catherine seem to be new coinages (the second reworks the standard antiphon from the Common of Virgin Martyrs, adding her name), while Ave virginum gemma was an infrequent motet text in the previous century, set locally only by Nicola Vicentino in his motet book published in Milan in 1571. In the 1620/21 breviary, it figured as the Antiphon ad Magnificat for Second Vespers (i.e. on the day itself, as opposed to the vigil) of St Catherine’s feast.36 In comparison to contemporary motet books, one striking feature of Rusca’s edition is the brevity of her texts. In accord with S. Caterina’s modest and inwardly-focused musical life, the non-liturgical origin of the other motet texts is no surprise. The recourse to verses or passages from the Song of Songs is more than obvious, given the book’s long history as an allegorical source for monastic life, and the special emphasis placed on it by Federigo Borromeo in On this celebration, see Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, p. 79. Breviarium . . . humiliatorum (1621), fol. 158: ‘In die sancta Paschae congregans cunctis fratribus choro, praepositus stans ante altare . . . ad chorum ter dicat: Christus Dominus, voce primo mediocri, secundo autem et tertio altior: [all] Resurrexit Dominus, alleluia, alleluia’. Again here, the masculine gender is a remnant from the earlier breviaries generated by the male branch (the Humiliati). 34 Carisio’s calendar is Diario sacro e perpetuo (Milan, 1668). Possibly the house owned relics of these martyrs. 35 Aresi’s sermons are Le palme giapponesi, sermone . . . delle vittorie di ventitre martiri del Giappone (Tortona, 1628), Le rose giapponesi, sermone della bellezza di tre martiri del Giappone (ibid., 1628) and De’ Cavalieri della Gran Croce, sermone . . . fatto in lode di ventritre martiri del Giappone (ibid., 1628). 36 The text is on fol. 410r of the 1621 breviary. 32 33

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his advice to nuns. Three of the six duets take their text from the book, and it is likely that Rusca thought this medium to be a common scoring for female monastic performance inside and outside her house. These duets, set out as a unit, seem to form the heart of the edition, and even if they held Marian connotations, their brevity and hortatory nature seem to render them, in the context of the monastery, emblems of female monastic vocation. Together with the generic psalm verses, they were also appropriate for spiritual recreation. The first duet is a short dialogue, freely texted, between Christ and the soul (or the nun):37 [Soul]: Jesus, my sweet love, alleluia. Christ: I am your love, so give me your heart. [Soul]: O good Jesus, You gave Yourself all to me, and in return you ask only for my heart? [a2]: But how much is this? O sweetest Jesus, who is so excellent, you ask for my heart? Behold my heart, behold now I give it, offering it up to You. Alleluia. This extremely simply text may well have originated inside the walls of S. Caterina. Yet, in comparison to the emotive (and quite lengthy) descriptions of spiritual life written by Confaloniera in her missives to Borromeo, its tone is markedly restrained. This suggests that, even though Rusca was recorded as being ‘molto spirituale’, her musical projection of female monastic vocation (or even of the Christian soul’s relationship to Christ) was cast in a relatively decorous fashion, eschewing the more personalised writing of nuns in their (semi-)private letters. The three Song of Songs duets use the literary voice of both the female and the male Spouse of the canticle. Ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat sets a standard passage in which the Sponsus knocks on the door of the Sponsa. The second, Veni in hortum meum, veni dilecta mea formosa, rearranges canticle verses in order to concentrate on the beauty of the Sponsa. Although it is filled with Marian tags (‘Vulnerasti cor meum’, ‘Pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol’), it is also the only vocal duet to be dedicated to another nun, in this case Anna Maria Fogliani, for whom it may also have served as a kind of ‘patroness’ piece. The third canticle duet, Surge, amica mea, employs the familiar verses in which the Sponsus calls the Sponsa, referring to her as the dove in the rock (Song of Songs 2: 14), and it ends with the sweetness of the Sponsa’s voice and the beauty of her face. In the Milan of Federigo Borromeo, this could refer both to the special status of the nun’s vocation as well as to the (very audible) vocal techniques to be heard from female monastic singers. The final two duets, O dulcissime Jesu and Domine Deus noster, quam admirabile, eschew the canticle and use standard texts, one a pre-Communion prayer, the other a psalm verse. 37 ‘Jesu, dulcis amor meus, alleluia; ego sum amor tuus, praebe mihi ergo cor tuum; O bone Jesu, tu te totum me dedisti, et a me cor meum tantum petis; sed quantum est hoc, O dulcissime Jesu, qui ita excellens es? Cor meum petis, en cor, en tibi nunquam auferendum dono, alleluia’.

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Both the three-voice pieces in the book use a single psalm verse of uncertain destination. The first, Jubilate Deo omnis terra, employs a single sung part together with two possible instrumental combinations: violin and violone (bass violin or viola da gamba), or ‘fiffara’ (probably transverse flute) and trombone. By publishing such pieces in a collection, which Confaloniera, at least, thought suitable for other female houses, Rusca underscored the idea – presumably held by herself and her cohorts – that all nuns’ use of melody instruments was not only licit but even to be promoted, an indirect way of transmitting sisters’ own opinion (as opposed to curial decrees) of what was appropriate in their music-making. The second trio (for voices alone), Hic accipiet benedictionem, is an unusual textual choice. It was set only one other time in the whole Milanese musical repertory, and is rare even on a European level. Although it seemed to have no place in the Mass or Office of the order, it figures in a prominent position in the Humiliate vesting ceremony for a nun. After the postulant had been led to the monastery, she was to be brought to the altar in the church. After a prayer said by the celebrant, her jewelry was removed and, as her hair was cut, the following antiphon was to be sung: ‘Haec accipiet benedictionem a Domino, et misericordiam a Deo salutari suo, quia haec est generatio quaerentium faciem Dei Jacob’ (i.e., ‘This woman will accept a blessing from the Lord, and mercy from God her Saviour, for this is the generation of those who seek the face of the God of Jacob’). Rusca’s text restores the opening of the Vulgate text (Ps 23: 5; ‘hic’) and ends at ‘salutari suo’, suggesting a more general use (‘He will accept . . .’). But if ‘hic’ is considered as meaning ‘at this place’ or ‘at this moment’ in the monastery church, the substitution makes perfect sense (‘Here and now she will accept. . .’). Thus the piece could well have been used for a nun’s profession at S. Caterina.38 In light of Borromeo’s penchant for presiding personally at vestings, he might even have heard the piece before its publication. Given the highly contested use of melody instruments in female monasteries, it seems a noteworthy surprise that all the motets which employ them (the three-voice Jubilate Deo noted above, and the two quartets Gaudete gaudio magno and Cantate Domino) are actually dedicated to other nuns, in the case of Jubilate Deo even to a sister in another house. Giulia Arese (c. 1578–1653; no direct relation to Paolo Aresi) was the abbess of the Benedictine foundation of S. Vincenzo in Milan, and had already received the dedication in 1621 38 The passage in the 1621 breviary is on fol. 454r. In light of this usage, the only other local setting of this verse, in Giovanni Paolo Cima’s Il primo libro delli motetti a 4 (Milan, 1599), may also have been written for a vesting at a monastic house, male or female. I know of no setting before Cima’s. Interestingly, the ‘Haec’ version of this text was set in the early nineteenth century by Johann Simon Mayr (1763–1845) in Bergamo, possibly related to his psalm settings ‘per monacazione’ (see Arrigo Gazzaniga, Il Fondo Musicale Mayr della Biblioteca Civica di Bergamo [Bergamo, 1963], p. 132). A similar use seems likely for the anonymous setting from around the same time preserved in the Benedictine house of St Peter in Cres, Croatia (listed in RISM: International Inventory of Musical Sources after 1600 [http://biblioline.nisc.com/scripts/login. dll?BiblioLine&dbname=QRISM; accessed 10 June 2006]).

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of a collection of a Mass and Vesper psalms composed by the veteran male Benedictine organist Serafino Cantone.39 The dedication of the first quartet to Tecla Roma has already been mentioned, and the inscription of Cantate Domino canticum novum to none other than Angela Confaloniera resonates with the – quite literally – new songs that Rusca would have taught her as a fledgling musician inside the walls of S. Caterina. In subtle ways, these trios and quartets reveal a side of female monastic musical life different from the quiet inner spirituality of the duets. Among the other few-voice pieces, the most unusual text is the opening motet for solo voice, a poetic-musical exordium to the edition as a whole, Salve regina caelorum. Strikingly, this is the only Marian setting in the whole book except for the Marian associations of the Song of Songs settings.40 The style of this text is simple enough to have been written by an inhabitant of the house. What is novel is its conceit: starting with a reference to the Marian antiphon Ave regina caelorum, it then highlights her as the inspiration for the speaker’s song. The text continues to address Mary as the joy of musicians and, in its final section, it most remarkably makes the instruments of music themselves her symbol, a kind of ‘musicking’ of devotion without parallel in any motet text or devotional literature of the time. The place of Salve regina caelorum as a kind of proem to Rusca’s edition points to other ways in which devotional practice became fused with musical objects for the inhabitants of S. Caterina. The mention of the instruments in the motet text also seems to defend Rusca’s scoring for obbligato instruments in the four-voice pieces dedicated to other nuns, and perhaps this choice represents the composer’s brief for the use of different kinds of melodic instruments (even those not deemed ‘suitable’ for women, such as the winds) in female monastic music in and out of the liturgy. That the two instrumental canzonas are included does not necessarily imply the use of melody instruments to perform them (their execution on the organ would be equally possible). But it is suggestive that the first of them actually bears a kind of inscription (“La Borromea”) to Federigo Borromeo (the practice of naming such pieces after a patron or colleague was quite widespread in early modern Italy), who supported nuns’ use of instruments so strikingly. In addition to the motets, the inclusion of a few complete psalms for Vespers is also not uncommon in contemporary motet editions. But Rusca’s Psalter choices include only the first three used by the Humiliate on Sunday (Pss 109, 110, 111) and some other major feasts, while her provision of choral recitation formulas (falsobordoni), which could be used for any psalm text, seems linked to the peculiarities of her order’s liturgy. As noted, its breviary 39 For the contested use of instruments in Milanese houses, Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 196–8. Giulia Arese was the dedicatee of Cantone’s Salmi, messe e lettanie a 5 concertati (Venice, 1621); a family bequest of 31 December 1619 (ASM, Religione, parte antica, ms 2297) contains a later note describing her as ‘professa a dì 17 aprile del 1594, e dormita nel Signore a 20 genaro 1653’. 40 For this piece, present in Ghedini’s transcriptions, see Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 264–5.

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included female-gender-specific rites for profession and burial, but otherwise it preserved the medieval form, shaped by the male branch. Although an attempt was made to have the order drop its liturgy in 1630/31 (in favour of standard Roman rite), Federigo himself quashed the idea, and the Humiliate kept their books as long as they existed.41 Rusca’s breviary featured an unusual choice of its selection of Vespers psalms for many feast-days, presenting cycles of five (not four, even though the order used the Rule of St Benedict) psalms for unusually linked groups of feasts. These had only partial overlap with the familiar choices of the Roman breviary or the lesser-known ones of the Ambrosian rite of the archdiocese. Their normal order of Sunday Vespers psalms, however, was entirely regular (Ps 109, Dixit Dominus, sequentially through Ps 113, In exitu). Most other major feasts, however, used different selections of psalms from those of Roman (or Ambrosian) rite, and on occasion made use of the psalm cycle known in the liturgy of S. Marco in Venice as the Salmi delle cinque Laudate (five psalms each beginning with ‘Laudate’ or ‘Lauda’). For settings of all the ‘special’ psalms of the order, however, there would have been little market in music publishing, as the items would have been unusable in almost all other religious institutions in Italy, and thus, whether or not Rusca had composed settings, there would have been little point in including them in what was already a fairly large and expensive book.42 The choice of the three psalms included in the Sacri concerti, then, highlights the similarities between the sisters’ breviary and the more common liturgies outside the house, while providing several items for the Humiliate to sing in alternatim practice (chant or organ versets alternating with full polyphony) on some major feasts. The ensuing falsobordoni may have been composed so as to provide the nuns with simple formulae for the many Vespers psalms unique to their order. These polyphonic recitation models would have been included in the print for their more widespread usefulness to other institutions of modest musical capabilities. Like the psalms, they are organised in ascending order of the church tones, with two extra formulae before the Magnificat (tones one and eight), together with doxologies, these last in lightly florid polyphony. The largest-scale festal repertory of the house is represented by the five motets for eight voices (performable by two or three choirs), and, as noted above, the extremely general nature of most of the texts is striking. The only exception is the piece for the house’s titular saint noted above, Ave virginum 41 On liturgical history and issues, see J. Wickstrom, ‘The Humiliati: Liturgy and Identity’, Archivum fratrum praedicatorum 62 (1992), 195–225 and John Wickham Legg, ‘The Divine Service in the Sixteenth Century, Illustrated by the Reform of the Breviary of the Humiliati in 1548’, Transactions of the St. Paul’s Ecclesiological Society 2 (1890), 273–95. 42 I summarise the details of the psalm cycles from the 1621 breviary. A normal motet edition of the 1620s would have included perhaps 18 to 22 items, so the 29 items in Rusca’s book (including the eight-voice works, which each take up two pages in the vocal partbooks) make the edition about 30% larger than the norm. The scope of the edition might also be due to the composer’s realisation that she was unlikely to gain financial support for publishing another music book, and thus a desire to fill the 1630 volume with as much of her work as possible.

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gemma Caterina. If there is one idea which unites the other eight-voice items – Omnes gentes, Exultate justi, Repletur os meum, Jubilate Deo – it would seem to be the idea of praise, and here again we might sense a conceptual link to the extensive adumbration of divine praise that Federigo Borromeo had written in his Tre libri delle laudi divini, as well as to wider patterns in devotional thought.43 Overall, there are no settings of penitential texts, another unusual feature among motet books of the time. If Rusca conceived of her pieces as being part of a category that Gerson would have labelled as the ‘mixed’ songs of earthly spiritual life, the texts that she chose to set and publish seem closest to his highest category of cantica among the living, the largely joyous songs of those who have made great progress in freeing themselves of worldly ties in order to come closer to spiritual perfection. The Magnificat that (according to custom) concludes the volume raises other issues. Even in Ghedini’s transcribed version, it was evident that its text is not the standard (Roman) version printed in the Humiliate’s breviary, but rather the recension found in Ambrosian rite.44 The print bears this out. It is unclear why this is the case; it is possible that Rusca was familiar with the Milanese version of the canticle from her childhood in an Ambrosianrite parish and simply set it from memory. It is also possible, however, that its selection was a deliberate homage to the great standardiser and protector of matters Ambrosian, Federigo Borromeo. Almost all other printed settings of this textual recension are in musical prints closely associated with Milan cathedral, usually composed by its chapelmasters or organists. It is striking that a musical edition seemingly so clearly marked by its institutional origin should end with a large-scale piece that technically should not have been sung by its original performers. But clearly Rusca’s cohorts did just that. The first impression made in the inner ear by Rusca’s pieces is that of a relatively simple (and often all-too-predictable) compositional approach: short, fairly generic ideas; extended prolongations of similar or repetitive sonorities; and frequent internal cadences. These features are more evident in the largerscale items than in the solo motets, the latter always a locus for innovation. The simplicity of the style recalls, not the motets being produced and sung in Milan’s churches during the 1620s, but rather the shorter and more direct kind of motet printed in local collections between 1605 and 1612. A simplistic explanation of this characteristic might invoke the possibility of the earlier (1593) birth-date for the composer, or perhaps a conscious turn away from the kinds of music she would have heard in churches in the years leading up to her profession, followed by isolation from more recent developments due to S. Caterina’s strict enclosure. How might we consider the overall reflection of her house’s musical life to be expressed in the pieces that Rusca wrote and included in her book? 43 The eight-voice setting of Jubilate Deo uses Ps 99: 1, while the trio with the same incipit employs Ps 65: 1–2. 44 On the musical fortune of the Ambrosian Magnificat text, see Kendrick, The Sounds of Milan, p. 121.

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Given the seemingly ‘non-public’ nature of its place in the aural geography of Milanese churches and shrines, it seems almost too facile to separate the solos and duets (possibly also the quartets with instruments) from the four-voice psalms and eight-voice pieces, the former representing some kind of document of nuns’ interior (Christological) devotion and informal music-making, the latter the relatively limited and general repertory for various feasts and aimed at an audience in the external church. Still, some kind of attention to sonic effect on a non-monastic public seems implicit in Rusca’s suggestions for choir division in the eight-voice pieces. For a number of religious orders in early modern Italy, musical editions produced by members reflect, at least in part, something of the order’s specific traditions of devotion or its internal culture.45 In the case of Rusca’s edition, however, apart from the liturgical peculiarities that seem to have generated the very generic approach to psalms, it is difficult to sense a corporate spirit of the Humiliate evident in the volume. Part – but only part – of the answer is the lack of a male branch of the order, and the consequent influence of episcopal authority or guidance, as in the case of Borromeo’s letters. In addition, the small size of the order, with four houses in Milan and others scattered through northern Italy and the Ticino, would seem to limit any kind of autonomous devotional life developing in the ‘orphaned’ female houses after 1570. The motet book, though, might suggest how the members of S. Caterina filled this lack: notable honouring of the house’s titular saint; a remarkable lack of emphasis on Mary (given the Marian devotion of the era) except in the unusual invocation of her in Salve regina caelorum; a marked emphasis on praise (and not, for instance, on penitence); and a very direct, ‘low’ Christology (evident in the dialogue motet cited above). In Rusca’s performance suggestions, there does seem to be some sense of outreach to an urban public, at least for the larger pieces, and thus to read the edition as a purely internal product seems unduly narrow. However, the entire project of polyphony at the house laboured under serious handicaps. S. Caterina was not able to compete with the large Benedictine foundations, with their strong patrician backing, their many singers, and their ability to transmit high musical capability across generations. Its effort at a more perceptible musical presence in the city would have run into fierce competition from the more musically established houses, and entailed the danger of losing the house’s place as a model of discipline and monastic enclosure. If the growth of music at the Humiliate house, and its public projection via Rusca’s book, were intended as an effort at creating a kind of public musical repertory for ‘good’ female houses (this seems implicit in Confaloniera’s suggestion, in a letter to Borromeo, that Rusca’s pieces would be suitable for other foundations), such a project would have encountered 45 The traditions of one (male) Italian Benedictine congregation have been treated in a preliminary way; Robert L. Kendrick, ‘Riflessioni sulla sorte della musica nella congregazione cassinese’, in Alberto Colzani, Maurizio Padoan and Andrea Luppi (eds), Barocco padano 4: Atti dell’ XI convegno sulla musica italiana nei secoli XVI–XVII (Como, 2006), pp. 424–52.

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major difficulties in the city’s prestige economy of music. Thus the problems evident in the necrology’s entry for Rusca might well have been inherent in the whole musical enterprise. How might we understand all the factors that went into the book? Perhaps it is easier to appreciate, at least at first, the Lucrezia Vizzanas and Arcangela Tarabottis of the century, religious women caught up in structure or circumstance, and left as victims of social practice not of their own making.46 It is harder to sense individuality when matters seem in such synchrony between episcopal ideology and the Humiliate’s lives. Still, we would do well to beware approaches that postulate easy diffusion of culture top to bottom. Despite Federigo’s remarkable sympathy for sisters, he followed contemporary practice in countenancing torture for female monastic witnesses to a famous case of monastic misbehaviour, that of the Nun of Monza.47 At a particular moment, the conditions of convent spirituality coincided in part with Borromeo’s own priorities. But that Rusca was heeding the traditions of her own institution in her choice of pieces to publish is evident from the plethora of St Catherine motets and the striking lack of Marian settings, a devotional topic dear to Federigo’s heart and one which provided something like 40 per cent of the other urban motet repertory in the 1620s. The conservative and simple musical style may have something to do with Rusca’s own musical education as a girl, and the ways in which she seemed to be on her own after her profession of vows. S. Caterina did not boast the continual contacts with outside male musicians typical of the Benedictine foundations, links that would have kept the music of those houses up to date with the latest styles. But it is likewise true that the last years of Borromeo’s tenure witnessed both a turn to traditional styles in the prelate’s taste as well as an increased attention to nuns on his part.48 Whether Rusca would have been aware of these trends is unclear, and the fact that the dedication was not originally her idea suggests that the reasons for her compositional choices are to be sought, after all, not in Borromean aesthetics but in Confaloniera’s remarks about the book. Rusca was writing, first and foremost, for women whose exposure to polyphony was recent and not professional. The brevity of the pieces may relate to their performance; probably memorised by untrained singers, they could not be long. Their avoidance of sharp dissonance and difficult (wide) intervals to sing underscores the point, even if this practice makes the music sound somewhat anachronistic in the swiftly changing world of the motet at the time. Thus the musical style, coincide as it might with aspects 46 As studied for example by Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Convent (Berkeley, 1995) and Francesca Medioli, L’Inferno Monacale’ di Arcangela Tarabotti (Turin, 1990). 47 As noted by F. Galliano, ‘Note giuridiche’, in Umberto Colombo (ed.), Vita e processo di Suor Virginia Maria de Leyva monaca di Monza (Milan, 1985), p. 765. For a balanced account of Borromeo’s own views and situation as both a nobleman and a prelate, see now F. Rurale, ‘Questioni di politica ecclesiastica tra Roma e Milano’, Studia Borromaica 18 (2004), 63–95. 48 On the conservative turn of the late 1620s, see Kendrick, The Sounds of Milan, p. 96.

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of archiepiscopal taste, points more towards Rusca as a pedagogical composer, making her ‘pale imitation’ of Catherine of Alexandria’s song resound not only in her own mouth, but in that of her students in the previously unmusical monastery. I have suggested that one might read the book as embodying Borromean ideals for nuns, or perhaps as reflecting Rusca’s own (conservative) musical education and situation in her house. But a third approach leaves more space for the composer’s own choices and agency. To read between the lines of Confaloniera’s letters is to grasp that Rusca’s first priority was that of the abilities of her cohorts, and presumably their own spirituality. Whatever her compositional capacity might have been, she seems to have been writing for a group of relatively unseasoned musicians with very marked priorities for musical celebrations, thus explaining some of the simple style and specific liturgical destination. And the selection of pieces, given her brothers’ decision to have them printed, might have been chosen to represent the best emblem of the convent’s culture in its essentials: rhetorical simplicity and linearity. It is striking, in this regard, that the two public manifestations of the convent’s culture to be issued around 1630 – namely, Cairo’s altarpiece for the public church and Rusca’s motets – go out of their way to combine the symbolic patroness of the house and the very real male protector of the order and its liturgy. With its mixture of this public face for the house, and the very inward and internal origin of much of its contents, Rusca’s edition also perhaps warns us not to apply in an overly facile way the distinction between public and private spheres familiar in much social theory. And in that sense there is little point in comparing Rusca’s collection to those of her contemporaries (as one might in the slightly later motets of the Milanese Benedictine nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani), as they may stem from other temporal moments but certainly reflect different aesthetic values. This interpretation is not however meant as an argument for essentialism. As bound as they are to the common life of a group of fifty women, Rusca’s motets do not represent a kind of purely female writing. Rather, they embody choices from a certain moment, in which the social status of the composer as female patrician and member of what had become a purely female order was important but by no means all-determining. In a broader sense, if research on nuns’ culture is to go forward, it might be able to chart, not only the expressive richness found in many cases best in the music, but also the complexities of distinction that went into the artistic areas over which they had some limited control.49 It would seem easy, at the distance of over a decade trying to hunt down this music, to feel self-congratulatory, thanking Jesinghaus’s unwitting providence while dismissing his nationalist agenda, or taking advantage of Ghedini’s transcriptions and the clues they provided to the edition’s trail while ignoring 49 Thus, if employed in a historically sensitive way, the categories suggested by Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge/Mass., 1984) might be useful in understanding the choices of Rusca’s book.

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his – quite sensitive and musical – reworkings. But even a greater wave of interest in female monastic music took place in a given intellectual climate. Research, not just musical studies, on Italian nuns had its own historical context: the search by liberal Catholic historians inspired by Vatican II for precedents for changing gender roles in the post-conciliar Church; the more generalised interest in women’s writing from the 1970s on; and the general impression, not always justified, among Italophile historians that Italy was the locus of the most anthropologically different as well as the most stylistically fruitful musical behaviour of early modern Europe. Such discoveries as Rusca’s motets seem to mark the end of only the preliminary stage of studies of nuns’ culture. Appendix Ex. 1. List of nuns noted as singers at S. Caterina from the ‘Biografia delle monache umiliate’ (Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, ms Trotti 453, begun in 1684): two sopranos (Angela Confaloniera, Claudia Rusca); five altos (Anna Maria Fogliani, Alma Felice Litta, Bona Prudenza Litta, Geronima Cattarina Casati, Ottavia Fulgenzia Bonfanti, the last born 1651); two ‘tenori’, (Clara Prassede Riva, Arcangela Maria Cripa). Ex. 2. Rusca entry from the ‘Biografia’, fols 13v–14r Claudia Francsca Rusca was brought up by her parents, who made her learn music on a solid basis; so she knew how to compose, sang soprano, and was much praised in her youth, so that she was accepted [in SCB] and they gave her a favour [?a dowry exemption] so she could use this talent and teach the other [nuns]; one cannot say how well she did in this task, but she certainly was an example of perseverance which God only knows; when she was old, she never failed but for a few years when she could no longer use [her talent]; she knew how to do the accounts [?from memory], and was always busy in serving and teaching, she had a good memory and carried out her duties with great diligence; because of her singing talents she did not do them all, but was the doorkeeper and mistress of the novices for many years in a proper manner; she received the sacraments thrice weekly with great devotion and perseverance, she could not get up for Matins but was most diligent in prayer and other practices, and certainly she was a mirror of virtue; several times she was nominated for abbess in the chapter, but Our Lord did not wish to give her this task; she had other good qualities, and lived many years, and the 1st of October she took Communion, and at table she was felled by a [?stroke], so that she took to bed, received Extreme Unction, and after six days died on October 6th, Rosary Sunday, in the year 1676, at the age of 83; she worked quite hard [for the monastery] to have the underground passage-way, which was obtained after many difficulties around 1633; she had a brother who was the [archdiocesan] vicar of nuns for many years, and Suor Antonia Lucia, her sister, who was an excellent nun of great charity and observance

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in this monastery, and something [about ALR] is recorded in its place [in the necrology]. [fol.13v] Claudia Francesca Rusca fu alleuata da’ suoi et la feccero imparar di musica con buon fondamento perche sapeua componere, cantaua il soprano, et in sua giouentù era molto lodata, si che fu accetata et le feccero cortesia perche esercitasse questa virtù, et che amaestresse ancora le altre, non si può dire [quanto] si sia adoperata in questa carica, certo è stata un esempio di perseueranza che solo Iddio sa, et essendo vecchia mai ha mancato, solo pochi anni perche non poteua più esercitarlo, lei sapeua far li conti da [?memoria], et era sempre impiegata in far seruitio et a insegnare, haueua una buona memoria, facceua li suoi officij con gran diligenza, per la uirtù del cantare non li facceua tutti, ma ha fatto la portinera, et maestra delle nouitie molti anni, come si deue; frequentaua li Santissimi Sacramenti tre uolte la settimana con grande diuotione, et perseueranza, non poteua leuar a matutino ma era diligentissima all’oratione, et a tutte le altre osseruanze, et certo era un spechio di uirtù, più uolte fu nominata nelli capitoli per farla superiora, ma Nostro Signore non li uolse dar quel carico, hauendo per altro buonissime qualità, uisse molti anni; et il primo giorno di 8bre fecce la Santa Comunione, et essendo alla mensa fù soprapresa dalla sgocia, sì che si portò a letto, se li diede l’olio santo et doppo sei giorni morì a dì 6 8bre la Domenica del Rosario l’anno 1676 d’anni 83, si adoperò assai per hauer il passo sotteraneo, che al fine doppo molte difficoltà si ottene, et questo incirca l’anno 1633, haueua un fratello che esercitò la carica di vicario delle monache molti anni, et Suor Antonia Lucia sua sorella che fù una bonissima religiosa in cotesto Monastero di gran carità, et osseruanza, et è notato qualche cosa al suo luoco. Ex. 3. Rusca, title page and dedicatory poem [within a frame] / [part name] / SACRI CONCERTI / a vna, dve, tre, qvattro, / e cinqve voci, / Con Salmi, e Canzoni Francesi à 4. / varii motetti, magnificat, / Falsabordoni, & Gloria Patri à otto / Nouamente dati in luce, Con la Partitura per l’Organo / da / svor clavdia rvsca / Monaca nel Monastero di Santa Catarina / vicino a brera. / All’Illustriss. e Reuerendiss. Sig.il Sig. Cardinale Federico Borromeo / Arciuescouo di Milano / [Borromeo’s shield] / in milano, Appresso Giorgio Rolla. 1630. A / SANTA CATARINA / VERGINE, E MARTIRE / PER L’IMPRESSIONE DE’ PRESENTI / COMPONIMENTI MUSICALI. Di la sù, dove infra i beati Chori / Vergine pia, ch’or di quel Dio nel Regno / A cui viva già desti il cor per pegno, / De la tua fe, godi immortali onori. / Odi d’umil ancella amica i prieghi / Perche vestita ancora del mortal manto, / Sotto gli auspici del tuo nome santo, / Degno a lo sposo eterno il canto spieghi. / Con l’armonia del Ciel, ben so che in vano / Cerca proportion Musa terrena, / E che concento d’immortal Sirena, / Non dee turbar audace ingegno umano. / Ma forse fuor di questo carcer cieco, / Ottenuta del Mondo alta vittoria, / In dar eternamente à Dio la gloria / Esser potrei de la tua voce l’Eco.

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La Componitrice. [followed by imprimatur and a two-page dedication to Federigo Borromeo] [From there above, o holy virgin, where you enjoy immortal honours among the choirs of the blessed in the kingdom of that God to whom you (while still alive) gave your heart as a pledge of your faith, now hear the prayers of a humble handmaiden and friend; so that she, still clothed in mortal garb, may present her song to her eternal Spouse under the protection of your holy name. Well do I know that the earthly muse in vain seeks [musical] proportion to heavenly harmony, and that the bold human mind should not disturb the concord of the immortal siren. But perhaps, once liberated from this blind prison and having won victory over the world, I could be the echo of your voice in eternally giving glory to God. The composer.] Ex. 4. Rusca, Sacri concerti, contents, source and destination of texts (numbering is editorial; voice parts are summarised as: C=Canto, S=Soprano, A=Alto; T=Tenore, B=Basso; Org=[partitura per l’Organo]; /=or) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

Salve regina caelorum (C/T, Org); free text, Marian praise via music Tu filia Dei (C/T, Org); free, St Catherine Consolamini popule meus (C/T, Org); free + liturgical (Christmas Matins; Is 60: 1); Christmas joy Veni sponsa Christi (C/T, Org); Office antiphon for St Catherine Exultate caeli (C/T, Org); free, for Easter Jesus, dulcis amor meus ‘Dialogo a 2: Anima, e Christo’ (CC/TT, Org); free, soul/Christ dialogue Ego dormio, et cor meum vigilat (CC/TT, Org); free, Song of Songs verses used Veni in hortum meum; ‘Alla virtuosiss. & M. Rev. Signora, la Sig. Madre Suor Anna Maria Fogliani Contralto suavissimo nel nostro Monastero’ (CA, Org); free, Song of Songs verses used Surge, amica mea (CA/AT, Org); free, Song of Songs verses used O dulcissime Jesu (CA, Org); free, medieval; Elevation of the Host at Mass? Domine Deus noster, quam admirabile (CA, Org); Ps 8: 2, praise Hic accipiet benedictionem (CCB, Org); Ps 23: 5; thanks, vesting of a nun? Jubilate Deo omnis terra; ‘Alla M. Ill., & M. R. Madre D. Giulia Aresa, Monaca nel Vener. Monastero di S. Vincenzo in Milano’ (C/T, Violin +Violone or Fiffaro [?transverse flute]+ Trombone, Org); Ps 65: 1–2; praise Gaudete gaudio magno; ‘Alla Virtuosiss. & M. Rever. Signora, la Signora Suor Tecla Francesca Roma Soprano dolcissimo nel nostro Monastero’ (CA, instruments as in #13); free, for feasts of Multiple Martyrs

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15. Cantate Domino canticum novum; ‘Alla Virtuoss. & M. Rever. Signora, la Signora Suor Angela Flaminia Confaloniera Soprano dolcissimo nel nostro Monastero’ (CA, instruments as in #13); Ps 149: 1; Ps 97: 2; praise and ‘new song’ 16. Adoramus te, Christe (SSATB, Org); Holy Week antiphon/Elevation of the Host 17. Canzona prima, La Borromea (CATB [instruments], Org) 18. Canzona seconda (as #17) 19. Dixit Dominus, primo tono (CATB, Org); Ps 109, for Vespers on Sundays and some feasts 19a. Falsa bordone del Primo Tono a 4 [i.e. psalm recitation formula] 20. Confitebor tibi Domine, secondo tono (CATB, Org); Ps 110, ditto 20a. Falsa bordone del Secondo Tono a 4 21. Beatus vir, terzo tono a 4 (CATB, Org); Ps 111, ditto 21a. Falsa bordone del Terzo Tono a 4 22. Omnes gentes, plaudite manibus; ‘Alla Molto Rever.Signora, la Sig. Madre Suor Aurelia Maria Pelizzona dignissima Madre Priora nel nostro Monastero’ (CATB, CATB, Org but also C, CAB, CATB, Org according to Rusca’s instructions); Ps 46: 2–3, praise 23. Ave virginum gemma Catharina (CATB, CATB, Org); antiphon for Second Vespers, feast of St Catherine 24. Exultate justi in Domino (CATB, CATB, Org); Ps 32: 1–2, praise with lyre 25. Repletur os meum (CATB, CATB, Org); Ps 70: 8, praise 26. Jubilate Deo omnis terra (CATB, CATB, Org); Ps 99: 1, rejoicing 27. Domine ad adiuvandum (CATB, CATB, Org); Vespers versicle and response 28a. Falsobordone del Primo Tono a 4 28b. Gloria Patri [i.e. “detachable” doxology usable for any psalm] 28c. Falsobordone del Ottavo Tono a 4 28d Gloria Patri (differs from 28b) 29. Magnificat Sesto Tono a 8 (CATB, CATB, Org); canticle for Vespers; Ambrosian text

Chapter six

The Wise and Foolish Virgins in Tuscan Convent Theatre Elissa B. Weaver

The parable of the wise and foolish virgins, recounted in the Gospel of Matthew, Ch. 25, verses 1–13, was a popular subject in the figurative and dramatic arts of Northern Europe from the late middle ages forward into the eighteenth century. The virgins figured prominently in the decoration of the portals of Romanesque and Gothic churches, in painting, in manuscript illumination, and in the graphic arts in France, the Low Countries and in Germany. In Italy, it was first known in two small fourth-century frescoes located in the Roman catacomb of Saint Ciriaca and in the crypt of Pope Damasus. They are represented in a sixth-century illuminated evangelistary from Rossano, in several frescoes of the late middle ages, primarily in churches and chapels of Northern Italy, and in one of the portals of the Duomo of Milan. If the subject continued to enjoy some popularity in the art of the Italian Renaissance and beyond, as is likely, little remains of it today. Antonello da Messina makes reference to the parable in his painting of St Jerome in His Study (now in the National Gallery, London) by including an unlighted oil lamp as one of several symbols of vice which are contrasted to symbols of virtue, inspired, perhaps, by Jerome’s references to the wise and foolish virgins in his letter to Eustochium and in his polemic Adversus Jovinianum. Parmigianino, between 1531 and 1539, painted three wise and  This is a corrected and revised version of my article by the same title that was printed incorrectly in Rinascimento, series 2, vol. 43 (2003), 249–63. It is reprinted here with permission of the editor of Rinascimento.  Regine Körkel-Hinkfoth, Die Parabel von den klugen und törichten Jungfrauen (Mt. 25, 1–13) in der bildenden Kunst und im geistlichen Schauspiel (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, 1994).  Körkel-Hinkfoth lists and describes many depictions of the wise and foolish virgins, in fresco mostly, but also in sculpture, relief, enamel, and even in an embroidery which has been lost. Among the frescoes are those of the cathedral of Anagni, of the monastery church of San Pietro al Monte in Civate (Lombardy), and several in Alto Adige, in the church of Santa Margherita in Lana, in the chapel of the castle of Castellappiano, and in two churches in Bolzano.  Körkel-Hinkfoth mentions work by the German sculptor Hans Schnattespeck, dated 1503–11, in the church of Santa Maria Assunta in Lana (Alto Adige).  P. Howell Jolly, in ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study: An Iconographic Analysis’, Art Bulletin 65 (1983), 238–53, suggests that Antonello may have been referring to St Jerome’s mention of the parable in his letter to Eustochium. She also argues that Antonello was influenced by Flemish painting, particularly that of Jan Van Eyck, and that this probably explains the iconographic programme of his painting. St Jerome also refers to the parable in his Adversus Jovinianum, lib. II, in PL 23, 322.

Fig. 6.1

Jacopo Robusti, Il Tintoretto, The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam).

Fig. 6.2

Copy after Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Upton House, The Bearsted Collection (The National Trust) / NTPL / Angelo Hornak).

Fig. 6.3

Copy after Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti), The Wise and Foolish Virgins (copyright: Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection).

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three foolish virgins at the two extremities of an arch in the church of the Steccata in Parma; several preparatory drawings for these paintings survive. I have found only one other important appearance of this parable in Italian art, though it is of some interest for this paper: it is a small painting by Jacopo Robusti, il Tintoretto. There are in fact three similar paintings, one by Jacopo (Fig. 6.1) and two others attributed to his workshop (Figs 6.2 and 6.3). It is not known for whom they were painted nor where they originally hung; today they are in museum collections in Holland, England, and the United States. In drama, too, the parable was popular in Northern Europe, providing subject matter for religious theatre as early as the eleventh and as late at the eighteenth century. Important examples have survived of this theatre in France, Holland and Germany. In Italy too the subject found favour among Tuscan nuns, who have left us four dramatisations of the parable. The Parabola decem virginum belongs to the Gospel of Matthew and is one of a series of apocalyptic parables that precede the narration of the Passion of Christ. The evangelist, in chapter 25: verses 1–13, tells of the five prudent virgins who await the bridegroom, ready to receive him with lighted lamps, and of five foolish virgins, who, instead, are unprepared and arrive at the crucial moment with lamps spent. The bridegroom takes the prudent virgins with him to the marriage feast, refusing admittance to the others. The parable ends with the warning, ‘Vigilate itaque, qui nescitis diem, neque horam’ (Watch, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour),10 underscoring the lesson that one must prepare for the coming of Christ in good time and be vigilant.11 It is in these terms that the parable is generally understood in European art and literature; and, by extension, the prudent virgins sometimes represent Ecclesia,  On the Steccata frescoes, see Giovanni Copertini, Il Parmigianino (2 vols, Parma, 1932), i, pp. 181–6 and plates LXI–LXXI, and Sydney Joseph Freedberg, Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cambridge/Mass., 1950), p. 97 and plates 87–112.  The painting attributed to Jacopo Robusti is today at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam; the two workshop paintings are at Upton House (Warwickshire) and at the Philadelphia Art Museum. On these paintings, see Rodolfo Pallucchini, La giovinezza del Tintoretto (Milan, 1950), p. 110, and his Tintoretto le opere sacre e profane (2 vols, Milan, 1990), i, p.106 and ii, figs 133, 134.  E. Alvisi, ‘Nota’, appended to his edition of the anonymous, Commedia di dieci vergine (Florence, 1882), pp. [70]–85. Alvisi discusses three plays: the Sponsus (late eleventh century) from the Abbey of Saint-Martial in Limoges, now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, a German Ludus de decem virginibus (fourteenth century) now at the Library of Muhlhausen, and a Flemish play, Het spel van de V vroede ende van de V dwaeze maegden (sixteenth century), which was published in Ghent in 1846. D’Arco Silvio Avalle published a critical edition of the Sponsus of Saint-Martial of Limoges together with the music, edited by R. Monterosso (Milan-Naples, 1965). On the date and the transmission of this work and on its language (bilingual, Latin and French), see Avalle’s ‘Prefazione’. G. Cohen also discusses the Sponsus in an essay on medieval apocalyptic theatre, ‘Le Jour du Jugement dans le théâtre du Moyen-Age’, Convivium 25, n.s. (1957), 268–75.  See Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge, 2002); the plays consulted for this study are listed in the bibliography, pp. 262–8. 10 Mt. 25: 13 11 Avalle, ‘Prefazione’ to his edition of the Sponsus, p. 12: ‘prepararsi in tempo’ and ‘vigilanza’. Avalle lists other passages in the Gospels where this message is repeated, for example, Mt. 24: 42, 44; Mk 13: 33, 34, 35, 37 and Lk. 12: 37, 40; 21: 36.

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as she ensures salvation, while the foolish stand for Synagoga, unwilling to accept the revelation of Christ and therefore unprepared for His coming. The figurative language of maidens who go to meet their bridegroom is particularly suited for convent drama, of course, since nuns were also virgin ‘brides of Christ’ like those of the parable. From the fourth century on, virgins who dedicated themselves to God received a liturgical benediction based on and closely resembling that of a nuptial pact. Despite changes over the years and variation in local practices, the rite continued to echo the bridal imagery of the Song of Songs, and the women received a nuptial crown like that of secular brides.12 Convent women internalised this image of their relationship with God, which is found in the language of their rituals, prayers, and in the devotional literature written by and for them. There were many other reasons, as well, that recommended this parable to convent women for their theatre. Perhaps the most banal, yet important, may have been that the story of ten women, the five wise and five foolish maidens, offered more female roles than most Biblical and hagiographic subjects (excepting, of course, the story of Saint Ursula and the ten thousand virgin martyrs). The theme could be dramatised as a victory of virtue over vice and could be staged in the form of a contrasto;13 and, as we shall see, the vices of the foolish virgins could be dramatised amusingly, and humour had an important role to play in early religious theatre. While the parable as told by Matthew teaches that Christians should be ever ready for death, it was widely used in theatre to depict virtues that constitute that preparedness, whose practice merits eternal reward, and vices that lead instead to damnation. As the parable is retold in convent theatre, the tardiness of the foolish virgins is attributed to their failure to practise the virtues and 12 Gabriella Zarri, ‘Gender, Religious Institutions and Social Discipline’, in Judith C. Brown and Robert Davis (eds), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (New York, 1998), pp. 204–8; and see her Recinti. Donne, clausura e matrimonio nella prima età moderna (Bologna, 2000), pp. 267–8. According to Zarri, the rite with which virgins were consecrated to God conferred ‘un forte spessore simbolico, legittimato ora dalla liturgia e confermato dalla testimonianza dei fedeli che assistono alla cerimonia, a quell’appellativo di sponsa Christi o sponsa Dei con cui le vergini erano designate’. Despite local variations the rite remained, to quote Zarri again, ‘una rappresentazione di quel mistico matrimonio che in virtù della professione monastica univa strettamente l’anima a Cristo’. See also Gabriella Zarri, ‘The Marriage of Virgins in the Sixteenth Century’, in Edith Ann Matter and John Coakley (eds), Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia, 1994), pp. 262–7. On the various initiation rituals of nuns, see also Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley and London, 1995), pp. 195–6; Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford, 1996), pp. 132–7, and Kate J. P. Lowe, ‘Secular Brides and Convent Brides: Wedding Ceremonies in Italy during the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation’, in Trevor Dean and Kate J. P. Lowe (eds), Marriage in Italy 1300–1650 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 41–65. The classic study of the consecration rite is René Metz, La Consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine: Etude d’histoire de la liturgie (Paris, 1954). 13 The contrasto, or battle, of vices and virtues, also provides the structure of the Flemish play based on the parable. The Het spel van de V vroede ende van de V dwaeze maegden, first published in Ghent in 1846, has appeared in two more recent editions edited by M. Hoebeke (Zwolle, 1959; The Hague, 1979).

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their consequent weakness in the face of temptation. They must renounce the world, be devout in the practice of their religious vocation, and live together harmoniously in order to grow in virtue. The plays emphasise the importance of humility, faith, charity, and the value of prudence and prayer in a religious community. Characters, new to the parable, are introduced in the plot to enliven the story. They are devils or their emissaries on earth, and the latter are often, like the virtues, abstractions, whose transparent names, speeches, and actions dramatise the vices they represent. In this paper the four plays I will discuss are the anonymous, sixteenthcentury one-act play (sacra rappresentazione), entitled the Commedia di dieci vergine (Comedy of ten virgins),14 and three seventeenth-century spiritual comedies: Eleanora Ramirez de Montalvo’s free adaptation of the parable, the Rappresentazione delle virtú e dei vizi (ca. 1650; Play of the virtues and vices),15 padre Benvenuto Flori’s Evangelica parabola delle vergini prudenti e delle stolte, composizione dramatica (Siena: Ercole Gori, 1642; The parable of the prudent and foolish virgins),16 and La rappresentazione dell’evangelica parabola delle dieci vergini tolta da S. Matteo al XXV (The play of the parable of the ten virgins, based on Matthew 25), written by suor Maria Costanza Ubaldini, a Camaldolese nun in the convent of Sant’Agata in Florence.17 The earliest play sets the stage well, since it is the most straightforward dramatisation of the parable in this group. Alvisi, who edited it in 1882, considered it to be a more complex play than the earlier versions known in Germany, France and in Flanders, since the characters who represent the vices are well developed and somewhat realistic, and because in this play the devil intervenes to tempt the virgins, while in the earlier versions that Alvisi knew devils merely arrive at the conclusion to take the foolish virgins to hell. Like the earlier Flemish play, the anonymous Commedia di dieci vergine dramatises a struggle between personified virtues and vices.18 The wise virgins in this play are called Fede, Speranza, Carità, representing the three cardinal virtues, Prudenza, the theological virtue traditionally understood to guide the others, and Umiltà, which in the medieval literature on vices and virtues is seen

14 This play has survived in a single manuscript at the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, cod. Ricc. 1510, on which E. Alvisi based his edition, Commedia di dieci vergine. 15 I consulted a typescript copy of the manuscript, made for Montalvo’s beatification proceedings: E. Ramirez Montalvo, Copie di tutti gli scritti della Venerabile, estratte dagli originali, Archivio de ‘La Quiete’, A1, corresponding to manuscript fols 189r–212v. 16 This play has been studied by Colleen Reardon in Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 87–97. 17 The autograph manuscript of this play is in the Archivio Buonarroti in Florence, ms. AB 94, fols. 202–76. On Ubaldini, see A. Grimaldi, ‘Il Chiostro e la scena. Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane e il convento di Sant’Agata’, Studi italiani 10 (1998), 153, 154, 181. See also Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy, pp. 193–7. 18 In the Flemish play the names of the wise virgins are Vreese (fear of God), Hope, Caritate, Gheloove (faith) and Ootmoedicheit (humility); those of the foolish are Tytverlies (idleness), Roeckeloose (folly), Hoverdie (arrogance), Ydelglorie (vanity), and Zottecollacie (stupidity).

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as a remedy, a corrective for the capital vices.19 In their opening speeches the virtues say little that is specific to their character, but their names tell all that is necessary and need little commentary. They form a familiar but somewhat heterogeneous group. The foolish virgins are called Galantina, Leggiadrina, Dialta, Cesarina, and Phitonica, names requiring exegesis, which is carefully given in the lines of self-presentation, recited, or perhaps sung, as they enter onto the scene. Galantina invites the others to be merry, to dance, sing motets, play music and dress elegantly. Leggiadrina takes pride in her beauty, nobility, and grace, wears a garland of flowers and perfumes (so much perfume, she says, that she will smell like a spice shop). Dialta is proud of her lineage, descended from important statesmen, a senator and a gonfaloniere, her brothers are all signori; she wants to be admired, and she wastes her time in vain thoughts. Cesarina also exalts herself, but for her learning: she reads better than a doctor, knows the course of the planets, speaks Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, German and the language of barbarians (‘la latina barbara,’).20 Phitonica is selfrighteous; she claims to be the most saintly of all; others make her sick (‘voi mi stomacate’).21 It is clear that these women, who take as their guide a character called Prosunzione (Presumption) will easily fall prey to the temptations of Il Mondo (The World), his wife La Carne (Flesh), the devil and his companion Sensualità.22 As in most sacre rappresentazioni and spiritual comedies, there is humour, here especially in the self presentations of the foolish virgins and their protests once they have fallen, and in the encounters with the tempters, who, warmly greeted by the foolish, are kicked, beaten and chased away by the wise virgins. The comedy addresses an audience of convent women, referring to them as ‘care spettatrice’, ‘care sorelle’, and ‘care compagne’. It refers to aspects of convent life: to prayers and self-punishments (discipline) and to the abbess.23 In the licenza an angel delivers the moral of the parable, asking the women to consider not the literal story (‘istoria,’)24 but its meaning (‘l’amirabil suo significato’),25 which he glosses carefully and summarises in three lines:

19 For the medieval literature on virtues and vices, see Richard Newhauser, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout, Belgium, 1993), on the various categories of vices and virtues, p. 58. 20 Commedia di dieci vergine, p. 15. 21 Ibid. 22 I translate only those transparent names that do not have English cognates. 23 A note written on the last page of the manuscript indicates that the copy belonged to ‘S[uor] Raffaella’. 24 Commedia di dieci vergine, p. 72. 25 Ibid.

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Felice certo sarà colei, i’ dico, al punto orrendo della morte, che sarà ritrovata in gratia Dei. (Happy she will certainly be, I say, who at the terrible moment of death will find herself in God’s grace.)26 The behaviour and the weaknesses of the foolish virgins in the face of temptation have been chosen to represent the problems encountered by the female monastic audience addressed by the play: they are vanity, pride of family, interest in play and in frivolous activities such as dancing, and the hypocrisy of self-righteousness and feigning superior piety. The play condemns the attachment of the foolish women to the secular world and their failure to live lives of earnest prayer and sacrifice.27 Prudenza plays opposite Prosunzione and has a central role in the salvation of the wise virgins, the prudentes virgines of the parable.28 Inspired by Prudenza, the wise virgins overcome first the temptations of Sensualità and Il Mondo, and they send away the Diavolo with holy water, prayers, and religious song; in the end, once again encouraged by Prudenza, they prepare their lamps and enter triumphantly through the door to where the Sposo (celestial Bridegroom) awaits them.29 Later theatrical versions of the parable vary the story in three principal ways: 1) by attributing different characteristics to the virgins, changing their names and illustrating their good and bad behaviour accordingly; 2) by introducing new allies and antagonists; and 3) by choosing to emphasise one of the two meanings ascribed to the meeting of virgins and bridegroom at the end of the play, that is, the moment of death and final judgment, as in the biblical text, or that of entry into the religious life. All translations in this essay are mine. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ecclesiastical authorities attempted to restrict as much as possible contact between convent women and the secular world: they imposed clausura (strict enclosure) in all convents, severely limiting the access of lay persons and prohibiting convent women from leaving the premises except for fire, war, or plague; they closed up windows and doors that gave onto the public streets and installed dark curtains or perforated metal sheets behind the parlour grill to obstruct the view of convent women. They made it very difficult for lay persons, even close relatives, to obtain permission to visit their convent relatives, and they sought to put all convents under the control of the local bishop, rather than their regular clergy, who were thought to be less rigorous in their oversight. 28 The special importance of prudence is also stressed in another convent play, the Sposalitio d’Iparchia filosofa (cod. Riccardiano 2974, vol. 3), written by Clemenza Ninci, a Benedictine nun at San Michele in Prato; see especially, Act I, scene i. An abridged edition of this play has been published by Cesare Guasti in Calendario pratese del 1850, v (Prato, 1849), pp. 63–101, with Guasti’s introduction on pp. 53–63. 29 On the operations of Prudence, see Dante, for example, who writes that the virtue is characterised by ‘li buoni consigli, li quali conducono sé e altri a buono fine ne le umane cose e operazioni’, Convivio IV. xxviii. Christine de Pizan expresses this notion in the Livre de la cité des dames, trans. P. Caraffi and ed. by E. J. Richards (Milan-Trent, 1997), I.xlvi, p. 202: ‘Prudence, si que toy mesmes as dit cy devant, est de avoir avis et regart sur les choses que on veult emprendre, comment il pourront estre terminees [...]’. See also St Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, I–II, 65, 2. 26 27

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Eleanora Ramirez de Montalvo’s Rappresentazione delle virtú e dei vizi (c. 1650) is a three-act, spiritual comedy, written in verse and prose. This play adapts the parable of the wise and foolish virgins to the situation of the Ancille della Santissima Trinità, the religious community at La Quiete, just outside Florence, founded by Montalvo for the education of young women of the patriciate.30 The parable is not mentioned explicitly, but the language of the play and the importance it gives to the virtue of prudence make the connection clear. In the second act the language of the parable is employed to contrast two groups of young women living in a community that replicates that of the Ancille: the ‘more prudent’ ones (‘le piú prudenti’) and those said to be ‘ill prepared inside and out’ (‘mal preparate di dentro e di fuori’).31 In the conclusion of the play a voice from heaven calls those who are prepared for death with the words of the Song of Songs, which like those of the parable refer to the prudent women as brides of Christ: ‘Veni de Libano, veni sponsa mea’.32 The Archangel Michael takes those who have been ‘most vigilant [...] faithful custodians’ (‘vigilantissimi [...] custodi fedelissimi’), whereas Lucifer claims the ‘foolish and stupid women’ (‘stolte et insensate’).33 Montalvo features two of the same virtues extolled in the earlier anonymous play, Prudenza and Humiltà, along with others unique to her play and presumably important for life at La Quiete, Pace, Letizia (Happiness), and Modestia. Their enemies are Superbia (Pride), Stoltitia (Foolishness), Dissoluzione, Discordia, and Malinconia, five vices to combat the five virtues, and the number five underscores the connection of this play to the parable. The vices, are assisted by Menzogna (Lies) and Adulazione, emissaries of Lucifero, who succeed in disrupting only the community of foolish women. In this play the virtues and vices are not represented by the virgins but have, instead, separate identities; they act upon and interact with the women. The apocalyptic message of the parable clearly applies to Montalvo’s play and is underscored at its conclusion, while the struggle of virtues and vices tells a story of the problems of communal life and teaches the ancille (maids, helpmates) how to overcome them for the benefit of all, in the here and now and in the hereafter. Also unique to this play is a metaliterary reflection on theatre, on the danger that the singing and revelry that accompany theatrical performances could represent for the young women, distracting them from their devotions. 30 La Quiete was not a convent; however, Montalvo instituted there many of the same structures and rules. The women took vows, though not solemn vows, and they observed enclosure. On Montalvo and the communities she founded in Florence, see the entry for her in the Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione (Rome, 1978); see also Laura Di Tommasi, ‘Una esperienza religiosa e una proposta educativa nella Firenze del Seicento: Le signore Montalve della Quiete’, (Unpubl. PhD Diss., University of Florence, 1989–90). On theatre at La Quiete, see Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre, pp. 198–204. 31 They belong, respectively, to the eremo buono and the eremo cattivo, divisions that represent the organisation of Montalvo’s community, where young women lived together in small communities called eremi, or hermitages. 32 Montalvo, Copia, p. 24. 33 Ibid., p. 27.

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Their teacher (the discreta) recommends that they prepare themselves for the proper enjoyment, in moderation, of this moment of healthful respite through a period of quiet and contemplation. The parable is developed, interpreted and applied in still different ways in the other two plays, one written by Padre Benvenuto Flori for the Olivetan convent of Ognissanti in Siena and another by the Camaldolese nun, Maria Costanza Ubaldini, for her convent of Sant’Agata in Florence. Both plays seem to allude to convent rituals, and each employs music liberally throughout, suggesting that they were very likely performed on the occasion of important convent festivities, most likely for the clothing (vestizione) ceremony, but, if not, then the profession, or the rarer and very elaborate consecration ceremonies. Benvenuto Flori’s L’Evangelica parabola delle vergini prudenti e delle stolte, composizione dramatica (Siena: Ercole Gori, 1642) is a spiritual comedy. His dramatisation of the parable teaches vigilance and preparedness for death through the proper use of the senses. The wise and foolish virgins in Flori’s play represent the five senses, their use and misuse, through encounters with others along a pilgrimage road that symbolises life.34 The foolish respond physically, understanding only appearances, whereas the wise virgins enter into relationships with those they encounter, moved by their suffering, and they put into practice the works of charity also mentioned in the Gospel of Matthew, 25: 34–40, just a few lines after the parable. Flori’s characters, too, have transparent names, those of the foolish especially. They are: Aquilina (sight), Aurilla (hearing), Odorosa (smell), Gustante (taste) and Tangifila (touch). Abetted by Sense, they leave their lamps to pursue Pleasure. The names of the wise virgins, not so transparent, are: Deifila (sight), Beatrice (hearing), Diletta (smell), Felice (taste) and Innocenza (touch). Each set of virgins uses their senses differently. The foolish seek pleasure and entertainment, while the character Prudenza warns them that the senses should be enlisted instead for their salvation: hearing, for example, is for listening when Holy Scriptures are read, for attending to divine voices and not those of this earth. The author of the play, Benvenuto Flori, was also a musician, who sang for many years at the cathedral of Siena and who taught music to the nuns of Santa Marta. Flori privileges the sense of hearing in the play, which allows him to introduce secular as well as spiritual music to teach the convent women musical decorum through both negative and positive examples. As is generally the case, much of the entertainment value of the comedy derives from the representation of the errors of the foolish virgins, and it is music in this play, especially the secular music, that enlivens the comedy, dramatising the foolish virgins’ pursuit of pleasure in song and dance, madrigals and moresche. The play concludes with the corrective example of heavenly, spiritual music, which emanates from behind the door of the wedding banquet room. Colleen Reardon, in her study of Flori’s play and its music, suggests 34 My discussion of this play is based on Reardon, Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls, pp. 88–97.

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that the author perhaps wished, through the use of negative example, to allow the religious women to perform and enjoy secular music that was normally forbidden them.35 Reardon reads this play also as a ‘pilgrimage to a nunnery’;36 and indeed the prudent virgins, when they are saved, pass through the door into the ‘blessed cloisters’ (‘benedetti chiostri’), an obvious allusion to the convent and reason to suspect that the play was performed at the festivities for one of the various rites of admission to convent life, which take place at the convent door. It was perhaps staged at the time of the clothing ceremony (vestizione), one of the most important yearly convent celebrations. Monastic rites for such occasions relied heavily on the imagery of brides of Christ taken from the Song of Songs. The young women were invited to enter through the convent door with the antiphon Veni sponsa Christi, and, in the Benedictine ritual, and perhaps in others as well, with Prudentes virgines (‘Prudentes virgines, aptate vestras lampades, ecce sponsus venit’).37 Several convent plays in the Tuscan corpus indicate clearly on the manuscript that they were to be performed at the clothing ceremony. Three, belonging to the collection of the National Library in Florence,38 probably dating from the early sixteenth century, mention the occasion specifically. The Rappresentazione di nostra donna come dua fanciulle furono infamate (Play of Our Lady about how two young women were defamed), a one-act play, ends with stage directions indicating that an investiture followed: ‘El vescovo si para per cantare la messa et dipoi veste le fanciulle’39 (The bishop comes to sing the mass and afterward he clothes the young women). Two other plays in the same manuscript miscellany, which seem to have been composed by Cherubina Ricciardi, a nun at the convent of Santa Lucia in Pistoia, also indicate that they were to be performed on the day of the clothing ceremony. They are the Rappresentazione di Ester and a play for which we have no title and only the list of interlocutors: an archangel and abstractions of a sort common to convent theatre and not unlike those we have noted in the plays on the wise and foolish virgins: Prudenza, Osservanza, and Pace, who are described as richly dressed and wearing crowns – the bridal crowns (corone) characteristic of wedding ceremonies, sacred and profane. The manuscript indicates that the Ester play was to be performed during the day and the other to follow in the evening.40 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 96. 37 Ibid., ch. 3: ‘Veni, veni soror nostra: Clothing, Profession, and Consecration Ceremonies in Sienese Convents’, pp. 50–74, especially pp. 52, 56, 58, on the antiphon Veni sponsa Christi in the rituals for clothing, profession and consecration of virgins in two Sienese convents, San Sebastiano in Vallepiatta (Gesuate nuns) and at Ognissanti (Olivetan nuns). For the use of the two antiphons in the Benedictine rituals, see Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 132–7, and Monson, Disembodied Voices, pp. 195–6. 38 Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, ms. Magl. VII 732. 39 Ibid., fol. 41v. 40 Ibid., fols 68r–77v and 77v–82r. 35 36

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If, as it seems, Flori’s play was performed for a rite of admission, the door from which celestial music emanates and where the prudent virgins are received by the Bridegroom, represents simultaneously the door of the Ognissanti convent, the entrance to an earthly paradise (as convents were often called), and it prefigures the Heavenly Gate and eternal reward. Linda Seidel, in her study of the Romanesque façades of Aquitaine, provides an architectural analogy. She observes that the representation of wise and foolish virgins on the archivolt of church portals in Aquitaine depicts the Gate of Paradise at the apex or keystone of the archivolt, the point where the wise virgins meet the Bridegroom, clearly making the connection between the celestial portal and the material one, providing, as she puts it, ‘a visible analogue to the anagogical thinking that permeates religious literature of the time’.41 Maria Costanza Ubaldini’s play, the Rappresentazione della evangelica parabola, like Flori’s, but even more clearly, is a dramatisation of the spiritual marriage of nuns, almost certainly an allusion to the clothing ceremony and the occasion for which the play must have been performed. In Ubaldini’s play a character called Virginità recites the prologue. She promises to marry the convent women to the King of Paradise, if they learn, as they should from the play, that virginity is essential but not sufficient to earn them that reward. It must be perfected through a life of virtue. The play, Virginità says, is a representation of the ‘holy, mystical banquet of the Lord’ (‘sacra del Signore mistica cena’) to be presented on a ‘bright stage’ (‘luminosa scena’).42 The stage must be ‘bright’ because the lamps of the Prudent Virgins illuminate it in the final act and other such lamps probably served as lighting throughout the play. On stage from the beginning is a choir of virgins; mute during most of the action, they take part in the joyful singing at the conclusion. Since these virgins clearly represent convent women, they very likely carried lighted lamps, which had both a practical use and symbolic meaning.43 The first two acts compare the conduct of the Prudent Virgins with that of the Foolish Virgins, as they are tempted by Superbia (Pride) and Stoltizia (‘Pazzia overo Stoltizia’; ‘craziness or foolishness’, in the list of interlocutors). Act three, the final act of Ubaldini’s play, in which the wise are rewarded and the foolish punished, may have re-enacted a convent ritual and certainly alludes to one. The manuscript calls for a scene change (‘si muta scena’), and the text makes clear that the Prudent Virgins now stand before the door to the house of the Lord, the ‘royal abode’ (‘albergo real’), which leads into the ‘room of holy nuptials’ (‘talamo sacrato’). This door surely, like the portals at Aquitaine, represents both the convent door and the door to Heaven, those liminal spaces beyond which the Bridegroom meets his bride. The stage is dark

41 Linda Seidel, Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine (Chicago, 1981), pp. 51, 106. 42 Ubaldini, La rappresentazione dell’evangelica parabola, fols 203r and v. 43 According to Kendrick, Celestial Sirens, pp. 132–7, at the Benedictine clothing ceremony the novice joins the nuns in singing the antiphon ‘Prudentes virgines’, and all leave the choir carrying lighted candles.

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except for the bright lamps of the Prudent Virgins, who move toward the door and kneel. The choir of angels announces the arrival of the Sposo (Bridegroom). He and the Sposa (bride) appear, and stage directions indicate that she wear her hair loose (‘la sposa sia con i capelli sparsi’).44 The loose hair here is a sign of beauty, probably meant to underscore the value of the offering the young bride makes of herself to the Bridegroom, and it may be that the actress who played the part of the bride was indeed a young convent woman who was about to be clothed (vestita) and whose hair would soon be cropped. The Prudent Virgins come forward to kiss the garments of bride and Bridegroom, and there follows a festive wedding ceremony and exchange of vows: Sposo Ecco che io vi ricevo Vostro Padre, Signor, fratello e sposo Nell’eterno riposo. Sposa Ed io vi accetto Quasi del grembo mio novella prole.45 (Sposo I here receive you As your Father, Lord, brother and spouse In eternal peace. Sposa And I accept You Like a new child in my womb.) He receives her; she accepts Him. The Bridegroom is seen as father, lord, brother and spouse of the bride, and she sees herself as His spouse and mother – common images of the relationship of Christ to religious women, often evoked in paradoxical juxtaposition as they are here. We find them, for example, in the writing of the thirteenth-century nun and mystic Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1301/2), a Benedictine (the parent order of the Camaldolese). In her spiritual Exercitia, Saint Gertrude refers to Christ as king, emperor, prince, ruler, protector, teacher, counsellor, guardian, friend, ardent lover, sweetest spouse, suitor, lovable brother, companion, administrator, etc.46 In her Legatus divinae pietatis Gertrude sees herself both as her Saviour’s bride and His mother.47 Such complex spiritual relationships, common in the writing of mystics, are found as well in the litanies of the Church in which the supplicant calls upon God and the Blessed Virgin in their many attributes. In this marriage ceremony the indescribable bond between a nun and her heavenly Bridegroom is portrayed as love in its most complete form, subsuming and surpassing all ordinary human bonds. Ubaldini, La rappresentazione dell’evangelica parabola, fol. 269v. Ibid., fol. 271r. 46 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1984; rpt. of 1982), pp. 186–91. 47 On Gertrude’s Legatus divinae pietatis, see the entry for the saint in Il grande libro dei santi. Dizionario enciclopedico (Cinisello Balsamo [Milan], 1998), ii, pp. 791–2. 44 45

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The Sposa tells the Prudent Virgins, the brides-to-be (also called ‘spose’, at this point), that they too are invited to the ‘room of the holy nuptials beyond the doors’ (‘talamo celeste entro le porte’).48 The message for the convent women in the audience, they too ‘brides’ and ‘brides-to-be’ of Christ, is that they are called to the ‘wedding banquet’, but like the Prudent Virgins they must prove themselves worthy. There is music throughout the play. A choir of angels sings in each act, but in act three the nuptial festivities are enhanced by more frequent musical accompaniment: the choir of angels is joined by the choir of virgins and by voices, which twice are solo voices, coming from off stage. The elaborate character of the production attests to the importance of the occasion for which the play was staged. These plays could have been performed for any number of convent festivities, especially the anonymous early play and Montalvo’s, which do not imitate convent ritual so closely as do Flori’s and Ubaldini’s plays. However, the elaborate music of the latter two plays and the extended nuptial metaphors in Ubaldini’s staging of the parable argue for their association with the investiture of young women, one of the most festive convent occasions of the year and one known to have included theatrical events, as the documents cited earlier attest. Relatives of the girls to be clothed attended the events, and they donated generously to pay for gifts, music, food, and wine. Ecclesiastical authorities, when they approved convent theatrical performances, generally did so only for Carnival celebrations. However, these plays corroborate evidence found in Church records – especially in pastoral visits and the decisions handed down by the Roman Congregation of Bishops and Regulars – indicating that theatre was widely practised and very seriously cultivated by the nuns, and that theatrical productions were, at least in some houses, not a Carnival exception but an integral part of convent life, features of some of the most important moments of the convent calendar. With this in mind, I return briefly in closing to the Tintoretto painting of a scene from the parable mentioned at the beginning of these remarks. Like most of the work of this painter, the scene depicted presents a drama in a complex architectural frame (Fig. 6.1). The excluded foolish virgins seem to be in movement, all in different positions, as they plead their case before a closed door, holding a banner that asks that the door be opened to them. Inside, in the company of other revellers and of Christ, and leaning over the door from a balustrade on a floor above, are the prudent virgins, responding to their unfortunate sisters below with a banner that explains that the Bridegroom does not recognise them. The foolish occupy the space in the lower right of the painting, framed from behind by a series of porticoes.49 The second-floor Ubaldini, La rappresentazione dell’evangelica parabola, fol. 271r. Giuseppe Maria Pilo, in his article ‘Il Tintoretto e alcune fonti visive della sua giovinezza: Jacopo Sansovino (e altri)’, Arte documento 8 (1994), 115–24, on pp. 120–21, argues that the architecture of the porticoes on the right side of the painting is based on a work by Jacopo Barozzi, il Vignola, his Mosé salvato dalle acque, which today is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 48 49

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balcony that holds the prudent virgins is on the left and resembles a choir loft. The critical byword for Jacopo Tintoretto’s entire corpus is ‘theatrical’, and it certainly seems appropriate for his representation of the parable. It is tempting to think that this painting (or perhaps one of the workshop copies) was made for Tintoretto’s daughters, who were Benedictine nuns in the convent of Sant’Anna di Castello, a convent, like many in Venice, known to have had a theatrical tradition.50 Given the importance of the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in convent life and ritual, it seems likely that the paintings once decorated convent walls. They are, in any event, a pictorial representation of the final, transforming moment in the dramatisations of the parable we have considered in this paper, and the architecture – a door and, above it, a balcony reminiscent of a church choir (common to all three versions of the painting) – suggests one of the convent spaces which might have been used for performance.51

50 Emilio Zanette, in Suor Arcangela Tarabotti, monaca del Seicento veneziano (Venice, 1960), pp. 81–2, discusses theatre and other revelry at the convent of Sant’Anna where the nun and writer Arcangela Tarabotti lived a century after the daughters of Tintoretto. Zanette reviews the pronouncements of the Venetian patriarchs on convent theatre from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth century and notes that they objected to convent plays on the subject of virgin martyrs, which they often found scandalous, but they approved for convent production plays on biblical subjects. The convent of Sant’Anna in mid-nineteenth century was converted by the Austrians to a naval hospital and its church became a gymnasium. Little is known of the church as it was in Tintoretto’s time, but in the following century its ceiling contained representations, attributed to Francesco Ruschi, of all of the parables of the Gospel of Matthew (Federico Paleologo Oriundi, La Chiesa e il convento di Sant’Anna in Venezia [Venice, 1914], p. 9). Tintoretto made at least one other painting of a subject common in religious theatre and known in convent theatre in Italy and in Belgium: the legend of the Tiburtine Sibyl who shows Emperor Octavian a vision of the Nativity (Pallucchini, La giovinezza di Tintoretto, pp. 101–2). 51 In the spring of 1650 the nuns of the Franciscan convent of Santa Chiara in Naples performed a play in their choir (not, however, a balcony in this case), which was viewed by their friars through the choir grate in the outer church (Archivio Segreto del Vaticano, Congregazione Vescovi e Regolari, Registra monalium. 15 luglio 1650, fol. 352r).

Part III Spiritual Directorship

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Chapter seven

Soul Mates: Spiritual Friendship and Life-Writing in Early Modern Spain (and Beyond) Jodi Bilinkoff

Early modern Catholics avidly read the life stories of exemplary female penitents composed by confessors, texts that were produced in great number, translated, and disseminated throughout Europe and its colonies. What messages did readers derive from this literature? Naturally, authors continued to construct their subjects as models of virtuous behaviour, as hagiographers had done for hundreds of years. But perhaps more compelling to many readers were the vivid depictions of friendships shared by priests and penitents. Since the early centuries of the faith Christians had acknowledged that the contemplative, celibate life held the possibility – perhaps the only culturallysanctioned possibility – for a man and a woman to have a deep, mutually satisfying relationship outside of marriage. Indeed, given how marriages were, for the most part, arranged for economic and procreative purposes, a celibate but otherwise intimate friendship may have struck many as a more attractive option. With the advent of printing this tradition became more widely known to a larger audience than ever before. As people learned of cases of spiritual friendship in earlier generations, did they aspire to participating in such relationships themselves? The potential to achieve a meaningful connection with a member of the opposite sex may well have served as a powerful incentive for people to remain within the Catholic fold, and even to consider a religious vocation. In this essay I explore the themes of spiritual and personal bonding that feature so prominently in the life-narratives of early modern women and men.  This is an abridged version of chapter 4 of my book Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, 2005).  Two classic works that treat these issues for the early Christian period are Rosemary R. Ruether, ‘Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether (ed.), Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York, 1974), pp. 150–83, and Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends: Essays and Translations (New York, 1979), esp. Part Two. Useful overviews that survey the whole Christian tradition may be found in Wendy M. Wright, Bond of Perfection: Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales (New York, 1985), pp. 3–31, 104–17, and Patricia Ranft, A Woman’s Way: The Forgotten History of Women Spiritual Directors (Basingstoke, 2000). There are numerous studies of friendship in the works and life experiences of particular Christian writers.

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First, a word about geographical focus. Scholars often organise topics along national and/or linguistic lines. This approach has resulted in a number of extremely important studies, to which I acknowledge my debt. It can, however, perhaps inadvertently lead to the conclusion that a whole range of issues relating to religious authority, gender relations, constructions of identity, and the uses of exemplarity were somehow unique or exclusive to a particular group or region. For this reason I attempt a comparative approach, to some extent deliberately blurring geographical and linguistic boundaries, in order to examine this body of literature within a broad early modern Catholic culture. I recognise, of course, that there are always specific local circumstances involved in the production and reception of texts; indeed I try to closely attend to them. But my reading of biographical narratives from different parts of Europe and its colonies has convinced me of the need to consider the similarities as well as the differences, the over-arching themes as well as the particularities. My encounters with these texts have compelled me to think about the big story of which all these individual life stories constitute parts. Thus I offer some observations based on narratives mainly from Spain and its colonies, but also from Italy, Portugal, France and New France in the period roughly between 1450 and 1750. One of the most common – and most poignant – themes to emerge from the memoirs of religious women was their desire for a compatible spiritual director. By this they did not mean simply a priest to hear their confessions. They longed for a kindred spirit, someone who could offer them advice, defend them against the accusations of others, and with whom they could exchange confidences: a true friend. This yearning for a compassionate and companionable spiritual guide fairly permeates the autobiographies written by pious women and the biographical accounts composed by male clerics. The intense desire for a ‘good’ confessor is understandable given that so many women described having had a ‘bad’ confessor or confessors, sometimes for years at a time. Teresa of Avila painfully recalled how unsympathetic confessors had confused and scolded her, and tried to persuade her that her visions and voices were demonic rather than divine in origin. These confessors, she lamented, ‘have done my soul great harm’. Teresa may be the most famous example of a woman in this predicament, but she is hardly the only one. Indeed, the neglect or mistreatment of penitents by confessors represents something of a commonplace, a theme that female  The Book of Her Life 5:3, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez (Washington, DC, 1976) I:46. See also 23:13–18, 24:1–5, 25:14–18, 26:3–4 and 30:13 (I use throughout the standard form of citing Teresa’s works, listing chapters and paragraphs). For Spanish texts I have consulted Santa Teresa de Jesús, Obras completas, Efrén de la Madre de Dios and Otger Steggink (eds) (Madrid, 1977). Teresa tried to institutionalise the right of nuns in the Discalced Carmelite order she founded to choose and change their confessors, but this prerogative would come under attack after her death. See Alison Weber, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000), 123–46.

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readers of hagiographies would have encountered in the accounts of earlier women with aspirations to the devout life. There is no reason to call into question the pain that each one actually suffered, however. The ‘bad’ confessor may have become such a common topos precisely because it was such a recognisable feature of women’s religious experience. At one point, admitted the Cistercian María Vela, ‘I was so tired of seeking a confessor that I simply gave up’. María’s words illustrate the extent of her despair, but also indicate that beyond simply hoping for an understanding confessor she was actively seeking one out. Evidence suggests that many women in early modern Catholic Europe and its colonies set out to find sympathetic spiritual directors and, hopefully, soul mates. Accounts of the lives of beatas, tertiaries and pious laywomen provide the most vivid instances of this sort of searching. Unlike professed nuns, these women without institutional support and formal status as religious were especially vulnerable to accusations of fraud, heresy, demonic possession and the like, and thus in particular need of the authorisation a male clergyman could provide. But also unlike professed nuns, laywomen and those who had made non-binding vows had the mobility to move about, make inquiries about specific priests, and plead their cases to initially sceptical clerics. Mari Díaz left her village and moved to the nearby Castilian city of Avila in the 1530s. The beata quickly gained the respect of neighbours for her piety, but was compelled to search the city for a spiritual director. Later, she would wryly recount how she had ‘exhausted several religious houses with my insistent and tiresome pleas to confess me’. Some two hundred years later, María Antonia Pereira would face similar problems. When the Galician began to experience extraordinary graces in prayer during the 1720s her confessor refused to let her even speak of such matters. In 1728 María Antonia did find a compatible confessor, José Ventura de Castro, fresh out of seminary. Her happiness was short-lived, however, as the Bishop of Tui, hearing reports of close contacts between an inexperienced cleric and a young married woman, forbade Castro from treating his penitent any longer. Depressed, but not deterred, she travelled

 The Third Mystic of Avila: The Self-Revelation of María Vela, A Sixteenth Century Spanish Nun, trans. Frances Parkinson Keyes (New York, 1960), p. 86. This is a somewhat loose translation of the Spanish, but accurately conveys the sense of María’s narrative up to this point. The original text reads: ‘y yo quedé tan cansada de Padres que no quise hablar en más’. Doña María Vela y Cueto, Autobiografía y Libro de las Mercedes, Olegario González Hernández (ed.) (Barcelona, 1961), p. 352. For examples of Spanish American nuns and their difficulties with confessors, see Kristine Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (Gainesville, 1999), pp. 28–32.  ‘Después que vine a la ciudad de Avila me confesé sana cuantas veces podía, y tenía cansados algunos conventos con mis importunos y prolijos ruegos que me confesasen.’ ‘Información de la vida, muerte, y milagros de la Venerable María Díaz….’ Avila, Archivo Diocesano, códice 3.345. See also Gerardo de S. Juan de la Cruz, ‘María Díaz, llamada “La esposa del Santísimo Sacramento”’, El Monte Carmelo 17 (1915), 166–70. Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca, 1989), pp. 96–106.

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to Tui to appeal to the bishop in person. Examples of women who deliberately sought out spiritual directors, can be multiplied. Less prominent in the hagiographical literature, but equally suggestive, is the evidence that some priests were searching, too, hoping to find spiritually gifted women to take on as directees. Or, they were at least singularly receptive to the female penitents with whom they came into contact, and open to the possibility of a closer relationship than just what their priestly office required. This observation points to a fascinating and not always sufficiently appreciated cultural construct. Even extremely devout male religious seem to have accepted the notion that God would not communicate directly with a man. Being a conduit of divine messages and recipient of divine graces was the prerogative of women, and the best a man could hope for was a vicarious experience through close contact with a charismatic woman. Paul Ragueneau succinctly conveyed this gendered view of spirituality, which assigned certain characteristics to each sex. Women, he acknowledged, had vivid imaginations and were especially vulnerable to demonic deception. But this priest, who had directed the visionary Catherine de Saint Augustin in New France, also had harsh words for men, whose overly-logical minds and pride prevented them from believing any reports of the supernatural. ‘God bestows his grace on whomever he wishes and whenever he wishes’, Ragueneau insisted, ‘and if at times he rewards more women than men it is often [due] to a lack of humility in us… .’ In fact, as John Coakley has discussed for an earlier period, the male confidants of holy women frequently expressed both awe and envy of women, who received supernatural gifts in a way that did not seem possible for them. Given this expectation, then, it is not surprising to find priests longing and  Una Carmelita Descalza del Convento de Santiago, Una mística gallega en el siglo XVIII: La Venerable Madre María Antonia de Jesús (La Coruña, 1991), pp. 57–72.  Other cases include María Quintana (1648–1734), María-Helena Sánchez Ortega, Confesión y trayectoria femenina: Vida de la Venerable Quintana (Madrid, 1996), pp. 240–41, 248–50; Isabel de Jesús (1586–1648), Vida de la Venerable Madre Isabel de Iesus, Recoleta Agustina… (Madrid, 1675), pp. 53, 58, 157–74; Barbe Acarie (1566–1618), while still a devout married woman, both toured various religious houses in Paris and invited clerics to her home. André Duval, La vie admirable de la Bienheureuse Soeur Marie de l’Incarnation… (Paris, 1893; orig. 1621), pp. 102 ff; Catalina de Jesús y San Francisco (1639–1677), Juan Bernique, Idea de perfección y virtudes. Vida de… Catalina de Jesús y San Francisco… (Alcalá de Henares, 1693), pp. 55–62. This chapter is entitled ‘Busca confessor a quien entregar la nave de su conciencia para la dirección y govierno de su espiritu’.  ‘Dieu fait des graces à qui il veut, & quand il veut, & si quelquefois il se fait voir aux femmes plûtôt qu’aux hommes, c’est souvent un manquement d’humilité en nous…’, Paul Ragueneau, La vie de la Mere Catherine de Saint Augustin… (Paris, 1671), pp. 10–15; quote p. 11. Similar points were made by supporters of María de Santo Domingo (d. ca.1524). See Jodi Bilinkoff, ‘Establishing Authority: A Peasant Visionary and Her Audience in Early SixteenthCentury Spain’, Studia Mystica 18 (1997), 49–52.  Coakley developes this theme in several essays, for example ‘Friars, Sanctity, and Gender: Mendicant Encounters with Saints, 1250–1325’, in Claire A. Lees (ed.), Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 91–110, and in his book Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York, 2006).

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looking for special women to satisfy their various spiritual needs just as women longed and looked for ‘good’ confessors. Many developed sensitive antennae, in any case. Luisa Ciammitti has analysed a fascinating case from Bologna. One morning in 1696 Angela Mellini entered the parish church of Santo Spirito and began to describe her extraordinary visions to the attending priest. Giovanni Battista Ruggieri immediately invited her to become his penitent, a move that angered Mellini’s current confessor, who had (predictably) disapproved of her method of prayer and treated her shabbily. Mellini and Ruggieri went on to develop a close and reciprocal relationship, as Ruggieri undoubtedly hoped from the start.10 After an emotional initial confession the Portuguese Franciscan Antónia Margarida de Castelo Branco begged Filipe de Santiago to become ‘her soul’s guide’. The friar admitted that ‘he had hoped [she] would ask him that’.11 Clerics who were young, newly arrived, or neophytes within a certain religious order were often especially interested in cultivating relationships with older, more established women. For example, Juan de Ribera became involved with Margarita Agullona several years after assuming the episcopal seat of Valencia in 1569. Ribera would eventually become a beloved figure in Valencia, and even achieve the status of canonised saint, but his first years as archbishop were rocky ones for the Seville native. Benjamin Ehlers has suggested that Ribera was attracted to the visionary Agullona for both ‘her sanctity and her popularity’. Their long association helped Ribera to integrate himself into the religious life of his adopted city, and he ‘drew from [Agullona’s] popularity both to exhort the Valencian people and to learn about their spiritual needs’.12 A watchful readiness to direct spiritually advanced women could yield considerable benefits, personal and professional. Given the years of hope, desire – and effort – that so many women and priests put into having a meaningful relationship with a like-minded individual, we should not be surprised at the outpouring of emotion when they finally 10 Luisa Ciammitti, ‘One Saint Less: The Story of Angela Mellini, a Bolognese Seamstress (1667–17[?])’, in Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (eds), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (Baltimore, 1990; orig. essay 1979), pp. 141–76. The Poor Clare Battista da Varano reported that Fra Pietro da Mogliano was initially ‘inspired’ to hear her confession; they subsequently maintained a close relationship. Battista da Varano, My Spiritual Life, trans. Joseph Berrigan (Toronto, 1986; orig. 1491), pp. 46–8. 11 ‘Dia da Conceição foi o primeiro em que me confessou e logo senti desusados efeitos, assim na comoção interior e abalo com as suas palavras, como na confiança com que lhe descobri minhas misérias, que conforme o meu génio foi coisa bem sobrenatural … quisesse ele pelo amor de Deus ser guia de minha alma, a que ele respondeu que o mesmo desejava de me pedir.’ Antónia Margarida de Castelo Branco, Autobiografía, 1652–1717, João Palma-Ferreira (ed.) (Lisbon, 1983), p. 184. This passage comes from a chapter entitled ‘Deu-me Deus Padre espiritual e do que por ordem sua obrei’. 12 Benjamin A. Ehlers, ‘Christians and Muslims in Valencia: The Archbishop Juan de Ribera (1532–1611) and the Formation of a “Communitas Christiana”’ (Unpubl. PhD Diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1999), pp. 97–103. Benjamin A. Ehlers, ‘Catholic Reform as Process: The Archbishop Juan de Ribera (1532–1611) and the Colegio de Corpus Christi, Valencia’, Archive for Reformation History 95 (2004), 186–209. See also Francisco Pons Fuster, Místicos, beatas y alumbrados: Ribera y la espiritualidad valenciana del s. XVII (Valencia, 1991), pp. 143–75.

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encountered such a person. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid being struck by the powerful and eroticised language used by these celibate Catholics, a language strongly reminiscent of the literature of romance. Confessors and penitents frequently portrayed their relationships as divinely ordained and suggested that God had especially chosen them to direct or be directed by this particular person. They used a discourse of destiny to describe instantaneous recognitions, profound personal transformations, and intense feelings of relief, vindication, and gratitude, both to their newly-found soul mate, and to God for giving one to the other. As in the conceit of ‘love at first sight’, many spiritual friends claimed to have known from their first meeting that their years of waiting were over. María Vela went through a whole string of confessors who either died, left town or treated her with disdain. Finally, around 1603, she met Miguel González Vaquero. In her autobiography María addressed herself to Vaquero, recalling how ‘the first day I spoke with [you] your spirit suited me so well and I was left with such satisfaction and delight of the heart that I hardly knew myself for having found that which I had so long desired, which was to meet a person who had experience of this sort of spiritual direction and of supernatural prayer…’.13 With this María Vela and Vaquero began a relationship that would last some fifteen years until the nun’s death in 1617. Soon after, Vaquero published her hagiography. He too remembered that fateful day: ‘It was the first time that I spoke with our saint, and although I had directed many very advanced souls I found something here that caused me notable confusion…’. Vaquero expressed his firm conviction that by taking on María as his spiritual daughter ‘many advantages were to come to my soul…’.14 Some women reported having received a premonition of some sort before actually meeting their divinely sent director. Margaret Mary Alacoque, forced to endure the scepticism of confessors and the taunts of fellow nuns, prayed to God and heard this reply: ‘He promised… He would send me His faithful servant and perfect friend’. Soon after, Claude de la Colombière came to preach at her convent at Paray-le Monial. As the Jesuit began to address the assembled community, Margaret Mary recalled, ‘I interiorly heard these words: “This is he who I send thee”’.15 13 ‘Pues digo que el primer día que hablé a V.M. me cuadró tanto su espíritu y quedé con una satisfacción y dilitación de corazón, que no me conocía, por haber hallado lo que yo tanto deseaba, que era topar con alguna persona que tuviese experiencia de este trato interior y oración sobrenatural…’, Vela, Autobiografía, p. 355. This is my translation; the one offered by Keyes in Third Mystic, p. 91 while more tepid, still carries an erotic charge. 14 ‘…fue la primera vez que hablé con nuestra Santa y aunque avia tratado almas muy aventajadas hallé aquí tanto que me causó notable confusión…el modo de hablar, tan humilde y sinzero, tan lleno de amor de Dios y tan assentada virtud… pareciendome que se le avian de seguir a mi alma muchas ganancias…’ Miguel González Vaquero, La muger fuerte, por otro título, La vida de Doña María Vela… (Madrid, 1674; 1st edn 1618), 141r–v. 15 The Letters of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, trans. Clarence A. Herbst (Rockford, IL, 1997), p. 212; The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, trans. the Sisters of the Visitation, Partridge Green (Rockford/Ill., 1986), p. 93; ‘Et lorsque ce saint homme vint ici, comme il parlait a la Communauté, j’entendis intérieurement ces paroles: “Voilà celui que je t’envoie”’.

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Many religious women highlighted that moment of finding the ‘right’ confessor in their written memoirs. Their sense of relief and gratitude is palpable. Confessors frequently stressed these moments as well. Their narratives describe an experience of personal transformation, but also underscore the authors’ mastery of the all-important skill of discernment. Unlike those other, ‘bad’, confessors, these priests possessed the intelligence and sensitivity necessary to recognise a genuine ‘Servant of God’. Thus both confessors and penitents identified the discovery of a soul mate as turning points in their lives and Lives. These accounts of providential meetings serve as preludes to narratives of relationships that lasted for years, even decades, and describe the crafting of remarkable personal bonds. ‘[W]henever God worked anything within her, which [affected] her much in soul or body, she would confer about it all with her Confessor’, recalled the biographer of Catherine of Genoa. Cattaneo Marabotto, ‘with the grace and light of God, understood well-nigh all, and would give [Catherine] answers which seemed to show that he himself felt the very thing that she was feeling herself’. The uncanny ability to understand each other ‘by just looking each other in the face without speaking’, signalled divine approbation of these two exemplary individuals, and of their close friendship.16 The bonds of empathy forged between priests and penitents found physical expression too, manifestations in body as well as soul. Caring could turn to curing when penitents suffered from physical problems. María Quintana, a beata from Segovia, spent years inflicting upon herself extreme mortifications in order to repent for an earlier life of sin. When in 1731 her health broke down completely, her confessor, Francisco Benito Colodro, actually took her into his home and nursed her. This move aroused so much gossip that María considered leaving the house. But God comforted her in the midst of their troubles, assuring her that ‘“The love that you have for your Confessor is not evil, nor does it displease me, rather it gives me much pleasure because it is the same as loving Me…”’.17 Vie de Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque écrite par elle-même (Paris, 1934; orig. completed 1685), p. 107; Georges Guitton, Perfect Friend: The Life of Blessed Claude La Colombière, S. J. (1641–1682), trans. William J. Young (St. Louis, 1956), pp. 133–44. María Vela first met, then received divine endorsement of her new confessor, Miguel González Vaquero. When she asked in prayer whether she should offer the priest her special obedience, she heard God reply with a scriptural quotation: ‘This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him’ (Matthew 17:5), words she understood to refer to Vaquero. Doña María Vela y Cueto, Autobiografía, p. 355; Third Mystic, p. 92. 16 Quoted in Friedrich von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends (2 vols, London, 1923; 1st edn 1908), i, pp. 157–8. 17 ‘El amor que tienes a tu Confesor, no es malo, ni en el me desagradas; antes me das mucho gusto, porque es lo mismo que quererme a Mi: y esse amor te lo doy.’ Sánchez Ortega, Confesión, pp. 282–3. For other cases of confessors nursing their penitents, see Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (New York, 2004) ch. 1; Jodi Bilinkoff, ‘Francisco Losa and Gregorio López: Spiritual Friendship and Identity Formation on the New Spain Frontier’, in Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (eds), Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York, 2003), pp. 115–28.

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For some religious women, it was as if the vow of obedience they made to their confessors conferred upon these priests an almost thaumaturgic power. The men to whom they submitted their wills could also control their bodies. María Vela, filled with the desire for frequent communion, but also extreme guilt, suffered fits and fainting spells whenever she attempted to receive the Eucharist. Only after María met and vowed special obedience to Miguel González Vaquero did the situation change. The nun later reminisced with her spiritual director, ‘For a whole year now, it has always been necessary for you to impose obedience upon me in order to enable me to confess…’. So tight were the bonds of bodily dependency that she observed, ‘when you were not at hand I have seldom been able to receive [communion]’.18 For their part, priests came to entrust the women they directed with aspects of their physical health as well as their spiritual edification. In 1725, while serving as prebendary of the Cathedral of Santa Fe in New Granada (Colombia), Juan de Olmos received news of his promotion to the rank of canon. While this was a much more prestigious position, the priest had many qualms about accepting, because, he explained, ‘my health had deteriorated, I was about sixty-two years old, and I feared a serious decline in my health’. Olmos’s response was to talk this over with his penitent, Jerónima Nava y Saavedra, and entreat the Poor Clare to pray for him and determine God’s will.19 Certain themes thus emerge in the accounts of early modern religious women and their male confidants as they described intense, often long-lasting relationships. They remembered exchanging confidences, even secrets, soliciting the other’s advice before making a decision, and learning how to tell, just with a glance, what the other person was thinking. They expressed pleasure when their chosen partner was present, and distress at separation. They cared for one another in sickness and in health, sometimes experiencing sympathetically the other’s bodily afflictions. In short, they interacted like many married couples. The only significant difference was the lack of sexual congress. But this does not mean that their partnerships were devoid of desire, passion, love. Indeed, a vivid imagery of marital or erotic union animates many of the writings and reminiscences of these men and women. After knowing Jeanne de Chantal and working closely with her for years, François de Sales found it difficult to disguise his feelings. ‘O, God, my dearest Daughter’, the French bishop exclaimed in a letter of 1610, ‘how tenderly and ardently I feel the 18 Third Mystic, pp. 103–4. Severe somatic responses of this type, usually related to the reception of the Eucharist, were fairly common among religious women. See also Sherry M. Velasco, Demons, Nausea, and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús, 1611–1682 (Albuquerque, 1996). For cases from an earlier period, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women,’ representations 11 (1985), 1–25. 19 ‘siendo mi salud desmedrada, mis años sobre sessenta y dos, entonses temí maior desasón de salud. Todo esto comuniqué a Gerónima como a mi hija… díjele a Gerónima pidiese a Dios…’; Olmos recalled this episode in a preface to the nun’s memoir. Jerónima Nava y Saavedra, Autobiografía de una monja venerable, Angela Inés Robledo (ed.) (Cali, 1994; orig. 1727), pp. 50–51.

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sacred bond and the good of our holy unity!’ In another letter he insisted that ‘…it will be impossible for anything to ever separate me from your soul. The bond is too strong. Death itself would not have the power to dissolve it because it is of a quality that lasts forever’.20 The classic theme of mystical marriage between a woman and Jesus Christ was well known by the fifteenth century, and women continued to describe ecstatic, erotic encounters with a divine spouse throughout the early modern period.21 However, in a fascinating variation, some women perceived Christ arranging and officiating over a union between herself and her confessor. Then again, as many women understood their confessors to take the place of God or Christ on earth, perhaps these two cultural constructs are essentially the same. In 1575 Teresa of Avila resolved to give her total obedience to Jerónimo Gracián, the man, whom she regarded as ‘the one who stood in God’s place’. Soon afterwards she experienced a powerful vision, ‘like a flash of lightning’: It seemed to me that our Lord Jesus Christ was next to me in the form that he usually appears, at His right side stood Master Gratian himself, and I at His left. The Lord took our right hands and joined them and told me he desired that I take this master to represent Him as long as I live, and that we both agree in everything because it was thus fitting.

Teresa concluded her recollection of this experience, so reminiscent of a betrothal or wedding ceremony, with a fervent prayer: ‘Blessed be He, who created a person, who so pleased me that I could dare to do this’.22 One of the most powerful gestures of solidarity between priests and exemplary women was also the final one. Many confessors attended and recorded the death of their penitents. This was a moment fraught with multiple, even conflicting meanings for these devout Catholics.23 As authors of edifying texts, clerics hastened to express joy and the conviction that the Servant of 20 Wright, Bond of Perfection, pp. 34–6, 102, 122–4. After a tentative start to their relationship, Fra Pietro da Mogliano ‘loved me with a holy and spiritual love beyond any he had for any other spiritual daughter he had in this world’, Battista da Varano insisted, adding, ‘I know this for a certainty’; My Spiritual Life, pp. 47–8. 21 Examples include Teresa of Avila, Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, María Vela, and Margaret Mary Alacoque. For medieval women’s experience of mystical marriage with Christ, see for example André Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1997; orig. 1988), pp. 376–85; Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 131, 174–5, 246–51; and several of the essays included in Catherine M. Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999). 22 Spiritual Testimonies, nos 35, 36 in Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 1. Mary Luti, ‘“A Marriage Well Arranged”: Teresa of Avila and Fray Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios’, Studia Mystica 12 (1989), 32–46; quotes 34–5. Another famous case of ‘betrothal’ between a woman and her confessor is that of Margaret Mary Alacoque and Claude de la Colombière. See Alacoque, Autobiography, pp. 95–6; Vie, pp. 110–11; Letters, p. 243. 23 For a good overview of the meanings and hagiographical uses of ‘the good death’, see Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1995), esp. pp. 371–8.

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God was assured a blessed afterlife. As human beings, they mourned the loss of a beloved partner. This potent mix of emotions can be found in the deathbed scene that generally concluded a hagiographical account, or at least its first part. André Duval, for example, vividly recounted the death of Barbe Acarie in 1618. In the biography he published in 1621 the French priest recalled that he was in Paris when his penitent fell ill at her convent in Pontoise. For several days Acarie’s great humility prevented her from notifying her preferred confessor, but finally she asked the other nuns to summon him. Duval hurriedly made the journey, arriving at the convent at half past five in the morning. He was indeed able to spend the last hours with her, annoint her, and prepare her for death. It is important to note that the house’s chaplain had been present this whole time. From a canonical point of view, any priest could have attended the dying woman. Clearly, Acarie desired the presence of this particular priest, whom she had known for years, who had guided her as both a laywoman and a religious, and had aided her in bringing the Discalced Carmelite order to France. When Acarie at last expired, her convent sisters were devastated with sadness, and Duval ‘tried to console them as best [he] could’. But, the priest allowed, ‘I was in as great need of consolation as they were’.24 Confessors represented themselves as solicitously caring for fatally ill penitents up to the end, hearing their last confessions, administering the final sacraments. For their part, holy women had something to offer the priests. Soon before she died in 1607 the Florentine Carmelite Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi made a promise to her confessor, Vincenzo Puccini. The nun vowed that ‘if she went to heaven, she would pray earnestly to God…that after this short life they might meet in that celestial kingdom’. The Jesuit remembered these words. After he completed his account of her ‘happy death’ Puccini switched into the first person voice to address the Servant of God: I will not now express myself to thee in many words to entreat thy prayers to the eternal God for me, who yet find myself in this valley of tears; for I confide in that which thou didst so often promise me with careful charity while I ministered to thee the most holy sacraments in thy last sickness.25

24 ‘Toutes les soeurs en furent grandement attristées….Je tâchai de les consoler du mieux que je pus, bien que pour moi j’eusse autant qu’elles besoin de consolation.’ Duval, Vie, pp. 304–17; quote p. 314. For more on Acarie and Duval and their years of collaboration, see Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford and New York, 2004), ch. 3. 25 Vincenzo Puccini, The Life of the Holy and Venerable Mother Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi [sic] (Cologne?, 1619) (Menston, 1970), pp. 274–88; quotes 278, 288. ‘No userò molte parole, per che me ancora trovandomi in questa valle di lagrime te degni di pregaro l’eterno Dio, confiandomi in quello, che ammistrandomi nella tua malattia i santisimi sacramenti, mi promettisi sovente con isuegliata carità…’ Vita della Veneranda Madre Suor M. Maddalena de’ Pazzi Fiorentina (Florence, 1611; 1st edn 1609), i, p.109. For a similar case, see Serafino Razzi, Vita di Santa Caterina de’ Ricci, Guglielmo M. di Agresti (ed.) (Florence, 1965; orig. 1594), pp. 307–9.

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In numerous deathbed testimonies priests once again underscored the exemplary virtues and privileged status of their female penitents, as well as their own faithful proximity. They reaffirmed key Catholic teachings concerning the immortality of the soul, the cult of the saints, and the efficacy of intercessory prayer. They depicted ‘model priests’ conscientiously completing their pastoral and sacramental duties. And they imbued with a sense of eternity narratives of desire, searching, providence, and fulfilment. Not even the popular romances of the day could rival these riveting accounts of men and women forging bonds that united them in body as well as soul, lasted for years, and persisted beyond the grave.26 I suggest that life-narratives that described the forging of strong bonds of friendship between women and their spiritual directors served a number of doctrinal and rhetorical purposes. Protestants, and many Catholic laypeople, routinely charged that clerics preyed upon women sexually, using confession merely as a tool of seduction. Given this pervasive cultural stereotype, one might think that these descriptions of intense male/female relationships and the use of highly affective language would only fan the flames.27 Nevertheless, the authors of hagiographical texts challenged conventional wisdom by insisting upon the possibility of chaste, but passionate, friendships between priests and their female penitents. Defiantly, they deployed intensely personal experiences as public weapons in support of the Catholic faith and of the Catholic priesthood. In their accounts, the much-maligned sacraments of confession and communion prove highly efficacious and profoundly change the lives of individuals. And God bestows upon a virtuous clergy something longed for by all men and women: the ability to understand, and be understood by, a special friend. Surely the risk of arousing gossip was outweighed by the rewards of spiritual and personal fulfilment, and of the continued recruitment of Catholic religious, male and female, in the generations to come.

26 Some women even described mystical post-mortem encounters with their confessors. See, for example, Ragueneau, Vie, pp. 179–82, 187, 191, for Catherine de Saint Augustin and Jean de Brebeuf; Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 36:20–21, for her vision of Pedro de Alcántara; 38:13, for Pedro Ibáñez; Antonio Panes, Chronica de la Provincia de San Juan Bautista…de Nuestro Seraphica Padre San Francisco (2 vols, Valencia, 1665–66), ii, pp. 770–73 for Francisca Llopis and Jerónimo Simón. 27 These attitudes are surveyed in Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York, 1996); R. N. Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to the Reformation’, in Dawn M. Hadley (ed.), Masculinity in Medieval Europe (London, 1999), pp. 160–77; Colleen Seguin, ‘Ambiguous Liaisons: Women’s Relationships with their Confessors in Early Modern England’, Archive for Reformation History 95 (2004), 156–85.

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Chapter eight

Barbe Acarie and her Spiritual Daughters: Women’s Spiritual Authority in SeventeenthCentury France Barbara B. Diefendorf

Historians of the Catholic Reformation commonly introduce Parisian laywoman Barbe Acarie (1566–1618) as a mystic whose visions of Teresa of Avila prompted the foundation of Teresa’s reformed Carmelite order in France. Ever since the first publication of her Life just three years after her death by her colleague and spiritual director André Duval, Acarie’s biographers have delighted in recounting the ecstasies that ‘consumed her’. The volume of Henri Bremond’s classic Literary History of Religious Thought in France devoted to The Coming of Mysticism, for example, features lengthy descriptions of her incapacitating raptures. There is truth to this image. Barbe Acarie was a mystic, and her claim, after reading Teresa’s life, that the saint instructed her to bring the Carmelite order to France did spur efforts to realise this vision. In depicting Acarie as a swooning visionary, however, historians have obscured the practical administrative talents she displayed in orchestrating the foundation of the French Carmelites and Paris’s new Ursuline order as well. They have overlooked her work raising funds and securing permissions for these foundations, along with the very active role she played on the worksite, supervising the construction of the Carmelites’ Paris convent. Most important, they have ignored the spiritual counsel that she offered aspiring and professed Carmelites, first as a laywoman – and a married woman at that – and then, after her husband’s death, as a Carmelite lay sister in the convents of Amiens and Pontoise. Taking a very different approach, this essay will examine the informal and yet very real spiritual authority exercised by Barbe Acarie.  André Duval, La vie admirable de la bienheureuse sœur Marie de l’Incarnation, religieuse converse de l’ordre de Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel et fondatrice de cet ordre en France, appelée dans le monde Madamoiselle Acarie (Paris, 1621), p. 22, as cited in Henri Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France depuis la fin des guerres de religion jusqu’à nos jours (11 vols, Paris, 1924–33), ii, pp. 203–4 (‘la consumaient et la minaient comme à petit feu’).  For example, Bremond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux, ii, pp. 203–6. The first three volumes of this work have been translated as A Literary History of Religious Thought in France: From the Wars of Religion to Our Own Time, trans. K. L. Montgomery (3 vols, London and New York, 1928–1936).

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Drawing largely on testimony collected shortly after Barbe Acarie’s death in view of beatification proceedings, I will first attempt to reappraise her role as a pious laywoman and leader of France’s Catholic renewal. I will then look more broadly at the influence she exerted both directly, through her real and spiritual daughters, and indirectly, through the biography published by André Duval, on several generations of pious women in France. I will argue that, largely because of Acarie’s example and teachings, the French Carmelites’ male superiors allowed the French order’s prioresses and mistresses of novices to exercise significantly more spiritual authority than was tolerated in the mother order in Spain. This greater acceptance of women’s spiritual initiatives, moreover, extended beyond the Carmelite order in France. The French case may in some respects be unique, and yet it is worth asking whether the current historiographical tendency to emphasise the gender inequities of the early modern period, especially in the context of the hierarchical Church, does not encourage us to continue identifying pious women as swooning mystics while overlooking both their active service as founders and builders of new convents and their spiritual influence as they shaped new generations of nuns. Barbe Acarie and the Catholic Reformation in France Born into a prominent Parisian family with many ties to the city’s civic and magisterial elite, Barbe Aurillot grew to adulthood in the politically-charged climate of the Wars of Religion that reduced France to near anarchy during the last four decades of the sixteenth century. She would have been but a six-year-old child when the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Parisian Protestants by their Catholic co-citizens occurred in 1572, and there is no evidence that she retained any memory of these events. She nevertheless grew up with a profound hatred of the Protestant ‘heretics’ and, along with her husband, Pierre Acarie, was a fierce partisan of the ultra-Catholic Holy League that seized power in Paris after driving King Henri III from his capital in May 1588. Pierre Acarie, whom she had married at the age of sixteen in 1582, even acquired the nickname of ‘the lackey of the League’ because of his devoted service to the League’s leaders, and he was one of only a small number of Parisians punished with exile after Henri IV, inheriting the throne on Henri III’s assassination in 1589, subdued his capital and gained entry in 1594. The tumultuous period of the League left a strong mark on Barbe Acarie’s spirituality. Although always staunchly Catholic, she experienced a religious  Acarie’s daughter Marie de Jésus Acarie testified at her beatification proceedings that ‘she had a great aversion to heretics and a very great zeal for their conversion, and she often spoke about this and one day told me with great fervor that she would like to have had the last heretic in her power, and if he did not want to convert, she would willingly and without offending God have exterminated him’. Archives du Carmel de Pontoise, ms Procès apostolique de Marie de l’Incarnation (hereafter Procès apostolique), fol. 508v; ‘Elle avoit une grande aversion des heretiques et un tres grand zele de leur conversion et en parloit souvant et dit un jour avec une grande ferveur quelle eust voulu avoir le dernier en sa puissance, que s'il ne se fust voulu convertir elle l'eust volontiers sans offenser Dieu exterminé’.

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conversion sometime after her marriage that deepened her piety and internalised it. Her first mystical trance has been dated to 1590, when Paris experienced a devastating siege. Like other League supporters, Barbe Acarie responded to the siege by increasing her religious devotions, frequently attending sermons and taking part in penitential processions. She gave herself over to the apocalyptic mood that settled onto the city as radical preachers called for resistance but also repentance so as to assuage the wrath of God, which they claimed had been provoked by sin, vanity, and toleration of heresy. In addition to her devotional activities, Acarie helped tend wounded soldiers brought in to a local hospital and visited poor families in her neighbourhood with words of comfort and gifts of food. She is reported to have accused her own motherin-law of hoarding food (as all bourgeois families were doing) and to have threatened to give it all away if she did not share more with the poor. Most people breathed a sigh of relief when the hardships provoked by the wars of the League had passed. Barbe Acarie, by contrast, recalled it as ‘a golden age’. ‘She had never been happier’, she claimed, ‘nor enjoyed more contentment, because her charity encountered an infinite number of subjects on which to expend itself in the common misery’. During the four years that her husband was exiled following the League, she continued her charitable activities but also her penitential devotions, fasting often, flagellating herself, and engaging in other bodily mortifications. Because the family had suffered losses and indebted itself supporting the League, she also worked to secure the return of alienated properties and restore family finances to a sound footing. Apparently she was successful in this, even though it meant selling Pierre Acarie’s office as a magistrate in the Chamber of Accounts for a low price. When he returned to Paris in 1598, the household had become an active centre for Catholic action, where the poor could count on help finding work or lodging and devout elites gathered to discuss plans for the reform of monastic life, the return of the Jesuits, who had been expelled in 1595, and the renewal of Catholic spirituality. With other dévots in her circle, Barbe Acarie took an active part in the reform of Montmartre, Montivilliers, Charme, and other convents that had

 François Bruno de Jésus-Marie, La belle Acarie: Bienheureuse Marie de l’Incarnation (Paris, 1942), pp. 47–9.  Duval, La vie admirable de Marie de l’Incarnation, p. 68.  Procès apostolique, testimony of Françoise de Jésus Fleury, fol. 339v; also Agnès de Jésus des Lyons, fol. 889r.  ‘un siècle d’or’; ‘Elle assuroit qu’elle n’avoit jamais trouvé un temps plus heureux et auquel elle eust plus de contentement parce que sa charité rencontroit une infinité de sujets dans les communes miseres sur lesquelles elle s’exerçoit continuellement’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Françoise de Jésus Fleury, fol. 339v; similarly, Valence de Marillac, fol. 696r; Marie de SaintJoseph (Nicole Fournier), fols 123v–124r, Marie de Jésus de Breauté, fol. 619v.  Procès apostolique, testimony of Jeanne L’Espervier, fol. 578v.  On 22 March 1594, Pierre Acarie signed legal documents giving Barbe authority to manage all of the family’s affairs. That same day, Henri IV entered Paris. Cited in Bruno de JésusMarie, La belle Acarie, p. 146.

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fallen away from their rule.10 The difficulties encountered in restoring strict observance of neglected monastic rules may have helped inspire the plan to create new, strictly observant convents such as the Carmelites. A demand for austere religious foundations for women was already apparent in the 1590s, when several Parisian women from elite families (including a princess with royal blood in her veins) went all the way to Toulouse to join the ascetic convent of Feuillantines, a reformed branch of the Cistercians, that had been founded there. Ascetic orders for men, including Capuchins and Feuillants, had been founded in Paris during the last quarter of the sixteenth century, but nothing comparable existed for women. The plan to found an order of Discalced Carmelites of Saint Teresa’s reform grew out of a desire to fill this need. So did a contemporaneous plan to found a convent of Capuchin nuns, or ‘Capucines’. Barbe Acarie and other members of the growing circle of dévots around her were actively involved in both projects and, once these foundations were made, went on to found a house of Ursuline nuns with women who craved religious life but lacked the intensely contemplative vocation of the Carmelites and Capucines. Opening schools for both day pupils and boarders, the Ursulines became teachers instead. Acarie convinced one of her wealthy cousins to serve as the principal patron and donor for the Ursulines and supported her in the decision to make the group an enclosed religious order instead of following the model of the more informal, open congregations of Ursulines that existed in Italy and Provence. Acarie also helped select the initial candidates for the foundation from among the women and girls who had applied to be Carmelites but were judged better suited for an active than a contemplative religious life. Members of Acarie’s circle also engaged in other works of charity. They aided the poor, rescued prostitutes from the street, and helped young girls in precarious family situations to find secure lodging and work. Formal organisations to serve these purposes were for the most part founded only after Acarie’s death, and yet there is an important continuity in the spirit of these efforts and also sometimes their personnel. Charlotte-Marguerite de Gondi, the marquise de Maignelay, for example, frequented Barbe Acarie’s circle from the 1590s, when she began accompanying her on charitable visits. The marquise later went on to become a major patron of the Filles de la Madeleine, a house for repentant prostitutes, and was active in elite confraternity of Ladies of Charity from the organisation’s foundation in 1634, thereby helping to transmit the dedication to Christian service that marked Barbe Acarie’s circle to a new generation of pious women.11

10 On the reform of these convents and other activities of Barbe Acarie’s circle, see Barbara B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004), pp. 76–82 and 96–100. 11 See Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 203–38 on the new institutions formed to channel women’s charitable impulses into good causes in seventeenth-century Paris.

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An Active Mysticism Far from being a passive visionary, Barbe Acarie was actively engaged in a life of Christian service. She practised and also taught that it was possible to be united with God in the highest part of one’s soul at the same time that one was engaged in acts of charity, or even routine tasks of daily life. The incapacitating raptures that Bremond and other historians describe were, it appears, largely confined to the period of the wars of the League, when Barbe Acarie, like other devout Parisians, was caught up in the apocalyptic anguish provoked by these wars. If, during this intensely emotional period, Acarie experienced ecstasies that immobilised her and left her incapable of reading spiritual texts and even sometimes of exercising her ordinary domestic functions, this was a transitory condition that she later overcame.12 According to Jesuit Pierre Coton, she ‘obtained [the power] to contain these supernatural impulses in the recesses of her soul’, so that they ‘no longer absorbed her senses’. He went on to explain that even when she was busy ‘taking care of household affairs, serving the poor, or attending to the salvation of those she visited, or who visited her’, Acarie remained absorbed in God, such that ‘she was in ecstasy without being [in an ecstatic state]’.13 Dom Sans de Sainte-Catherine, the director general of the Feuillants and a long-time friend of Acarie’s, offered similar testimony, explaining that she had learned that ‘even though occupying oneself with God is a . . . sweeter action to the soul than occupying oneself for God, nevertheless, when it is necessary, one must descend from God to worldly things for the service of this very God, which is called leaving God for God’.14 This is the heart of the matter. For Barbe Acarie, and for other dévots in her circle, even the highest state of mystical absorption in God was not an end in itself but rather a means of activating oneself for the service of God. Acarie firmly opposed any devotional practice or prayer that ‘did not result in the 12 Among other evidence for this change is testimony from fellow Carmelites for Acarie’s beatification proceedings that, far from being unable to read because of her mystical trances, she was seldom without a book in her hand. Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie du SaintSacrement (Valence de Marillac), fol. 647r; Marguerite de Saint-Joseph, fols 755v and 786v; and Marie de Saint-Joseph (Fournier), fols 147v–148r. 13 ‘elle obtint que ces mouvements surnaturels s'arrestassent au fond de l’ame et n’absorbassent plus ses sens’; ‘Cette disposition interieure de l’ame avec Dieu faisoit qu’elle estoit en extase sans y estre’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Pierre Coton, 736v; see also the mémoire from Coton in Duval, La vie admirable de Marie de l’Incarnation, pp. 690–91, as cited in JeanMarie Prat, Recherches historiques et critiques sur la Compagnie de Jésus en France au temps du P. Coton, 1564–1626 (5 vols, Lyons, 1876), i, p. 369; ‘cette âme de madame Acarie, lors mesme qu’elle estoit dans le monde, estoit occupée au soin de sa maison, au service des pauvres et au salut de ceux qui la visitoient, ou qu’elle visitoit, sans s'occuper et perdre Dieu de vue pour l’ordinaire’. 14 ‘encores que s’occuper avec Dieu soit une action plus divine et noble et plus douce a l’ame que s’occuper pour Dieu neanmoings quant il est necessaire il faut descendre de Dieu aux choses de ceste vie pour le service du mesme Dieu, ce qui s’appelle laisser Dieu pour Dieu’; Archives nationales de France, Paris (hereafter, AN), M233, n. 3: ‘Points notables de la vie de la bienheureuse sœur Marie de l’Incarnation, Carmelite, laquelle en la vie seculiere se nommoit Mademoiselle Acarye par le General des Feuillants, 12 septembre 1619’.

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practice of [Christian] virtues’.15 In particular, she scornfully rejected the sort of ‘abstract mysticism’, or attempt at direct illumination, popular among some dévots at the time and believed instead in seeking God through mortifications and penitence.16 According to Marie de Tudert, who worked alongside her in the 1590s and later became a Carmelite nun, Acarie ‘strongly condemned’ objectless prayer and attempts at direct spiritual illumination: ‘She called this weakminded and strongly advised always choosing some specific point on which to meditate, either the passion or some other mystery’.17 The point is important, because it is often suggested that only the arrival of the Spanish Carmelites rescued French Catholicism from an abstract mysticism in which they ‘sought God through suspension [of their faculties] rather than through imitation [of Christ]’. This charge was first made by Ana de Jesús de Lobera, the Carmelite prioress brought from Spain to make the French foundation, in one of her early letters back to Spain.18 It is, however, surprising that historians have given the charge such credence, given that Mother Ana had only recently arrived, spoke no French, and, like Saint Teresa, believed France a country thoroughly mired in heresy. She was not in a position to fairly judge the spiritual practices of the dévots who had brought her to France. Everything we know about Barbe Acarie’s spirituality suggests instead that, from at least the time of the League, her piety centred on the life, and especially the passion, of Christ. The Christocentric character of her piety was the fundamental basis of her actions. It produced what might best be termed an ‘active mysticism’. As Anne de Saint-Laurent, a lay sister at the Carmelite convent of Pontoise, testified: ‘She told us that we should be very pleased when the opportunity to do some charitable action presented itself and always ready to set aside our devotions for that. She strongly encouraged us to perform all of our actions in the presence of God and to unite all of our actions to Our Lord Jesus Christ’.19 It is in this spirit that Barbe Acarie tended wounded soldiers in the hospital of Saint-Gervais and poor patients in the Hôtel-Dieu, visited the sick and poor in her neighbourhood, and helped fallen girls to find a new life. It also explains her role in the reform of Montivilliers, Montmartre, and other convents and her part in the founding of the Carmelites and Ursulines. 15 ‘elle ne faisoit grand estat de l’oraison ny de la devotion qui ne se terminoit a la pratique des vertus, et appeloit cela devotion en l’air et en l’imagination’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Pierre Coton, 736v. 16 AN, M233, n. 3, ‘Points notables’. 17 ‘Elle appeloit cela feneantise d’esprit et conseilloit fort de prendre toujours quelque point pour mediter, soit de la passion ou autre mistere’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie de Jésus de Tudert, fol. 568v. 18 ‘s’appliquait à Dieu par suspension plutôt que par imitation’; Jean Orcibal, La rencontre du Carmel thérésien avec les mystiques du Nord (Paris, 1959), pp. 12–17. 19 ‘Elle nous disoit que nous debvions estre bien aises quand il se presentoit quelque action de charité et estre tousjours prestes de quitter toutes nos devotions pour cela. Elle nous incitoit fort a faire toutes nos actions en la presence de Dieu et unir toutes nos actions a celles de Nostre Seigneur Jesus Christ’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Anne de Saint-Laurent de Saint-Leu, fol. 74r.

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Her role in founding the Carmelites, for example, may have begun with a mystical vision, but it took many more active forms thereafter. The project was only realised through the efforts of a number of dévots, but, as Michel de Marillac aptly phrased it, ‘she was the one at the ship’s helm’.20 She took charge of soliciting the patronage of Catherine d’Orléans, princesse de Longueville, who secured the king’s consent to the foundation and contributed its initial endowment, and then raised additional funds as they became necessary to cover the costs of sending to Rome for papal authorisation, bringing nuns who had known Teresa from Spain, remodelling the decrepit priory of NotreDame des Champs into a suitable convent for the new order, and housing and feeding prospective novices until they could move into their new home. During the remodelling process, Acarie went almost daily to the construction site to supervise the work. A number of witnesses to her beatification commented on how well she got along with the construction workers, urging on their labours but also explaining in clear and precise terms just what needed to be done.21 She later took the same pragmatic interest in the buildings and grounds of the Carmelite convents of Amiens and Pontoise. She insisted, for example, that the enclosure wall and infirmary at Pontoise be completed even though the convent had no money at the time, and even drew up a design herself for the pulpit in the Pontoise church.22 Barbe Acarie and the Conduct of Souls Acarie’s interest in the convent buildings was exceeded only by her interest in the women who were chosen to be the first Carmelites. It is well known that she played an important part in selecting the first Carmelites, but it is worth thinking a bit more about just what this means. From the time plans began to be laid for the foundation, young women started arriving at the Acarie house seeking entry to the new order. At first, Barbe Acarie just took promising candidates into her family home. When their numbers became too great, she rented a house near the monastery of Sainte-Geneviève and transferred the women there. Although she appointed one of them as acting superior of the group, she continued to visit on a regular basis. According to Anne de Saint-Laurent, Barbe Acarie ‘had full responsibility for the girls assembled in the house near Sainte-Geneviève...; nothing took place except by her advice. She had charge of temporal and spiritual matters’.23 Remarkably, although a married woman and not herself a 20 ‘mais c’estoit elle qui congduisoit la barque’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Michel de Marillac, fol. 764. Also testimony of Marie de Jésus de Tudert, fol. 548. 21 Procès apostolique, testimony of Michel de Marillac, fols 766r–8r; also Louise de Jésus Jourdain, fol. 723v, and Marie du Saint-Sacrement (Valence de Marillac), fol. 719v. 22 For Amiens: procès apostolique, testimony of Agnès de Jésus des Lyons, fol. 4v; for Pontoise: testimony of Marie de Saint-Joseph Fournier, fols 99r–100v, and Jeanne de Jésus Séguier, 826v. 23 ‘C’estoit elle qui avoit tout le soing des filles qui estoient assemblées a la maison proche Ste. Geneviefve a Paris; . . . rien ne se faisoit que par son advis. Elle avoit soing du temporel et du spirtuelle’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Anne de Saint-Laurent de Saint-Leu, fol. 60r.

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nun, Acarie is credited not just with managing the business affairs of the house but also with instructing the new recruits in religious matters, directing their ‘religious exercises’, and probing their consciences to determine their spiritual aptitudes and decide whom to select for the first novices.24 Her talent for what was then known as ‘the discernment of spirits’ was so widely recognised that the Capuchin friars charged with forming a new convent of Capuchin nuns asked her to help select the first novices for that convent as well.25 Barbe Acarie was already experienced in the conduct of souls (by which I mean all manners of spiritual direction except those requiring the sacerdotal authority of the Church) from the way she raised her three daughters and the role she had taken on as the spiritual guide of a number of devout women. She taught her daughters to recount the ‘state of their souls’ to her every evening and schooled them in the love of God but also in self-mortification and denial of will.26 The latter capacity was, in Acarie’s opinion, particularly important, because only when someone had learned to completely renounce her own will could she devote herself entirely to accomplishing the will of God. To this end, she subjected her daughters to gruelling tests of self-denial from a very early age. A daughter who showed too much pleasure when a piece of ripe fruit was held out to her soon saw it taken away; a daughter who looked too eagerly at the dishes set out for dinner had to stand at her place and watch others eat; a daughter who betrayed her preference for the pink dress fabric was sure to be outfitted in blue.27 These acts run so contrary to today’s childrearing practices that it is hard to understand how Barbe Acarie’s daughters could recount them as marks of their mother’s saintliness and not as evidence of child abuse, and yet they viewed them as signs of Acarie’s deliberate, and often painful, suppression of her maternal instincts so as to bring her daughters closer to God. At the same time, Acarie’s daughters vigorously denied that their mother had intended them for religious life. Mortifying one’s self-will was a virtue considered useful to wives as well as nuns, and the decision to take religious vows, the daughters insisted, was entirely their own. And yet it is hard to imagine an upbringing more suited to producing contemplative nuns. I would go further, however, and argue that Acarie’s emphasis on denial of self-will produced not just excellent nuns but also, more paradoxically, strong and scrupulous leaders for the Carmelite order that all three daughters eventually joined. Teaching the girls to look inside themselves, to weigh and reject self-interest, and to seek always to accomplish God’s will, Acarie schooled them in self-discipline but also the ability to make mature decisions and advance systematically toward chosen goals. These were valuable skills for the leaders of a religious order in full expansion, as the French Carmelites were 24 ‘les exercices de la vie religieuse’; Procès apostolique, testimony of Jeanne L’Espervier, fol. 581v, and Marguerite de Gondi, marquise de Maignelay, fol. 397v. 25 Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie de Saint-Joseph (Nicole Fournier), fol. 129v. 26 Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie de Jésus Acarie, fols 500v–502r, and Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement Acarie, fol. 425v. 27 Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie de Jésus Acarie, fols 500v–503v, and Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement Acarie, fols 425r–426r.

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soon to be, and all three daughters quickly rose to positions of responsibility in the houses they served. In addition to her daughters, Barbe Acarie offered spiritual advice to a growing circle of lay dévotes. Among these women was Charlotte de Harlay de Sancy, marquise de Breauté (in religion Marie de Jésus), who experienced a religious conversion after hearing a particularly moving sermon by the charismatic preacher Philippe Cospeau in 1601. Uncertain how to go about leading the devout life she desired, Breauté sought advice from her kinswoman Madeleine Luillier, dame de Sainte-Beuve (later the founder of the Parisian Ursulines), who in turn directed her to Barbe Acarie. According to Breauté’s Carmelite biographer, Acarie immediately recognised the qualities of Breauté’s soul, and ‘she took charge of that conscience and made herself in some fashion its director’.28 In this capacity, Acarie encouraged Breauté to abandon her fashionable dress and society pleasures, but she also taught her a new form of prayer, instructed her in other devotional practices, and welcomed her to the house on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève when, after hesitating between the new convents of Carmelites and Capucines, she decided in favour of the former group. Barbe Acarie’s engagement with the consciences of the first Carmelites did not end with the arrival of the Spanish mothers and enclosure of novices at the newly remodelled priory of Notre-Dame des Champs, now renamed the Carmel of the Incarnation. Taking advantage of the privilege of entering the cloister that the princesse de Longueville enjoyed as the convent’s founder, Acarie continued not only to regularly visit the first Carmelites but also to inquire into their souls and to ‘fortify them against spiritual difficulties’. The Carmelites’ chroniclers insist that she took on this role only because the newlyarrived Spanish nuns spoke no French, and add that ‘this useful assistance, necessary in these beginnings, did not in any way diminish the activity, zeal, and application of the Spanish mothers to perfecting their pupils in all ways possible to them. Overseeing their comportment at meals and during daily periods of recreation as well as during religious services, they observed the behavior of the novices in their least detail’.29 Clearly, however, there is an important difference between observing behaviour and discoursing at length about the innermost movements of one’s soul, and it was Barbe Acarie who was in a position to share the intimate thoughts of the new novices and to offer counsel concerning their hesitations and fears. 28 ‘elle prit soin de cette conscience et s’en rendit en quelque facon le directeur’; Carmel de Clamart, ms Vie de Mere Marie de Jesus [de Breauté], p. 29. See also Chroniques de l’ordre des Carmélites de la réforme de Sainte Thérèse depuis leur introduction en France (5 vols, Troyes, 1846–65), ii, pp. 17–20. In a similar fashion, Marie de Tudert sought Acarie’s advice as a young widow on the advice of her nephew Pierre de Bérulle. Procès apostolique, testimony of Marie de Jésus de Tudert, fol. 568v. 29 ‘les fortifiait contre les peines intérieures.’ ‘Ce secours utile, nécessaire même dans ces commencements, ne diminuait en rien l'activité, le zèle et l’application des mères espagnoles pour perfectionner leurs élèves dans tout ce qui était de leur ressort: elles observaient dans ses moindres détails la tenue de leurs novices’; Chroniques des Carmélites, vol. i, p. 122.

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Although the order’s chronicles insist that the Spanish nuns not only consented but also encouraged Barbe Acarie to take on this role, there is other evidence to suggest a growing level of tension between Acarie and Spanish prioress Ana de Jesús de Lobera. This is not the place to recount those tensions.30 What is important is rather to grasp the long-term consequences of Barbe Acarie’s role, and here there is an ironic concordance with Ana de Jesús’s deepest inclinations. Even before coming to France, Ana de Jesús had battled for more than ten years against changes that the Carmelite fathers, who were the nuns’ superiors in Spain, had made in the constitutions handed down by Teresa of Avila. At issue were certain modifications imposed by provincial Nicolás Doria, which increased the power of the order’s male superiors at the expense of the prioresses. The Dorian constitutions deprived prioresses of the right to choose their convent’s confessors and in other ways sought to limit their role in guiding the spiritual development of their nuns.31 The Carmelites lost the quarrel in Spain; Doria obtained a papal brief in 1592 ordering use of the revised constitutions. And yet Ana de Jesús never really gave in. She brought the older constitutions with her when she came to France and impressed on the French novices and superiors alike the idea that these constitutions represented the authentic Teresian vision. When those superiors – secular clerics André Duval, Jacques Gallement, and Pierre de Bérulle – obtained a brief in 1606 confirming their exclusive right to govern the Carmelites, rather than handing their government over to the Carmelite fathers, as the Spanish nuns wished, they immediately confirmed the use of the older constitutions of Alcalá in place of the Dorian constitutions. The issue of spiritual leadership was central to this decision, but so was the extreme respect and admiration that superiors Duval, Gallement, and Bérulle had for Barbe Acarie and for the women she had helped choose to be the first French Carmelites. The first point is easier to demonstrate. The Carmelite biographer of Marie de Jésus de Breauté, who played a significant role in the lengthy quarrels that took place over the Carmelites’ government, puts the issue of the prioress’s authority right at the centre of her account of these quarrels. Describing how the Carmelite fathers had modified Teresa’s original constitutions because they believed that they gave too much authority to the prioresses and too little to their male superiors, she goes on to lament that, under the revised constitutions, the sisters lost their ‘freedom to disclose to their prioress the deepest recesses of their hearts’. They also lost the prioress’s very voice. So intent were the superiors to gather all authority to themselves that ‘they scarcely listened to [the prioresses]’.32 Written by a Carmelite sister, probably Agnès de Jésus-Marie de Bellefonds, this biography represents well See Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 106–9. Alison Weber, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000), 123–46; also Stéphane-Marie Morgain, Pierre de Bérulle et les Carmélites de France: La querelle du gouvernement, 1583–1629 (Paris, 1995), pp. 161–78, 240. 32 ‘liberté a decouvrir a leur prieure le fond de leur cœur’; ‘a peine vouloit on ecouter [les prieures]’; Carmel de Clamart, ms Vie de la Mere Marie de Jesus [de Breauté], Carmélite, 30

31

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the issues that mattered most to the nuns in the choice of constitutions. This was not just a question of authenticity, or of a tool to use against the claims of the Spanish Carmelite fathers; it was also, and in my opinion perhaps foremost, a question of the spiritual authority and leadership exercised by the nuns themselves over and against that of their male superiors. I would further suggest, and this is more difficult to demonstrate conclusively, that respect for the spiritual capacities of Barbe Acarie, but also for the Carmelites closest to her, such as Marie de Jésus de Breauté, Madeleine de SaintJoseph de Fontaines, and Louise de Gallois, made the decision to stick with the original constitutions a logical choice for French superiors Duval, Bérulle, and Gallement. They did not share the Spanish fathers’ suspicion of female authority and initiative, but rather accepted these qualities as compatible with their own authority. Whether this played a conscious role in their thinking is impossible to know for certain. What is demonstrable is that prioresses and mistresses of novices played an important spiritual role within Carmelite convents in France and an indispensable one in the order’s rapid expansion. In many cases, moreover, the spiritual authority of Carmelite prioresses spilled over into the world through the counsel they offered the women and men who flocked to their parlours. In a letter to a fellow prioress, Madeleine de Saint-Joseph de Fontaines defined ‘the interior conduct and perfection of souls’ as ‘the principal obligations of our office’, and she warned against the danger of allowing the convent’s temporal concerns to get in the way of this task.33 In her Avis pour la conduite des novices (Advice for the Direction of Novices), moreover, Mère Madeleine emphasises the need to teach novices ‘that they must tell everything that is in them, whether temptations or excessive feelings of distress, consolation, unruliness, or imperfection. In short, they should conceal nothing voluntarily, it being necessary for a soul to be entirely open to her who directs it and for a Carmelite to carry her soul in her hand’.34 This director is first and foremost the prioress whom, in Mère Madeleine’s words, God has principally charged with the novices’ care. The mistress of novices also has an extremely important place in the formation of the novices, of course, but she must, in Mère Madeleine’s opinion, form in them ‘a tight bond with and love for their prioress’ and make sure that this is their primary attachment, as God intends.35 Nuns were not the only beneficiaries of religious women’s spiritual counsel. Recent writings on the Catholic Reformation typically present reformed pp. 70–71. The Chroniques des Carmélites, which contain an excerpt from this biography, attribute it to Agnès de Jésus-Marie de Bellefonds. 33 ‘le conduit intérieur et perfection des âmes sont les obligations principales de notre office’; Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Lettres spirituelles, pp. 263–4, undated letter (#244) addressed only to ‘une Prieure de Carmel’. 34 ‘qu’elles doivent dire tout ce qui est en elles; . . . elles ne doivent rien avoir qu’elles cachent volontairement, estant necessaire qu’une ame soit toute ouverte à celle qui la conduit et qu’une Carmelite porte son ame dans sa main’; Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Avis pour la conduite des novices (Paris, 1672), p. 26. 35 ‘une grande liaison & amour envers leur Prieure’; ibid., pp. 56–7.

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religious orders as hermetically sealed off from the world through their high walls and rules of strict cloistering. These convents remained connected to the lay world, however, in ways that are often overlooked. Friends and family visited with nuns in the convent parlour, while wealthy patrons even secured permission to visit the cloister on a regular basis, often in the company of their daughters or friends, in exchange for their gifts.36 Although some visits, especially by family members, were purely personal, other visitors sought spiritual guidance and consolation from the nuns. Even strangers came to the parlour grille to seek counsel from prioresses who had gained a reputation for spiritual acuity. Despite the endowments required for their foundation and the practice of accepting dowries from entering novices, most CounterReformation convents remained financially insecure and were dependent on charitable gifts for their continued existence. This made it very difficult to turn away lay visitors who might prove generous in their gratitude. It would be unfair to single out the prospect of material reward as the unique reason for cloistered nuns offering spiritual advice. Many felt a certain responsibility and even mission to help educate lay people who came in search of spiritual guidance, especially when they asked how to recognise religious vocations and other questions that pertained to a prioress’s direct experience. For Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, at least, the problem was how to contain these questions and avoid becoming the regular spiritual director of lay women. ‘It’s not that you can’t see them sometimes’, she advised another Carmelite prioress, ‘but, in my opinion, to direct them entirely would be very difficult, because you cannot observe their actions. Caring for her own house is quite enough work for a superior, and if she wants to do a good job with it and to take the time necessary to elevate these souls solidly in ways of the Son of God, there will be very little left over’.37 Despite this warning, Mère Madeleine did give spiritual advice to some elite women.38 So did many other prioresses. A great many of the biographies that appear in the Carmelites’ Chronicles credit their subjects with serving as the spiritual directors of prominent lay women, who confided their secrets and sought their advice. The Chronicles recount, for example, how Richelieu’s favourite niece, Madame de Combalet (later duchesse d’Aiguillon), entrusted Anne du Saint-Sacrement Viole with

36 For a more detailed discussion of women’s visits to cloistered convents, see Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 120–33 and 160–61. 37 ‘Ce n’est pas qu’elles ne vous puissent voir quelquefois, mais je dis, pour les conduire entièrement, ce qui seroit aussy bien difficile, ne voyant pas leurs actions. C’est bien assés d’ouvrage pour une Supérieure que le soin de sa maison, et si elle s’en veut bien acquitter et prendre le tems qu’elle doit pour élever les âmes dans la solidité des voyes du Fils de Dieu, elle n’en aura pas guères de reste’; Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Lettres spirituelles, pp. 216–18, letter 208, undated and addressed simply to ‘une Prieure de Carmel’. Similarly, pp. 266–9, letter 246, also undated and addressed simply to ‘une prieure de Carmel’. 38 See, for example, the ‘Déposition autographe de Madame de Longueville’, as published in Victor Cousin, La jeunesse de Madame de Longueville, 7th edn (Paris, 1869), pp. 415–16; more generally, pp. 414–20.

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‘the secrets of her soul and the direction of her conduct’. It was impossible to say ‘no’ to such an influential dévote. Women were not alone in seeking spiritual direction from Carmelite prioresses.40 Mère Anne was also credited with playing a crucial role in the conversion of a Protestant minister after the most learned men in the city had failed in the task.41 Marie de la Trinité d’Hannivel became a close confidante of the bishop of Troyes, where she had been sent to found a new convent. He is reputed to have ‘sought her advice in the most delicate situations’. In addition, the Chroniques assure us, a brother of the French chancellor Nicolas Brûlart de Sillery ‘did nothing important without her advice’, and even Vincent de Paul consulted her frequently when establishing the Congregation of the Mission in Troyes.42 I could offer similar examples from the lives of many other Carmelites, especially among the generation closest to Barbe Acarie. Her daughter Marguerite, for example, played an important role in the conversion of Philippe-Emmanuel de Gondi, who abandoned the worldly pleasures that characterised his life as a courtier shortly after the death of his wife to become a priest of the Oratoire.43 The Carmelites were not the only seventeenth-century nuns to offer spiritual counsel to lay men and women, as well as playing an important role in the spiritual direction of their sisters in religion. Jacques Ferraige, the biographer of Marguerite de Sainte-Gertrude d’Arbouze, founding abbess of the Valde-Grâce, comments at length on the spiritual instruction she provided her daughters. He devotes an entire chapter to praising her talent for explaining scripture and does not hesitate to compare her to the greatest medieval preachers in describing the lessons she gave the nuns: ‘Her heart aflame and her mouth speaking from the abundance of her heart, her words were so many sparks of fire, which seared the hearts of her listeners and ravished them by their sweetness, transporting their souls, as that great preacher Saint Anthony of Padua was wont to do’.44 As abbess, Marguerite de Sainte-Gertrude believed herself accountable for the souls as well as the bodies of the nuns entrusted to her care. As a consequence, she encouraged her daughters, in particular 39

39 ‘les secrets de son âme et la direction de son conduit’; Chroniques des Carmélites, vol. iv, p. 180. 40 This paragraph and the two that follow summarise arguments made in Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 149–60, and Barbara B. Diefendorf, ‘Discerning Spirits: Women and Spiritual Authority in Counter-Reformation France’, in Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (eds), Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women (Newark/Del. and London, 2003), pp. 241–65. 41 Chroniques des Carmélites, vol. iv, p. 193. 42 ‘prenait ses conseils dans les circonstances les plus épineuses’ and 453 ‘le commandeur de Sillery . . . ne faisait rien d’important sans son conseil’; ibid., vol. iii, p. 428. 43 [Tronson de Chenevière], Vie de la venerable mere Marguerite Acarie, dite du S. Sacrement, religieuse Carmelite dechausée (Paris, 1689), pp. 170–73 and 177–80. 44 ‘son cœur estant tout embrasé, é sa bouche parlant de l’abondance du cœur, ses paroles estoient autant d’estincelles de feu, qui brusloit les cœurs des auditeurs, é les ravissoient par leur douceur, é transportoit les ames, comme faisoit jadis ce grand Predicateur S. Antoine de Pade’; Jacques Ferraige, La vie admirable . . . de la B. Mere Marguerite d’Arbouze, ditte de Saincte Gertrude (Paris, 1628), pp. 693 and 694.

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novices, to ‘communicate’ their interiors to her as well as to their confessor. Ferraige even suggests that the abbess’s role as spiritual director may be more important than the confessor’s. It is only in unreformed, lax houses, he says, that the nuns always want a confessor around; ‘in well-formed houses, one finds the daughters content with communicating with their Mother’.45 Jean Macé, the biographer of Franciscan Third Order Penitent Marie de Saint-Charles de Veuilly, similarly describes how the Filles de Sainte-Elisabeth confided in Marie as ‘their true spiritual Mother’ and revealed to her the ‘depths of their souls’ with the ‘candour of true children’. By Macé’s account, the nuns recognised Mère Marie’s mastery of ‘this great profession of guiding souls to perfection’.46 I could cite further examples from other pious lives, but I believe that my point is clear. Women played an important role as spiritual counsellors and directors of conscience in the Catholic Reformation in France. This role has often been overlooked, especially in recent literature that tends to depict the Catholic Reformation as a movement dominated by a male clergy insistent on depriving women of their apostolic vocation and confining them behind the cloister’s high walls. Comparative data is currently scarce, but the evidence suggests that French women were significantly more able to enjoy an active role as spiritual leaders than their sisters in Italy and Spain. There appears to have been less suspicion of their spirituality, less fear that they would fall into error and then lead others similarly astray. There appears to have been more acceptance of the idea that women could be the chosen vessels or tools through which God enlightened not only other women but also men. Barbe Acarie had a formative role in this phenomenon, as a teacher to and model for other pious women during her lifetime, but also through the medium of André Duval’s biography after her death. Published just three years after Acarie died in 1618, the biography was a bestseller by the standards of its time and was already in its seventh edition by 1627, six short years after the first edition appeared. In it, Duval recounted a number of occasions on which Barbe Acarie demonstrated unusual spiritual acuity and powers of insight that, in her biographer’s opinion, could only come from God. He told of several incidents in which she revealed that malevolent spirits were at work in young women whom even the finest theologians had mistaken for saintly, but he also made public the less dramatic sorts of spiritual guidance that Acarie had offered pious women in the wake of the League. He praised this work in unequivocal terms, saying that, ‘There is no doubt that God, in this spiritual direction, gave her the grace to discern the innermost movements of their souls’.47 He also praised Acarie’s ability to interpret scripture. ‘Her discourse had more 45 ‘communiquer’; ibid., pp. 285 and 286 ‘aux maisons bien-formees, on voit les filles contentes de la communication de leur Mere’. 46 ‘leur vraye mere spirituelle’; ‘le fond de leur âme’; ‘la candeur de vrais enfants’; ‘une maîtresse passée en ce grand métier de conduire les Ames à la perfection’; Jean Macé, Le vie de la venerable mere Marie de S. Charles (Paris, 1671), p. 85. 47 ‘Il n’y a point de doute que Dieu, en cette conduite des âmes, ne lui ait donné la grâce de discerner les mouvements intérieurs des esprits’; Duval, La vie admirable de Marie de l’Incarnation, p. 108.

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of the divine than the human to it’, he told his readers. ‘On several occasions she referred to passages from the Song of Solomon and gave them a meaning at once both so sublime and so appropriate that the most famous theologians could not have done better.’48 And he recounted at length how she gave advice to Carmelite novices that was crucial to their spiritual formation.49 It was not Duval’s intention to offer up Barbe Acarie as a model for other women to imitate. Like other pious biographers, he saw his subject as an exceptional case and published her life as the first step toward gaining recognition for her gifts through the process of canonisation. While he may have wanted readers to admire and imitate her charitable practices, he would have believed it self-evident that the spiritual powers that allowed her to perceptively intuit the state of another’s soul were divine gifts and could not be imitated at will. What he may not have realised, however, is that even reading about these gifts in a woman whose life and background were very similar to their own may have encouraged some pious women to aspire to emulate them. Whether or not this was intentional, Duval helped naturalise the idea that women were capable of spiritual discernment, and that these powers could not only be cultivated but also used to aid others without impinging upon the territory sacred to the confessional or the sacerdotal powers of the priest. The Catholic Reformation was a period of rapid change; the demand for an educated clergy experienced in the subtle skills of spiritual direction was not quickly or easily met. Many of the women that Barbe Acarie counselled had been unable to find a priest who could meet their spiritual needs when they initially turned to her for help. It does not take too much imagination to see something of a ripple effect, with Acarie’s protegées and other respected prioresses being asked for their spiritual counsel and the practice spreading from there. It is not surprising that the same era that allowed women to cultivate an apostolic vocation in new teaching congregations intended to give girls a better understanding of their faith should have also given birth to several congregations that offered religious retreats to lay women as a fundamental part of their mission. Among these congregations were the Visitandines and Filles de la Croix (Daughters of the Cross). This aspect of the Visitandines’ vocation is generally overlooked, and yet it is something that the organisation’s founders, François de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal, considered essential to their purposes.50 The Visitandines provided retreats primarily to women from the same elite social groups from which their membership was drawn. The Filles de la Croix, by contrast, extended the practice to ordinary women. They aimed to make a sufficient profit on the retreats they sponsored for the wealthy to subsidise those they gave for members of the working-class. Priests naturally participated in these retreats; only they could celebrate mass and administer 48 ‘Ses discours tenaient plus du divin que de l’humain: parfois elle alléguait des passages du cantique de Salomon et leur donnait un sens si sublime et si à propos, que des docteurs célèbres n’y eussent pas si bien réussi.’ Ibid., p. 110. 49 Ibid., pp. 149–52. 50 On the spiritual retreats conducted by the Visitandines and the Filles de la Croix, see Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, pp. 179, 181–2, and 221–2.

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the sacrament of penitence after the extended confession that was intended to climax the retreat. The nuns nevertheless played an important role in guiding the participants’ meditations, preparing them for their confessions, answering their questions, and generally responding to their spiritual needs. In addition to these new institutions that offered women a chance to help educate and cultivate the piety of other members of their sex, there were some women who undertook this sort of teaching on an individual basis, as a logical extension of their charitable activities and personal sense of apostolic mission. One such woman was Geneviève Fayet, who later founded the Ladies of Charity to take this sort of activity into Paris’s Hôtel-Dieu. At the request of Vincent de Paul, Fayet looked in on the hospitals and charitable foundations she passed on her way to her estates in the Loire Valley and reported to him on their state. She went far beyond her instructions, however, in catechising children and teaching and counselling women in the places she stopped along the way. She often spoke in churches and on at least one occasion addressed more than one hundred people in the presence of their priest. In the letter she wrote Vincent de Paul concerning this trip, Fayet marvelled that God had given her the courage to speak in such a public way.51 We cannot, of course, know whether reading Barbe Acarie’s biography might also have helped give Geneviève Fayet the confidence to take on this role of teacher and spiritual guide. It is nevertheless telling that, when she stopped to inspect the HôtelDieu in Etampes, a young nun, apparently puzzled by this encounter with a lady who dressed like a servant and yet lectured her confidently about her spiritual well-being, asked her bluntly, ‘What sort of woman are you? Are you married? I have heard so much about a certain Mademoiselle Acarie, but I think you are someone else’.52 Since Barbe Acarie had been dead fifteen years at this point, it is most probably through Duval’s biography that her fame had spread. And yet Geneviève Fayet seems to have taken it as quite natural, if somewhat amusing, that she should be mistaken for Acarie. Is this not because on some level she did base her idea of Christian charity but also her mission to spread the gospel on Acarie’s model? Vincent de Paul explicitly used Barbe Acarie as an example in at least one of his conferences to the Daughters of Charity. Recalling how she ‘gave a careful account of her prayer to her maidservant’, he advised the Daughters to do the same.53 It is clear from the context that Vincent expected the Daughters to be familiar with Acarie’s Life, which was probably among the pious readings they heard over meals. The same conference contains a more profound echo of Acarie’s spiritual practices in a passage in which Vincent says, ‘My Daughters, remember that when you leave prayer and Holy Mass to serve the poor, you are losing nothing, because serving the poor is going to God and you should 51 Vincent de Paul, Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, trans. and ed. by Jacqueline Kilar from the 1920 edition of Pierre Coste (5 vols, Brooklyn, 1985), i, p. 195. 52 Ibid., p. 192. 53 Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac: Rules, Conferences, and Writings, Frances Ryan and John E. Rybolt (eds) (New York, 1995), p. 203.

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see God in them’. This comes very close to the idea that lay at the heart of Barbe Acarie’s active mysticism: ‘when it is necessary, one must descend from God to worldly things for the service of this very God, which is called leaving God for God’.55 Respect for Barbe Acarie and for the dévotes in her circle, I would suggest, provided the foundation of trust on which French women’s later spiritual role could build. At the same time, Acarie’s Life offered a model of charitable engagement, spiritual discernment, and apostolic mission that spoke to the heart of pious women caught up in the Catholic revival that spread in the wake of the Wars of Religion in France. Rather than focusing on her raptures and visions, we should see Acarie as an important precursor to the apostolic engagement that characterised French women’s participation in the Catholic Reformation once they overcame the initial limits on their roles and founded open congregations that carried their mission into the world. She helped open the way for this through her charitable activities and the spiritual counsel she offered other women, but also through her active mysticism and belief that God should be sought less in mystical absorption than in active service. 54

Ibid., p. 204. AN, M233, n. 3: ‘Points notables de la vie de la bienheureuse sœur Maire de l’Incarnation’; testimony of Dom Sans de Sainte-Catherine, General of the Feuillants, as cited above, fn. 14. 54 55

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Chapter nine

The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ (1687): The Teresian Mystic Life and its Visual Representation in the Low Countries Cordula van Wyhe

In the 1680s the community of Discalced Carmelites in the Low Countries embarked on the ambitious project of producing an emblem book consisting of 101 engravings entitled Idea Vitæ Teresianæ Iconibus Symbolicis Expressa. The images were executed by the Antwerp artist Jacob Mesens and the book was dedicated to the provincial of the Teresian order in Flanders, Hubertus Joannes-Baptista. Eleven copies of this work are known to have survived in male and female Teresian convents in Spain, France, Belgium and Germany. The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ represents a detailed visualisation of the Catholic understanding of the human mind, its faculties and the Teresian prayer practices. Seen in their entirety, the images were a manual for novices needing instruction in the path to spiritual maturity. The thorough and careful training of novices was certainly the foremost concern of the young and expanding order. For example, Fray Juan de Jesús María (1564–1615) opined that negligence in the education of the novices is a particularly grave ‘scourge to […] the Divine interest, as well as the interests of the Community’. There has recently been a growing number of scholarly publications on the topic of spiritual directorship in early modern Europe. For example, Alison Weber examined St Teresa’s innovative guidelines for the prioress’s role as spiritual director in female convents, a role usually

 I thank the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Antwerp, Bruges and Pontoise, as well as the friars of the Teresian order in Ghent, in particular Piet Hoornaert, for their kind help. Special thanks are due to Paul Arblaster for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay and his kind assistance with translations from the Dutch.  In addition to those listed by Karel Porteman (‘Een Emblematische Voorstelling van het Mystieke Leven: De “Idea Vitæ Teresianæ” (c. 1686)’, Ons geestelijk erf 48 (1974), 48), I was able to locate one copy in each of these convents: Burgos, convent of Discalced Carmelite friars; Paris, convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns (now Bibliothèque Ecole St Anne, Seine); Pontoise, convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns; Cologne, convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns.  John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, Giovanni Strina (ed.) (Brussels, 2001), pp. 10, 13.

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carried out by priests. Moreover, Jodi Bilinkoff explored the gender and social values which informed the relations between clerics and their spiritually gifted female penitents by investigating life narratives, primarily from Spain, but also from France, Italy, Portugal, Spanish America, and French Canada. This article contributes to this literature with an investigation of the mystical ideals conveyed in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ and the specifics of their visual representation. It will be shown that seventeenth-century Teresian mysticism was not a faithful replication of St Teresa’s teachings, but a reinterpretation of her principles in response to the new pedagogical and practical requirements generated by the expansion of the order. In this way, this essay aims to heighten awareness of the intriguing, yet neglected field of Discalced Carmelite mysticism after St Teresa. The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ is divided into five parts beginning with an introduction on mental faculties and followed by chapters on the value and practice of mortification, the acquisition of virtues, the exercise of ‘oratio mentalis’ (mental prayer) and the ‘oratio supernaturalis’ (supernatural prayer) with its promise of visions and transverberations in its highest stages. The images accompanying all five sections largely consist of nuns and monks either displaying symbolic attributes or carrying out spiritual exercises (Figs 9.3, 9.9). Antonia Sondermann suggests that the figures represent St Teresa and St John of the Cross. Predominantly, however, the nuns and monks symbolise mental faculties and theological concepts. For example, Karel Porteman pointed out that many images derive directly from Cesare Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’. First published in Rome in 1593, the ‘Iconologia’ quickly advanced to become the most popular guide to symbols in seventeenth-century Europe with a first Dutch edition published in 1644. The figures in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ therefore have to be regarded as generic, emblematic figures. The human ‘intellect’ and ‘spirit’ is always personified by a friar, while the human ‘soul’ and ‘will’ are represented by a nun. This division is likely to be based on the fact that in Latin ‘intellectus’ and ‘spiritus’ are gendered male and ‘voluntas’ and ‘anima’ are feminine nouns. Owing to the centrality of the human soul as a spiritual and theological concept in prayer methodology, the nuns have a far greater visual presence in the sequence of emblems (seventy-eight images show nuns and only fourteen show friars). Nevertheless, friars also appear occasionally in scenes of mortification, mental and unitive prayer and, most  Alison Weber, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, no. 1 (2000), 123–46.  Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, 2005).  An important publication in this respect is Christopher C. Wilson (ed.), The Heirs of St. Teresa of Avila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy (Washington and Rome, 2006).  M. Antonia Sondermann, Isabella de Spiritu Sancto (1606–1675). Herzbücher (Grevenbroich, 2005), p. 103.  Porteman, ‘Een Emblematische Voorstelling’, 46–61.  See also Margit Thøfner, ‘“Let your desire be to see God”: Teresian Mysticism and Otto van Veen’s Amoris Divini Emblemata’, Emblemata (2001), p. 99.

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importantly of all, in the final emblem of the ‘Mount of God’ (‘Mons Dei’). Nevertheless, it may be possible that the author of the Idea was indeed a woman. For example, an unabridged manuscript version with extensive, unpublished Latin commentaries is preserved in the convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Antwerp, and Karel Portemans suggested that this may indeed have been the author’s copy.10 It was certainly not unusual for Carmelite nuns after Teresa to author erudite devotional emblem books. For example, the prioress of the convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Cologne, Mother Isabella de Spiritu Sancto (1606–1675, born Isabella de Uquina), authored and illustrated a voluminous emblematic trilogy on the Teresian spiritual life for the edification of her fellow sisters which is inspired by Netherlandish heart emblematics.11 Nevertheless, given that the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ circulated in male and female convents, it may have been a self-help tool for nuns and a teaching aid for their (male) spiritual directors. Already attracting the attention of scholars, the scope and theological ambition of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ makes it unique amongst seventeenthcentury emblematics in the Low Countries. Karel Porteman first published a detailed bibliographic description of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ in 1972. Santiago Sebastián López’s 1982 facsimile edition of the images made them accessible to a wider audience.12 In his introduction, he interprets the images predominantly in relation to the writings of Jerónimo Gracián, St Teresa’s spiritual director and co-worker. Gracián had come to Brussels in 1606 following an invitation from his friends and protectors, the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, co-sovereigns of the Spanish Netherlands. With the support of the Archdukes, Jerónimo Gracián threw his weight behind the campaign for the Teresian cause. Although Gracián’s influence on post-Teresian mysticism cannot be underestimated, his reputation is mostly that of a populariser rather than that of a professional theologian; as Louis Cognet put it ‘In spite of all attempts at rehabilitation, Gracián’s personal views, as they come to us through his works, remain inconsistent and confused’.13 It is argued here that the works of Gracián do not represent a sufficient context for a more nuanced understanding of the theological and artistic concepts of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ. The Idea is a comprehensive, visual summa of Discalced Carmelite spirituality conjoining core Teresian principles with the Thomistic scheme of religious psychology. The full systematisation of Discalced Carmelite principles certainly required the reception of St Thomas’ more abstract reflections on the human condition given that St Teresa’s Porteman, ‘Een Emblematische Voorstelling’, p. 49. A modern edition by M. Antonia Sondermann is now available, Isabella de Spiritu Sancto. 12 Santiago Sebastián López, ‘Iconografia de la vida mistica teresiana’, in Boletin del Museo e Instituto “Camón Aznar”, 10 (1982), 15–38. 13 ‘En dépit de tous les essais de réhabilitation, les vues personnelles de Gracian telles qu’elles nous apparaissent à travers ses ouvrages, demeurent inconsistantes et confuses’; Louis Cognet, Histoire de la Spiritualité Chrétienne, vol. 3: La Spiritualité Moderne 1500–1650 (3 vols, Paris, 1966), p. 181. 10 11

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writings were purely an account of her own understanding of her personal mystical experience. Although, some of St Teresa’s Dominican confessors may have familiarised her with Thomistic concepts, owing to her lack of formal education St Teresa’s use of St Thomas’ ‘faculty psychology’ (Green) was nevertheless highly idiosyncratic.14 The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ therefore provided a concise visual handbook with detailed diagrams which integrated scholasticintellectual with emotive-mystical concepts in a detailed and accurate manner. Indeed, a publication of this kind may have become necessary in view of the order’s expansion to Italy, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland by the middle of the seventeenth century, resulting in an increase in the number of novices requiring spiritual instruction. Only an investigation of the specific elements of this expanded system of the Discalced Carmelite theology of prayer and the way they are depicted in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ can offer a more complete insight into the pedagogy of spiritual directorship in male and female convents of the Discalced Carmelite order after Teresa. The writings of the Discalced Carmelite theologian, Juan de Jesús María, the Calagurritan (1564–1615), and Fray Tomás de Jesús (1564–1627) influenced the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ to a significant degree.15 They were intimately conversant with the Thomistic teachings on the human faculties and virtues thanks to their studies at the Universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares.16 Although the curriculum at both universities was strongly focused on a renaissance of Thomism and the harmonisation of the scholastic-intellectual and positivemystical tendencies in theology, the chairs in the theology faculty at Salamanca represented a wide variety of positions ranging from Thomist to anti-Thomist.17 In this respect, Edward Howells pointed out that the epistemology of John of the Cross, who also received his philosophical and theologial training at Salamanca, is only partly influenced by St Thomas and has to be regarded as an ‘original combination’ of various ideas.18 Significantly, however, Discalced Carmelite theologians contributed to the revival of Thomism in the 1630s with the publication of a hugely popular course of theology at Salamanca University 14 Deidre Green, Gold in the Crucible. Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition (Shaftesbury, 1989), pp. 40–41. Carole Slade defines St Teresa’s uses of terms such as memory, intellect and will as ‘Augustinian’ in character. St Augustine was, of course, a vital influence on St Thomas; see Carole Slade, St Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London 1995), pp. 84–107. 15 The most important publications on Tomás de Jesús are: Alison Peers, The Spanish Mystics (3 vols, London, 1960), ii, pp. 219–39; ‘Thomas de Jésus’, in Dictionnaire de la Spiritualité (17 vols, Paris, 1932–1995), xv, pp. 834–44; José de Jesus Crucificado, O. C. D., El P. Tomás de Jesús escritor místico (Rome, 1951); Piet Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration: a study of the prayer theology of Tomás de Jesús’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56, no. 4 (1980), 339– 76; For Juan de Jesús María (1564–1615), see E. Allison Peers, The Spanish Mystics, vol. iii, 16– 28; Piet Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ. Een Gebedspraktijk van de Karmel. De Contemplative Aspiratie (Ghent, 1996), pp. 109–246. 16 Dictionnaire de la Spiritualité, vol. xv, p. 833. 17 Melquiades Andreé, La teologiá espanóla en el siglo XVI (Madrid, 1976–7), pp. 32–7, 371–83; Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York, 2002), pp. 16–17. 18 Edward Howells, John of the Cross, pp. 16–17.

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which was an extended commentary on the Compendium of Aquinas.19 In 1610, at the request of the Archdukes Albert and Isabella, Pope Paul V dispatched Tomás de Jesús from Rome to Brussels to take up the directorship of the newly founded convent of Discalced Carmelite friars. As prior of the Brussels convent and later Provincial of the order for Belgium and Germany (from 1617), Fray Tomás de Jesús quickly established himself as one of the leading theologians of Teresian thought. It is certainly significant that the publication of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ coincides with several re-editions and translations of his works into Dutch and French.20 Thomism had a decisive influence in the Low Countries long before Fray Tomás arrived in Brussels. Aquinas’ Summa Theologica had been made a textbook for all students by the Jesuit (and later Cardinal) Robert Bellarmine, who held the chair of theology at Louvain University from 1570 until 1576.21 Juan de Jesús María, on the other hand, never travelled to the Spanish Netherlands. After having entered the Discalced Carmelite reform at Pastrana at the age of eighteen he spent the majority of his life in Italy, where he played a prominent part in founding the Italian Congregation, being elected successively Definitor, Procurator General, and, in 1611, General of the Order. His Instructio novitorum, written in 1588 and first published in Rome in 1605, had become by the middle of the seventeenth century the standard manual for novices after its translation into Spanish, Italian, French, German, Flemish, and Polish.22 As will be shown shortly, the overall organisation and theological concepts represented in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ are mainly based on Fray Juan’s Instructio novitorum. Given that the more than one hundred engravings of the Idea are a comprehensive treatment of complex Thomistic and Teresian principles, the following account can only be a basic discussion of selected issues. By the time the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ was published, religious emblem books had enjoyed a long-standing popularity amongst the members of the Teresian order in the Spanish Netherlands.23 The format of a religious emblem book was certainly highly suitable for the teaching of the subjective and interiorised Teresian spirituality. Devotional emblem books represented a meditative format which was less based on the apperception of rigid guidelines than on the individually creative meditation of the dialectical tension between a 19 Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism 1450–1700 (Washington, 1999), p. 135. 20 For example, the French edition of his Prática de la viva fe (Brussels, 1613) was published in Paris in 1674 and his Reglas para examiner y discernir el interior aprovechamiento de un alma (Brussels, 1620) was translated into Dutch in 1675. Moreover his Scala Salutis was published in a French translation in Liège in 1675 and his Trattado della presenza di Dio was published in an Italian edition in 1685. 21 Hilde de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the Universities in Europe, vol. 2: Universities in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 494, 506. 22 Peers, Spanish Mystics, vol. iii, p. 19. There were twenty editions in the seventeenth century: John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. xix. 23 M. Antonia Sondermann, Isabella de Spiritu Sancto; see also Margit Thøfner, ‘Let your desire …’.

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lemma (motto), pictura (image) and the poetic subscription (epigram). The subscriptions in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, for example, are regular, trochaic Latin epigrams. Although the images visually dominate the emblematic ensemble, the Latin epigrams comment upon and complement the message of each image.24 Nevertheless, the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ has to be regarded in the wider context of religious emblematics. Discalced Carmelites were not trendsetters of emblematics in the Low Countries. For example, the Jesuits had developed a flourishing meditative literature since the 1580s which drew largely on emblematics for the stimulation of devotional emotions. In particular, the famous Antwerp Jesuit Jan David (1545–1613) expanded the typical literary model of Jesuit meditations by enriching it with personal mystical experiences. His most famous work, Paradisus sponsi et sponsae, published in 1607, has exactly 100 images.25 The fact that the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ has 101 images makes it tempting to conclude that the Discalced Carmelites might have been in competition with the work of the celebrated Jesuit. However, it will be shown that the complexity and novelty of the theological concepts depicted forced the designer of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ to resort to innovative, but also conservative, artistic solutions. The Thomistic Idea of Human Nature and the Teresian Model of the Interior Man The starting point of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ is four images depicting the creation of Adam and Eve, the fall of humanity in the garden of paradise and the redemption of humankind through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross revealing him to be the new Adam. These images invite the beholder to contemplate Christ’s salvific death on the cross and to cultivate sentiments of reciprocal love towards God. The fifth image then encourages the reader to comprehend the divine and the human condition from an intellectual rather than emotional perspective (Fig. 9.1). This ‘Model of Interior Man’ is designed to instruct the reader about the apprehension of divine truth through man’s physical and mental processes. This diagram is an approximate visualisation of the first chapter on the passions in the Instructio novitorum by Juan de Jesús María in which he describes the mental and sensorial faculties according to the Thomistic scheme. Juan de Jesús María starts with a definition of the passions 24 Lieselotte Dieckmann, ‘Renaissance Hieroglyphs’, Comparative Literature, 9 (1957), 313; One of the copies held in the convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns in Antwerp has detailed, hand-written prose texts in Latin for each image and the date ‘1687’ on the title page. Karel Portemans therefore suggested that this might have been the author’s copy and that the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ was initially conceived to be published in a more lengthy format; Portemans, ‘Een Emblematische Voorstelling’, 49. 25 Jan David, Paradisus sponsi et sponsæ: in quo messis myrrhæ et aromatum ex instrumentis ac mysterijs Passionis Christi colligenda, vt ei commoriamur. Et pancarpium Marianum, septemplici titulorum serie distinctum, vt in B. Virginis odorem curramus, et Christus formetur in nobis (Antwerp, 1607). For an overview of Jesuit emblematics, see G. Richard Dimler, The Jesuit Emblem (New York, 2005).

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‘Voorbeelt van den inwendigen mensch’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26626).

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as ‘a movement of the sensitive appetite, provoked by the imagination of good or evil, and accompanied by some physical alteration …. Now, passion thus defined has its seat solely in the Sensitive Appetite which is divided into two parts, namely, the Concupiscible and the Irascible’.26 In the diagram, six of the concupiscible appetites namely joy or delight, sadness, desire and aversion or abhorrence, love and hatred, and the five chief passions of the irascible appetites such as hope and despair, courage, fear and anger, can be seen on the friar’s shoulder. They are probably represented below the rational powers of cognition, as inscribed on the head of the figure, to illustrate that they are corporeal and not mental abilities.27 The passions, as defined by St Thomas, can have a significant, yet only indirect, impact on the working of the mind, because the internal senses can also be calmed and controlled by reason’s command.28 Juan de la Jesús María makes this clear when writing: ‘we must remark that the eleven passions, if allowed full scope, will become the sources of as many vices, whereas, on the contrary, if governed rigorously according to the dictates of reason, aided by the grace of God, they become nurseries of as many virtues’.29 Explanatory notes linked to the friar’s eyes, nose, mouth and mantle in the diagram elaborate on the role of the five senses (Fig. 9.1). The senses are divided by those operating via an external organ and those via non-external media. For example, Sight, Smell and Hearing are identified as coming about by ‘an external means/medium’ (per medium extraneum), while taste relies on a ‘non-external medium’ (Gustus fit per medium non-extraneum, scilt per linguam). Paradoxically, touch according to the author of this diagram, ‘comes about by non-external means, namely by the flesh’ (Tactus fit per medium non extraneum scilt per carnem). Inscribed on the five circular fields on the monk’s head are the five mental faculties which act upon the sensorial impressions of the senses. Furthest to the right is situated the common sense (sensus communis) which ‘understands sensory objects by differentiating between things’ (Sensus communis-sensuum obiecta rerum differentia cognoscit). An example of this faculty would be, according to St Thomas, ‘discerning between white from black or green’.30 In other words, the common sense describes the process of synthesising the input from the various exterior senses. It is grouped here together with the imagination (imaginativa) which is, as it were, a storehouse of the sensorial data received by the common sense.31 For St Teresa, for example, the imagination played an important part for her meditative methods, because the mental images conjured up by the imagination from sense-perception John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 20. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (hereafter ST), I, ii, q. 22. 28 ST, Ia.75.2, ad 3; John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, pp. 20–24; Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 252–7. 29 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 61. 30 Quoted after Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas, p. 192. 31 ‘stores in the common sense the perceptions received by the common sense’ (‘Imaginatiua conservat species in sensu communi, a sensibus sommunibus receptas’), see ST I, q. 78, art. 4. All Latin translation by Janet Fairweather and David Money. 26 27

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were an important part of her meditative methods. The circle on the left contains phantasms (termed collectively ‘Phantasia’) and the cogitative power (cogitatiua). Phantasms are not organs of perception and consequently do not generate sensory experiences. However, they are, as Robert Pasnau puts it, ‘remnants of sensation’ or ‘left-over sensory impressions’ which nevertheless have the active ability to ‘combine and separate perceptions stored in the imagination’ (species in imaginatiua seruatas componit, et diuidit).33 In other words, phantasms rearrange and feed raw material such as feelings or sounds to the intellect, which in turn abstracts it in order to understand universal concepts of things in the world. In this way, phantasms are mediators between sensory impressions and the intellect, because the latter is unable to draw directly on the physical senses.34 The cogitative (or estimative) power, sandwiched here in the diagram between ‘Intellectus’ and ‘Phantasia’, allows for apprehensions that go beyond sensory perception such as the perception of good and evil intentions. Thus, the cogitative power operates on a more abstract and universal level than phantasms. In comparison to the intellect, however, the cogitative power apprehends particulars and is incapable of the intellect’s level of abstractedness in comprehending concepts. In the diagram, the cogitative power is therefore appropriately placed above phantasms and directly below the intellect.35 Placed in the circle to the left is memory, the ‘receptacle of all perceivable things, which stores intentions elicited from the imagination and picks them up again’ (est arca otium rerum sensibilium, que, jntentiones a cognitiva eticitas conseruat, et resumit). This is to say that ‘memory’ designates the ability of the brain to preserve mental operations and to replicate them later. Aquinas distinguishes the memory from the imagination in that the former is an act of reproducing complete conscious processes, while the latter merely stores up mental images.36 Memory should also be distinguished from phantasms. Phantasms merely designate our ability to rearrange and present generic sense impressions, while memory handles more complex impressions with specific associations and intentions. A rather obscure reference from St Thomas Summa Contra Gentiles (and one not mentioned by Fray Juan) is the faculty ‘virtus motiva’ situated in the diagram in the circle furthest to the left. The ‘virtus motiva’ is described here as the location ‘from which all movements are derived’ (A qua deriuantur omnibus motus). St Thomas defines this as a motive force which acts upon the heart and not, according to a modern understanding, on the nervous system.37 The superior rational faculties, according to Aquinas, are intellect and will. In the diagram, the intellect, towering above phantasia and cognition, 32

Green, Gold in the Crucible, pp. 39–40. Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas, pp. 280, 280–95. 34 Ibid., p. 313. 35 Ibid., pp. 254–6. 36 Ibid., pp. 281–4; Catholic Encyclopedia online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/ 10174a.htm 37 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (London, 1924), lib. 3, cap. 68 n. 5. 32 33

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is defined as ‘the power whereby a man understands and has sensibility’ (est volentia qua honmo intelligit, et sapit). In other words, the intellect makes experience (the materials supplied by the sensuous faculties) understandable by extracting general, non-sensory traits. Unlike sensation, the intellect is not activated by or dependent on a physical organ. It transcends the organic order. Nevertheless, the intellect still requires the concurrent running of sensory capacities in the form of phantasms which, as has been mentioned above, act as mediators between the corporeal and intellectual components of a human being and without which the intellect ultimately cannot apprehend universal concepts.38 The will, placed here above all other faculties, is also a spiritual power with a ‘natural inclination towards some attainable good thing’ (est inclinatio naalis ad aliquod bonum appetibile). This is entirely in keeping with the Thomistic definition of the will as a faculty whose desires stem from the basic realisation that something is good.39 The will, according to St Thomas, is a faculty of choice exerting a positive influence on the entire mental process of all lower appetites. The relation between will and intellect is reciprocal: ‘The will and the intellect mutually include one another, for the intellect understands the will, and the will wills the intellect to understand’.40 Nevertheless, the caption below the diagram is a citation from St Bernard’s Third Sermon on the Ascension of the Lord clearly emphasising the primacy of the will as man’s supreme mental faculty: ‘Just as the external man is recognised by the face, similarly the inner man is revealed by the will’.41 The classical Discalced Carmelite theology of prayer was characterised by a symbiotic interaction between the intellectual and the emotive (affective) activities of the will. St Teresa believed that the intellect provides distinct and particular knowledge of God, obtained mainly through meditations on the mysteries of the faith, necessary to motivate and sustain the love-acts of the will. The working of the intellect therefore precedes the affective exercise of the human will. Once the praying person is consumed by true fervour, the intellect must come to rest and cease to be active.42 The cornerstone of this prayer theology, as Piet Hoornaert puts it, is that the entire person takes part in the process of introspection leading to a union with the divine. Hence, body and soul, exterior and interior, affectivity, imagination, intellect and the will coalesce.43 The opening image of the ‘Typvs Hominis Interior’ in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, which takes issue with the interaction of sensorial impressions and mental faculties, is thus entirely consistent with the Teresian emphasis on the

38 Norman Kretzmann, ‘Philosophy of Mind’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 128–60. 39 Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas, p. 234–41. 40 ST, I, q. 16, art. 4. Trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2 vols, Chicago, London 1952), vol. i, p. 97. 41 Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, ser. 2, vol. 183, col. 308, lines 27ff. 42 Slade, St Teresa, ch. 4. 43 Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration’, 375.

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all-encompassing investment of all aspects of human cognitive psychology during mental prayer. The Mortification of Passions and the Acquisition of Virtues: The Purgative and Illuminative Way of the Interior Life The following three parts of the emblem book follow the Dionysian tripartite division of mystical life into the ‘via purgitativa’ (purgative life of beginners), the ‘via illuminativa’ (illuminative life of proficients) and the ‘via unitativa’ (unitive life of the perfect). There is no evidence that either St John of the Cross or St Teresa of Avila were conversant with the writings of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite.44 It is therefore most likely that the author of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ was influenced by post-Teresian authors, who subscribed to the three ages of the interior life as defined by Pseudo-Dionysius. Emblems fourteen to fifty-nine are dedicated to the purgative stage described by Fray Tomás de Jesús as ‘supernatural … so that those beginning on it [the way] are purged from vices by the peculiar enlightenment and motion of the Holy Spirit, and the affections or passions of the soul are reformed, so that the flesh may promptly serve the soul, and sensuality may obey reason, and the will may obey divine orders’.45 Consequently, emblems fourteen to twenty-six deal with the mortification of the passions, which is the first stage of purgation. The opening diagram represents the ‘Praxis Mortificationis’ (Practice of Mortification) at whose centre is placed a heart holding out symbols of the passion (Fig. 9.2). The two hearts floating in the triangle of the Trinity above represent the union of the human soul with the divine. God is represented by the upper heart which is inscribed with the Latin abbreviations for the Trinity: P. F. SS.. Two ladders whose steps consist of the concupiscible and irascible passions on the left and right respectively reach up to this divine union. Here, the passions are to be understood as positive forces supporting the activities of the intellect and will, because they intensify the mystic’s tendency towards the object of his desire. The epigram at the bottom ‘SACRAMENTORVM FREQVENTIA’ and the three doors above identified here as ‘VOTA’, ‘REGVLA’ and ‘CONSTITVTIONES’ are the gateway to mortification. This corresponds to Fray Juan’s statement in his teaching manual for novices that the monastic life regulated by the observance of its vows, the constitutions and the rule, ‘allow[ing] nothing, however trifling, to be done, unless “in the word of the Lord”’, is a life most suited to the purgation of the human soul.46 However, 44 St Teresa of Avila, Life, in: Complete Works, ed. and trans. by E. Allison Peers (3 vols, London, 1946), vol. i, p. 136 (hereafter CWST). Here she admits that ‘I do not know why they call it Illuminative but I understand it to mean the life of those who are making progress’. 45 ‘Via purgativa supernaturalis …, ut incipientes peculiari Spiritus Sancti illustratione et motione purgentur a vitiis, animaeque affectiones feu passiones reformentur, ita ut animae caro promte deserviat, rationique sensualitas pareat, atque divinis mandatis voluntas obediat’, Thomas a Jesus, Divinae orationis, sive a Deo infusae methodus, natura et gradus, libri quatuor (Antwerp, 1623), p. 42. 46 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, pp. 13–14.

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‘Pratyck van de verstervinge’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26637).

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‘Volherdinge in de verstervinge’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26640).

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the Latin epigram below the ‘Ladder of Mortification’ admonishes the reader that ‘one who has entered these doors and has begun this ladder should be mindful of constancy.’47 This is appropriately taken up in the last image of this section showing a nun doing pull-ups on a thin twig of a palm tree bending dangerously under her weight (Fig. 9.3). Here, the subscription states that the palm does not succumb to the immense weight, because ‘the palm is the cross, on which hangs the person who loves it, and will not descend from this branch of glory, knowing that thus persisting, and engaging in violent exercise, he/she will be certain of victory’.48 Fray Juan similarly opined that ‘Perseverance is then the crown of the entire edifice … . It combats time, the rock on which the human heart is so often broken … . A virtue so vigorous excludes all vacillation, since it has always before its eyes to encourage it, the victory and the palm’.49 The third part (emblems twenty-nine to seventy-nine) of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ illustrates the illuminative state to which the mystic is raised on emerging from purgation. On entering this stage the soul joins a supernatural order in which its very essence is illuminated by a heightened intellectual comprehension of the divinity, as Tomás de Jesús explains: ‘Indeed in the illuminative way, which has its seat in the second heaven of the soul, that is, in the intellect, contemplative men, who have risen thus far, see God in spiritual and intellectual objects, by the rays of the gift of intellect’.50 In accordance with this quality of the illuminative stage, the introductory diagram is entitled ‘Praxis Virtutum’ (Practice of Virtue). The ladder on the left lists the desiring, concupiscible senses, while the steps of the ladder on the right consist of a range of virtues (Fig. 9.4). Here, the traditional Thomistic discourse on the moral virtues has been adapted to the monastic vocation. For example, fortitude, temperance, justice are missing. Silence and poverty, on the other hand, were added as specific virtues fitting the circumstances of the contemplative life. Other emblems in this section also contain representations of virtues which are particularly apt to Discalced Carmelite spirituality, such as emblem fortytwo on ‘abnegatio sui-ipsius’ (self-abnegation). The exercise of self-abnegation ‘Sed qui portas has intravit, Et hanc Scalam inchoavit, Memor sit constantiæ.’ 48 ‘Palma crux est, in qua pendet Qui hanc amat, nec descendet Ab hoc ramo gloriæ, Sciens quod sic persistendo, Violenter & agendo, Certus sit victoriæ.’ This is expanded in the explicatio of the manuscript version in Antwerp where the author asserts that ‘Christ shows us perseverance in the mortification of the cross’; Convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns, Antwerp, Rosier, ms. 8, Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, fol. 110. 49 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 277–8. 50 ‘In via vero Illuminatiua, quae in secundo animae caelo, nempe in intellectu sedem habet, viri contemplatiui, qui ad hanc vsque conscenderunt, doni Intellectus radiis, Deum in spiritualibus ac intellectualibus obiectis intuentur’, Thomas a Jesus, Divinæ orationis, pp. 236–7. 47



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‘Pratyck van de deugden’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26649).

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‘Gaven, end vruchten van den H. Geest’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26672).

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is a vital prayer-activity, because it helps to direct the human will entirely towards the divine during the actus interiores virtutum, fiery and short aspirations, which were meant to stimulate the anagogical movement of soul during prayer.51 In this way, the canon of virtues in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ subtly asserts ascetico-mystical concerns above theological considerations. In a similar manner, Juan de Jesús María also subscribes to the plasticity of the canon of virtues in his lengthy chapter on the acquisition of virtues in the Instructio novitorum. Here, he states that he ‘shall treat only those that are most appropriate to our state, and, taking into consideration the circumstances of time and place, conduce to the aim of our religious vocation’.52 He admits that the theological arguments are not on his side, but he nevertheless asserts that religion is the noblest moral virtue of them all, because it exists in the highest human faculty: the will. Prayer is a consequence of religion in which the will cooperates with the intellect and is hence the second highest virtue.53 In accordance with Fray Juan’s manual for novices, the seven Gifts and twelve Fruits of the Holy Spirit and the eight Beatitudes complete the section on the virtues in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ. Fray Juan points out that the virtues are indeed closely associated with the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit in that they help a person to perfect the virtues.54 The gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear are supernatural and permanent (habitus). The Fruits of the Holy Spirit, on the other hand, are not enduring qualities, but acts generated by the practice of virtue and empowered by the Gifts.55 Emblem number forty-nine depicts the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Ghost which infuse the proficient mystic in his illuminative stage (Fig. 9.5). Curiously, the visual formulation of these theological concepts is restricted to the image of a nun writing under divine inspiration. Margit Thøfner points out in her essay for this volume that this motive was part of the long-established pictorial convention for male scholar saints such as St Jerome.56 The portrayal of the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit must have posed a particular challenge to the artist in view of the fact that there was no pictorial tradition for this highly abstract and complex subject matter. The artist therefore opted for a recognisable and familiar mode of representation which was customarily associated with learning and divine inspiration. These connotations of the pictorial motive projected at least partly the quality of the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Ghost appertaining to prophecy, understanding and the teaching of Divine things. The Latin subscription, however, gives these connotations a particular Teresian inflection by stressing the anagogical Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, p. 183. John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 75. 53 Ibid., p. 325. 54 Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, ii, q. 68, art. 3; John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, pp. 311–22. 55 Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07409a.htm 56 See, for example, Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in his Study, c. 1460, oil on wood, 46 x 36,5 cm., National Gallery, London, and Albrecht Dürer, St Jerome in his Study, 1514, engraving, 259 x 201 mm., Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe. 51 52

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movements of the mind infused by the Gifts and Fruits of the Holy Spirit. Here, writing is presented as self-transcendence and self-mastery rather than self-expression and self-promotion. It is ‘not a matter of reason but of motion … as soon as the mind receives revelations, she [the human soul] entirely lives, illuminated as the result of divine light, whereby she divinely grasps and, by writing, transcends itself/herself, with a holy priest as guide’.57 It is remarkable that it is a nun rather than a friar who is represented here in a customarily male but characteristically Teresian activity. The precedent for this, however, was already set by the first visual hagiography of St Teresa published 1613 in Antwerp by Adriaen Collaert and Theodor Galle where, as Margit Thøfner has pointed out, ‘Teresa’s usurpation of male privileges is made quite explicit’.58 Emblem fifty-nine is dedicated to the ‘Praesentia Dei’ (The Presence of God) and introduces a more genuine Teresian concept into the theology of prayer of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ (Fig. 9.6). The presence of God is essential, because prayer presupposes a relation between the ever-present God and the person, who strives to sustain this presence. The idea of the divine presence became a characteristic feature of seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelite spirituality and the emblem takes direct issue with the teachings of Juan de Jesús María on this topic. Fray Juan explains that the presence of God ‘is a certain application of the mind to thinking about God … For though God is present in every place (though perhaps we ourselves may not consider it), yet we are not said to have Him present, nor to live in his presence according to the sense of the saints, unless we make this application of the mind’.59 Following Thomas Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Fray Juan devises two modi in which the divine presence can be invoked and experienced in the context of mental prayer: the imaginative and intellectual presence of God.60 St Teresa may have been influenced by the same Christian tradition when she devised her twin notion of imaginary and intellectual visions and locutions which, broadly speaking, operates with the same definitions.61 The imaginative presence is stimulated through sensory apperception (in the form of statues or images of Christ’s earthly life) and then processed by the cogitative faculty ‘Quibus jam non rationis, Sed sectatur motionis Ductum Sancti Spiritus. Modo capit revelata, Tota vivit; illustrata Ex divino lumine, Quo divine comprehendit, Et scribendo se transcendit, Duce sacro flamine.’ 58 See Margit Thøfner’s essay in this volume. 59 ‘Est quedam mentis applicatio ad cogitandum de Deo ... Nam etsi omni in loco præsens Deus adsit (quamuis forte id ipsi non consideremus) non tamen eum habere præsentem, aut secundum sensum Sanctorum, in eius præsentia versari dicimur, nisi hanc mentis applicationem faciamus’, Joannes a Jesu Maria, Schola de Oratione, in Opera (Cologne, 1622), p. 547. 60 Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, pp. 157–8. 61 Green, Gold in the Crucible, pp. 52–5; Howells, John of the Cross, p. 76. 57



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‘Tegenwoordigeyt Godts’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26682).

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and the imagination.62 The intellectual presence of the divine, on the other hand, designates the openness of the praying person for the all-encompassing presence of the divine independent of any sensorial trigger. It is therefore exclusively brought about by the workings of the human intellect and regarded as superior to the imaginative, divine presence. Juan de Jesús María compares the intellectual presence of God to a meeting between a blind and a deaf man. The blind man can neither see nor hear his companion, but he nevertheless feels his presence. In a similar way, the soothing presence of the divine can only be sensed, but not seen or heard.63 The figure of the nun in this emblem exemplifies here both modi of divine presence. Her kneeling with arms crossed in front of her chest is the pose of a praying person as stipulated by Fray Juan in his Disciplina Claustralis first published in 1598: ‘One should kneel (if obedience does not prescribe it in any other way) with hands folded together under the scapular resting on the leather belt. Alternatively, the arms can be crossed over the breast or the fingers may be intertwined; depending upon the individual's comfort and devotion. Then one should devote one’s attention to what the Lord says in one’s heart’.64 The evocation of the imaginative presence is indicated here by the cross situated above her on the left. It can represent a physical object of meditation fixed to the wall and the mental image which the nun educed in her mind. The intellectual presence is depicted by a ray of heavenly light entering the pictorial space from the upper right, illuminating the praying nun. Interestingly, in the Latin epigram below this image, the intellectual presence is defined as ‘superior’ to the imaginative presence, but the latter is presented as ‘perhaps more fertile from your [the novice’s] point of view’.65 In the accompanying explication, the author warns the reader of the danger of delusions should the novice attempt the intellectual presence of the divine prematurely and stresses the importance of consulting one’s spiritual

62 P. Gaston de Kerpel, ‘L’exercice de la présence de Dieu chez les écrivains au début de la Réforme carmélitaine thérésienne’, Ephemerides Carmeliticae 27 (1976), 154–61. 63 Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, p. 158. Although Tomás de Jesús formulates a fourfold concept in his Trattato della presenza di Dio, his distinction between the corporeal and the affective presence of God is ultimately identical to the two-tiered division of Juan de Jesús María; P. Gaston de Kerpel, ‘L’exercice de la présence de Dieu’, p. 169–72; Thomas a Jesus, Korten Wegh Tot het Innigh Ghebedt (Ypres, 1682), p. 27; Thomas a Jesus, Orationis mentalis via brevis et plana (Brussels, 1623), esp. p. 48. 64 ‘Men weze dus geknield (ten ware de gehoorzaamheid het anders bevole) houde de handen samengevouwen onder het scapulier, rustend op den riemgordel, ofwel ook kruisgewijze over de borst of ook nog met de vingeren ineengevlochten; al naarvolgens eenieders gemak en godsvrucht. Dan lette men goed op wat de Heer ons in het hart zegt; Joannes a Jesús María’, Kloosterlijke Leiding of Vingerwijzingen bij de oefeningen van het kloosterleven, om die op geestelijke en volmaakte wijze te verrichten (Ghent, 1938), p. 39. 65 ‘Duplex Dei nos videntis, Et nobiscum colloquentis Signatur præsentia; Una præstat, sed secunda Tibi forte plus fæcunda Est experientia.’

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director. Indeed, the intellectual presence of God can only be the result of a long period of spiritual maturity in view of the fact that its objective is the cultivation of an intense and unceasing awareness of the all-encompassing presence of the divine informing all human thoughts and actions. Ultimately, the attainment of this consciousness perfects the virtues and infuses the faithful with the Fruits and Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Thus, the cultivation of the presence of God is an essential part of the illuminative stage of the interior life. 66

The Teresian School of Prayer The fourth and penultimate chapter of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ initiates the novice into the details of the Teresian method of prayer. The section is introduced by a diagram entitled ‘Typvs Passionvm Animae’ (Designs of the Passions of the Soul) which abridges the synthesis of the Thomistic theological and psychological concepts of the previous three parts of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ (Fig. 9.7). It therefore helps the novice to recapitulate what he has learned thus far and prepares him for the more praxis-orientated images on prayer methodology. However, the diagram also expands the concepts of the purgative and illuminative stage with genuine Teresian elements of mental and contemplative prayer, some of which recur in the last section of the emblem book dedicated to the unitive life. Again, the citation from St Bernard’s eightyfirst sermon, ‘come let us now give our attention to the explanation, so that, the more the soul acknowledges its origin, the more she may blush at having a degenerate life’ is a fitting gloss to the image.67 The focal point of the diagram on the ‘Typvs Passionvm Animae’ is a winged heart which was a standard symbol for the praying human soul in Netherlandish heart emblematics.68 An engraving in Jan David’s Veridicus Christianus, a manual on the core values of Christian life, illustrates the popularity of the winged heart as a symbol of prayer. It is framed here by figures symbolising mortification and charitable works on the left and right side respectively (Fig. 9.8).69 John-Baptist Knipping argues that ‘it would appear incongruous if a member of the Carmelite order had not been engaged in the invention of such heart symbolism’.70 St Teresa’s ‘affective voluntarism’ 66 Convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns, Antwerp, Rosier, ms. 8, Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, fols 224–8. 67 Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus, ser. 2, p. 183, col. 1171, lines 34 ff. 68 Karl-August Wirth, ‘Religiöse Herzemblematik’, in Das Herz, Im Umkreis der Kunst (3 vols, Biberach an der Riss 1965–1969), ii, pp. 63–107. 69 See also Benedictus van Haeften, Schola cordis siue auersi a Deo cordis ad eumdem reductio, et instructio (Antwerp, 1635), print no. 37. Already, Cesare Ripa, probably drawing on St Augustine, represented prayer as a flaming heart in his ‘Iconologia’ from 1593; see St Augustine, Confessions, ‘You had pierced our hearts with the arrows of your love …’ (Penguin edition, book 9, ch. 2, p. 182). 70 John-Baptist Knipping, Iconography of the Counter-Reformation in the Netherlands: Heaven on Earth (2 vols, Nieuwkoop, 1974), p. 101. Cesare Ripa, Iconologia overo Descrittione dell’ imagini vniversali…(Rome, 1593), p. 186.

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‘Voorbeeldt der passien van der ziele’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26627).

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‘Tria, deum ad Misericordiam flectentia’, Plate 33, Jan David, Christeliicken waerseggher, de principale stucken van t’Christen geloof en leuen int cort begrijpende (Antwerp, 1603) (copyright: Cambridge University Library, Lib. 6.60.2.).

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(Knipping) gives preference to love rather than the intellect for man’s spiritual progress, as she advises her sisters: ‘the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do then, whatever most arouses you to love’.71 The emotional spirituality of the reformed Carmel was evidently well expressed by a genre in which the heart symbolises the different stages of man’s relation to Christ and its ultimate goal of reaching an all-consuming love for God.72 In the diagram from the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, the winged heart is ascending towards the divinity in the clouds above, but it also enlists the support of the five senses and the eleven passions below for this anagogical movement. The hands of the heart open the doors leading to the five senses at its bottom, while the eleven passions, sub-categorised here as ‘honest’, ‘useful’ and ‘delightful’ according to St Thomas, are suspended above this plinth.73 Indeed, a closer look at the diagram reveals that all passions dispose the soul towards the good. The concupiscible appetites are now precisely named as the ‘Love of the Beauty of Heaven’, ‘Yearning for immortal splendour’, ‘Delight in the heavenly paradise’, ‘Hatred of the evil of sin’, ‘Flight from sin and eternal punishment’, ‘Sadness at sin committed’. The irascible appetites are also represented as striving to the good in that they are labelled as ‘Hope of the true happiness’, ‘Boldness against the enemies of the soul’, ‘Despair incapable of contributing to goodness’, ‘Fear of sinning and perishing’, ‘Anger against vices’.74 In view of their specific supportive role, the passions seem to be represented in the form of eleven individual bells resonating upon the mental faculties above. The fact that the bell of love is the only one which is firmly attached to the sense of sight below may refer to Saint Thomas’ statement that the act of beholding the beloved intensifies love for the divine: ‘Although the contemplative life consists chiefly in an act of the intellect, it has its beginning in the appetite, since it is through charity that one is urged to the contemplation of God…one delights in seeing the object loved, and the very delight in the object seen arouses a yet greater love’.75 The heart is inscribed with the triangle of the Trinity bearing the Word GRATIA (Grace). Indeed, the motif of the human heart filled by the triangle of the Trinity also belonged to the standard iconographic repertoire of religious heart emblematics. Benedict van Haeften (1588–1648), provost of the Benedictine monastery of Afflighem (today Belgium), explains this in his celebrated devotional emblem book Schola Cordis from 1635: ‘… the very shape of the human heart … forms a perfect triangle. No other shape, moreover, can fill a triangle if it is not itself also triangular… the Most Holy Trinity fills

CWST, Interior Castle, vol. ii, p. 233. Knipping, Iconography of the Counter-Reformation, i, pp. 96–108. 73 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 22 see also p. 332. 74 ‘Amor caelestis pulchritudinis; Desiderium decoris immortalis; Delectatio paradisi coelestis; Odium turpitudinis peccati; Fuga culpat ac pana sempiternae; Tristitia ob admissapeccata; Spes vera faelicitatis; Audacia contra hostes animae; Desperationis usus nullus, vel tantum improprius; Timor peccandi, ac pereundi; Ira contra vices.’ 75 ST, II, ii, q. 180, art. 7. 71 72

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and inhabits the triangular heart’. Similarly, in the diagram of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, the eleven passions and the lower portions of reason are represented as being consumed by the divinity, because they are inscribed within the Trinity which fills the human heart. They are arranged in a hierarchical order, starting with the Thomistic classifications of the concupiscible and irascible appetites at the pointed bottom of the triangle and the mental faculties of common sense, imagination, as well as the estimative faculty (= cogitative power) and sensory memory above. The listing of sensory memory here is an elaboration on memory as represented in the first diagram on the ‘Typvs Hominis Interior’ (Fig. 9.1). According to St Thomas, sensory memory, located in the bodily organ, preserves the particulars of objects such as their functionality and practicality. Intellectual memory, on the other hand, is concerned with the abstract, universal concepts of objects.77 Intellectual memory is situated here above the triangle of Grace and is appropriately paired with the Intellect. At the right hand side is placed the will. Together they are identified as the superior forces of reason. Placed vertically above the left hand side of intellect and memory are ‘Synderesis’ and ‘Conscience’ both of which, according to St Thomas, are part of the rational part of human faculties. Fray Juan defines synderesis in his Instructio novitorum as ‘the habit of the intelligence by which it readily grasps the most fundamental moral truths. Conscience is the judgment of the reason concerning the morality of an action we are about to perform’.78 Fray Juan here paraphrases St Thomas, who believed that by virtue of synderesis the natural law of morality becomes an innate part of the human heart which can only be partially obscured by concupiscence or other passions.79 Once the basic principles of morality are apprehended and become part of synderesis, conscience, also a natural disposition of the rational part of the human mind, applies these first principles to particular situations, or as St Thomas puts it, conscience ‘is not a power, but an act’.80 The moral virtues which perfect the sensual appetites and the intellectual powers are placed in ascending order on both sides of this gradation of sensorial and mental faculties.81 The spiritual 76

76 ‘Considera Secvndo, Ipsam cordis humani figuram insinuare eiusdem immensam capacitatem: habet enim formam Pyramidis, quæ, vti sensu clarum est, perfectum efficit triangulum … Considera Tertio, Solam Sanctissimam Trinitatem triangulare cor replere, & inhabitare. Anima mea quam creasti, Domine (ait iterum Augustinus) ita facta est capax maiestatis tuae, quod a te solo, & a nullo alio possit impleri; quando autem te habet, plenum est desiderium eius: & iam nihil aliud quod desideretur exterius, restat’, Benedictus van Haeften, Schola cordis, pp. 148, 151. 77 ST, I, q. 78, art. 4. 78 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, pp. 64–5. 79 Thomas Aquinas, ST, I, i., q. 79, art. 12. 80 Ibid., I, q. 79, art. 13, for conscience in general see I, ii, q. 19, art. 5–6. 81 Temperance perfects here its corresponding virtues of chastity, humility and the concupiscible appetites. Fear of God, on top right, is one of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit. The moral virtue of fortitude, situated below fear, is the necessary obverse of temperance ST, I, ii, q. 61, art. 2; I, ii, q. 60, art 4; II, ii, q. 141 and 143; ST, I, ii, q. 61, art. 2. On the right hand side, the column of virtues is headed by the two theological virtues of charity and hope and the moral virtue of justice whose connected gift of piety is placed above, while the corresponding virtues of justice, penance

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passions of the higher faculties, namely Beatitude, Contemplation, Rapture, Prayer, Spirit, Devotion, Taste of God and the Fruits of the Holy Spirit, are added vertically on top of the winged heart and reach directly upwards to the Trinity in the clouds (described here as the ‘most delightful, opulent and honest Good’). These passions of the soul point to Teresian prayer theology and are in this way the only true Carmelite addition to this diagram.82 The following images of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ then exemplify the six stages of interior prayer as they were formulated by Juan de Jesús María: preparation, reading, meditation, thanksgiving, oblation and petition.83 With this six-fold division Fray Juan deviated from the traditional seven-fold system of the Teresian reform which included ‘contemplation’ and ‘epilogue’, but not ‘oblation’.84 He certainly shared the view of his fellow brethren that contemplation was the core objective of the Teresian life.85 However, he defines contemplation exclusively as ‘contemplatio divina’, meaning the mystical contemplation of divine secrets granted by God alone during the unitive stage of prayer. He thereby preserved St Teresa’s use of the term, who equally regarded contemplation as a form of supernatural prayer and not of mental prayer (oración mental).86 He defended his re-formulation of the stages of prayer on pedagogical grounds by arguing that contemplation is unobtainable for beginners. Novices should assimilate first the basics of Christian doctrine such as the exercise of virtue, which is essential to prayer, rather than being encouraged to attempt contemplation oversoon: ‘We shall say nothing of it [the act of Divine contemplation] here, because this matter is beyond the range of our young brothers, who, nonetheless, should encourage in themselves the desire to stretch out toward it. We would tell them that this ineffable blessing is granted in this exile to those who strive valiantly’.87 It is perhaps owing to the great popularity and widespread use of Fray Juan’s manuals for novices that the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ follows his six stages of mental prayer and not the usual seven-fold division of the Spanish Carmelite reform. The six stages of the Teresian method of prayer were certainly a novel subject matter which did not allow the artist to take recourse to traditional and obedience, are placed below. ST, II, ii, q. 101–108 & 121; II, ii, q. 104; supplement, q. 16, art. 2; The coupling of wisdom as a perfecting agent of faith can only be understood if wisdom represents here one of the three intellectual gifts of ‘wisdom’, ‘science’ and ‘understanding’; ST, I, ii, q. 57, art. 2. Prudence is paired with synderesis and conscience, because conscience applies general realizations derived from prudence (and synderesis) to specific circumstances. Below prudence is situated its attendant gift of prophecy (one of the nine charismata); ST, I, ii, q. 57, art 4–6; also see II, ii, qq. 47–49, 51; ST, I, ii, q. 111, art 4. 82 Thomas a Jesus, Divinæ orationis, pp. 236–7. 83 Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration’, p. 352. 84 Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, p. 198. 85 Peers, Spanish Mystics, vol. iii, pp. 20 and 26. 86 Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, p. 187. 87 Peers, Spanish Mystics, vol. iii, p. 20; Tomás de Jesús, on the other hand, regarded contemplation as a fundamental part of mental prayer, growing out of meditation. In his view, God communicates his light occasionally and briefly even to the beginner; Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration’, pp. 354–5.

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iconographic motives. Instead, the artist invests a greater effort in a more subtle and detailed psychological depiction of these Discalced Carmelite practices. For example, emblem sixty-nine depicting a nun carrying out the ‘lectio’ or spiritual reading is a particularly apt example of this representational strategy (Fig. 9.9). The nun is kneeling before an altar decorated with her order’s coat of arms and is visibly reading aloud from a large book she is holding in front her. Rather than being shown withdrawn into herself, her posture is erect and her head turned towards the top of the altar above her. A closer look at the writings of seventeenth-century Discalced Carmelite authors illustrates that the depiction of the nun conveys precisely their recommendations of how the ‘lectio’ should be conducted. The ‘lectio’ was a preparatory stage for the subsequent ‘meditatio’. The initial impulse for meditation was usually a specific thought, desire, or effect which occurred during the reading. During the course of the meditation then the specific passage would be recited again. The first stanza of the Latin epigram summarises this purpose of the ‘lectio’: ‘The food of a mind that is prepared and set apart from crowds is attentive reading: subsequent recollection will recite it while praying, and, like a chewer of the cud, will ruminate upon it’.88 Similarly, for Juan de Jesús María the ‘lectio’ is not primarily the acquisition of knowledge, but the enhancement of the desire to do good. Consequently, texts should be chosen which, according to experience, inflame devotion. They should be read in a thoughtful, calm and composed manner which reflects these intentions of the ‘lectio’: It should be suited to the aim one has in view, that is, calculated to move the heart, such as is generally found in pious books of meditation. The reading should be made slowly, with great reflection, and not for the purpose of learning, but to increase our love for God. When any thought strikes us and makes an impression on the soul, we should cease to read in order to penetrate and consider it attentively. For the aim of meditation is to excite the affections, and by the affections to inflame the will. Indeed, this advice ought to be always observed in reading if we wish to derive fruit from it.89

The nun’s upright and concentrated posture certainly conveys the essential interiority, devotion and sincerity rather than the intellectual curiosity which these friars deem detrimental to the ‘lectio’. The nun’s face, the pages of her

‘Pastus montis præparatæ, Et a turbis segregatæ, Est attenta lectio, Quam dum orans recitabit, Hanc, ut mandens, ruminabit Sequens recollectio.’ In the explication, the author explains this emphasis on slow and attentive reading further with an analogy between food and spiritual reading: just as one should chew over one’s food carefully, and avoid damaging the stomach, so should one read, digest carefully, and reread; Convent of Discalced Carmelite nuns, Antwerp, Rosier, ms. 8, Idea Vitæ Teresianæ, fols 265–6. 89 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, pp. 414–15; see also: Thomas a Jesus, Eenen korten ende effen Wech des Inwendichs Ghebed (s’Hertogenbosch, 1628), p. 71. 88

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‘Geestelycke Lesse voor het ghebet’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26691).

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book, her scapular and the floor around her are partially illuminated by a ray of light which enters the pictorial space from an unknown source above the altar. The resulting dark and light contrasts not only add variety and interest to the pictorial composition, but also convey the sense that the nun is communicating with God through her reading rather than being engaged in an intellectual pursuit. Indeed, the second stanza of the Latin epigram below the image instructs the beholder on the ideal ‘lectio’: ‘Let it be calm, balanced, opportune, not extended beyond the due time, so that it may set the spirit alight with love that darts in all directions and excites emotion’.90 The practice of spiritual reading was an intensely debated topic in the early modern Catholic Church. Fray Juan’s and Fray Tomás’ ideas of the ‘lectio’ cannot be regarded as quintessentially Teresian, but merely as replicating a generally accepted position.91 Nevertheless, an unexplained feature of the figure of the nun is the fact that she reads not in silence, but aloud. There were in fact opposing views on this subject within the Church. For example, the Tractatus de Orando Deum by John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, first published in Douai 1576 and cited well into the seventeenth century, opposes the practice of reading aloud: …the spirit soe soone as it is moved and a litle sett on fire, executeth its office with farre more celeritie, then the motion of the lipps, or the corporal forming of words is able to doe. …For the motion and agitation of the lipps is slower, and the corporal weight of the tongue pronouncing the words is lesse apt for the purpose. And not onely this, but the now opening now shutting of the mouth is more laborious, then that it can assist the spirit or mind in any thing, especially it being once inflamed and set on fire by this diuine love.92

However, loud reading was by no means unorthodox. For example, in his Meditation upon the Mysteries of our Holie Faith, the famous Spanish Jesuit, Luis de la Puente, advocates a reading technique which alternates between silent and loud reading. In this context, he calls vocal and mental prayer ‘sisters, ‘Sit sedata, sit perpensa, Opportuna, non extensa Ultra tempus debitum, Ut amore dissultante, Et affectum excitante Hæc inflammet spiritum.’ 91 See, for example, Louis du Pont, Les Oevvres Spiritvel dv R.P. Lovys dv Pont (Paris, 1621), vol. 2: La Guide Spirituelle ov il est Traicte de l’Oraison, Meditation, et Contemplation…, trans. René Gavltier, p. 122. 92 St John Fisher, A Treatise of Prayer, and of the Fruits and maner of praying, 1640, D. M. Rogers (ed.), English Recusant Literature (Menston, 1969), pp. 228–9, 227, 233–325. It was published in Rome 1578, and Paris 1631. An Italian edition appeared Naples 1592 and Venice 1593. One English translation appeared in 1560 (rpd 1563, 1577), another in 1640. He marshals Cyprian: ‘God is the hearer of the heart not of the voyce, he is not to be moved by clamour or noyse, who sees the inward thoughts of the mind’, as well as Samuel (1:13) in support of his case: ‘yet did she [Anna] not forme any one word att all, but prayed in hart only, as the Scripture sayth’; ibid., pp. 219–20. 90



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that helpe one another’, because ‘mentall praier vseth sometimes to breake out into vocall, speaking to our Lord exteriour wordes arising from the interiour feruour, & deuotion: and vocall praier vseth to quicken the soule to make it more attentiue to mentall’.93 Isabella de Spiritu Sancto, prioress of the Teresian convent in Cologne, on the other hand, did not support this twofold division between silent, mental prayer and loudly spoken, vocal prayer, but instead advocated to her fellow sisters the middle way of the quietly spoken prayer which, in her view, aids attentiveness, memorisation and devotion.94 Although, the figure of the nun in the emblem can be regarded as an exemplar of the Teresian method of prayer, the Discalced Carmelite theologians allowed for considerable latitude in the practice of its various stages. For example, Fray Juan thought that the optimisation of spontaneous affective impulses should determine the order and length of the prayer’s structure. To this effect, the ‘lectio’ can be conducted before or after the ‘preparatio’, if it enhances the intensity of the ‘meditatio’.95 Nevertheless, Fray Juan urges the novice to seek ‘counsel with an experienced guide’ before settling into a particular practice.96 Likewise, Tomás de Jesús stressed that the seven stages of interior prayer should be understood as a pliant guide and help for the novice rather than as an inflexible system. Although he considered some elements such as the fifth degree of thanksgiving essential, the novice should nevertheless learn how to shape his/her daily practices best to suit his/her psychological make-up.97 It is worth mentioning that St Teresa herself was of the opinion that there was no precise method of meditation. Owing to her impulsive temperament, she had her own difficulties with meditation, but she insisted on the importance of meditation as a prelude to contemplation.98 Supernatural Prayer: The Unitive Stage of the Interior Life The fifth and last part of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ deals with the fulcrum of the spiritual life: supernatural or contemplative prayer. It is the epitome of the loving dialogue between God and the human soul as Tomás de Jesús explains: ‘it is the chief of all, and in this life the supreme step of the spiritual progress, the ineffable union of our mind with God himself, and the hidden conjunction, and slipping of God himself into the soul, and the amazing manifestation’.99 Discalced Carmelite reformers regarded the spiritual progress of a soul as 93 Luis de la Puente, Meditation vpon the Mysteries of our Holie Faith, trans. John Heigham (S. Omers, 1619), p. 23. 94 Sondermann, Isabella de Spiritu Sancto, p. 141. 95 John of Jesus Mary, Instruction of novices, p. 333. 96 Ibid., p. 338. 97 Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration’, p. 352. 98 CWST, Interior Castle, vol. ii, pp. 305–7. 99 ‘purgata iam mentis acie, diuina limpidissime intueri, & arcano amoris nexu ipsi Deo adhaerere ... Quare merito de hac via Vnitivua vltimo loco tractauimus: est enim praecipuus omnium ac in hac vita supremus spiritualis profectus gradus, ineffabilis mentis nostrae cum Deo

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highly variable and unpredictable, making it impossible to predetermine when a novice should move from the purgative to the illuminative stage and to supernatural prayer.100 However, spiritual progress was not only owing to perseverance and steadfastness in personalised, devotional exercises: the mystical experiences of supernatural prayer were believed to be bestowed by divine grace alone. The sequence of images range roughly from the ‘Oratio Recollectionis’ (The Prayer of Recollection), the ‘Oratio Quietis’ (The Prayer of Quietude) to the ‘Oratio Unionis’ (Prayer of Union), with the traditional Teresian experiences of locutions, raptures, transverberations and visions culminating in the spiritual betrothal and marriage. Emblem eighty-three represents the Prayer of Quiet (Oración de Quietud) which St Teresa defines as a preliminary state of the unitive life (Fig. 9.10). During the Prayer of Quiet the innermost recesses of the human soul are filled with a degree of stillness, sweetness and delight which eludes rational explanation. St Teresa writes: ‘Both the inward and the outward man seems to receive comfort, just as if into the marrow of the bones had been poured the sweetest of ointments, resembling a fragrant perfume […]’.101 The artist conveys this sense of solace and well-being by showing a nun resting her head in Christ’s lap. Any indication of an actual location has been replaced here by an aureole of clouds indicating the supernatural quality of this prayer experience. The nun does not touch or see Christ, but is shown here as merely experiencing his divine presence. He in turn seems to support her with his arms, while their heads and the positions of their arms mirror each other. This visual congruence between the figure of the nun and Christ conveys the idea that the human, mental faculties are for the duration of the ‘Oratio Quietis’ in complete harmony with the divine. The human will, now purged from its selfish desires, entirely coheres with the will of God, whereby memory and the intellect can support the activity of the will in the Prayer of Quiet.102 The Latin epigram, paraphrasing St Teresa, elaborated on the delicate balance of intellect and will during aspirative practice: ‘This taste of tranquillity is present in the centre of the will, which is said to be ‘bound’; however the powers of cognition are released, not held captive, a fact which is sufficiently ascertained’.103 The third stanza then continues to stress the significance of intellectual comprehension which can act as a spur to intensify aspiration towards full union: ‘Here she [the soul] perceives by the intellect ipso vnio, ac arcana coniunctio, ipsiusque Dei in animam illapsus, ac mirabilis manifestatio’, Thomas a Jesus, Divinae orationis, p. 318. 100 Peers, Spanish Mystics, vol. iii, p. 25. 101 Green, Gold in the Crucible, pp. 41–2. 102 CWST, Way to Perfection, vol. ii, p. 129; Life, vol. i, p. 83. 103 ‘Gustus hic tranquillitatis Inest centro voluntatis, Quæ ligata dicitur, Vires tamen noscitivæ Sunt solutæ, non captivæ, Quod satis discernitur.’

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‘Ghebet van ruste’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26705).

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that the divine presence is in a wonderful way so close that she will be able to arrive at union with it through an increase of effort’.104 The accentuation of intellectual activity in this stanza is perhaps not accidental, but rather informed by Tomás de Jesús and Juan de Jesús María, who argue against the idea in traditional mystical theology that all preceding intellectual activity is eclipsed from the anagogical movement of the will towards divine union. Like St Teresa, they concede that the intellectual activity can largely come to rest once the higher stages of unitive aspirations have been reached. Yet, they insist that an intellectual activity such as exercises of meditation will always precede aspirative practice and that a simplified intellectual aspect continues to be present in its later stages.105 For example, Fray Juan cites St Augustine and St Thomas in support of his conviction: ‘As for me, I prize that this intervention cannot be conducted without intellectual processes. This is a view which St Augustine and St Thomas support: nothing unknown can be loved meaning that without knowledge there is no focus for affection’.106 St Teresa never fully elaborated on this point herself. Interestingly, editorial corrections to St Teresa’s autograph manuscript of her Life in the El Escorial, near Madrid, correct her initial emphasis on the inactivity of the mental faculties during the Prayer of Quiet to subtly foreground the role of the intellect. Alison Weber suggested that these fine tunings of St Teresa’s wording may have been a precaution to dissociate the saint’s non-discursive prayer practices from the Quietistic methods of the alumbrados aimed at a direct and complete absorption into the Godhead resulting in the surrender of free will. According to Weber therefore, ‘Teresa’s dilemma was to communicate the effortless, non-discursive nature of her experience without appearing to adhere to the doctrine of justification by faith alone.’107 Significantly, second generation Carmelites such as Jerónimo de Gracián, Ana de Jesús, and Tomás de Jesus still regarded Quietistic and Illuministic tendencies as a threat to the Teresian spiritual heritage.108 The ensuing union of the human soul and the divine in the unitive phase of the mystic’s spiritual journey is not permanent. Brief moments of absorption ‘Sibi numen hic divinum Miro modo tam vicinum Intellectu comperit, Quod ad ejus unionem, Per conatus auctionem, Pervenire poterit.’ 105 Hoornaert, Gÿ staat mÿ altÿd bÿ, p. 229. 106 ‘Quant à moi, j’estime que cette intervention ne peut se faire sans quelque acte d’entendement, vue que Saint Augustin et Saint Thomas tiennent que rien d’inconnu ne peut être aimé, c’est-à-dire que, sans la connaissance il n’y a point d’affection’; Jésus Marie, Jean de, La théologie mystique, trans. Cyprien de la Nativité de la Vierge (Brussels, 1994), p. 153, quoting here ST, 1.2.q.27. art.2.: ‘sine cognitione amari non posse’. 107 Alison Weber, ‘The Three Lives of the Vida: The Uses of Convent Autobiography’, in Marta V. Vincente and Luis R. Corteguera (eds), Women, Texts and Authority in Early Modern Spanish World (Aldershot, 2003), p. 121. 108 Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, esp. pp. 82–117. 104

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‘Vereeninge des Herte met Godt’ (copyright: Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, Cabinet des Estampes, sig. S. IV 26706).

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which usually do not last longer than half an hour, according to St Teresa, are punctuated by long interludes of separation as she explains: ‘that union is as if the ends to two-way candles were joined so that the light they give is one: the wicks and the wax and the light are all one; yet afterwards the one candle can be perfectly well separated from the other and the candles become two again, or the wick may be withdrawn from the wax’.109 The corresponding epigram on unitive prayer in the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ does not visualise St Teresa’s lively analogies, but reverts to the popular pictorial tradition of heart emblematics (Fig. 9.11). Emblem eighty-four shows two burning hearts situated in a blazing aureole of clouds placed vertically above each other. They are coupled, yet are clearly conjoined as separate entities. The Latin subscriptio comments on the brief duration of this experience of oneness with the divine: ‘From love kindled and reciprocated with flames arises delightful union, which is not always total, for partial communion with God is given.’110 In conclusion, it is worth re-emphasising that the mystic was not meant to conduct a fixed prayer routine. Instead, the continuous modification of the devotional exercises was regarded as essential for the attainment of true contemplation. For example, Tomás de Jesús believed that any location or time is favourable to aspirative prayer and that a frequent change of location is propitious to contemplative devotion.111 Once the praying person is fully trained in these psychologically sophisticated, aspirative activities then, as Fray Juan put it, he/she will have attained ‘such a degree of agility and rapidity of the will, that merely a simple apprehension of divine things, immediately carry them [the praying persons] towards God without further acts of the intellect’.112 This sense of achievable numinous maturation is also conveyed visually. The motive of the conjoined hearts can already be found above the ladders of mortification and virtue where it equally signifies the final objective of unitive prayer (Figs 9.2 and 9.4). The repetition of this symbolism clearly links the individual images of the Idea Vitæ Teresianæ conceptually and heightens the sense of the spiritual progress. Ultimately, however, the mystic’s life was an exile from the full union with the divine only achievable after death.

CWST, Interior Castle, vol. ii, p. 335. ‘Ex amore inflammato, Flammis & reciprocato Grata surgit unio, Quæ non semper est totalis, Datur quippe partialis Cum Deo communio.’ 111 Hoornaert, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration’, p. 369. 112 ‘une telle agilité ou vitesse de la volonté, que seulement par une simple conception des choses divines, aussitôt ils se portent à Dieu sans autre acte d’entendement’; Jean de Jésus Marie, La Théologie Mystique, p. 152. 109 110

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Part IV Community and Conflict

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Chapter ten

‘Little Angels’: Young Girls in Discalced Carmelite Convents (1562–1582) Alison Weber

In 1577, Teresa of Avila wrote to her superior, seeking permission to admit a seven-year-old girl as a boarder in a Discalced Carmelite convent: Antonio Gaytán has been here. He came to ask if his daughter could be received in Alba. She must be about the same age as [your sister] Isabelita. The nuns [at Alba de Tormes] write me that she is especially amiable. Her father will provide food and afterwards give all her disposable possessions, which they say amount to six or seven hundred ducats and even more. And what he does for that house [i.e., the monastery at Beas] is priceless. I beg you not to fail to send me the permission, in your charity – and quickly. I tell you these little angels edify us and are refreshing. With no more than one in each house, I don’t see any obstacle but a benefit.

Teresa’s dream of having one ‘little angel’ per convent was never fulfilled. During her lifetime, only five young girls resided in the seventeen Discalced Carmelite convents she helped to found. It is not surprising that the Discalced should eschew the practice, common in many orders at the time, of taking in doncellas (boarders) or educandas (students). For example, at the Convent of the Incarnation of Avila, where Teresa had spent the first twenty-seven years of her life in religion, many girls, some as young as four, lived in multi-room cells with their aunts or sisters.  Letter to Jerónimo Gracián, July/August 1577 (?), The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila. 1546–1577, vol. i, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh (Washington, D.C.), p. 556. ‘Antonio Gaytán ha estado aquí. Viene a pedir se le reciba en Alba su niña, que debe de ser como la mi Isabelita de edad. Escríbenme las monjas que es en extremo bonita. Su padre le dará alimentos y después todo lo que tiene fuera del vínculo, que dicen serán seis o setecientos ducados y aun más; y lo que hace por aquella casa y ha trabajado por la Orden no tiene precio. Suplico a vuestra paternidad no me deje de enviar la licencia por caridad, y presto; que yo le digo que nos edifican estos ángeles y dan recreación. Como hubiese una en cada casa y no más, ningún inconveniente veo sino provecho’; Cartas, Tomás Alvarez (ed.) (Burgos, 1983), p. 288. Mariana was the daughter Antonio Gaytán, a widowed layman who through conversations with the Carmelite was inspired to abandon a dissolute life and devote himself to works of charity. He assisted Teresa in three foundations, for which the foundress was extremely grateful.  Otger Steggink, La reforma del Carmelo español. La visita canónica del general Rubeo y su encuentro con Santa Teresa (1566–1567) (Rome, 1965), p. 61. There was no minimum age for

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But the austere convents Teresa began to found in 1562 were hardly suitable places for young children. The nuns observed strict enclosure; they abstained from eating meat, except in time of illness; and they wore a habit of rough wool, stockings made of woven flax, and hemp sandals. Food was sometimes scarce, and illnesses such as typhus and malaria were endemic. The life of a Discalced nun also required an unusual degree of emotional detachment, or desasimiento. As Jodi Bilinkoff has shown, the Teresian reform was predicated on the idea that cloistered nuns could serve a Church in crisis through ‘an apostolate of prayer’; if they could not be preachers, they could pray for preachers and other defenders of the faith. But Teresa believed that this mission could only be accomplished if nuns removed themselves from the economic and status concerns of their families. Therefore, she sought aspirants with strong vocations who were willing to make the genuine sacrifice of severing the bonds with their kin. As Article 19 of the constitutions, drafted around 1562, states, ‘As much as they can, the Sisters should avoid a great deal of conversation with relatives. Aside from the fact that they will become preoccupied with their relatives’ affairs, they will find it difficult to avoid talking to them about worldly things’. Detachment was required of intramural relationships as well. The Teresian constitutions specify that each nun shall have her own bed and that there shall be no common workroom. ‘Particular friendships’ were proscribed, as they were in all convents, although the solitary living arrangements and small size of the Discalced convents may have made this easier to enforce. The constitutions warn, ‘Let no Sister embrace another or touch her on the face or hands. The Sisters should not have particular friendships, but should include all in their love for one another, as Christ often commanded His disciples’. Silence was to be observed from Compline in the evening until after Prime of the following day. In sum, the foundress realised the reformed convents’ poverty and austerity were incompatible with educating young girls, much less looking after small educandas, although according to the Cimbron Decree (1547) they were required to make their profession or leave by the time they reached eighteen; Nicolás González y González, El monasterio de la Encarnación de Avila (2 vols, Avila, 1976), i, p. 208. Teresa had a large, two-floor apartment with cooking facilities at the Incarnation, which she shared with her younger sister Juana and several other relatives; Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a SixteenthCentury City (Cornell, 1989), p. 115.  Ibid., p. 128; Jodi Bilinkoff, ‘Woman with a Mission: Teresa of Avila and the Apostolic Model’, in Giulia Barone et al. (eds), Modelli di santità e modelli di comportamento (Turin, 1994), pp. 295–305. Teresa writes extensively of the need for detachment from relatives in chapters 7–9 of The Way of Perfection, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez (3 vols, Washington, D.C., 1976–1985), ii, pp. 65–75.  The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. iii, p. 324. ‘De tratar mucho con deudos se desvíen lo que más pudieren; porque, dejando que se apegan mucho sus cosas, será dificultoso dejar de tratar con ellos algunas del siglo’; Obras completas de Santa Teresa, Tomás Alvarez (ed.), 10th edn (Burgos, 1998), p. 1277.  Ibid., vol. iii, p. 322.  Ibid., vol. iii, p. 328. ‘Ninguna hermana abrace a otra, ni la toque en el rostro ni en las manos, ni tengan amistades en particular, sino todas se amen en general, como lo manda Cristo a sus apóstoles muchas veces’; ibid, p. 1281.

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children. Above all, the serious mission of apostolic prayer demanded mature postulants, able to withstand the rigours of emotional detachment. As article 21 of the constitutions specifies, ‘[Aspirants for the novitiate] should be at least seventeen. And if they are not detached from the world, they will find the way we live here hard to bear’. Yet Teresa’s descriptions of the little girls in her letters permit us to understand why she felt compelled to make a few exceptions to her general policy. Before turning to the letters, it is important to point out some similarities and differences between the Discalced Carmelite reform and the reforms of the Council of Trent, especially in regard to age limits for postulants. Teresa founded her first Discalced convent in 1562. One year later, the Council of Trent dedicated its twenty-fifth and final session to monastic reform. In addition to approving decrees mandating ritual observance, enclosure, and the renunciation of private ownership, the Tridentine fathers drew up a series of provisions designed to assure that monastic vows were freely taken. Anyone who forced a young boy or girl to take the habit against his or her will was anathema. Professions were to be made only after one year’s probation and on the completion of the sixteenth year. Although the canonists did not prohibit monastic houses from taking in children as boarders or students, the legislation unequivocably established sixteen as the age of legal consent for making binding monastic vows.  Collected Works., vol. iii, p. 324. ‘[Q]ue no sean menos que de diez y siete años. Porque si no vienen desasidas de él [mundo], podrán mal sufrir lo que aquí se lleva’; Obras completas, p. 1277.  When in 1567 the general of the Carmelite order visited the Discalced or reformed convent of San José in Avila, which Teresa had founded five years earlier, he was so impressed with its Tridentine spirit that he gave Teresa patents to found reformed convents throughout Castile. Before her death in 1582, she had founded fifteen convents and supervised two foundations from a distance. See Jodi Bilinkoff, ‘Teresa of Jesus and Carmelite Reform’, in Richard De Molen (ed.), Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation. Essays in Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventyfifth Birthday (New York, 1994), pp. 166–86.  Chapter XVI declares that any renunciation of property made more than two months before profession is null and void, thereby protecting (in theory, at least) the inheritance rights of children during their novitiate and discouraging novitiates lasting longer than a year. Chapter XVII allows girls over the age of twelve to take the habit under special conditions: if the bishop ‘has carefully examined the wish of the virgin, whether she has been forced or enticed, or knows what she is doing; and if her will is found to be pious and free . . . and if the monastery is a suitable one for her’; Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (Rockford, 1978), pp. 226–8. Trent did not put an end to forced monachisation, although hundreds of men and women did avail themselves of the protections of chapter XIX, which allowed those who could prove that they had been compelled to enter a religious order ‘by force and fear’ to petition for release from their vows; Anne Schutte, ‘By Force and Fear: Involuntary Monachization in Eighteenth-Century Europe’ (monograph in progress). Elizabeth Lehfeldt examines the impact of Trent on convents in Valladolid and concludes that its codes of discipline were unevenly enforced; see ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999), 1009–1030. In contrast, enclosure was effectively enforced in seventeenth-century Italy; Francesca Medioli, ‘The Dimensions of the Cloister. Enclosure, Constraint, and Protection in Seventeenth-Century Italy’, in Thomas Kuehn, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Silvana Seidel Menchi (eds), Time, Space, and Women’s Lives in Early Modern Europe, vol. 57: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, 2001), pp. 165–80.

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Thus, Teresa’s preference for mature postulants with genuine vocations was consonant with the spirit of Tridentine legislation. In fact, as we have seen, she set a higher minimum age for novitiates than had the Tridentine fathers. And for the most part she was punctilious in observing the particulars of Tridentine and subsequent legislation as it was introduced into Castile. Nevertheless, she availed herself of the Council’s silence on the issue of boarders and accepted five ‘underage’ girls to live in the Discalced convents. With one exception, all eventually professed at the Tridentine legal age of sixteen.10 How did Teresa reconcile these exceptions with her esteem for the monastic virtue of detachment? From the perspective of the girls, what impact did their upbringing as a sole child in a household of nuns have on their choice of vocation? In other words, did Teresa and her sisters comply with the spirit as well as the letter of Tridentine legislation regarding the freedom of vocations? In regard to the question of detachment, I believe Teresa rationalised her decision on the basis of what she saw as the greater good an exceptional ‘little angel’ could bring to a convent. When Teresa argues, as she does in the letter quoted at the beginning of this essay, that ‘these little angels edify us and are refreshing’ (the Spanish reads literally ‘they give us recreation’), she is defending the girls’ presence with an allusion to the Discalced Carmelites’ hours of recreation, the twice-daily periods when the vow of silence was rescinded and nuns met for conversation and relaxation. Despite her commitment to austerity, Teresa considered recreation an important safeguard against convent melancholy, the psychological disorder that could lead to madness, demonic possession, and questionable supernatural favours. Recreation was also a time meant to quicken the sisters’ love for one another, to strengthen their solidarity, and thereby protect them against the dangers of particular affections.11 Isabel de Jesús (Dantisco) (1568–1639), an ‘angel’ who entered the convent at age eight, seems to have been ideally suited to fulfil the role of providing the nuns with spiritually uplifting distraction. Isabel was a younger sister of Teresa’s beloved confessor Jerónimo Gracián.12 Through her letters, Teresa provides Gracián with a steady stream of updates on his little sister’s life in Carmel: 10 The only novice given the veil before the age authorised by Trent was a wealthy aristocrat, Casilda de Padilla (b. 1562), who took the habit in opposition to her family at the age of eleven and professed, with a dispensation from Rome, a week after her fifteenth birthday. Casilda came from one of the wealthiest families in Spain and brought with her a large dowry. She had literally run away from home to join the Discalced. Teresa admired her fervour but also recognised that the dowry would help the struggling reform enormously. The legal complications surrounding Castila’s novitiate and the embarrassment that resulted when she later left the order made the foundress extremely wary of accepting novices without familial approval. 11 See, for example, Teresa’s remarks on particular friendships in The Way of Perfection (Camino de perfección), The Collected Works of St. Tesesa of Avila, ch. 7, ii, p. 69. 12 Teresa was extremely fond of their mother, Juana Dantisco. Doña Juana, married at the age of twelve to a court secretary, bore twenty children, of whom thirteen survived. Another daughter, Juliana de la Madre de Dios (Dantisco) (1574–1621), also became a ‘little angel’, entering the convent at the age of eight. See the biographical sketches in E. Allison Peers, Handbook to the Life and Times of St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross (London, 1954). On Teresa’s occasionally imprudent devotion to Gracián, see Janice Mary Luti, ‘“Marriage Well Arranged” Teresa of Avila and Fray Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios’, Studia Mystica 12 (1989), 32–46; Barbara

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Oh, how pretty [Isabel] is becoming. How plump she’s getting and charming. May God make her a saint and watch over your paternity much more than me.13 My Isabel is here. … I gave her a little melon; and she told me it was very cold, that it deafens her throat. I tell you she uses the most delightful expressions, and she’s always happy, with a gentle disposition that reminds me very much of my father [i.e., of you].14 Our Isabel is like an angel. The disposition and happiness of this creature are something to praise God for. Today the doctor happened to pass by a room where she was, for he usually doesn’t go that way. Since she saw that he had seen her, even though she tried hard to take flight, she began to cry thinking she was excommunicated and that she deserved to be expelled from the house. We all had a good laugh about this and love her dearly, and with reason.15 My Isabel is getting better every day. When I go to recreation… she sets aside her needlework and begins to sing: Mother Foundress Is coming to recreation; Let’s all dance and sing And clap our hands in jubilation. But this is for a moment. Outside the time of recreation she remains in her hermitage so absorbed with the Infant Jesus, the shepherds, her work, and her thoughts (which she tells me about) that it is something to praise the Lord for…. She sends her regards, and prays for you. And she desires to see you, but not Señora Juana [her mother] or anyone, for she says they are of the world.16 Mujica, ‘Paul, the “Enchanter”: Saint Teresa’s Letters to Jerónimo Gracián’, in Christopher Wilson (ed.), The Heirs of St. Teresa of Avila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy (Washington, 2006), pp. 21–44. 13 20 September 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 333. ‘¡Oh, qué hermosita se va haciendo! ¡Cómo engorda y qué bonita es! Dios la haga santa, y a vuestra paternidad me guarde mucho más que a mí”; Cartas, p. 246. 14 13 December 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 436. ‘La mi Isabel está aquí…. Dábale de un melón; dice que está muy frío, que le atruena la garganta. Yo le digo que tiene dichos gustosísimos, y una alegría ordinario y una blandura de condición que se parece harto a mi padre’; Cartas, p. 281. 15 Beginning of December 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 419. ‘La nuestra Isabel está hecha un ángel. Es para alabar a Dios la condición de esta criatura y el contento. Este día acaso salió el médico por una pieza en que ella estaba, que no suele ir por allí. Como vio que la había visto, aunque echó harto a correr, fue su llanto que estaba descomulgada y que la había de echar de casa. Mucha recreación nos da, y todas la quieren grandemente, y con razón’; Cartas, p. 273. Isabel apparently believed that she was under obligation to observe enclosure, although she had not taken formal vows. 16 End of December 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 449. ‘Mi Isabel está cada día mejor. En entrando yo en la recreación, como no es muchas veces, deja su labor y comienza a cantar: “La madre fundadora/ viene a la recreación;/ bailemos y cantemos/ y hagamos el son”. Esto es un momento. Y cuando no es hora de recreación, en su ermita tan embebida en su Niño Jesús y sus pastores y su labor, que es para alabar al Señor…. Dice se encomienda a vuestra

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To María de San José, the Seville prioress, she writes: It’s extraordinary the talent this child has, for with some drab little shepherds and some little nuns and a statue of Our Lady belonging to her, there isn’t a feast in which she doesn’t create something with these in her hermitage or at recreation, along with some verses for which she provides a lovely tune, all of which leave us amazed.17

These letters give us some idea of how the girls occupied their time: they did needlework, they played with religious images, they made up tunes and verses, and they spent time alone in hermitages, the prayer huts that Discalced Carmelites built on the grounds of their convents. I have found no evidence of them being educated in any traditional sense. They apparently knew how to write, for there are frequent allusions to their letters, although none has survived. The letters are more illuminating in regard to Teresa’s attitudes to this child. The foundress seems to have been charmed by Isabel’s immaturity – her spontaneous displays of affection, absorption in play, and even her childish scrupulosity. These letters provide further evidence that, pace Philippe Ariès and Lawrence Stone, early modern people did recognise childhood as a distinct and important phase in the life-cycle.18 Yet Teresa was captivated in equal measure by Isabel’s spiritual precociousness. She writes of Isabel with amused awe, in a tone that recalls the description of her own childhood in The Book of Her Life, when she records that she and her brother plotted ‘to go off to the land of the Moors and beg them, out of love of God, to cut off our heads there’.19 In her autobiography Teresa parodies the hagiographic topos of the wise child in a self-deprecating gesture that nevertheless suggests the continuity of her vocation. Her humorous depictions of Isabel’s childish piety similarly paternidad y que le encomienda a Dios y le tiene deseo de ver. A la señora doña Juana no, ni a ninguno, que dice son del mundo’; Cartas, p. 282. 17 9 January 1577; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 467. ‘Es extraña la habilidad de esta criatura, que con unos pastorcillos malaventurados y unas monjillas y una imagen de nuestra Señora que tiene, no viene fiesta que no hace una invención de ello en su ermita o en la recreación, con alguna copla, a que ella da buen tono, y la hace, que nos tiene espantadas’; Cartas, p. 642. Teresa was not entirely uncritical of Isabel. In this letter she complains about her cold laugh and expresses her opinion that Teresita is the more charming of the two girls. 18 The principal proponents of the so-called modernisation paradigm – the thesis that the pre-modern era lacked a concept of childhood – were Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York); and Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth, 1977). The thesis has been seriously challenged. Pollack argues, for example, ‘It is … true that parents of the past had a different notion of childhood and the parental task than parents of today. However, it stretches the evidence entirely too far to maintain that children were undifferentiated from adult society or that harshness, at best indifference was their lot’, 191–2; ‘Parent-Child Relations’, in David I. Kertzer and Marzoi Barbagli (eds), The History of the European Family. Volume One: Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789 (New Haven, 2001), pp. 191–220, quotation at 191–2. 19 The Book of Her Life, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. i, p. 34. ‘irnos a tierra de moros, pidiendo por amor de Dios para que allá nos descabezase’; Libro de la vida in Obras completas, p. 11.

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imply the likelihood of providential foreshadowing. Whether reviewing her own life retrospectively or reporting on Isabel’s behaviour, Teresa is clearly reading for signs of spiritual continuity.20 The most cherished ‘angel’ in the Teresian Carmels was undoubtedly the foundress’s niece, Teresa de Cepeda, the daughter of Teresa’s brother, Lorenzo. (Her name in religion was identical to her aunt’s – Teresa de Jesús. The foundress refers to her often with the diminutives ‘Teresita’ or ‘Teresica.’) Lorenzo had emigrated to Peru in 1540, where he married the daughter of a conquistador. He returned to Spain as a wealthy widower in 1575, bringing with him his three surviving children: sixteen-year-old Francisco, thirteen-yearold Lorenzo, and a little girl. As the foundress reported her first impression of the little girl in a letter to her cousin, ‘Teresita is eight or nine years old, very charming and beautiful’.21 Lorenzo arrived on the scene at a crucial moment: the convent of San José in Seville was in serious financial difficulty, and Lorenzo generously opened his American treasure chest for the troubled reform. Teresita subsequently took up residence at the convent. She was dressed in the Carmelite habit, although her status was officially that of a doncella or boarder. As Teresa wrote to Gracián on 27 September 1575: She is already here with her habit, for she looks like the house’s little elf. And her father is [beside] himself with joy, and all the nuns are delighted with her. She has the disposition of an angel, and she is adept at entertaining in recreation, telling her stories about the Indians and her voyage by sea better than I could do. I am happy that she will not be a burden to anyone.… I don’t think God wants this soul to be reared among the things of this world.22

In fact, the girl was so charming in her habit that the nuns had her portrait painted. The painting, attributed to Juan de la Miseria, hangs in the convent of San José today (figure 1). Teresa had consulted two canonists over the legality of bringing Teresita into San José. As she reports to Gracián in this same letter, they had informed her that the Council of Trent specified that no one under twelve years of age could be given the habit, but that a child could be raised in a convent.23 Thus 20 Darcy Donahue has observed in the autobiographical writings of other Discalced Carmelite nuns a similar tendency to see their religious vocation beginning in early childhood; ‘Portrait of the Holy Woman as a Young Girl: Childhood in the Autobiographies of Spanish Nuns’, paper delivered at the Folger Library, 1995. 21 Letter to Madre María Bautista, August 1575; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 222. ‘La Teresa habrá ocho u nueve años, harto bonita y hermosa’; Cartas, p. 771. 22 27 September 1575; The Collected Letters, p. 228. ‘Ya ella está acá con su hábito, que parece duende de la casa, y su padre que no cabe de placer, y todas gustan mucho de ella; y tiene una condicioncita como un ángel, y sabe entretener bien en las recreaciones contando de los indios y de la mar mejor que yo lo contara. Holgádome he que no les dará pesadumbre…Creo [Dios] se ha de servir de que esta alma no se críe en las cosas del mundo’; Cartas, pp. 212–13. 23 In fact, the Council of Trent specified that giving the habit to a girl younger than fifteen required a dispensation from the bishop. See note 9 above. The two canonists either neglected to inform Teresa of this requirement or she chose to ignore it.

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Attr. to Juan de la Miseria, Portrait of Teresita de Cepeda holding the tiny figure (of Christ?) (copyright: Convent of Discalced Carmelite Nuns, San José, Seville).

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Teresa was well aware that Teresita had not officially begun her novitiate. But the unofficial ceremony during which Gracián bestowed a habit on Teresita subsequently became a point of contention when the convent became embroiled in a dispute with the Calced branch (fathers of the mitigated observance) of the order. In 1578, María de San José dismissed a confessor with whom she disagreed over questions of spiritual direction. He retaliated by denouncing the convent to the Carmelite provincial for a bizarre conglomeration of doctrinal and moral offences. Although the original charges have been lost, the retractions have survived. According to one retraction, ‘Several nuns said that one time [Father Gracián] held a girl called Teresica between his legs right in front of the sisters, and that at that moment our Mother Foundress said, “I wish I were you, Teresica.” I declare this testimony to be false…’.24 María de San José, who claims she made her confession under duress, states in her retraction: I made a grievous error when, having been asked if the aforementioned father [Gracián] had held an eight-year-old girl between his legs, I said yes. I did not note the difference between holding her this way and having her leaning against his side, as in fact was the case. He had just given her the habit, which she received with the spirit and devotion of an angel. And everything Father [Gracián] said to the girl was in this spirit. When he asked her if she was to marry, it was to see the prudence with which she answered, and he was pleased that she hated the idea of marriage. And all this took place when the girl’s father was present.25

What was really at the bottom of the troubles in Seville remains murky.26 We know that the Calced interrogators were enraged over Gracián’s treatment of them during his role as visitor (inspector) to the province in Andalusia. Gracián’s familiar relationship with the Seville prioress, his lax observance of enclosure, and the irregularity of Teresita’s status in the convent gave them plenty of ammunition for extracting revenge.27 24 ‘Item, que dicen tener una vez a una niña llamda Teresica entre las pierans delante de las mismas hermanas, y que aquel instante dijo nuestra Madre Fundadora: quien fuera tu Teresica. Digo a esto, que es testimonio, que no pasó….’; quoted in Enrique Llamas Martínez, Santa Teresa de Jesús y la Inquisición española (Madrid, 1972), p. 204. 25 ‘Lo segundo en que agravié, fue en que, preguntándome si el dicho Padre había tenido una niña de ocho años entre sus pierans, dije: sí, no advirtiendo la diferencia que en esto había, de tenerla allí, o arrimada al lado, como a la verdad fue, acabándola de dar el hábito, el cual, con tanto espíritu y devoción tomaba como un ángel. Y de esta misma manera eran todas las palabras que allí el dicho Padre decía a la niña de que si se había de casar, por ver con la prudencia con que respondía, holgándose de que así aborreciese los casamientos, y esto fue estando su padre presente de la misma niña’; ibid., p. 202. 26 I discuss this episode from 1578, in which María de San José and Gracián were charged with immorality, in Alison Weber, ‘María de San José: Saint Teresa’s “Difficult” Daughter’, in Christopher Wilson (ed.), The Heirs of St. Teresa of Avila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy (Washington, 2006), pp. 1–20. 27 María’s description of the unofficial ceremony reveals that both Lorenzo and Gracián spent time within the cloister, in contravention of Tridentine legislation on enclosure. Chapter V of the twenty-fifth session states, ‘Neither shall anyone, of whatever birth or condition, sex or age, be permitted . . . to enter the enclosure of a monastery without the written permission of the bishop

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Surprisingly, the whole affair blew over relatively quickly. The prioress was deposed and imprisoned for six months, but within a year a new vicargeneral, Angel de Salazar, restored her privileges, and the following year all the allegations were retracted. Why wasn’t the apparent infraction of the Tridentine decree regarding the minimum age for bestowing the habit taken more seriously?28 I can only speculate that the vicar-general wanted to put an end to the order’s internecine conflict. If this was the case, then amnesty was the best policy.29 Still, the episode suggests that although Teresita may have been a boarder in the eyes of canonists, in the imagination of the Seville community she was a postulant. The ceremony of bestowing the habit on the girl may have been performed with the knowledge that it was not legally binding, but it seems to have been carried out with the clear expectation of Teresita’s religious vocation. During the Seville trials of 1578, Teresita and Teresa were far from Seville. In June 1576, Teresa had been ordered to return to Castile; she made the journey accompanied by Lorenzo and Teresita. Although the little girl had become very fond of the Seville nuns, her aunt thought it best for her to be raised in the Avila convent near her father. As Teresa wrote to María de San José during a stop in Malagón: Teresa was a little sad on the journey, especially the first day. She said it was caused by having to leave the sisters behind. On arriving here, she felt as though she had been living with these sisters all her life. She was so happy she could hardly eat supper the day we arrived. I was delighted because I believe her affection for them is deeply rooted.

In a footnote she adds, ‘Teresa is not writing to you because she is busy. She says she is prioress and sends you her best regards’.30 Why is Teresa paying such close attention to Teresita’s emotional state? Is she worried that the girl, having formed attachments to the Seville nuns, will find it difficult to move to a new convent? Or by describing Teresita’s happiness in Malagón – her adaptability, we might say – is she justifying her decision to take her back to Castile? The later seems to be the case. Within or the superior’ (Canons and Decrees, p. 221). Given the strained relations between the Discalced and the bishop of Seville, it seems highly unlikely that they had received this permission. 28 The twenty-fifth session explicitly ‘anathematizes each and all persons ... who shall … in any way force any virgin or widow … to take the habit of any religious order or to make a profession’; ibid., p. 228. 29 María de San José later wrote that the Inquisition collaborated with the Calced fathers in extracting confessions from the nuns by threatening them with excommunication. Nevertheless, the Holy Office never brought a formal process against the convent; see María de San José Salazar, Book for the Hour of Recreation, trans. Amanda Powell, Alison Weber (ed.) (Chicago, 2000), pp. 155–6. 30 15 June 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, pp. 285–6. ‘Teresa ha vendio, especial el primer día, bien tristecilla; decía que de dejar a las hermanas. En viéndose acá, como si toda su vida hubiera estado con ellas, que de contento casi no cenó aquella noche que venimos. Heme holgado, porque creo es muy de raíz el ser aficionada a ellas…. Teresa no la escribe porque está ocupada; dice ella que es priora, y se le encomienda mucho’; Cartas, p. 560.

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three months, Teresita had joined the community of nuns in the convent of San José in Avila. Teresa, ordered to stay in Toledo, once again sends news of Teresita to the Seville prioress: All of the nuns [in Avila] tell of how they are in awe at the perfection they see in her and inclination to assume the lowest offices. She tells them they shouldn’t think that because she is the niece of the foundress they should esteem her more, but less. They are very fond of her; they say any number of things about her. I tell you this so that you may give praise to God, for you were the nuns who directed her toward the desire for this good.31

In the following months, Teresa seldom writes to María without including news of the little girl: ‘Teresa is well and sends you her regards. She is a lovely child and has grown a great deal. Pray for her that God may make her his servant.’32 When María de San José sends sweets and orange-flower water to Avila, Teresa writes: Oh, and Teresa[ita], how she jumped for joy when she saw what you had sent her! It is extraordinary how she loves you. I think she would forsake her own father to go anywhere with you. The older she grows, the more virtuous and sensible she gets. She has already begun to receive Holy Communion and shows no little devotion.33

Once again, the letters leave the clear impression that although Teresa appreciated the girl’s distinct, childlike sensibility, she saw clear signs of a future vocation. This is even more clear in a letter written to Lorenzo in 1577. Teresa had become her brother’s unofficial spiritual director, and in this letter she gives him some pointers on using the hair shirt and discipline she is sending him. For example, she counsels Lorenzo not to wear the hair shirt at night or more than two days a week and to place a little linen cloth between it and his stomach, and not hit himself too hard with the discipline. ‘God desires your health more than your penance, and that you obey’, she advises.34 In the same letter she adds, ‘I am sending [a hair shirt] to Teresa and also a discipline that she requested of me, a very hard one. Have it sent to her with

31 7 September 1576; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 314. ‘A todas dicen las trae confusas de ver su perfección y la inclinación a oficios bajos. Dice que no piense que por ser sobrina de la fundadora la han de tener en más, sino en menos. Quiérenla mucho; hartas cosas dicen de ella. Para que alaben a Dios (pues ellas le dieron a ganar este bien) les digo esto’; Cartas, p. 570. 32 22 October 1577; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 569. ‘Teresa está buena y se encomienda a vuestra reverencia. Está muy bonita y ha crecido mucho. Encomiéndela a Dios que la haga su sierva’; Cartas, p. 658. 33 June 4 1578. Since the second volume of letters translated by Kavanaugh was still in press at the time this essay was submitted, for letters written after 1578 I cite from the following translation: The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers (2 vols, Westminster, 1950), ii, p. 576. ‘¡Oh, Teresa qué saltos daba con lo que la envió! Es cosa extraña lo que la quiere. Creo dejaría a su padre por irse con ella. Mientras más crece, tiene más virtud y muy cordecita; ya comulga y no con poca devoción’; Cartas, p. 672. 34 27–28 February 1577; The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 506. ‘[M]as quiere Dios su salud que su penitencia, y que obedezca’; Cartas, p. 52.

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my best regards’.35 I must note that Teresa’s attitude toward physical penance was moderate for her day; indeed, her letters show that she often tried to restrain the penitential fervour in Discalced monasteries and convents. Yet this letter also indicates that she considered physical penance, provided it did not endanger one’s health, to be an important part of spiritual life. She did not deem an eleven-year-old too young to adopt the hair shirt and discipline.36 Today it is difficult for us to imagine how girls brought up in these circumstances could have freely chosen their vocation. From the time she was nine, Teresita was surrounded by people who clearly expected her to become a nun, and from the evidence of Teresa’s letters she was doing everything to fulfil their expectations. But in the one surviving letter that Teresa wrote directly to her niece shortly after Lorenzo died in 1580, there are indications that all was not well with the fourteen-year-old. Teresa offers the following consolation: As to the aridity you are suffering from, it seems to me Our Lord is treating you like someone He considers strong: He wants to test you and see if you love Him as much at times of aridity as when He sends you consolations…. If any bad thought comes to you, make the sign of the Cross, or say a Paternoster, or strike your breast, and try to think of something else: if you do that, the thought will actually be winning you merit, because you will be resisting it.37

The aridity, scruples, and temptations that Teresita has apparently been suffering from were common afflictions experienced by postulants as they approached the end of their novitiate. The reassuring tone of Teresa’s letter suggests that she did not believe that Teresita was suffering from a real crisis of vocation. Teresa informs her nephew Lorenzo, who had gone back to the Indies, that his little sister had taken their father’s death ‘like an angel – which indeed she is, and a splendid nun and very happy in her vocation.’ 38 A year later, Teresa informs Lorenzo that his fifteen-year-old sister ‘is a woman now and is continually growing in virtue. You can safely take her advice, for, though the letter she is sending you made me laugh, God is indeed speaking through

35 The Collected Letters, vol. i, p. 505. ‘A Teresa envío uno y una disciplina que me envió a pedir muy recia; mándesela dar vuestra merced y mis encomeindas’; Cartas, pp. 51–2. 36 On the basis of representations of childhood in twenty convent autobiographies, Isabelle Poutrin argues that children who had reached the age of reason (at six or seven) were deemed capable of understanding the articles of faith, praying, and performing penance; Isabelle Poutrin, ‘Souvenirs d’enfance: L’apprentissage de la sainteté dans l’Espagne moderne’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 32 (1987), 331–54. 37 7 August 1580; The Letters of Saint Teresa, vol. ii, p. 767. ‘En lo que toca a las sequedades, paréceme que la trata ya nuestro Señor como a quien tiene por fuerte, pues la quiere probar para entender el amor que le tiene, si es también en la sequedad como en los gustos; téngolo por merced de Dios muy grande….Cuando algún pensamiento malo le viniere, satígüese o rece un Paternóster o dése un golpe en los pechos y procure pensar en otra cosa, y antes será mérito, pues resiste’; Cartas, p. 872. Lorenzo had died suddenly on 26 June 1580. 38 28 December, 1580; The Letters of Saint Teresa, vol. ii, p. 791. ‘… lo ha llevado como un ángel, y así lo está y muy buena monja y con gran contento de serlo’; Cartas, p. 104.

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her…’. Teresa looked forward to going to Avila for Teresita’s impending profession. Teresita’s profession was delayed, however, due to a dispute over her father’s will. Lorenzo père had destined part of his legacy for the convent of San José in Avila should his son Francisco have no heir at the time of the father’s death. This was a reasonable provision, since Francisco was planning to become a Carmelite friar. But shortly after his father’s death, Francisco abandoned his novitiate and married a woman from a noble but penurious family. His formidable mother-in-law decided to dispute the convent’s legacy.40 To protect Teresita, now described as ‘quite a sad little thing’, from the pressure of her relatives, Teresa secured permission to bring the girl with her when she made her next foundation in Burgos.41 From Burgos, Teresa writes to María de San José that Teresita ‘is a real little saint and longs to be professed’, and asks María to pray for her: ‘You will realise she needs it, for, after all, though she is a good little creature, she is only a child’.42 In fact, Teresita, as she declared years later in Teresa’s beatification process, was planning to abandon the Carmelites for another order. 39

One day, when this witness was having various thoughts and imaginings and struggling with herself over whether she would leave this order and go to another, hiding all of this from the Holy Mother, … she [Teresa], with a rather severe expression, let this witness know that she knew what had happened in her heart, and she made counter-arguments to what she was desiring and thinking about joining another more relaxed order…. This reasoning was so grave and efficacious that this witness felt very ashamed and she made up her mind to profess in this order, which she did a few days after the death of the Holy Mother.43 39 15 December 1581; The Letters of Saint Teresa, vol. ii, 905. ‘[E]stá ya mujer y siempre crece en virtud. Bien puede tomar sus consejos, que me ha hecho reír cuando vi la carta que le escribe, que verdaderamente habla Dios en ella y obra bien lo que dice’; Cartas, p. 108. 40 In 1580, Francisco de Cepeda, the elder son of Lorenzo, married Orofrisia de Mendoza y Castilla, daughter of Doña Beatriz de Castilla y Mendoza and Francisco de Mendoza. Although the two families were among the noblest in Spain, they had fallen on hard times financially. Elizabeth Lehfeldt has shown that in post-Tridentine Castile nuns were often involved in protracted lawsuits with their natal families over dowry payments, maintenance allowances, and inheritance rights; ‘Convents as Litigants: Dowry and Inheritance Disputes in Early-Modern Spain’, Journal of Social History 33 (2000), 645–64. 41 29 November 1581; The Letters of Saint Teresa, vol. ii, p. 896. ‘anda tristecilla’; Cartas, p. 466. From the evidence of this and other letters, Gracián was playing a role in persuading Teresita not to abandon her vocation. 42 6 July 1582 and 14 July 1582; The Letters of Saint Teresa, vol. ii, pp. 948, 950. ‘…está muy santita y con mucho deseo de verse ya profesa’ ‘Miren que lo ha menester que aunque es bonita, es niña, en fin’; Cartas, pp. 749, 751. 43 ‘Habiendo estado un día, entre otros, esta declarante con varios pensamientos e imaginaciones y entre éstas batallando dentro de sí de si dejaría esta Orden e iría a otra, y todo esto encubriéndolo mucho a la Santa Madre, . . . con rostro algo severo, dió a entender a esta declarante lo que en su corazón había pasado y la fué haciendo una contraposición de lo que deseaba o pensaba de ir a otra Religión más abierta…. Fué este razonamiento tan eficaz y grave, que esta declarante quedó muy confusa y se determinó de profesar en esta Orden, como lo hizo pocos días después de la muerte de la dicha Santa Madre’; quoted in Silverio de Santa Teresa,

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Given the determination of Francisco and his mother-in-law to overturn the conditions of Lorenzo’s will, one wonders if Teresita’s temptation ‘to leave this order’ and join another one may have been a coded expression for abandoning the religious life altogether. A good marriage for Teresita might have suited Francisco’s – and his mother-in-law’s – ambitions for the family. Nevertheless, whether they planned to place Teresita in another order or arrange a marriage for her, they were probably using Teresita to put pressure on her aunt, in effect saying, ‘release your claim on Lorenzo’s bequest or lose Teresita’. Returning to Avila, the party stopped at the Discalced convent of Valladolid, where Teresa’s cousin, María Bautista, was prioress. Here Teresa discovered that her cousin and Teresita had joined forces with Francisco, his wife, and motherin-law to contest Lorenzo’s will. When Teresa refused to concede, María Bautista unceremoniously ejected her from the convent. Shortly afterwards, on 4 October 1582, the foundress died, with her niece as witness to her final agony.44 One month later, Teresita made her profession in Avila. Such a scenario complicates rather than resolves the question of the efficacy of the Tridentine rulings on the age of spiritual consent.45 With the exception of a wealthy aristocrat who had obtained a papal dispensation, during Teresa’s lifetime no novice made binding vows before the legal age of sixteen. Yet it is clear that Teresa believed that she had discerned Teresita’s vocation long before the official beginning of the novitiate and exerted considerable influence to make it come to fruition. Was Teresita brainwashed, or if that is too strong a word, conditioned to believe that a monastic vocation was the result of her autonomous choice? In the dispute between her worldly relatives and her aunt, did Teresita find a window of opportunity to express her will, or did she continue to mirror the expectations of which ever side had the most immediate access to her? 46 If Teresa hadn’t died in 1582 in her niece’s presence, would Teresita have returned to the world? These are questions that must remain unanswered. But it is instructive to observe that even within a reformed order – indeed, within the family of the paradigmatic Tridentine reformer – family

Historia del Carmen Descalzo en España, Portugal y América. vol. 4: La Descalcez independiente (1577–1582) (Burgos, 1936), pp. 791–2 (my translation). According to Silverio de Santa Teresa, this testimony was taken in Avila in 1610. However, the only testimony of Teresita’s included in the publication he cites is from 1598. See Procesos de beatificación y canonización de Santa Teresa de Jesús, Silverio de Santa Teresa (ed.), Biblioteca mística carmelitana (3 vols, Burgos, 1934–35). 44 Teresita describes her aunt’s suffering followed by her serene death in a detailed testimony for Teresa’s beatification in 1598; Procesos de beatificación y canonización de Santa Teresa de Jesús, vol. i, pp. 189–98. 45 There is evidence from seventeenth-century Seville that parents paid dowries for daughters as young as four years of age; Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Seville (Princeton, 1990), p. 91. Although these were not legally binding monastic dowries, according to Tridentine and post-Tridentine legislation, they may be indications of long-term intentions on the part of the parents. 46 Poutrin astutely notes that we cannot assume that girls were entirely passive in their assimilation of models of religious behaviour their families and their culture imbued in them; ‘Souvenirs d’enfance: L’apprentissage de la sainteté dans l’Espagne moderne’, p. 351.

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attachments and family finances could threaten to undermine Tridentine legislation. To conclude, Teresa’s letters provide further evidence that the so-called modernisation paradigm – the thesis that the early modern era lacked a concept of childhood – is inadequate. More significantly, however, the letters indicate that notions of childhood were labile and could reflect ambivalence and contradictions. Clearly, Teresa was cognisant that the ‘little angels’ were intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually immature. But unlike the Tridentine canonists, she saw no clear demarcation point between childhood and spiritual maturity. For the Carmelite reformer, a vocation was not the result of an autonomous choice but a continuing response to God’s plan. And God, she believed, sometimes had plans for little girls.

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Chapter eleven

Securing Souls or Telling Tales? The Politics of Cloistered Life in an English Convent Claire Walker

On 8 April 1623 Dame Agnes Lenthall, the novice mistress at the English Benedictine abbey in Brussels, wrote to the archbishop of Mechelen, the cloister’s ecclesiastical superior, detailing a number of disorders within her house. Underpinning several of her concerns was the complaint that ‘ther is such continuallye examininge & talkinge of one anothers accions & proceedings, one to another, & of the gostlye fathers makinge our selves ther judges, that it maketh a busnis in the house of nothinge, & a motive of breach of charitie’. Lenthall was writing at the outset of what would become a major dispute which factionalised the community for thirty years, and severely damaged the convent’s reputation. Although the issues behind the disunity were varied and complex, at the root of the Benedictine nuns’ difficulties was a breakdown of authority, centred principally on conflicting views about the convent’s spiritual direction, but also involving personal clashes between the abbess, Mary Percy, and senior nuns. At its height, the rebellious nuns blockaded part of their cloister against the abbess and her supporters, which led to the expulsion of the ringleaders, while other rebels left to found a new monastery. The departure of a controversial confessor in 1637 partially healed the rift in the house, but even the death of Abbess Mary Percy in 1642 did not restore complete harmony. Peace eventually returned in 1652 after the nuns united against the archbishop when he imposed his own candidate as abbess. The Brussels Benedictine dispute reveals the avenues open to cloistered women to express dissent and challenge authority. The voluminous files of correspondence in the archdiocesan archives at Mechelen attest that disaffected nuns were prepared to argue their case to their ecclesiastical superior, and present a litany of their opponents’ faults to support the veracity of their own position. Accusations ranged from the indiscriminate talk outlined by Lenthall and the censure of the abbess as authoritarian, prone to favouritism and persecution of her opponents, to more scandalous assertions of sexual impropriety and witchcraft. The letters’ claims and counter claims reveal the  Archdiocesan Archives of Mechelen-Brussels (hereafter AAM), Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Agnes Lenthall to Jacob Boonen, 8 April 1623.

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degree to which rumour and innuendo abounded within monastic enclosures and how this scandalous information might be used in internal power plays. This paper seeks to examine the letters’ language of complaint to understand how convent hierarchies and interpersonal relationships were negotiated. The correspondence shows that nuns’ status in the cloister was measured not only by worldly standards, such as social background, but also by the way women religious exercised their temporal and spiritual obligations. Indeed spirituality is a central theme in many of the missives; not only because the struggle at Brussels focused on differing modes of spiritual direction, but also because individual nuns understood it was both a potent weapon and a valuable asset in the quest to vanquish their opponents and achieve their desired devotional and governance goals. Just as in the secular world a woman’s chastity and sexual reputation might be questioned in neighbourhood disputes, so in the cloister the nun’s spirituality and her suitability as a bride of Christ could be impugned during disagreements and power struggles. Gossip evidently played a central role in the eruption, evolution, and resolution of events at Brussels, so firstly I will examine its place in early modern society and politics and, more particularly, in religious cloisters. The second section will explore the ways in which it was manifested in the Brussels dispute. I will look specifically at the early years of disharmony, outlining the kinds of accusations opponents levelled at one another, and the targets of gossip in the abbey. Finally, I will discuss the function of gossip within the religious community. Gossip and the Monastic Community Gossip can be defined as ‘informal private communication between an individual and a small, selected audience concerning the conduct of absent persons or events’. Although there is an increasing historical literature on its significance in early modern society, much of it is grounded in the earlier research of anthropologists. Max Gluckman’s analysis of the social functions of gossip, despite criticism and modification by his peers, has been particularly useful. Gluckman argued that gossip performed a vital function in maintaining the ‘unity, morals and values’ of a social group, while also controlling ‘competing cliques and aspiring individuals’ within it, as well as facilitating the choice of leaders through verbal evaluations of contenders’ character, leadership qualities and work capacity. Although Gluckman focused on the positive attributes for group cohesion and control and largely ignored the destructive element of gossip, and indeed its importance for individuals, his work is useful for the study of ‘small, morally homogeneous, and bonded social groups’ like convents.  Sally Engle Merry, ‘Rethinking Gossip and Scandal’, in Donald Black (ed.), Toward a General Theory of Social Control, vol. 1: Fundamentals (New York, 1984), p. 275.  Max Gluckman, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology 4 (1963), 308, 310.  Merry, ‘Rethinking Gossip’, p. 274.

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More recent analyses have stressed the gendered nature of gossip, arguing that it is primarily, although not exclusively, associated with women. This is significant for studies of gossip in early modern society for two principal reasons. Firstly, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century people considered it a predominantly female activity; and, secondly, scholars have increasingly focused on the centrality of gossip in defining ‘a good name or reputation’. Thus, historians have largely approached gossip from the perspectives of scolding and slander, with gender a primary consideration. Using the voluminous records of both the common law and church courts, scholars like James Sharpe, Martin Ingram and Laura Gowing have evaluated the motives, language and significance of defamation in early modern England. Ingram noted that ‘slander suits in the church courts sprang from a society in which sexual reputation, “credit” or “honesty” was of considerable and … practical importance and a major touchstone of respectability’. Contemporaries were well aware of the relationship between gossip and honour across the social spectrum, and Sharpe has asserted that it did ‘function in controlling sexual behaviour and, in particular, female sexual behaviour’ in the sense that ‘behaviour would be commented upon and that reputations could be lost’. Yet Gowing’s investigation of the language of insult has suggested that slanderous words were more complex than simply the enforcement of communal behavioural norms. Sexual insult was a discourse used by both women and men in household and neighbourhood disputes, thus ‘the words of slander, ostensibly about sex, turn out to be about almost everything else’, ranging from disagreements over marital relations, children’s behaviour, servants, property, money and business. Gossip was similarly complex. Often dismissed by contemporaries and modern scholars alike as a ‘private’ activity predominantly confined to women, recent historical research has pointed to the anomalies in this interpretation. Steve Hindle has argued that ‘gossip was a formative stage in the development of “public opinion” over a whole range of issues, local and national, private and public, personal and political’.10 His point is clearly illustrated by Dagmar Freist’s analysis of public opinion in Caroline London about the unfolding  Alexander Rysman, ‘How the “Gossip” became a Woman’, Journal of Communication 27 (1977), 176–80; Deborah Jones, ‘Gossip: Notes of Women’s Oral Culture’ (1980), rpd in Deborah Cameron (ed.), The Feminist Critique of Language (London, 1990), pp. 242–9. For an excellent discussion of female and male gossip in Venice, see Elizabeth Horodowich, ‘The Gossiping Tongue: Oral Networks, Public Life and Political Culture in Early Modern Venice’, Renaissance Studies 19 (2005), 22–45.  Peter J. Wilson, ‘Filcher of Good Names: An Enquiry into Anthropology and Gossip’, Man 9 (1974), 100.  Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 292.  James Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (University of York, Borthwick Papers no. 58, 1980), pp. 20–21.  Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford, 1998), pp. 114–19. 10 Steve Hindle, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change 9 (1994), 393.

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religious and political situation. Freist noted that ‘being part of public opinion, rumours and gossip thrived even more at moments of crisis throughout the seventeenth century, and gossip, which is usually associated with private talk and women, became politicised’.11 James Daybell has likewise revealed women’s role in disseminating news through their social discourse and correspondence with family, friends and patrons, noting that they reported political events, and even transmitted newsletters, as well as engaging in seemingly apolitical social chitchat. In fact much of the latter might just as easily be considered political. Daybell points out that information construed as gossip, such as what gift might please the queen, was in fact important political capital which might advance the recipient’s interests at court.12 Moreover, gossip of a more ‘social’ nature was never without wider public import. It created ‘cognitive maps of social identities and reputations’ in early modern communities.13 Reports of the poor characters and misdeeds of neighbours spread by social discourse might have serious consequences if taken seriously by the authorities. Ulinka Rublack’s study of female crime in early modern Germany has shown that gossip about matters like illegitimate pregnancy and infanticide could lead to prosecution and even execution.14 Similarly, scholars of witchcraft have explored neighbourhood gossip’s role in identifying, accusing and ultimately condemning witches.15 Thus, like slanderous insults, gossip also held significance beyond the actual information imparted to friends and neighbours. What seemed on the surface ‘idle chatter’ might be asserting communal standards of behaviour or defining group boundaries or engaging in political activity. Steve Hindle and Dagmar Freist have both considered the centrality of female social space and women’s networks in exchanging sensitive news.16 Whatever the intent, relaying rumours or being party to them was an empowering experience for those concerned, and they clearly understood that their words were politically charged. Thus gossip might be a powerful tool in individuals or factions’ quests to alter the status quo. Spreading rumours about neighbours could effect changes which might otherwise not be possible.17 And this was as true in religious communities as in secular neighbourhoods. 11 Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (London and New York, 1997), pp. 21–2; see also pp. 211–13. 12 James Daybell, ‘“Suche newes as on the Quenes hye wayes we have mett”: The News and Intelligence Networks of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (c.1527–1608)’, in James Daybell (ed.), Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700 (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 121, 125. 13 Merry, ‘Rethinking Gossip’, p. 279. 14 Ulinka Rublack, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 1999), pp. 16–27. 15 Clive Holmes, ‘Women Witnesses and Witches’, Past and Present 140 (1993), 45–78; James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London, 1996), chs 6 and 7, esp. pp. 182–5; L. K. Deal, ‘Widows and Reputation in the Disocese of Chester, England, 1560–1650’, Journal of Family History 23 (1998), 382–92; Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York, 2002). 16 Hindle, ‘Shaming of Margaret Knowsley’, p. 393; Freist, Governed by Opinion, pp. 291–2. 17 Horodowich, ‘Gossiping Tonue’, 32–3.

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Most references to gossip with respect to monastic women, focus upon it as an external threat – one that constitutes a source of distraction from outside the cloister. News from or about the secular world and its values was deemed dangerous by ecclesiastical authorities, because it reminded professed nuns, who had supposedly cut ties with those outside the enclosure, of the very people, events and ideals they were meant to forget. Gossip accordingly imperilled nuns’ immortal souls. Mary Laven’s study of Venetian cloisters highlighted the authorities’ inveterate problem of eliminating conduits of news embodied in convents’ scholars, boarders and lay servants. Of particular concern were visits by friends and relatives in convent parlours and local laywomen who performed services for the nuns. They were the recipients of monastic hospitality and gifts and, in return, they would run errands and bring news of worldly affairs. Casual lay servants, who were deemed the worst offenders in this respect, were actually described as ‘gossips’ by witnesses of their intercourse with those nuns who frequented the doors, windows and other points of contact between the cloister and the city.18 The verbal permeability of enclosure was not restricted to Venetian religious houses. Despite Archbishop Carlo Borromeo’s careful attention to detail in reforming Milanese monasteries, news from the world invariably found its way into the Angelic convent of San Paolo via the boarding girls and other visitors who remained a necessary evil in the monastic economy.19 In a third order regular Franciscan cloister in Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands which, like the English Benedictines in Brussels, experienced factionalism during the early seventeenth century, the nuns similarly exchanged material and oral gifts with little regard to the terms of their claustration.20 Craig Harline’s story of the misfortunes of Sister Margaret Smulders and her dysfunctional convent reveals another dangerous aspect of ‘idle talk’ or ‘prattling’ within religious communities – that of fostering internal discord. In the numerous letters and interviews through which the Bethlehem sisters communicated their rivalries to the ecclesiastical authorities, it is evident that gossip was rife in the house and it did much to foster suspicion and resentment among opposing factions. According to Sister Margaret, the mother superior whom she disliked and blamed for the community’s ills was one of the worst offenders, both indulging in the practice herself and turning a blind eye towards those of her flock who were irredeemable gossips.21 Such unseemly conversation among inhabitants had plagued monasteries for centuries, evidenced by various edicts against ‘idle talkers’. However, the problems at Bethlehem show that internal gossip was potentially more dangerous than the distractions of secular news at the grate. Dissatisfaction with the status 18 Mary Laven, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (London 2002), ch. 7, esp. pp. 124–9. 19 P. Renée Baernstein, A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York and London, 2002), pp. 87–8, 95. 20 Craig Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret (New York, 1994), pp. 129–40, 148–51, 153, 215. 21 Ibid., pp. 115–16, 121–2, 147–8, 153, 185, 226–8, 248.

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quo might well lead to internal divisions and even revolt against the nuns holding authority. Moreover, news of disunity would inevitably trickle from the enclosure, damaging the house’s reputation. Thus, warnings against casual conversation with visitors and monastic servants were just as concerned with the information which might be passed out of the convent as they were with worldly distractions filtering in. And there was a further dimension to internal gossip which ensured it was instrumental in laying bare internal difficulties to external bodies. If tensions were high enough, concerned nuns would inform their ecclesiastical superiors, either during a visitation, or via unsolicited correspondence. In both instances the grievances were documented as enduring records of hitherto verbal rumours. The epistolary gossip of the English Benedictine nuns provides the subject-matter of this paper. Gossip and the English Benedictines of Brussels The Statutes of the English Benedictines made abundantly clear the prescriptions against gossip. In the chapter on ‘Silence’, the nuns were admonished against murmuring about their sisters both to one another and to secular people, they were exhorted always to speak modestly and charitably of worthy subjects and not relate news from outside the cloister and, significantly, they were warned to converse ‘in publike, and not on Corners, or in their Cells’ where presumably the seeds of sedition might be sown.22 Although the emphasis in the statutes is directed towards spiritual profit and sisterly charity, specific elements highlight the kinds of difficulties that ecclesiastical supervisors, like Archbishop Mathias Hovius of Mechelen, understood might foster discord. Despite the stringent provisions for the house’s enclosure, which limited contact between the cloister and the world to the bare minimum, the permeability and danger of conversation necessitated further restrictions and warnings. In fact, as the examples from other cloisters noted above have shown, no matter how many statutory prohibitions existed, the evils they aimed to eliminate, or at least discourage, surfaced regardless. At Brussels, like elsewhere, the statutes were disregarded. In 1620 Hovius’s visitation recommended that indiscriminate social intercourse at the grate was distracting the nuns and damaging the house’s reputation.23 In 1623 Agnes Lenthall reported that certain nuns were to be found continually at the grate talking to seculars, including English Protestants, ‘ther talke tendinge to nothing but vanitie’.24 Anne Ingleby likewise complained about the difficulties caused by hospitality, writing that guests brought ‘much vanity and distraction in to our house: for 22 Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule of … S. Benedict … Delivered to the English Religious Woemen of the Monastery of Our Blessed Lady of the Perpetuall Virgin Mary in Bruxelles and to all their Successours [hereafter Benedictine Statutes] (Ghent, 1632), Part 1, pp. 24–9. 23 AAM, Mechliniensia, ms Reg.8, fol. 236c, Visitatio Monastery S. Mariae Ordinis S. Benedicti Anglarum Bruxellen, 10 May 1620. Thanks to Craig Harline for this reference. 24 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Agnes Lenthall to Jacob Boonen, 8 April 1623.

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ther wordes and carrage is very unfitting for us to see which hath left the world alltogether’.25 It is impossible to know if the worldly intrusions noted by Hovius and highlighted by Lenthall and Ingleby contributed to the mounting disquiet at Brussels, but the obvious freedom with which certain members of the community accessed secular people and news exacerbated a potentially serious situation. An examination of the Brussels correspondence shows that ‘idle chatter’ was not only distracting nuns from their spiritual obligations. It also became a crucial weapon in the lengthy struggle for spiritual and political control of the community. Correspondence to Jacob Boonen, Hovius’s successor as archbishop of Mechelen, at the outset of hostilities in the early 1620s ranged across a dizzying array of issues. Foremost were complaints about the leadership style of Abbess Mary Percy, who was accused of not governing in accordance with the cloister’s statutes. I have discussed the rebellion against Abbess Percy elsewhere so I do not want to detail it at length here.26 However, the misuse and control of information in the cloister was at the forefront of many nuns’ grievances. Mary Vavasour claimed that the abbess did not scruple at gossip in her efforts to demonise her opponents, noting she ‘douth usially speake of the imperfections of one Religious to an other’ and had recently told Vavasour about things her novice mistress had said against her more than three years previously.27 However, while Mary Percy enjoyed relating tittle-tattle about others, she was not so willing to tolerate others’ accounts of her own peccadilloes. Several women accused their abbess not only of questioning the grate sister, who monitored physical contact between the nuns and outsiders and the flow of correspondence, about which of her opponents had complained to the archbishop, but they also suggested that she searched their cells for correspondence intended for him. In April 1623 one of the deans (senior nuns assisting the abbess), Elizabeth Southcott, begged him to command Percy when she visited the nuns’ cells not to read papers written to him or to the visitor he appointed to monitor the house’s affairs.28 Mary Vavasour informed Boonen that the abbess had many times expressed her dislike of the statutory provision which permitted the nuns to report irregularities directly to the archbishop or visitor, perceiving it as a facility to ‘represse her’. Percy regularly complained about those in the cloister who exercised this right and sought to learn their identity. Vavasour noted that she was still in disfavour with the abbess for failing to inform her about one nun’s written complaint about Percy’s leadership which had come to light a year ago.29 Lucy Knatchbull revealed that a servant had been grilled by Abbess Percy about correspondence he had carried to Boonen, and that the abbess had declared she would ‘make Ibid., Anne Ingleby to Jacob Boonen, [1623]. Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke and New York, 2003), pp. 70–72. 27 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Mary Vavasour to Jacob Boonen, [1623]. 28 Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, 23 April 1623. 29 Ibid., Mary Vavasour to Jacob Boonen, [1623]. See also Teresa Gage to same, [1623]. 25 26

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no scruple to open’ any letters she intercepted because ‘she knew they could writ nothing but untruths against her’.30 Although Mary Percy endeavoured to stem the flow of criticism of her governance to the archbishop, she was unable to silence her critics because they were acting within the terms of the house’s statutes. The third part of the Brussels statutes dealt with external supervision and the nuns’ right to appeal to authorities outside the enclosure. They were allowed ‘free liberty’ to write to the bishop or visitor of any difficulties they perceived in the running of the monastic household, and the grate sister, responsible for forwarding the correspondence, was forbidden from telling anyone who had written such missives. Moreover, the statutes stated explicitly that the abbess and other senior nuns should not ‘hinder the free writing of their Religious to their Superiours … under payne of suspention from their Offices’. Nor was the abbess, or anyone who was the target of a grievance, to ‘goe about to finde out the Authors of the sayd Complaynte; neither may shee shew any signe of any greife or disgust’ against those she suspected of reporting her.31 Thus, individuals in religious communities were granted the facility to impart news of internal affairs to specific outsiders in the interests of preserving order in accordance with the rule and statutes without fear of internal retribution. Yet there were constraints upon untrammelled gossip filling such letters. Correspondents were admonished to consider carefully if the matter could not be resolved internally, and if they had to appeal to the visitor to ‘avoyde and fly all kinde of exaggerations in those things that they write and propounde, and they shall onely make a naked Relation of the matter’. Complaints were to be made upon legitimate grounds and must not ensue from ‘Passion’. False accusations would be punished.32 In the light of their statutory right to report impediments to good order and spiritual progress, the Brussels Benedictines who were dissatisfied with the status quo wrote of the manifold ills engulfing their community. After their grievances against their abbess, concerns about the cloister’s confessors featured prominently. Nowhere was this more evident than in the late 1620s and early 1630s after the appointment of the controversial secular priest, Anthony Champney, which led to the open rebellion against Mary Percy and the temporary departure of the rebels. However, dissatisfaction with the cloister’s clerical assistants predated the arrival of Champney in 1628. There was constant unease about the house’s relationship with the Society of Jesus, with pro- and anti-Jesuit nuns complaining about either insufficient access to the fathers or their corruption of Benedictine spirituality. Like the grievances against Mary Percy, I have discussed the spiritual grounding of the Brussels disunity elsewhere.33 Yet amidst the battles over which spiritual path best 30 Ibid., Lucy Knatchbull to Jacob Boonen, [1623]. For some other examples of Percy’s efforts to identify complainants, see Ursula Hewicke to Jacob Boonen, 19 June 1621; Frances Gawen to same, 29 July [1623]; Teresa Gage to same [1623]; Martha Colford to same [1623]. 31 Benedictine Statutes, Part 3, pp. 7–9. 32 Ibid., pp. 5–7. 33 Walker, Gender and Politics, pp. 138–42.

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suited the monastery, the house’s clerics caused other concerns. In 1623 several nuns, led by Lucy Knatchbull, appealed to the archbishop to remove one of the chaplains, Francis Ward. A young secular priest, educated and recently ordained in Rome, Ward arrived at the convent in 1621 to assist fellow secular priest, Robert Chambers, who had been there since 1599.34 There were evidently differences between the two men and the nuns divided into factions supporting one or the other. With the abbess in the Ward camp, many letters outline the virtues of Father Chambers and how Mary Percy sought to undermine his authority. Mary Vavasour claimed that Percy blamed all disobedience and subordination upon Chambers’s encouragement of such behaviour; an opinion strongly disputed by Vavasour, who declared the chaplain always exhorted his penitents to respect their superiors.35 Frances Gawen attributed the house’s difficulties to differences between the abbess and Chambers, noting also the convent’s division between the two confessors.36 Elizabeth Southcott agreed that many of the abbey’s problems stemmed from disunity between the confessor and the abbess, but she clearly saw the chaplain as the maligned party. She wrote of his dedication to the cloister and his good advice, which if followed would have prevented the difficulties then engulfing the community.37 Potentiana Deacon explained why there were divisions between the two chaplains. She reported that Francis Ward discouraged his penitents from seeking alternative spiritual guidance, in particular from the Jesuits, who since the cloister’s foundation had been available to those nuns, who profited from Ignatian piety. Robert Chambers apparently sanctioned this spiritual plurality so long as the nuns acted within the confines of their rule and statutes.38 Thus the abbess, who was keen to bar priests of the Society from the cloister, supported Ward’s stance and thereby both Percy and her preferred chaplain incurred the anger of those nuns desiring access to Jesuit confessors. However, Francis Ward’s unsuitability as a chaplain and various requests for his removal were not simply grounded in the seemingly perennial Jesuit/ secular debate at Brussels. Certain nuns accused him of improper dealings with some of his penitents. In May 1623 Lucy Knatchbull, the cloister’s cellaress, sent two accounts to Jacob Boonen detailing the chaplain’s impropriety with certain women. In the first, she explained that the previous Sunday he had preached a troubling sermon in which he endeavoured to clear himself and those nuns who were his special friends of any suspicion of inappropriate 34 Godfrey Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850 (4 vols, Ware-Durham and Great Wakering, 1969–77), i, p. 70; ii, p. 336. 35 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Mary Vavasour to Jacob Boonen [1623]. 36 Ibid., Frances Gawen to Jacob Boonen, 5 April 1623. For earlier notice of the problem, see Alexia Blanchard to Jacob Boonen, 20 November 1622; Elizabeth Southcott to same, 24 November 1622; Mary Wintour to same, [1622–23]. It was also criticised in Agnes Lenthall to same, 8 April 1623. 37 Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, 23 April 1623. 38 Ibid., Potentiana Deacon to Jacob Boonen, 26 August 1623.

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behaviour. Yet, despite his protestations, Knatchbull explained that several women were devoted to him, and one in particular ‘in all her cariage sheweth her selfe … passionately affected towards him’. This nun, one of the deans, was his confidante and as well as close physical contact with her, he had reputedly told her that ‘kissing thought [i.e. though] in some cases it might be sinne, yet it was nott as he used it’.39 By 16 May the cellaress had further damning accounts of Ward’s suspect conduct. A nun whose office necessitated regular meetings with the chaplain had admitted to Knatchbull that he often professed his love to her and kissed her. Too weak to resist his advances, the woman admitted his actions had generated ‘daingerus effects in her’ so that she had lost the ability to pray and was confused and troubled. Another nun reported similar amorous overtures which she had rejected. On behalf of several nuns Knatchbull requested that the archbishop dismiss Father Ward to prevent scandal.40 She was not the only one to report his infelicities. Potentiana Deacon castigated the May sermon which had prompted Knatchbull’s correspondence, and in a later missive she hinted at the chaplain’s impropriety with one of the novices whose acceptance for profession was imminent. She too sought his removal for fear that his familiarity with his favourites would lead to the house falling into ‘very great dissention and discord’.41 The young chaplain left Brussels in 1623, suggesting that these reports had substance and were not simply scurrilous attempts by pro-Jesuit nuns to damage the reputation of the abbess’s ally in her quest to diminish Jesuit influence in the house. However, Francis Ward’s departure did not resolve the deeper issues fracturing the increasingly troubled religious community. Potentiana Deacon’s critique of his conduct included mention of another novice, Margery Cotton, who desired Jesuit spiritual direction, but faced expulsion unless she submitted to Ward’s supervision. Cotton, along with several other women in the novitiate and certain recently professed nuns, became the new focal point for dissent. Those seeking admission as novices and then as professed nuns undertook periods of trial and training after which the choir nuns would vote to accept or reject their clothing as novices and profession of final vows. At Brussels it became apparent that those nuns who felt powerless in the face of their abbess’s authoritarianism sought the limited means available to them to thwart her, including wielding their right to include or exclude potential members. Thus, the early 1620s witnessed several battles over the acceptance of novices, and the novitiate became the symbol of all that was wrong in the fractured convent. One of the common complaints against Abbess Mary Percy was that she heeded the opinions of the younger professed nuns more than the advice of their seniors. The monastic hierarchy was structured according to age of religious profession and the statutes made clear the precedence of older sisters 41 1623. 39 40

Ibid., Lucy Knatchbull to Jacob Boonen, [May 1623]. Ibid., Lucy Knatchbull to Jacob Boonen, 16 May 1623. Ibid., Potentiana Deacon to Jacob Boonen, 19 May 1623; same to same, 26 August

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over their juniors in almost every situation. Hence, Percy’s opponents made much of the convent’s inverted hierarchy in their criticism of her leadership. In 1623 Frances Gawen informed the archbishop that insubordination was rife among younger members of the house, attributing the internal dissension to ‘the little esteeme the juniors have of the Deanes, Assistentes & other Ancientes’. She claimed that ‘as soone as they are professed they esteeme them selves subordinate to none but the Abbesse & Prioresse and scarsely to them’.42 Elizabeth Southcott complained that ‘some of the yoinger sort are given to make rediculous jestes of their anntientes’.43 Particular individuals were accused of fostering disrespect. Anne Ingleby outlined the problematic behaviour of Cecilia Atslow whose unchecked passionate outbursts had long troubled several nuns. Most recently she had refused to accept the authority of a dean who was temporarily replacing the prioress, belittling her in the presence of fascinated junior nuns and lay sisters who clamoured to know more about the contretemps.44 Frances Gawen suggested such difficulties might be solved by placing newly professed women under the authority of a senior mistress for two further years ‘for better grounding them in obedience [and] humilitie’. She also proposed that nuns should not be granted an active voice (the right to vote) in every election so that they might gain the maturity and experience to cast their ballots in accordance with communal interests rather than being swayed by peer pressure.45 Such attempts to curb the inappropriate power wielded by junior sisters represented another means by which their disaffected elders sought to restore the internal hierarchy, and thereby order, in the house. Yet the problems to be solved went deeper than simply better regulating existing members of the monastic household. Many correspondents questioned the suitability of women admitted for trial as postulants and novices. Frances Gawen blamed Mary Percy’s determination to impose her will on the convent and admit whoever she wished without informing the nuns of candidates’ ‘temporal, spiritual, and corporal abilities’.46 As a result there were various women whose tenure remained uncertain as the communal vote to accept or reject them was deferred indefinitely to allow them further time to secure their dowry, to reform their behaviour, or to recover their health. There was disquiet regarding several women’s suitability to proceed either to take the novice’s veil or to full profession of vows, but the two most contentious candidates were Frances Parker and the aforementioned Margery Cotton. Frances Parker, the daughter of Baron Monteagle, was disabled and the cloister’s deliberations regarding her acceptance had so infuriated her mother that she threatened to remove her daughter or not pay her dowry if she remained. Although Parker was allowed to become a novice, ultimately she was not accepted for profession as a choir nun after a heated debate about 44 45 46 42 43

Ibid., Frances Gawen to Jacob Boonen, 13 April 1623. Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, n.d. Ibid., Anne Ingleby to Jacob Boonen, [1623]. Ibid., Frances Gawen to Jacob Boonen, 13 April 1623. Ibid.

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both her suitability and the processes of admission intensified the disunity between the abbess’s faction and her opponents in the house. At issue were Parker’s disability (the statutes forbade the admission of disabled women), her vocation (which wavered as hostility to her mounted), her mother’s antipathy to the house (several nuns worried that this might damage the cloister’s reputation), her dowry (a substantial sum which would assist them greatly), and the abbess’s role in admitting her and leading her family to believe that there would be no difficulty securing her clothing and profession.47 Although there were clearly several anomalies surrounding Parker’s entrance into the community, the correspondence shows that she ultimately became a pawn in the factional rivalry which rent the convent apart. Few doubted her sincerity and desire to be a nun, she simply lacked the physical attributes specified in the statutes and this became the basis of opposition to her and thereby manifested further grounds for excluding her. A secret ballot in 1623 did just this and she was subsequently professed in the English Augustinian cloister in Leuven.48 Margery Cotton was a different case altogether, although many of the arguments raised against Frances Parker surfaced in the debate over her suitability. Placed in the cloister when she was about ten years old by her father who said he would provide her dowry should she wish to be a nun, she became a postulant in 1622. In April 1623 the novice mistress, Agnes Lenthall, wrote to the archbishop on her behalf, noting that despite many deficiencies in her conduct, Cotton was keen to be clothed as a novice in case her father died before she was accepted and her portion lost.49 The questionable postulant evidently attained her wish, but in October 1624 the new novice mistress, Ursula Hewicke, wrote of her disquiet about the abbess’s promise to secure Cotton’s profession in November, saying that she was not sure the woman had a vocation. Hewicke claimed that Cotton displayed little liking for the abbess, the convent or the religious life she was about to embrace, and that the abbess and confessor were determined to proceed with her acceptance because of her long residence, good portion and physical and spiritual potential.50 Hewicke’s misgivings clearly persuaded Boonen to delay the election, but they incurred the wrath of Mary Percy, who reputedly berated the novice for confiding in the novice mistress. Moreover, Hewicke’s communication with the archbishop caused a breakdown in the relationship between her and the abbess. 47 Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, 13 July 1622; Agnes Lenthall to same, April 1623; Ursula Hewicke to same [1623]; Frances Parker to same, [1623] and 15 May 1623; Ursula Hewicke to same, 17 May 1623; Eugenia Poulton, Elizabeth Southcott, Magdalen Digby, Lucy Knatchbull and Alexia Blanchard to same, 18 May 1623; Brussels Statutes, Part 2, pp. 65–6. For a discussion of this, see my ‘Recusants, Daughters, and Sisters in Christ: English Nuns and their Communities in the Seventeenth Century’, in Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Broomhall (eds), Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington, 2008), pp. 61–76. 48 The Chronicle of the English Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain … 1625–1644, Adam Hamilton (ed.) (2 vols, Edinburgh and London, 1904–06), vol. ii, pp. 37–9. 49 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Agnes Lenthall to Jacob Boonen, 8 April 1623. 50 Ibid., Ursula Hewicke to Jacob Boonen, 29 October 1624.

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By February 1625 Hewicke was informing Boonen that while outwardly Cotton had reformed, she doubted her sincerity – an opinion supported by several other nuns.51 Martha Colford surmised that the novice’s newfound diligence was contrived simply to attain her great desire to be professed.52 Anne Ingleby was more forthright arguing that Cotton’s lack of true virtue and religious devotion were evident in her recent gossip that two scholars who had since left the convent were witches. Implying that her behaviour suggested that Cotton herself might have ‘som intangilment with such artes as she hath affirmed was sayed of others’, Ingleby urged careful examination of the novice and the confessor from whom she claimed to have obtained the information.53 As the rift widened between the novice mistress and abbess over the issue, Hewicke begged the archbishop to allow the vote for Cotton’s acceptance or dismissal to be conducted as a secret ballot, like the election which ousted Frances Parker.54 Cognisant of her impending eviction from the house where she had spent nearly half her life, in desperation Margery Cotton implored the archbishop to examine her case thoroughly, insisting that her soul was innocent and all faults might be attributed to childish levity which she was trying to amend.55 Her pleas evidently failed as there is no record of her profession at Brussels. The debates surrounding Margery Cotton offer an insight into not only the breakdown of authority and relations among the Brussels Benedictines but also the importance of talk – both legitimate and illegitimate – in the unfolding crisis. The novice mistress was a senior monastic portfolio, entrusted to a mature and virtuous nun, who reported to the abbess. Thus, direct communication between the two was paramount in determining the suitability of candidates for profession and in dealing with problematic aspirants. The correspondence of both Agnes Lenthall and Ursula Hewicke indicates that it was impossible to conduct the business of the novitiate under the leadership of Mary Percy, who at best neglected to consult them about their charges and at worst made decisions which undermined their authority. Other nuns confirmed the difficulties experienced by these incumbents and noted the breakdown in communication on both sides.56 This failure of formal discussion about the novitiate was replaced by endless conversations, some valid debates, but most of them informal chitchat about the parties concerned. Both Mary Percy and Ursula Hewicke participated, detailing each other’s faults. Hewicke’s correspondence outlined the abbess’s shortcomings to Boonen, and she presumably talked about them with her supporters in the convent. Percy not only informed 51 Ibid., Ursula Hewicke to Jacob Boonen, 4 February 1625. See also Elizabeth Southcott to same, 26 January 1625. 52 Ibid., Martha Colford to Jacob Boonen, 24 March [1625]. 53 Ibid., Anne Ingleby to Jacob Boonen, [1625]. 54 Ibid., Ursula Hewicke to Jacob Boonen, 5 April 1625. See also Elizabeth Southcott to same, 25 March 1625. 55 Ibid., Margery Cotton to Jacob Boonen, April 1625. 56 Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, 26 January 1625; same to same, 25 March 1625.

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Margery Cotton of the novice mistress’s role in her delayed admission, but she denounced the officer’s actions to various people. In turn, other nuns discussed the incident so that opinions flew around the enclosure and found their way beyond its confines. In the process, individual reputations were compromised. Hewicke complained that the abbess’s criticism of her conduct had undermined her position among her charges and encouraged insubordination.57 Elizabeth Southcott observed that Percy’s actions had similarly diminished respect for the abbess among the scholars and novices.58 Like earlier reports of disunity which had reached the abbey’s families and friends in England, this further instance of discord damaged the house’s fortunes.59 Loose words, like Francis Ward’s inappropriate conduct with certain nuns (which had also attracted gossip), not only challenged individual reputations, they threatened the very survival of the community. The Function of Monastic Gossip In the light of the statutory prescriptions against indiscriminate talk, several nuns recognition of the damage it caused internal harmony and order, to say nothing of the disastrous consequences it had upon the cloister’s reputation, the persistence of gossip at Brussels suggests that it performed so vital a role in communal relations that most were prepared to risk its adverse consequences. To understand the function of monastic gossip, we must be mindful of the closed and prescriptive environment in which the women religious interacted on a daily basis, the ideologies which structured the monastic life, and the spiritual imperatives which constituted the nuns raison d’être. Forced by Church and society to accept claustration, monastic women’s lives were confined not only by the walls which separated them from the world, but also by the rigid daily routine of prayer and work in which even recreation was regulated to specific times and places, and there were strict guidelines about interaction with one’s sisters. Enforced periods of silence were obligatory and all discourse on matters other than spiritual things was to be measured and observant of religious propriety. Everyone and everything in the convent had their place. Hierarchy was paramount, and the rituals of daily life served to remind each woman of her status in the professional ranks. The spiritual basis for this seemingly rigid regime lay in the nuns’ contemplative vocation. They prayed for their salvation, that of their families and patrons, and for the success of the Catholic Church over Protestant foes, formally by singing the divine office, through personal meditation, and in other set readings and devotions, and informally by infusing every waking action with religious intent and by conducting themselves in accordance with the strict rules of mortification. Dying to the world and secular habits was the objective of every professed nun

59 57 58

Ibid., Ursula Hewicke to Jacob Boonen, 4 February 1625. Ibid., Elizabeth Southcott to Jacob Boonen, 26 January 1625. Ibid., Potentiana Deacon to Jacob Boonen, 13 December [1622].

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in the hope that she might attain mystical union with her God in this life and eternal salvation in the next. As the example of the Brussels Benedictines in the early 1620s shows, the reality of monastic life was often far removed from the ideals set out in rules and statutes and other prescriptive literature. Even in relatively harmonious cloisters, the differing range of personalities, abilities and commitment to the contemplative life ensured that daily affairs and relationships were not conducted in strict accordance with the statutes. Individuals negotiated their role in the monastic family usually with regard to the required provisions, but exceptions to certain rules might be made when circumstances warranted it. And ecclesiastical supervisors, like the archbishop of Mechelen, concurred with such arrangements, accepting them as essential for the good of the convent.60 Yet, specific accommodations for individuals or even whole communities were only possible when there was consensus both internally and between the cloister’s leaders and external superiors. Thus, those in positions of authority needed the respect of their juniors and their clerical overseers if they were to modify elements of monastic regimen or facilitate dispensations for individuals. Moreover, the house had to be governed appropriately and it needed to be well ordered – a far cry from the chaos emerging among the ranks of the English Benedictines. Indeed the Brussels abbey in the early 1620s seemed to represent the antithesis of the monastic ideal. Dissatisfaction with the governance of the abbess and those holding senior offices, constant contravention of the statutes, spiritual conflict, hints of sexual impropriety and witchcraft, and the disintegration of the internal hierarchy presaged the anarchy of the late 1620s and early 1630s. All these woes were exacerbated by the free-flowing gossip about the cloister’s failings. However, despite gossip’s incompatibility with prescriptions of silence and injunctions to use conversation moderately, it would be wrong to attribute the convent’s difficulties to ‘idle chatter’. Instead I want to argue that gossip was an important mechanism for the restoration of order in the house. In the cloistered monastic environment where hierarchy, obedience and self-denial were promoted to preserve order, illegitimate chitchat whether internally among likeminded sisters or externally with visitors at the grate or in correspondence, enabled nuns to influence how their community functioned. Much of the discussion about Mary Percy’s faults as abbess centred upon her failure to govern in accordance with the house’s statutes. These documents were again invoked in the difficulties with the acceptance of postulants and novices, and the breakdown of communication between Percy and her novice mistresses. Therefore they provided disaffected nuns with a legitimate paradigm for complaint and restitution of the status quo. But while the statutes offered a useful template for illustrating how far the cloister’s leadership had strayed from the prescribed ideal, evidence of internal factions and indeed the content and tone of the correspondence to the archbishop demonstrated that rumour 60 Craig Harline and Eddy Put, ‘A Bishop in the Cloisters: The Visitations of Mathias Hovius (Malines, 1596–1620)’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), 626–31.

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and innuendo had entered the fray. So Mary Percy and those in her clique were criticised as unsuitable for the positions they held. Their faults, whether real or fabricated by their detractors, were demonised as exemplary of all that was wrong in the cloister. In turn, the dissenting nuns extolled the virtues of their circle as those which would restore order and unity in the convent. Defining good and deficient leaders, nuns, prospective nuns and priests in this way, with deference to the overriding pre-eminence of the statutes, the correspondents established ‘cognitive maps’ not only of desirable and undesirable character traits but also of the people who exhibited them. In this way they were able to assert control over the cloister’s temporal and spiritual governance, and even over who was permitted to join or serve the community. Gossip also encouraged the bonds of sisterhood and collective identity in the monastery. By articulating what was wrong with their convent the reforming nuns identified the values and morals which they believed were central to unity and the house’s good name. This was crucial from both a group and a personal perspective. The monastic ethos which dissolved the individual into the corporate entity of the religious community meant that honour and reputation were vested in the entire household. One nun’s scandalous behaviour reflected upon the whole convent and could endanger its livelihood. Anyone who might bring shame upon the cloister had to be expelled if they were not prepared to reform their behaviour. Therefore, Francis Ward’s alleged sexual dalliances secured his dismissal. The widespread concerns about Margery Cotton, whose apparent disregard for her sisters and for the religious life generally, in spite of several opportunities to amend her ways, suggested that she did not respect the collective interests of the cloister. She was likewise excluded before she could bring dishonour upon them all. Complaints about the insubordinate behaviour of recently professed women towards their seniors similarly insinuated that their lack of respect and levity might lead the house into disrepute. In all instances gossip was essential in identifying the problem and in solving it through notifying the archbishop of the dangers these disruptive elements posed. But it also warned unsuitable associates that they were unacceptable. In April 1623 Agnes Lenthall complained about older nuns hanging around the schoolroom and novitiate and audibly chatting about the faults of those inside. She argued that the negative opinions overheard by the candidates were largely responsible for their poor progress.61 However, this gossip might also be seen as defining the exclusivity of the monastic household, by actively discouraging those whose chance of admission was slight. Although monastic gossip apparently performed the kinds of functions with respect to group solidarity and reputation identified by anthropologists and some historians, there were so many divisive undercurrents fracturing the Brussels Benedictines that specific complaints sometimes seem peripheral to the wider issues. The overriding concern of most correspondence during the early years of the dispute was the conduct of Mary Percy, about whom the litany of 61 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Agnes Lenthall to Jacob Boonen, 8 April 1623.

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criticism was endless. Thus, it is possible that the Brussels gossip, ostensibly about several problematic members of the community and certain personnel associated with it, was in reality about the abbess. The dissenting nuns’ sense of disempowerment under her authoritarian leadership found expression in reporting and thereby rectifying the apparently scandalous behaviour of others. This is not to say that there were not legitimate concerns about the targets of gossip, like Ward, Parker and Cotton, but it is likely that their failings provided convenient opportunities for exposing yet another deficiency in the abbess’s governance. Finally, gossip sought to identify and advertise the spiritual stature of the nuns and thereby the pious integrity of the community. Given the centrality of prayer in the monastic apostolate the spiritual health of the house was paramount both for individual salvation and for the survival of the convent – parents would not send their daughters to an establishment which lacked strong holy credentials, nor would patrons offer alms and practical assistance in return for prayers. Cloistered women therefore needed to inform those outside their walls of their pious achievements, and to counter any negative perceptions, despite such publicity being at odds with the monastic imperatives of silence, modesty and rejection of worldly concerns. Ultimately, nuns interpreted their religious obligations in the light of the economic and political practicalities of survival. Silence, although not abandoned, was pragmatically reinterpreted to advance the cloister’s interests. So they advertised their spiritual credentials by circulating, even publishing, their devotional writings and accounts of saintly sisters’ lives. Similarly, they reported the achievements of virtuous and holy sisters in conversations at the grate and in letters to families, friends, patrons and ecclesiastical officials. Such talk might be justified as spiritually edifying and beneficial to seculars, but it nonetheless had more worldly objectives in the quest to secure postulants and patronage. Yet the ability to discuss the perfections of one’s sisters in this way proved a double-edged sword. Discourse with those beyond the enclosure could just as easily identify the faults and scandals of the not so perfect members of the convent, as clearly happened among the Brussels Benedictines. However, despite its damaging potential disgruntled nuns nevertheless informed the world of their sisters’ failings. In the case of the correspondence to Jacob Boonen, this was in order to force the expulsion or correction of the faulty individuals and thereby restore order and unity. But it is more difficult to interpret disclosures to lay people and others beyond the cloister’s ecclesiastical superiors so positively. Instead, this seemingly indiscriminate gossip about Mary Percy and her allies has to be seen as political. There were evidently differing ideas about what constituted the spiritual tenor of the abbey, in particular regarding the benefits of Jesuit prayer. Some women were content that the plurality of religious guidance which satisfied individual needs was not at odds with communal spirituality; others considered it divisive and in part responsible for the disunity within the cloister. Thus the Brussels gossip asserted the spiritual allegiance of the writers. Whether pro- or anti-Jesuit, the nuns wanted to enlist the support of both secular and clerical allies in the

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struggle to secure their desired devotional orientation. Thus, as some scholars have suggested, they were in part participating in the political battles among the regular and secular clergy which were dividing English Catholics at the time.62 They were also fighting to retain or gain access to those priests who they felt offered them the best chance to attain eternal salvation. As Aurea James noted in a request to confess to the priest who had secured her vocation, ‘[he has a] total understanding of my soul and my difficulties for which I am more dependent on him than any other, and I find myself always satisfied with his counsel’.63 As the dispute intensified, such pleas to Boonen became more frequent and even more insistent. In 1629 Benedicta Hawkins begged permission to transfer to another cloister, explaining ‘for in my contience I cannot live insecurite of my soul, in this government, without the assistance of the Societe to ayed me in my present difficultes’.64 The Brussels Benedictine correspondence therefore reveals that monastic gossip was far more complex that studies have hitherto acknowledged. Far from women’s ‘idle talk’ and chatter, it was central to communal, spiritual and political identity in the early modern English convent.

62 Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795 (London, 1914), pp. 257–9; David Lunn, The English Benedictines, 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London, 1980), p. 201; Placid Spearritt, ‘Prayer and Politics Among the English Benedictines of Brussels’ (unpublished paper). I am grateful to Dom. Placid for permission to cite his research. 63 AAM, Fonds Kloosters, Englese Benedictijnen, ms 654.12–1, Aurea James to Jacob Boonen, 11 October 1622. 64 Ibid., Benedicta Hawkins to Jacob Boonen, 17 February 1629.

Chapter twelve

Writing the Thirty Years’ War: Convent Histories by Maria Anna Junius and Elisabeth Herold Charlotte Woodford

The shocking events of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) were recorded in eye-witness accounts by German-speaking men and women across the Holy Roman Empire, providing a wide variety of perspectives. Among them are a significant number of texts written by nuns. It was common in convents to keep written records of important events, sometimes in the form of a continuous chronicle for posterity. This tradition existed in convents across Europe in the early modern period and was often the responsibility of the abbess or prioress. In the areas of Germany affected by the Thirty Years’ War, the life of contemplation in cloisters suffered severe disruption. In many cases, nuns, who had been living in strict enclosure in the wake of Counter Reformation spiritual reforms, were forced to leave their convent and travel in poor conditions to live in poverty and exile. Convent property was threatened; the estates and livestock plundered by ‘friendly’ and enemy armies alike, with abbey treasures and even the buildings a target for the enemy. The writings of two nuns whose convents were affected by the Swedish phase of the War (1630−35) provide a fascinating glimpse of this period. The abbess Elisabeth Herold (r. 1633–57) of Oberschönenfeld near Augsburg in Bavaria was elected when her community was in exile in the Alps after fleeing in haste from the advancing Swedish army. Oberschönenfeld, a wealthy Cistercian  See Benigna von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe (Göttingen, 1999), and Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618–48 (Basingstoke, 2002).  See Charlotte Woodford, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford, 2002), pp. 63–5.  See Charlotte Woodford, ‘Convents and writings by nuns’, in Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (eds), Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 104–12.  For example, the Augustinian nuns of Marienstein in Eichstätt fled to Ingolstadt. See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, p. 109, and Klara Staigers Tagebuch: Aufzeichnungen während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges im Kloster Mariastein bei Eichstätt, Ortrun Fina (ed.) (Regensburg, 1981).  See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, ch. 5, and Werner Schiedermair (ed.), Kloster Oberschönenfeld (Donauwörth, 1995). Oberschönenfeld survived secularisation and exists to this day.

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abbey with extensive lands, was in an isolated rural setting and defenceless against the enemy. In contrast, Maria Anna Junius, a professed nun in the Dominican convent of the Holy Sepulchre (Heiliggrab) just outside Bamberg was able to remain in her convent even though the town was occupied several times by the Swedish army. The nuns of the Holy Sepulchre and the nuns of Oberschönenfeld came largely from patrician or upper middle-class families; the Bamberg nuns had important connections to the city’s ruling elite. So the abbess of the Holy Sepulchre repeatedly used her network of important contacts, including the Margravine of Bayreuth, to negotiate peaceful terms with the Swedish high command. The convent was given a guard to prevent it from being plundered and the enemy officers were generally respectful towards the nuns. This chapter will analyse how the authors justify or take issue with the choices taken by their communities during this troubled period. In the case of Junius, the account sheds light on the pragmatic decisions which the nuns had to make in order to survive with their buildings, land and virginity intact. It highlights the importance of their relationship with two groups of powerful men, who take it in turns to rule the city – the Catholic Bamberg city council and the Protestant Swedish army. This chapter will also analyse how Junius and Herold make sense of the events of the Thirty Years’ War and fit them into their understanding of the workings of divine providence. In a valuable recent study of seventeenth-century autobiographical writing by women, Eva Kormann focuses on how writers express their own subjective position by describing their relationship with the world and God. This is a very productive way of approaching the texts and its methodology has informed this chapter.10 Kormann suggests that Junius perceives the horrors committed in the war as disruptive experiences (‘Stör-Erfahrungen’), which, by deviating from a preconceived pattern, disturb her views of God and the world.11 In the second half of this chapter, I will suggest that, in the face of this, the function of Junius’s text is to reinforce her readers’ belief in divine providence. Like  See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, ch. 4, and Hieronymus Wilms, Geschichte der deutschen Dominikanerinnen 1206−1916 (Dülmen i. W, 1920), pp. 285−9.  Although Cistercian houses in the middle ages took mostly women from noble families, Oberschönenfeld had been reduced to two nuns in the wake of the Reformation and so decided to accept middle-class women; most of Herold’s nuns fell into this category, see Woodford, Nuns as Historians, p. 180.  For convenience, this article refers to the army of King Gustavus II Adolphus as ‘Swedish’. It should be noted, however, that the Protestant ‘Swedish’ officers encountered by the nuns in Bamberg were largely German noblemen.  Eva Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott: Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert (Cologne, 2004). 10 Kormann uses the term heterology (‘writing the other’) to describe the phenomenon and perceives it as characteristic of early modern writing by men and women. See Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott, p. 6, who takes the term from Verena Olejniczak, ‘Heterologie. Konturen frühneuzeitlichen Selbstseins jenseits von Autonomie und Heteronomie’, LiLi, 26 (1996), 6–36. 11 Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott, p. 196. The term ‘Stör-Erfahrung’ is taken from Peter Sloterdijk, Literatur und Lebenserfahrungen: Autobiographien der Zwanziger Jahre (Munich, 1978), p. 11.

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her contemporary Herold, Junius uses her own faith in the workings of divine providence to help her readers deal with the disturbing events she narrates. Maria Anna Junius, the daughter of Bamberg Burgomaster Johannes Junius (1573–1628), chronicled the history of the Swedish War in and around her convent beginning in April 1633 during an interlude of peace.12 She appears to have begun retrospectively from notes made close to the events, quite possibly supplemented, according to Mortimer, by other sources such as newspapers or pamphlets.13 It is relatively unusual for a nun like Junius, who did not hold a convent office, to carry out a substantial piece of history writing. Most likely, she would have sought official permission from the abbess.14 In general, histories preserved by convent archives form an official narrative of the convent’s past, including only those events which the convent authorities want remembered. Junius claims to be writing so that subsequent generations are aware of ‘what we poor sisters suffered and endured in this long period of war, with the grace and help of God’.15 She thus highlights the function of the account in the formation of the collective memory of the institution. However, the account also seems to emphasise not merely that the nuns came through it physically intact but also with their virginity intact, which is important for the honour and prestige of the convent. In particular, it justifies the relationship the nuns had with the Protestant occupying forces in Bamberg – a relationship which appeared questionable to the outside world – and shows its beneficial nature for the long-term survival of the community. It contrasts this relationship with the ambivalence towards the nuns of the Bamberg city council. From the reform movements of the fifteenth century onwards, secular authorities attempted to assert control over monastic houses within a city’s boundaries.16 It may be that some tension between the convent of the Holy Sepulchre and the Bamberg city council derived from such struggles for power and influence over the convent. Over and above this, however, Junius had important personal reasons to mistrust Bamberg’s council. Five years earlier, her parents had been falsely accused of witchcraft and executed by the authorities in one of the largest and most brutal witch-purges of the seventeenth century.17 12 Maria Anna Junius, ‘Bamberg im Schweden-Kriege’, in Friedrich Karl Hümmer (ed.), Bericht des Historischen Vereins für die Pflege der Geschichte des ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg, 52 (1890), 1−168, 53 (1891), 169−230. Hereafter cited as ‘Junius’, plus the pagination of this edition. 13 Mortimer, Eye-witness Accounts, p. 114. 14 When the seventeenth-century choir nun Maria Hildegard Pluembl from Seligenthal did so, she was given permission by the abbess, who allowed her access to her abbey’s archives. Woodford, Nuns as Historians, p. 50. 15 ‘…was wir arme schwestern mit der gnad und hülff gottes haben geliedtern und aussgestanden in dissen langwerigen krigs Zeiten’, Junius, p. 7. 16 As Amy Leonard, Nails in the wall: Catholic nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago, 2005), p. 36, has shown in the case of the Strasbourg Dominican convents. See also Kaspar Elm, ‘Reform- und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Ein Überblick’, in Kaspar Elm (ed.), Reform- und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Ein Überblick (Berlin, 1989), pp. 3–19 (p. 14). 17 See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, pp. 131−4, and Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott, pp. 206−10. For different perspectives on early modern witch purges, see the essays in Jonathan Barry,

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Junius precedes the main part of her account with a short autobiographical section including veiled criticism of the witch purges.18 The highest levels of the town administration were affected by it. A study by Andrea Renczes, focusing on the family of the bishop’s chancellor, Georg Haan, suggests that members of the Bamberg authorities used the persecution of witches as a means of disposing of rival factions.19 Men were initially discredited by the ‘discovery’ of female witches within their close family. Junius’s mother was one of the first to have been arrested; Haan’s wife and daughter were also executed. Even the chancellor himself was tortured and before he was executed he was forced to testify against Junius. Kormann convincingly links Junius’s criticism of the Bamberg persecution of witches to the critical stance which she takes later in the account towards the Bamberg town council whose members would have been implicated in her parents’ deaths.20 In the first occupation, the nuns received no assistance or advice from the Prince-Bishop of Bamberg or the city council, other than a recommendation that they should don secular clothes and flee. However, they used their connections with the Margravine of Bayreuth to secure a guard for the convent which protected them from the advancing Swedish army. Their concern was not simply for their own well-being but for the survival of the convent as an institution, which depended on them to protect their buildings and their power over the lands whose tithes formed their income. Hence to flee would have meant loss of control over the lands and as a consequence loss of the income they brought, a problem also faced by the abbey of Oberschönenfeld. When Herold returned from exile, she had to re-claim her feudal rights over the abbey’s territories. When Bamberg was attacked in 1632, the nuns feared ‘something else’, presumably rape, more than death.21 But they decided to remain and hence were forced to cooperate with the occupying army in order to secure their position. Junius describes the nuns’ fear during the first Swedish occupation of Bamberg when a group of commanding officers and their wives arrived unexpectedly one evening and demanded to dine with them. The fear was compounded by the fact that a priest who had come secretly to say Mass for them had not yet left the buildings and needed to be hidden.22 With a touch of comedy, she reports the men’s surprise that the nuns refused to leave the main room except when accompanied by another; she told an officer that the nuns ‘always’ go about in a pair, presumably a falsehood.23 Junius’s expectations of the officers were initially conditioned by the polemical way in which war was depicted by contemporary accounts, such as pamphlets or sermons, which Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1996). 18 Junius, pp. 11–14. 19 Andrea Renczes, Wie löscht man eine Familie aus? Eine Analyse der Bamberger Hexenprozesse (Pfaffenweiler, 1990). 20 Kormann, Ich, Gott und Welt, p. 209. 21 ‘Etwas anders’, Junius, p. 33. 22 Ibid., p. 42. 23 Ibid.

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focused on atrocities such as the rape and slaughter of innocents. However, as Kormann shows, her first-hand experience of Swedish officers overturned her preconceived stereotypes and enabled her to break with received ideas.25 Hence, in February 1633 when Bamberg was under threat of a second Swedish occupation, Junius’s community had sufficient experience of Protestant military rule to be more confident that the convent would survive it a second time. This brought the Dominican nuns into conflict with the Bamberg authorities, whose attempts to control them they resisted. In February 1633, Burgomaster Keim, a member of the council, appeared in the convent to warn the nuns of the attack and ‘invited’ them to leave.26 The daughter of former Burgomaster Junius and her community refused; Keim departed, commending the city to their prayers. Later, the city council attempted a second time to make them leave, sending their confessor with orders to remove them violently.27 Junius reports: ‘We could not be persuaded to leave; although people had accused us of much ill-conduct, we took little notice of this slander by wicked people; God Almighty knows that our intentions in staying here were neither wicked nor unlawful’.28 In this defence of her community’s behaviour, Junius calls on God as her witness and expresses her contempt for the convent’s enemies. Thus in its attempt to gain control over the convent, the council attacked the nuns’ reputation. The accusation was presumably that the community’s relationship with the first Swedish occupiers of Bamberg had gone beyond the bounds of decency. Junius uses her account, however, to highlight the chaste nature of their relations with the Swedish commanders: 24

Although people have accused us of much ill conduct, I can testify before God that nothing happened to a single sister from our convent that in the slightest way damaged her virginal state: even though the Swedes have gone in and out of our house daily, they have always behaved towards us with decency and respect.29

Junius protests their innocence using frequent intensification, testifying ‘before God’ that not ‘a single sister’ received ‘the slightest’ damage to her virginity. It is not surprising that the fact that the Swedes went ‘in and out’ of the convent on a daily basis left the nuns open to fierce criticism. Ulrike Strasser’s recent monograph, State of Virginity, demonstrates convincingly the 24 Hans Medick, ‘Historisches Ereignis und zeitgenössische Erfahrung: Die Eroberung und Zerstörung Magdeburgs 1631’, in Krusenstjern and Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe, pp. 377−407 (p. 399). 25 Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott, p. 196. 26 Junius, p. 104. 27 Junius, p. 15. 28 ‘Man hat uns nicht Berethen könen ob man uns schon vil übels hat nach gereht / haben wir doch Büsser leüdt redten wenig geacht / gott der allmechtig weis / das wir in keener Bössen noch unrechen meinung da Bleiben’; ibid., p. 105. 29 ‘Wie wol man uns vil übels hat nach gesagt kon ich es doch mit gott bezeugen das nicht einer einigen schwester unsers Convents das allergeringste so ihren Jungfrewlichen stand zu wieder wehre geschehen ist / ob die schweden schon täglich Bey uns seint aus und eingangen haben sie sich doch allezeit züchtig und ehrerbittig gegen uns gehalten’; ibid., p. 222.

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extent to which female virginity took on a symbolic as well as a practical value for the early modern state.30 The fact that Swedish officers were allowed to penetrate the convent may have left them open to accusations of prostitution. Yet, these ambiguous relationships with the ‘enemy’ army were essential for the survival of the convent as an institution. Jealousy of the convent’s financial and material assets seems to have been central to the Bamberg Dominicans’ conflict with the council. In February 1633, after the city had been taken, the council advised the enemy to search the convent for grain and wine.31 It similarly advised the Swedes to search the Bamberg Poor Clares. A Swedish provisions’ officer arrived at the convent asking to inspect their cellars. Junius calls him a good man, for instead of insisting on entering the enclosed space, he let them dictate a list of their possessions. Out of sympathy for the nuns, he deliberately showed them the letter which brought him there, so that they could identify its author. Junius writes that it came from ‘our good councillors’,32 using the adjective ‘good’ ironically. She withholds the name of the author of the letter, commenting only that she knew the hand-writing. No doubt she expected contemporary readers to be able to supply the name. The Swedish provisions’ officer pointed out the discrepancy between the council’s treatment of the convent and the charity which the nuns showed to the poor citizens of the town.33 Junius replied that the world gives poor thanks to good deeds, implying that she is disappointed by the betrayal, but not surprised by it. Thus the ‘enemy’ troops offered the convent protection, while the council attempted to exploit it. Similarly, the following year (8 March 1634), Burgomaster Keim ordered the convent to provide an ox for the Swedish commander.34 The nuns replied stating that the request seemed questionable, since the commander had given them their livestock himself. Junius interprets it as an attempt to rob the convent, which she claims the council would do with pleasure, just as it steals from the poor citizens of the town.35 Again, she ironically calls them ‘the good men’ claiming they informed the Swedes that the convent was rich and ‘they could get what they wanted here’.36 The tensions with the city council were undoubtedly exacerbated by the fact that the convent frequently received financial or material gifts from the Swedish commanders. On 20 February 1633, Colonel von Ross sent them half a dozen ‘Reichstaler’ (gold coins) for unspecified items produced by the nuns, which they had given him and his wife when they visited the convent.37 When he dined with them on a subsequent occasion, Junius praises him as a 30 Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, 2004). 31 Junius, p. 112. 32 ‘Unser schöner rathsherrn’, ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., p. 175. 35 Ibid. 36 ‘Die schönen herrn’; ‘sie könen bey uns bekumen was sie wollen’; ibid. 37 Ibid., p. 113, see also p. 115.

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man who has achieved good things for them. On 26 February 1633, several German officers from the Swedish army visited the convent; one gave them a small alabaster altar and a crucifix.39 The altar is described as the one in the main convent room, which implies that the nuns never returned the gifts, although surely they must have been taken by force from another church or convent. This was certainly the case with livestock acquired by the nuns during the occupation. Before the first visit of the Swedish Major General Lohausen, the convent was sent a cow as a goodwill offering. Junius comments: ‘when the Swedes had departed from Bamberg, we gave the cow back’.40 We can infer from this that the cow had been taken by force from a local farmer. Lohausen was a pious Calvinist; he attended Mass with them, accompanied by the Prior of the local Carmelites and greatly enjoyed himself. He and his cousin became good friends of the convent and protected their interests throughout the occupation. When he withdrew his troops from the town, he parted from the nuns with great sorrow and sent them another cow as a farewell gift.41 Yet Junius describes how, during his period of rule over Bamberg, ordinary citizen’s possessions were stolen by soldiers and sold back to them, sometimes repeatedly.42 Peasants from the suburb of Staffelstein had apparently been made to drive their own livestock into town and surrender them for sale by the soldiers. The nuns themselves bought an ox for 3 ‘Taler’ as well as a cow; the soldiers wanted to sell the nuns twelve sheep, but Junius reports that the convent did not want to buy them.43 The nuns attempted to secure their own interests through their relationship with the occupying army, but in doing so they were forced to profit from the misfortune of local citizens, presumably running the risk of compromising their position in the city. The Swedish commander, Major General Lohausen, claims that if the nuns had followed the council’s advice and left the convent, their buildings would have been destroyed.44 Junius thus defends the convent’s relationship with the Swedish officers by claiming that the protection the nuns’ received extended to the surrounding area. Lohausen tells them (addressing them as his dear daughters) that if their convent were not there, the suburb would have been raised to the ground.45 Junius eulogises Lohausen, claiming he ensured his soldiers were disciplined and the streets and water supplies kept clean to protect Bamberg from plague.46 Later in the account, the poverty of the villagers worsened considerably after soldiers ruled by a subsequent and less merciful commander destroyed vital crops. Junius expresses guilt at not 38

Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 114. 40 ‘Welche kuh wir wiedter geben haben alls die schwedten von Bamberg hinweg seint’; ibid., p. 114. 41 Ibid., pp. 129–30. 42 Ibid., pp. 116−17. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 119. 45 ‘Meine lieber döchter’; ibid., p. 129. 46 Ibid., pp. 131−2. 38 39

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being able to alleviate the suffering of those around her. She writes that their poverty was painful for her to see and the nuns would have gladly helped them all, but they had already been overwhelmed by people begging for alms and were exhausting their reserves of grain.47 She claims the nuns were unsure how they would feed themselves (thirty people) throughout the winter.48 The convent suffered from the villagers’ inability to pay the full tithes owing to the convent. The previous autumn, a crowd of villagers had brought tithes on foot, for they lacked the livestock to pull a cart.49 Junius emphasises that they did all that was possible for the poor: ‘We did not send any people away completely empty handed, but rather we gave them at least a bit of bread’.50 She comforts herself with the thought that God knew the extent of their trouble, and would bless their course of action. The Bamberg Dominicans thus preserved their connections with their land, continued to draw an income from it and protected their position so that they were able to feed all the nuns and did not have to send any away. Yet all around them the villagers and their own servants struggled with poverty. In contrast, the lifestyle of Herolds’ nuns in exile from 1632 was, for a time, far more like that of the ordinary people around them. Even after the nuns returned to Oberschönenfeld in 1635, the abbey had lost control over its estates and its income. During the extensive renovation Herold was forced to send nuns to live with friends and family because the convent’s finances could not support them. Her account of the Swedish War, the final section of an extensive history of her convent from its foundation in 1211, covers the period of office of her predecessor, Apollonia Wörl (r. 1624−33), whose death was hastened by the difficult circumstances of the community’s exile.51 Herold’s anger at the convent’s misfortune is palpable throughout the long history. The golden age of the convent’s foundation is contrasted with the present disaster. Unusually, Herold is highly critical of Wörl’s leadership of her community during the Swedish War. She suggests that more could have been done to secure the abbey’s assets, and find sanctuary for the nuns. This sort of criticism of the running of a convent is seldom found in historical accounts, which are usually reticent out of a sense of loyalty and respect for the memory of the dead. Herold uses her account of the Swedish War to ‘set the record straight’ in a way which resembles Junius’s aims. Yet, in contrast to Junius’s affirmation of her convent’s policy, Herold was a dissenter in the period she narrates.

Ibid., p. 189. Ibid., p. 165. 49 Ibid., pp. 100−101. 50 ‘Wir haben keinen menschen gar lehr hin weg gehen lassen sondern auffs wenigst ein Brott geben’; ibid., p. 189. 51 Oberschönenfeld, Klosterarchiv, ‘Die Chronik der Äbtissin Elisabeth Herold’. Herold’s history covers fols 1−237. It stops before her own election as abbess, but was continued by later members of the convent. See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, pp. 164−83. Hereafter cited as ‘Herold’, plus the foliation of the manuscript. All translations are my own. 47 48

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Apollonia Wörl had refused to listen to advice that the abbey was under threat. Much of this advice came from the abbot of Kaisheim, Johannes Beck, whose sister, Margaretha Beck, was the prioress of Oberschönenfeld. The connection between the two houses was very strong; Oberschönenfeld was a daughter-house of Kaisheim and its confessor was always one of the monks.52 There was most likely a split between the abbess and the prioress; the prioress’s faction probably had the support of the male clerics. Herold tells us Wörl’s head-in-the-sand approach was carried out ‘in opposition to other members of the house’.53 In 1631, when Gustavus Adolphus had swept south through Germany and taken Würzburg, the abbot of Kaisheim wrote to the abbess, warning her of the imminent danger to the convent. He advised: ‘She should make provision by sending away some of her best things while there is time and opportunity; careful planning will do no harm’.54 Gustavus Adolphus was expected to march through Franconia and continue to Augsburg. It was high time therefore that the convent found a safe location for its valuables. The abbess asked for advice on where to send them, and yet despite having somewhere in mind, she put the matter on one side. Before long, the danger was much greater, and Herold emphasises the nuns’ anxiety through the rhetoric of her account: ‘the longer it went on, the greater the cry; the longer it went on, the nearer the enemy came to our beloved fatherland; everyone was in danger. The good mother abbess, she did not know at all what she should do’.55 Herold makes it abundantly clear through this repetition of syntactical structures that the danger to the convent was foreseeable, and the abbess’s inaction misguided. On Palm Sunday 1632, Donauwörth, a strategic position nearby on the river Danube, was captured by the army of Gustavus Adolphus’ army. The Swedes were able to cross the river and advance on Augsburg. Yet, ‘here in the convent, we did not want to open our eyes; we left things for later, let the talk wash over our ears, as if it had nothing to do with us’.56 The rhetoric of this passage again heightens the sense of danger; by evoking the senses of seeing and hearing, it highlights the extent of the abbess’s denial of the evidence before her. It was indeed only a matter of weeks before Augsburg fell on 20 April 1632. The abbey, formerly wealthy in grain, livestock and valuables, was impoverished.57 Not a penny of its wealth had been sent away to a place of safety.58 Many of the valuables were walled up in the convent. However, when Woodford, Nuns as Historians, p. 42. ‘Entgegen ander hausgenossen’, Herold, fol. 225v. 54 ‘Sÿ solle sÿ wol für sehen. und etwas ihre böste sachen beÿ seith thon weil man zeit und gelegenheit hab. ein guete für sorg khend nit schaden’ (Herold, fol. 225r). 55 ‘Nun wurd das geschreÿ ie langer ie grosser, der feind khame ie lenger ie naheter zue unserm lieben vatterland; ieder man stunde in gefahr. die guete frau abbtissin die wuste auch nit was sÿ solt anfangen’ (Herold, fol. 225v). ‘Vatterland’, translated here as ‘fatherland’, refers to her local area, and so has the meaning of diocese or territory. 56 ‘Man wolt alhie im gottshaus die augen noch nit auf thun. man lies also alle ding bleiben. lies die redden fir ohren gehen. als gieng uns solliches nit an’ (Herold, fols 225v−226r). 57 Ibid., fol. 226r. 58 ‘Nit einer hellers werth’, ibid. 52 53

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the Swedes arrived they threatened the mason into revealing their location and the valuables were plundered and lost. When the abbess eventually decided to flee such was the need for haste that she would not take anything with them except what they needed in exile. This included silverware and documents belonging to the convent archive (needed to re-claim their territory and rights after the War), which were loaded onto a carriage, together with grain, wine, and oats. Nevertheless, some additional items were taken behind the abbess’s back, another indication that her position had been undermined by her mismanagement of the convent’s affairs.59 The hardship of the nuns’ exile can be seen from the loss of life among the nuns in that period. On Apollonia Wörl’s election in 1624, Oberschönenfeld had 28 nuns and 7 lay sisters. Thirty five women went into exile in 1632. However, by the time of the abbess’s death in 1633, the community had been reduced to nineteen nuns and novices, five lay-sisters and two pupils.60 They fled in carriages to Füssen, on the edge of the Alps, and then up into the mountains to Reutte in Tyrol, where they spent two and a half months in lodgings. Then it was necessary to flee again, this time on foot, to the village of Bichlbach. All thirty-five of them lived with peasants in a small farmhouse consisting of a single all-purpose room. They slept on the hard floor in their clothes and in the barn, which had a leaky roof.61 By September, they were able to move to a more suitable empty manor house belonging to a women’s religious foundation (Damenstift) and remained there until 1635. Herold introduces her section about the Swedish War with a standard formulation, a variation on a humility topos: ‘My quill is extremely reluctant to narrate what happens next, and my simple mind finds it impossible to fathom or to describe’.62 Junius too uses this sort of formulaic language to refer to the horrors of war: ‘We experienced inexpressible fear and sorrow’.63 Such a formulation seems to suggest a crisis of language: their experience surpasses that which they are capable adequately of encoding in a text. Herold hints that this is accompanied by a crisis in knowledge: she is unable to comprehend the events she has witnessed. Kormann indeed suggests that the ‘impossibility’ topos is used to denote disruptive experiences that transcend the writers’ idea of the world.64 According to Kormann, the use of such expressions in Junius’s writings goes beyond this and is an indication that she cannot interpret what she witnesses theologically.65 The rest of this chapter will examine briefly the significance of the ‘impossibility’ topos, before attempting to show that Junius frequently interprets the events of the War in the context of providential Ibid., fol. 226v. Ibid., fol. 242r. 61 Ibid., fol. 230r. 62 ‘Wie es nun weither […] hergangen […], ist meiner feder schier unneiglich, und meinen schlechten verstand unbegreifflich zue ersinnen und zue beschreiben’; ibid., fol. 224r. 63 ‘Also haben wir unaussprechliche forgt und trübsal gehabt’, Junius, p. 29. 64 ‘Stör-Erfahrungen’, Kormann, Ich, Welt und Gott, p. 196. 65 ‘Die Grausamkeiten [erscheinen] nicht mehr heilsgeschichtlich […] andeutbar’, ibid., p. 205. 59 60

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design. It will be argued that Junius’s outlook is informed by the philosophy of neo-stoicism, and that her text has a spiritual function within the convent, of propagating this philosophy, inviting the readers to become constant or resolute (‘beständig’) by analogy with the nuns in the text. Benigna von Krusenstjern, in a recent chapter on death in the Thirty Years’ War, demonstrates how formulaic language is frequently used by early modern chroniclers to describe the death of a loved one.66 This formulaic language, she suggests, is not hollow and devoid of meaning, but indicates that the writer is resorting to the reassurance of known formulations as a way of helping them deal with a traumatic event. Authors use formulaic language to express their confidence in the salvation of loved ones who have been released from suffering, an expression of faith in divine consolation. The use of formulaic language does not necessarily suggest that the writer is unable to deal with the event, but is in fact performative: it is a way in which the writers attempt to cope with them. It seems therefore to be a step too far to suggest that the ‘impossibility’ topos is an indication of Junius’s doubt in the workings of divine providence. Junius’s text had a public function within the cloister, an intended readership of Counter-Reformation nuns. It seems more likely then that the performance of Junius’s faith within the chronicle is intended to affirm the nuns’ system of belief. Krusenstjern suggests that seventeenth-century writers − and she includes Junius in her analysis − avoided, as far as possible, dwelling on, or depicting in any detail deaths, such as deaths in battle, which might seem problematic for the reader.67 The chroniclers use brief formulae to record ‘unchristian’ deaths, that is deaths for which the dying person has been unable to prepare and which are therefore difficult to interpret theologically. These suppress the implications of such a death, to avoid disturbing the reader.68 In this respect it seems problematic to dissociate Junius’s own belief from the message she is trying to convey to the reader. She surely interprets events theologically not (merely) as an expression of her own faith, but as a way of increasing the reader’s faith in providential design. Krusenstjern’s suggestion that formulaic language provides reassurance is borne out by the use of the ‘impossibility’ topos by Junius and Herold. It too can be seen as performative, for it is most frequently used as part of an attempt precisely to convey the horror of war to the reader, accompanied by techniques such as metonymy, accumulation, or explanatory clauses. Herold writes: It is impossible to describe what has happened in other places during this unpleasant Swedish War, what manner of terrible deaths and stories, what manner of ills and lamentation in every place; it would also demand far too much time.69 66 Benigna von Krusenstjern, ‘Seliges Sterben und böser Tod: Tod und Sterben in der Zeit des Dreißigjährigen Krieges’, in Krusenstjern and Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe, pp. 469−96 (p. 472). 67 Krusenstjern, ‘Seliges Sterben’, p. 477. 68 Ibid. 69 ‘Was sich nun under disem laidigen schwedischen krieg, an allen andern und ohrten zuegetragen, was für greÿliche doten und geschichte, was für grosses übel und iamer an allen

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She cannot depict the horrors of the War in general and so limits the account to what concerns her own convent. Nevertheless, she manages to evoke a part of the horror through an accumulation of images, intensified by her repetition of syntactical structures. When Junius writes, ‘On that same day there was such turmoil in the town that I cannot write enough about it’,70 the reference to the turmoil in Bamberg it is a form of metonymy and leaves a space for the reader’s imagination. Junius mentions the fear of the nuns, ‘which is not possible to describe in full, for everyone who reads this can probably imagine what we suffered as weak women, situated so far outside the town, for we seldom slept during this time because of our great fear’.71 Her ‘impossibility’ topos is followed here with one or more subordinate clauses which explain their terror. This undermines to some extent her initial claim that she is unable to convey her emotion and demonstrates her confidence that the readers will understand the nuns’ fear from their knowledge of the context. Following an ‘impossibility’ topos with a series of explanatory clauses is a technique which recurs frequently in the account and sometimes the explanatory clauses form a lengthy section.72 So, although the authors recognise the crisis of language which they face in attempting to express something far beyond the usual human experience, they cope with the experience by resorting to a formula which simultaneously and metonymically evokes the horror for the reader. How did the authors understand the war? Herold at first explains it in metaphysical terms. She stylises it as a loss of moral values, a loss of peace and love, trustworthiness and fidelity.73 She has no hope that these values will return in her own time. Rather, the Prince of Darkness has occupied the German lands and filled them with strife, war, bitter quarrels, envy, and hatred.74 Junius also mentions evil spirits in her account as an instigator of the world’s troubles. In her brief account of the 1620s, she describes how there was so much money that children played with it on the streets. Junius states emphatically: ‘For I can only believe that the evil spirit scattered money [among the people]’.75 This phrase ‘for I can only believe’ suggests that Junius is providing a metaphysical interpretation of the currency crisis to which she is committed: it was the Devil who scattered money among the people, in order to seduce them. One might infer therefore that Junius, like Herold, had a strong belief in the power of evil forces. When the currency later lost its value, ohrten […] seÿe vorüber gangen, ist nit müglich zue beschreiben, wurd auch solliches zue vil langwierige zeit und weil erforderen’, Herold, fol. 224v. 70 ‘Allso ist denn selbigen tag ein solcher Johmer in der statt gewessen / das ich nicht genug darvon schreiben kan’, Junius, p. 21. 71 ‘Welches mir nicht müglig war alles zu schreiben / dan iedtermentlich so disses list / kon wol denken was wir alls schwage weibs perschonen die so weit da haussen gelegen seind haben aus gestanden / dan wir disse zeit gar wenig nacht wegen grosser forcht geschlaffen haben’; ibid., p. 24. 72 See ibid., p. 167. 73 Herold, fol. 224r. 74 Ibid., fol. 224v. 75 ‘Dan ich nicht anders mein / der bösse geist hab damals / das gelt auß geseht’ (my italics), Junius, p. 8.

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causing people to fall into debt and poverty, Junius comments that many were indeed seduced by the Devil: ‘Some too were even seduced by the evil spirit, as we will later hear’ (a reference to her account of the persecution of witches).76 These comments suggest that Junius and Herold were prepared to interpret the events of their time as a conflict between those doing God’s work and those working for Satan. As such, the horrors they witnessed were brought about not by providence, but by the forces of evil in the world, a supposition which enables them to preserve their faith in God, and find consolation in their belief in eternal life. While Junius’s view of the Protestant Swedish army becomes more differentiated over the course of the conflict, Herold preserves her negative view of the Swedes, associating Lutheranism with the work of the Devil. Herold understands the War as a conflict instigated by ‘this wearisome and accursed Lutheranism’ and the King of Sweden, with his army of ‘Godless heretics’.77 This is the language of the propaganda of the time. Hans Medick has shown, using the example of Magdeburg, how the war was widely interpreted by both sides in a theological context.78 Protestant preachers in the town warned that the town might fall as divine vengeance on their sinfulness, just as Jerusalem was laid to waste in the first century AD. On the other hand, Catholics claimed that their besiegement of the town was carrying out God’s work. Similarly, according to Junius, the Catholic General Tilly would wear the martyr’s crown in heaven for his virtue and his participation in a just war.79 The chronicle of another south German nun, Juliana Ernst, reflects on the punishment awaiting Gustavus Adolphus after death, when he will be held to account for his sins.80 Evidence that Junius interprets the events of the war through a belief in divine providence is to be found throughout the account, not merely as a conventional framing device at the outset. During the first attack, the nuns pray to God and ask for the intercession of the Virgin Mary, vowing to carry out a procession in her honour throughout the following year, if they are able to remain in their convent. Junius says that they could ‘visibly see and feel’ that the Virgin honoured their vow, and so she attributes their safety to God’s grace and the Virgin’s intercession, ending the entry ‘ammen’, as if recording her faith in God within the account were itself a form of prayer.81 When the Swedes threaten to set fire to Bamberg, yet fail to do so, she attributes it to God’s goodness.82 Bamberg was taken by the Catholics during the octave of 76 ‘Auch zum tel gar von bössen geist verfürt seint wordten / wie man hernacher hören wird’; ibid., p. 9. 77 ‘Das laidige vermaledeÿten Lutertumb’, ‘gotlosen közern’, Herold, fol. 224v. 78 Medick, ‘Historisches Ereignis’ p. 379. 79 Junius, pp. 69–70. 80 Juliana Ernst, ‘Ein gleichzeitiges Bericht über das Wirtembergische Kriegesvolk vor der österrichischen Stadt Villingen vom Jahre 1631–1633’, in Karl J. Glatz (ed.), Württembergische Vierteljahresschrift für Landesgeschichte, 1 (1878), 129–37 (p. 130). 81 ‘Die weil wir sichbarlig gesehen haben und gespürt’, Junius, p. 25. 82 Ibid., pp. 61–2.

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the St Kunigunde, and Junius reads this as a punishment for the Swedes having celebrated a service in the church of St Kunigunde on the saint’s feast day (3 March 1633).83 The successful re-taking of Bamberg is attributed to God, a point strengthened by Junius’ comments that the Catholic forces were not sufficiently powerful to repel the Swedes without help.84 Among many similar references, a Protestant attack is defeated ‘through divine intervention’.85 In August 1634, Junius contends that God drives the Swedes away from nearby Forchheim, the Catholic fortress, and clears Bamberg of troops in the octave of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.86 Again, to show that she is not merely describing events, but also giving an interpretation of them to which she is committed, she uses the performative phrase ‘I believe’ (‘ich vermeine’), an expression of her faith in God. She prays in October 1633 that God will prevent the Swedes from returning87 and expresses a hope at New Year 1634 that the Lord will keep them through the winter, for otherwise she does not know how they will feed themselves.88 The extent to which Junius perceives her faith as a consolation is visible through her use of the discourse of neo-stoicism. Neo-stoical philosophy, developed by Julius Lipsius in the wake of the French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth century, advocates constancy of mind as a way of dealing with the horrors of the world.89 In the Christianisation of stoicism, constancy or steadfastness is achieved by focusing on the consolation of eternal life and recognition of the temporal nature of suffering. It was popular in Austria under Ferdinand II (r. 1619−37) through the influence of the Jesuits.90 Its presence in Junius’s text may derive from the strong family links between the ruling houses of Austria and Bavaria and the Jesuit influence on Bavaria and Southern Germany since the 1550s. It could also be a sign of the influence of the Bamberg Jesuit College on her convent, for it has been suggested that in the seventeenth century the Jesuits had an increasing practical influence on the spiritual teaching of nuns including the prescription of spiritual exercises.91 Junius’s experience of the Thirty Years’ War participates in the discourse of stoicism by demonstrating the resolute nature of Junius and her fellow nuns as a practical example for the reader. Junius’s community is advised from the outset that if it remains in the convent, the nuns will not be harmed. Ibid., p. 62. Ibid. 85 ‘Durch schickung gottes’, Ibid., p. 179. 86 Ibid., p. 208. 87 Ibid., p. 162. 88 Ibid., p. 165. 89 For another example of the influence of neo-stoicism on an eye-witness account, see Harald Tersch, ‘Gottes Ballspiel. Der Krieg in Selbstzeugnissen aus dem Umkreis des Kaisershofes (1619−1650), in Krusenstjern and Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe, pp. 427−69 (pp. 447−8). 90 Tersch, ‘Gottes Ballspiel’, p. 448. 91 Arnold Schromm, Die Bibliothek des ehemaligen Zisterzienserinnenklosters Kirchheim am Ries: Buchpflege und geistiges Leben in einem schwäbischen Frauenstift (Tübingen, 1998), p. 133. 83 84

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Junius interprets their remaining there despite their great terror as constancy (‘Beständigkeit’), a use of neo-stoical terminology; overcoming their terror is made possible because the nuns’ faith in God strengthens their resolve. During the first attack on Bamberg, she describes their mortal fear, saying that death was constantly in their minds: ‘we surrendered ourselves to God’s will, and relied completely on the help and mercy of our beloved bridegroom, Jesus, remaining strong, courageous and resolute (‘bestendig’) in our convent’.92 Junius also writes of the second attack: ‘However, we remained resolute in our little Holy Sepulchre’.93 Moreover, at the end of the account, Junius interprets their preservation as God’s reward for their constancy, and describes them as having been tested by God; he was their comfort (‘trost’) and their help.94 The influence of neo-stoicism is also visible in Herold’s history through the qualities Herold attributes to the various abbesses of the convent. She describes the way in which her predecessor, Apollonia Wörl, bore her suffering patiently and was a model of Christian resignation.95 Nevertheless, at the crucial moment, Wörl’s confidence fails her and she is the antithesis of the resolute, stoical mindset. Rather, when faced with the war, she is vacillating and irresolute. Herold speculates as to the reason for this, and suggests the abbess may have believed that ‘God would conceal our convent, in a miraculous way, against the natural order of things, from the eyes of the enemy’.96 While Junius regards her convent’s preservation from harm as a divine miracle, Herold considers Wörl to have been simpleminded (‘einfeltig’) to expect one, because it would go against the natural order. She undermines Wörl’s position by ridiculing it, implying that Wörl hoped Oberschönenfeld would be somehow miraculously concealed from the enemy by some impossible means. This implies Wörl’s refusal to act was the result of a failure of reason, and she continues: ‘No one ever heard or read of an example of such a thing, much less could or should one have sensibly imagined it might happen here’.97 So despite praising Wörl for her patience in the face of adversity, her actions are condemned as unreasonable, for she was hoping for an unprecedented and unnatural escape. By implication, the destruction of the convent is interpreted as a natural consequence of war and, furthermore, a war caused by Satan and Lutheranism. It is not part of the providential design, but rather the ‘natural’ result of evil forces working in the world, and moreover working through human agents, for Herold is bitterly critical of the way in which the secular authorities were indifferent to her convent’s fate.98 As with Junius, Herold’s faith provides her 92 ‘Doch haben wir uns in willen gottes ergeben / und uns ganz und gar auff die die hilff und barmherztigkeit unsers geliebsten Breuttigam iesu verlassen / und stark müttig und bestendig in unsern closter verblieben’, Junius, p. 33. 93 ‘Wir aber sind in unsern heilligen greblein Bestendtig verblieben’, ibid., p. 105. 94 Ibid., pp. 222–3. 95 ‘Gedultig und dermassen in den göttlichen willen Resigniert’, Herold, fol. 220v. 96 ‘Gott wurde unser gottshaus. wider den natürlichen lauff. miracolosischer wiss vor den augen des feindts verdecken’, ibid., fol. 225v. 97 ‘Der gleichen Exempel hat man von keinen anderen gehört oder gelesen. noch vil weniger hat man ihren solliches allhie kenden oder sollen vernunfftig einbilden’, ibid. 98 See Woodford, Nuns as Historians, pp. 175−6.

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with some comfort. She consoles herself and the reader with her certain belief that the destroyers of convents (‘clöster verderber’) will be called to account for their actions to God ‘and will receive the reward they deserve’.99 The experience of the Swedish War for Junius and Herold has many similarities, despite the different fates of the two convents. The war explodes the enclosed nature of both convents, with Junius’s obligation to provide entertainment for enemy officers and their wives and Herold’s community forced into exile, sharing living space with a peasant family. Both convents receive little assistance from the secular authorities, and find few benefactors; the reaction to their troubles even by the authorities on their own side is mostly self-interested and exploitative. The small kindnesses they receive stand in stark contrast to the brutality around them. The great value of these convent chronicles, however, lies not just in the insights they give us into nuns’ lives and the relations between convents and secular society, but in the insight into how the writers dealt with the horrors of the War.100 Placed within the discourses of the time, such as neo-stoical philosophy and the theological interpretations provided by contemporary sermons and pamphlets, Junius’s faith in providential design and Herold’s in evil spirits and divine vengeance no longer seem like hollow figures of speech. Rather, they are models of interpreting their experience which gave the writers comfort, just as the process of writing itself was most likely therapeutic for them. Moreover, the texts are part of a public discourse, intended for a readership of early modern nuns. The authors hoped that they would strengthen the faith of the readers and bring consolation to them in the uncertain times in which they lived.

99



100

‘Und den lohn bekommen, den sÿ verdiendt’, Herold, fols 29v−30r. See Tersch, ‘Gottes Ballspiel’, p. 427.

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Naples, Archivio di Stato: Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3459, O.Maz.III, n.37. Naples, Archivio di Stato: Corporazioni religiose soppresse, S. Patrizia, 3460, O.IV. Naples, Archivio di Stato: S. Gregorio Armeno, 3435, ‘Esemplare delle nobili memorie della reverenda D. Fulvia Caracciola’ (1577). Oberschönenfeld, Klosterarchiv: ‘Die Chronik der Äbtissin Elisabeth Herold’. Paris, Archives nationales de France: M233, n. 3: ‘Points notables de la vie de la bienheureuse sœur Marie de l’Incarnation, Carmelite, laquelle en la vie seculiere se nommoit Mademoiselle Acarye par le General des Feuillants, 12 septembre 1619’. Pontoise, Archives du Carmel de Pontoise: Procès apostolique de Marie de l’Incarnation [Barbe Acarie]. Printed Primary Sources [Tronson de Chenevière], La vie de la venerable mere Marguerite Acarie, dite du S. Sacrement, religieuse Carmelite dechausée (Paris, 1689). Arbiol, Antonio, O. F. M., La religiosa instruida con doctrina de la Sagrada Escritura, y Santos Padres de la iglesia cathólica, para todas las operaciones de su vida regular (Madrid, 1734). Benedictus XIV, De servorum Dei beatificatione et beatorum canonizatione (Bologna, 1734–38). Biagio della Purificatione, Vita della Ven. madre Suor Chiara Maria della Passione Carmelitana Scalza: Fondatrice del Monastero di Regina Coeli. Nel Secolo Donna Vittoria Colonna Figlia di Don Filippo Gran Conestabile del Regno di Napoli (Rome, 1681). Boldetti, Marco Antonio, Osservazioni sopra i Cimiterj de’ Santi Martiri (Rome, 1720). Bosio, Antonio, Roma Sottoterranea. Opera postuma di A. Bosio Romano Antiquario Ecclesiastico Singolare de’ Suoi tempi compita, disposta, & accresciuta dal M.R.P. Giovanni Severani da Severino sacerdote della Congregatione dell’Oratiorio di Roma (Rome, 1632). Breviarium romanum ad usum, et secundum ritum fratrum ordinis humiliatorum (Pavia, 1621). Cagiano, G. A., Successi Maravigliosi della Veneratione del B. Andrea Avellino Chierico Regolare Patrone, e Protettore delle Città di Napoli, di Palermo, e d’altre molte (Naples, 1622). Calvin, Jean, Traité des reliques ou advertissement très utile du grand profit qui reviendrait à la chrestienté s’il se faisoit inventaire de tous les corps saints et reliques qui sont tant en Italie qu’en France (Geneva, 1543). Celano, Carlo, Notitie del Bello, dell’Antico, e del Curioso della Città di Napoli (4 vols, Naples, 1692).

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The Chronicle of the English Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain … 1625–1644, Adam Hamilton (ed.) (2 vols, Edinburgh and London, 1904–06) Collaert, Adriaen and Theodor Galle, Vita b. virginis Teresiæ a Iesv ordinis Carmelitarvm excalceatorvm piae restavratricis (Antwerp, 1613). Constituciones generales para todas las Monjas, y Religiosas, sujetas a la obediencia de la Orden de nuestro Padre San Francisco…recopiladas de las antiguas; y añadidas con acuerdo, consentimiento, y aprobación del Capítulo General, celebrado en Roma a 11. de Junio de 1639 (Madrid, 1642). Constituciones propias del convento del Santíssimo Sacramento de Monjas Recoletas Bernardas de la villa de Madrid (Madrid, 1656). Constituciones y estatutos…para las Religiosas del Monesterio de S. Bernardo… en su villa y Corte Arçobispal de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid, 1625). David, Jan, Paradisus sponsi et sponsæ: in quo messis myrrhæ et aromatum ex instrumentis ac mysterijs Passionis Christi colligenda, vt ei commoriamur. Et pancarpium Marianum, septemplici titulorum serie distinctum, vt in B. Virginis odorem curramus, et Christus formetur in nobis (Antwerp, 1607). Duval, André, La vie admirable de la bienheureuse sœur Marie de l’Incarnation, religieuse converse de l’ordre de Notre-Dame du Mont-Carmel et fondatrice de cet ordre en France, appelée dans le monde Mademoiselle Acarie (Paris 1621, rpd Paris 1893). Fernández de Caso, Francisco, Discurso en que se refieren las solenidades, y fiestas, con que el excelentíssimo Duque celebró en su villa de Lerma, la Dedicación de la Iglesia Colegial, y translaciones de los Conventos que ha edificado allí (n.p., n.d.). Ferraige, Jacques, La vie admirable, et digne d’une fidele imitation, de la B. Mere Marguerite d’Arbouze, ditte de Saincte Gertrude (Paris, 1628). Flori, Benvenuto, Evangelica parabola delle vergini prudenti e delle stolte, composizione dramatica (Siena, 1642). González Vaquero, Miguel, La muger fuerte. Por otro título la Vida de doña María Vela, Monja de San Bernardo, en el Convento de Santa Ana de Ávila (Barcelona, 1640). Herrera, Pedro de, Translación del Santíssimo Sacramento a la iglesia colegial de San Pedro de la villa de Lerma (Madrid, 1618). Idea Vitæ Teresianæ Iconibvs Symbolicis Expressa (Antwerp, 1687). Jesus, Thomas a, Divinae orationis, sive a Deo infusae methodus, natura et gradus, libri quatuor (Antwerp, 1623). Kirchhueber, Barnabas, Der Gnaden=und Tugend=reiche Anger/Das ist: Die sonderbare grosse Gnaden/tugendsame Leben/vnd andere denck= vnd lob=würdige Begebenheiten/So in dem Uhr=alten vnd hochberühmten Gotts=Hauß/vnd jungfräulichen Closter S. Clarae Ordens in München bey S. Jacob am ANGER biß in die 480. Jahr verschlossen/vnd verborgen gelegen/nunmehr angemerckt vnd eröffnen (Munich, 1701). Macé, Jean, La vie de la vénérable mère Marie de Saint-Charles, religieuse de sainte Elizabeth dite au siècle Madame la baronne de Veuilly (Paris, 1671).

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Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Avis de la venerable mere Madeleine de S. Joseph, pour la conduite des novices (Paris, 1672). Ortega, Pedro de, Fundación del insigne convento de S. Blas de Lerma, de Religiosas de la Orden de Sto. Domingo (Burgos, 1630). Parrino, Domenico Antonio, Napoli Città Nobilissima, antica e fedelissima esposta à gli occhi, & alla mente de’ Curiosi (Naples, 1700). Pont, Louis du, Les Oevvres Spiritvel dv R.P. Lovys dv Pont (2 vols, Paris, 1621). Pozo, Alonso del, Vida de la Venerable Madre doña Micaela de Aguirre (Madrid, 1718). Regio Paolo & Cleonte Torbizi, Vita di S. Patricia vergine Figlia dell’Imperator Costante e Protettrice della Città, e Regno di Napoli, Descritta già da Monsignor Paolo Regio, Vescovo di Vico Equense, e poi rinovata, & ampliata da Cleonte Torbizi, ad istanza delle molte Reveren. Monache del Monasterio di S. Patricia di Napoli (Naples, 1643). Regla de la Bienaventurada Virgen Santa Clara (Madrid, 1620). Regla propia y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas del Orden de la Santísima Trinidad, Redempción de Cautivos (Madrid, 1699). Regla y Constituciones del convento de las Carmelitas Calçadas de la Regular observancia de la Virgen María del Monte Carmelo de Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas de la villa de Madrid (Madrid, 1630). Regla, y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas de Nuestra Señora de la Merced (Madrid, 1683). Rispoli, Niccolò, Vita, Virtù, e Miracoli Principali di S. Patrizia, raccolta del Cav. Manzo Naopolitano e stampato nel 1611 ad istanza delle Signore Dame Monache del Monastero di S. Patrizia in Napoli. Ristampata ora a divozione e spese delle medesime con distinta relazione delle Reliquie insigni, che sio conservano nella loro Chiesa (Naples, 1741). St Benedict, The Rule of the Most Blessed Father Saint Benedict Patriarke of all Munkes (Ghent, 1632). Statutes Compyled for the Better Observation of the Holy Rule of … S. Benedict …Delivered to the English Religious Woemen of the Monastery of Our Blessed Lady of the Perpetuall Virgin Mary in Bruxelles and to all their Successours (Ghent, 1632). Tutini, Camillo, Notizie della Vita e miracoli di due Santi Gaudiosi, l’Uno Vescovo di Bittinia, e l’altro di Salerno: e del martirio di S. Fortunata, e Fratelli, e del loro culto, e veneratione in Napoli (Naples, 1634). Vasi, Giuseppe, Delle Magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna Libro Ottavo che contiene i Monasteri Conservatori di Donne… (Rome, 1758). Printed Editions Amezua, Agustín G. de (ed.), Lope de Vega en sus cartas. Introducción al epistolario de Lope de Vega Carpio, 2nd edn (3 vols, Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1989).

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Barbieri, Francisco Asenjo, Biografías y documentos sobre música y músicos españoles (Legado Barbieri), Emilio Casares (ed.) (2 vols, Madrid: Fundación Banco Exterior, 1986–88). Chroniques de l’ordre des Carmélites de la réforme de Sainte Thérèse depuis leur introduction en France (5 vols, Troyes, 1846–65). Colombo, Umberto (ed.), Vita e processo di Suor Virginia Maria de Leyva monaca di Monza (Milan: Garzanti, 1985). Commedia di dieci vergine, E. Alvisi (ed.) (Florence: Libreria Dante, 1882). D’Arco Silvio Avalle, Sponsus, ed. with music by R. Monterosso (MilanNaples: R. Ricciardi, 1965). Hernáez de la Torre, Domingo and Joseph Sáenz de Arquíñigo, Chrónica de la provincia de Burgos (Madrid, 1722), Antolín Abad Pérez, O. F. M. (ed.) (Madrid: ed. Cisveros, 1990). Het spel van de V vroede ende van de V dwaeze maegden (Ghent, 1846), Marcel Hoebeke (ed.) (Zwolle: Ijeek Willink, 1959 and The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979). Jesus Mary, John of, Instruction of novices (Rome, 1588), trans. and ed. by Giovanni Strina (Brussels: Soumillion 2001). Junius, Maria Anna, ‘Bamberg im Schweden-Kriege’, in Friedrich Karl Hümmer (ed.), Bericht des Historischen Vereins für die Pflege der Geschichte des ehemaligen Fürstbistums Bamberg, 52 (1890): 1−168, 53 (1891): 169−230. Madeleine de Saint-Joseph, Lettres spirituelles, Pierre Sérouet (ed.) (Bruges: Présence du Carmel, 1965). Pinel y Monroy, María, Retablo de Carmelitas, Nicolás González (ed.) (Madrid, 1981). Procesos de beatificación y canonización de Santa Teresa de Jesús, Silverio de Santa Teresa (ed.) (3 vols, Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 1934–35). Relaciones breves de actos públicos celebrados en Madrid de 1541 a 1650, Simón Díaz (ed.) (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Madrileños, 1982). Salazar, Pedro de, O. F. M., Corónica e historia de la fundación y progreso de la Provincia de Castilla de la orden del bienaventurado padre San Francisco (Madrid, 1612), Antolín Abad Pérez, O. F. M. (ed.) (Madrid: ed. Cisveros, 1977). Sondermann, M. Antonia, Isabella de Spiritu Sancto (1606–1675). Herzbücher (Grevenbroich: Bernardus Verlag, 2005). St Augustine, The City of God, trans. M. Dods (Edinburgh, 1872). St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, T. Gilby (ed.) (London, 1981). Staiger, Clara, Klara Staigers Tagebuch: Aufzeichnungen während des Dreißigjährigen Krieges im Kloster Mariastein bei Eichstätt, Ortrun Fina (ed.) (Regensburg: Pustet, 1981). Téllez, Gabriel [Tirso de Molina], Historia general de la orden de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, Manuel Penedo Rey, O. de M. (ed.) (2 vols, Madrid: Provincia de la Merced de Castilla, 1973–74). Teresa de Jesús, Cartas, Tomás Alvarez (ed.) (Washington, D. C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1983).

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Teresa de Jesús, The Collected Works of St Teresa of Avila, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodríguez (3 vols, Washington, D. C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, D. C., 1976–85). Teresa de Jesús, The Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans. E. Allison Peers (2 vols, Westminster: Sheed and Ward, 1950). Toledano, Miguel, Minerva Sacra (Madrid, 1616), Ángel González Palencia (ed.) (Madrid: C. Bermejo, 1949). Torre, Carlo, Il ritratto di Milano (Milan, 1674; 2 vols, 1714 [facs. edn, Bologna, 1973]). Vela y Cueto, María, Autobiografía y libro de las Mercedes, Olegario González Hernández (ed.) (Barcelona: Flors, 1961). Secondary Literature Ahlgren, Gillian, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). Arenal, Electa and Stacey Schlau (eds), Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in their own Words, trans. Amanda Powell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989). Baade, Colleen R., ‘“Hired” Nun Musicians in Early Modern Castile’, in Thomasin La May (ed.), Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: ManyHeaded Melodies (Burlington/VT: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 287–310. Baernstein, P. Renée, A Convent Tale: A Study of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). Barry, Jonathan,, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts (eds), Witchcraft in early modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Belting, Hans, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Benvenuti, Anna, et al. (eds), Storia della santità nel cristianesimo occidentale (Rome: Viella, 2005), pp. 105–08. Bilinkoff, Jodi, ‘Teresa of Jesus and Carmelite Reform’, in Richard De Molen (ed.), Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation. Essays in honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-fifth Birthday (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994). ———, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). ———, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Boesch Gajano, S., ‘Verità e pubblicità: i racconti di miracoli nel libro XXII del De Civitate Dei’, in E. Cavalcanti (ed.), Il ‘De Civitate Dei’. L’Opera, le interpretazioni, l’influsso (Rome, Freiburg/Breisg.; Vienna: Herder, 1996), pp. 367–88. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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Deal, L. K., ‘Widows and Reputation in the Diocese of Chester, England, 1560–1650’, Journal of Family History 23 (1998): 382–92. Diefendorf, Barbara B., ‘Contradictions of the Century of Saints: Aristocratic Patronage and the Convents of Counter-Reformation Paris’, French Historical Studies 24 (2001), pp. 469–99. ———, ‘Discerning Spirits: Women and Spiritual Authority in CounterReformation France’, in Margaret Mikesell and Adele Seeff (eds), Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 241–65. ———, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Dinan, Susan, ‘Confraternities as a Venue for Female Activism during the Catholic Reformation’, in John Patrick Donnelly and Michael W. Maher (eds), Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain (Kirksville, Missouri: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), pp. 191– 214. ———, ‘Overcoming Gender Limitations: The Daughters of Charity and Early Modern Catholicism’, in Kathleen Comerford and Hilmar Pabel (eds), Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honor of John O’Malley, S. J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 97–113. ———, Women and Poor Relief in Seventeenth-Century France: The Early History of the Daughters of Charity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione (9 vols, Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1974–). Domínguez Ortiz, Antonio, La sociedad española en el siglo XVII (2 vols, Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1970). Duvignacq-Glessgen, Marie-Ange, L’ordre de la Visitation à Paris aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Cerf, 1994). Eire, Carlos M. N., From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Elm, Kaspar, ‘Reform- und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Ein Überblick’, in Kaspar Elm (ed.), Reform- und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen. Ein Überblick (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989), pp. 3–19. Emond, Cecile, L’Iconographie Carmélitaine dans les anciens Pays-Bas méridionaux (2 vols, Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1961). Facchiano, A., ‘Monasteri Benedettini o Capitoli di Canonichesse? L’esempio di S. Patrizia di Napoli’, Benedictina 38 (1991): 35–60. Farè, A., Il monastero di S. Caterina in Brera (Tesi di laurea, Università degli Studi, Milan, 1991–92). Fischer, Anton. Die Verwaltungsorganization Münchens im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Unpubl. PhD Diss., University of Munich, 1951). Freedberg, Sydney Joseph, Parmigianino: His Works in Painting (Cambridge/ Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950). Freist, Dagmar, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645 (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997).

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Gatz, Johannes, ‘Klarissen-Kloster St. Jakob am Anger in München’, in Bayr. Franziskanerprovinz (ed.), Bavaria Franciscana Antiqua (Munich: Lentner, 1957), pp. 195–272. Geary, Patrick, Furta Sacra: Theft of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). Gluckman, Max, ‘Gossip and Scandal’, Current Anthropology 4 (1963): 307–16. Gowing, Laura, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Green, Deidre, Gold in the Crucible. Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition (Longmead, Shaftesbury: Element, 1989). Grimaldi, Antonia, ‘Il Chiostro e la scena. Michelangelo Buonarroti il Giovane e il convento di Sant’Agata,’ Studi italiani 10 (1998), 149–98. Guilday, Peter, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914). Harline, Craig, The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Inside a Seventeenth-Century Convent (New Haven and London: Doubleday, 1994). Harline, Craig and Eddy Put, ‘A Bishop in the Cloisters: The Visitations of Mathias Hovius (Malines, 1596–1620)’, Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 611–39. Henneberg, J. von, ‘Cardinal Caesar Baronius, the arts and the early Christian martyrs’, in F. Mormando (ed.), Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image (Chestnut Hill/MA: Charles S. and Isabella V. McMullen Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 136–50. Hills, Helen, ‘“Enamelled with the Blood of a Noble Lineage”: Tracing noble blood and female holiness in Early Modern Neapolitan convents and their architecture’, Church History, 73, no. 1 (March 2004): 1–40. ———, Invisible City: The architecture of devotion in seventeenth-century Neapolitan convents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Hindle, Steve, ‘The Shaming of Margaret Knowsley: Gossip, Gender and the Experience of Authority in Early Modern England’, Continuity and Change 9 (1994): 391–419. Holmes, Clive, ‘Women Witnesses and Witches’, Past and Present 140 (1993): 45–78. Hoornaert, Piet, ‘The Contemplative Aspiration: a study of the prayer theology of Tomás de Jesús’, Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 56, no. 4 (1980): 339–76. Howell Jolly, Penny, ‘Antonello da Messina’s Saint Jerome in His Study: An Iconographic Analysis’, in Art Bulletin 65 (1983): 238–53. Howells, Edward, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Crossroad, 2002). Hubensteiner, Benno, Die geistliche Stadt: Welt und Leben des Johann Franz Eckher von Kapfing und Liechteneck, Fürstbischofs von Freising (Munich: Pflaum, 1954). Ibsen, Kristine, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1999).

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Il grande libro dei santi. Dizionario enciclopedico (Milan: Cinisello Balsamo, 1998). Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Jones, Deborah, ‘Gossip: Notes of Women’s Oral Culture’ (1980), rpd in Deborah Cameron (ed.), The Feminist Critique of Language (London: Routledge, 1990). Kendrick, Robert L., Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Milan (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996). Kerpel, P. Gaston de, ‘L’exercice de la présence de Dieu chez les écrivains au début de la Réforme carmélitaine thérésienne’, Ephemerides Carmeliticae 27 (1976): 146–211. Knipping, John-Baptist, Iconography of the counter-reformation in the Netherlands: heaven on earth (2 vols, Nieuwkoop: de Graaf; Lieden: Sijthoff, 1974). Körkel-Hinkfoth, Regine, Die Parabel von den klugen und törichten Jungfrauen (Mt. 25, 1–13) in der bildenden Kunst und im geistlichen Schauspiel (Frankfurt am Main and Berlin: Peter Lang, 1994). Kormann, Eva, Ich, Welt und Gott: Autobiographik im 17. Jahrhundert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). Krusenstjern, Benigna von and Hans Medick (eds), Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreißigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999). Laven, Mary, Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent (London: Penguin, 2002). Lavin, Irving, Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (2 vols, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press and the Pierpont Morgan Library, 1980). Layna Serrano, Francisco, Los conventos antiguos de Guadalajara (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1943), Legg, John Wickham, ‘The Divine Service in the Sixteenth Century, Illustrated by the Reform of the Breviary of the Humiliati in 1548’, Transactions of the St. Paul’s Ecclesiological Society 2 (1890): 273–95. Lehfeldt, Elizabeth, ‘Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 1009–30. Leonard, Amy, Nails in the wall: Catholic nuns in Reformation Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Liebhart, Wilhelm, ‘“Die Seelen haben einen großen Trost verloren …” Die ‘gottseelige’ Klara Hortulana Empacher im Münchner Angerkloster’, Amperland 31 (1995): 36–9. Llamas Martínez, Enrique, Santa Teresa de Jesús y la Inquisición española (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1972). Lowe, Kate J. P., ‘Secular Brides and Convent Brides: Wedding Ceremonies in Italy During the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation’, in Trevor Dean and Kate J. P. Lowe (eds), Marriage in Italy 1300–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 41–65.

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Lunn, David, The English Benedictines, 1540–1688: From Reformation to Revolution (London: Burns and Oates, 1980). Marcora, Carlo, ‘Lettere del cardinal Federico alle claustrali’, Memorie storiche della diocesi di Milano 11 (1964): 183–424. Martini, Alessandro, ‘I tre libri delle laude divine’ di Federico Borromeo: Ricerca storico-stilistica (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1975). Medioli, Francesca, L’ ‘Inferno Monacale’ di Arcangela Tarabotti (Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990). Medwick, Cathleen, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (London: Duckworth, 2000). Merry, Sally Engle,‘Rethinking Gossip and Scandal’, in Donald Black (ed.), Toward a General Theory of Social Control, vol. 1: Fundamentals (New York and Orlando/Fla: Aademic Press, 1984), pp. 271–302. Metz, René, La Consécration des vierges dans l’église romaine: Etude d’histoire de la liturgie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954). Monson, Craig A., Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Mooney, Catherine M. (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Morgain, Stéphane-Marie, Pierre de Bérulle et les Carmélites de France: La querelle du gouvernement, 1583–1629 (Paris: Cerf, 1995). Mortimer, Geoff, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years War 1618–48 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). Nappi, E., ‘Pittori del Seicento a Napoli: Notizie inedite dai documenti dell’Archivio Storico del Banco di Napoli’, Ricerche sul 600 napoletano (Milan: Edizioni “L & T”, 1983). Newhauser, Richard, The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular (Turnhout: Brepols, 1993). Norton, Mary Beth, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). Orcibal, Jean, La rencontre du Carmel thérésien avec les mystiques du Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). Pallucchini, Rodolfo, La giovinezza del Tintoretto (Milan: Edizioni Daria Guamati, 1950). ———, Tintoretto le opere sacre e profane (2 vols, Milan: Electa, 1990). Pane, Roberto, Il Monastero Napoletano di San Gregorio Armeno (Naples: L’Arte tipografica, 1957). Peers, E. Allison, Handbook to the Life and Times of St Teresa and St John of the Cross (London: Burns and Oates, 1954). ———, The Spanish Mystics (3 vols, London: Sheldon Press, 1960). Pernoud, E., ‘Les épreuves de sainte Thérèse: la collection de Manuel Navarro’, Nouvelles de l’estampe 133 (1994): 23–5. Pilo, Giuseppe Maria, ‘Il Tintoretto e alcune fonti visive della sua giovinezza: Jacopo Sansovino (e altri),’ Arte documento 8 (1994): 115–24. Pollack, Linda A. ‘Parent-Child Relations’, in David I. Kertzer and Marzioi Barbagli (eds), The History of the European Family. Volume One: Family

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Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Porteman, Karel, ‘Een Emblematische Voorstelling van het Mystieke Leven: De “Idea Vitæ Teresianæ” (c. 1686)’, Ons geestelijk erf 48 (1974): 46–61. Poutrin, Isabelle, ‘Souvenirs d’enfance: L’apprentissage de la sainteté dans l’Espagne moderne’, Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 32 (1987): 331–54. Prosperi, Adriano, “Otras Indias”. Missionari della controriforma tra condatini e selvaggi’, in Giancarlo Garfagnini (ed.), Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura (Florence: Olschki, 1982), pp. 203–34. Pulz, Waltraud, ‘Imitatio – Aemulatio – Simulatio: Leibhaftige Heiligkeit und scheinheilige Leiber’, in Peter Burschel and Anne Conrad (eds), Vorbild Inbild Abbild: Religiöse Lebensmodelle in geschlechtergeschichtlicher Perspektive (Freiburg/Breisg.: Rombach, 2003), pp. 35–47. Querol Gavaldá, Miguel, ‘Corresponsales de Miguel Gómez Camargo’, Anuario Musical 14 (1959): 165–77. Ranft, Patricia, A Woman’s Way: The Forgotten History of Women Spiritual Directors (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). Rapley, Elizabeth, A Social History of the Cloister: Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). Reardon, Colleen, Holy Concord Within Sacred Walls: Nuns and Music in Siena, 1575–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Rizzo, Vincenzo, I Cinquantadue affreschi di Luca Giordano a S. Gregorio Armeno (Naples: Arte tipografica, 1992). Rocher, Yves (ed.), L’Art du XVIIe siècle dans les carmels de France (exh. cat., Musée du Petit Palais, Paris, 1982). Rublack, Ulinka, The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Ruiz Alcon, M. T., ‘Santa Teresa en los monasteries de El Escorial y de las Descalzas Reales’, Reales sitios 19, no. 74 (1982): 17–24. Rysman, Alexander, ‘How the “Gossip” became a Woman’, Journal of Communication 27 (1977): 176–80. Saba, Agostino, Federico Borromeo ed i mistici del suo tempo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1933). Sallmann, Jean-Michel, Santi barocchi: Modelli di santità, pratiche devozionali e comportamenti religiosi nel regno di Napoli dal 1540 al 1750 (Lecce: Argo, 1994). Sanger, Alice E., ‘Women of Power: Studies in the Patronage of Medici Grand Duchesses and Regentesses 1565–1650’ (Unpubl. PhD Diss., University of Manchester, 2002). Schiedermair, Werner (ed.), Kloster Oberschönenfeld (Donauwörth: Auer, 1995). Seidel, Linda, Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

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273

Sharpe, James, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York, Borthwick Papers no. 58 (York: University of York, 1980). ———, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London: Hamilton, 1996). Signorotto, G., ‘Cercatori di reliquie’, Rivista di storia di letteratura religiosa, 3 (1985): 383–418. Silverio de Santa Teresa, Historia del Carmen Descalzo en España, Portugal y América. vol. iv: La Descalcez independiente. Ultimas fundaciones. Muerte de la Santa. (1577–1582) (Burgos: Monte Carmelo, 1936). Slade, Carole, Saint Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Soergel, Philip, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Strasser, Ulrike, ‘Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, decorated relics and the contest over women’s place in the public sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (1999): 255–88. ———, ‘Una Prophetessa in tempo di guerra; il caso die Maria Anna Lindmayr (1657–1729)’, in Gianna Pomata and Gabriella Zarri (eds), I Monasteri Femminili Come Centri Di Cultura Fra Rinascimento E Barroco (Rome: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 2005), pp. 365–87. ———, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Strathern, Marilyn, Partial Connections (Savage/Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). Taggard, Mindy Nancarrow, ‘Art and Alienation in Early Modern Spanish Convents’, South Atlantic Review 65 (Winter, 2000): 24–40. Thøfner, Margit, ‘“Let your desire be to see God”: Teresian Mysticism and Otto van Veen’s Amoris Divini Emblemata’, Emblemata (2001), 83–103. Tommasi, Laura Di, ‘Una esperienza religiosa e una proposta educativa nella Firenze del Seicento: Le signore Montalve della Quiete’ (Unpubl. PhD Diss., University of Florence, 1989–90). Vicente Delgado, Alfonso de, La Música en el Monasterio de Santa Ana de Ávila (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 1989). Walker, Claire, ‘Recusants, Daughters, and Sisters in Christ: English Nuns and their Communities in the Seventeenth Century’, in Susan Broomhall and Stephanie Tarbin (eds), Women’s Cultures and Communities in Europe, 1400–1800 (forthcoming). ———, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003). Weaver, Elissa, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Weber, Alison, ‘María de San José: Saint Teresa’s “Difficult” Daughter’, in Christopher Wilson (ed.), The Heirs of St Teresa of Avila: Defenders and Disseminators of the Founding Mother’s Legacy (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2006), pp. 1–20.

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———, ‘Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, no. 1 (2000): 123–46. ———, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Weichselgartner, Caroline Renate, Kloster und Stadt: Das Angerkloster in München im Mittelalter (Remscheid: Gardez!, 2004). Wickstrom, J., ‘The Humiliati: Liturgy and Identity’, Archivium fratrum praedicatorum 62 (1992): 195–225. Wilson, Christopher C., ‘Saint Teresa of Avila’s Martyrdom: Images of Her Transverberation in Mexican Colonial Painting’, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 74–75 (1999): 211–33. Wilson, Peter J., ‘Filcher of Good Names: An Enquiry into Anthropology and Gossip’, Man 9 (1974): 93–102. Woodford, Charlotte, ‘Convents and Writings by Nuns’, in Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (eds), Companion to Women’s Historical Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 104–12. ———, Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Wright, Wendy M., Bond of Perfection: Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). Zanette, Emilio, Suor Arcangela Tarabotti, monaca del Seicento veneziano (Venice and Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1960). Zardin, Danilo, Donna e religiosa di rara eccellenza: Prospera Corona Bascapè, i libri e la cultura nei monasteri milanesi del Cinque e Seicento (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1992). Zarri, Gabriella and Lucetta Scaraffia (eds), Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge/ Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Zarri, Gabriella, ‘Gender, Religious Institutions and Social Discipline’, in Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (eds), Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 193–212. ———, ‘The Marriage of Virgins in the Sixteenth Century’, in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (eds), Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994).

Index Abbiati, Filippo, 102 Acarie, Barbe (Marie de l’Incarnation, née Aurillot), 5, 6, 146, 152, 154–71, 262–3, 267 Acarie, Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement, 162, 167, 262 Acarie, Marie de Jésus, 156, 162 Acarie, Pierre, 156, 157 Adolphus, Gustavus, 146, 253, 257 Afterlife. See Salvation Agatha, Saint, 131, 135, 269 Agnès de Jésus des Lyons, 157, 161 Agnès de Jesús-Marie de Bellefonds, 164, 165 Agnes, daughter of Emperor Ludwig IV, 42 Aguilar, Isabel de, 81 Aguirre, Micaela de, 90, 264 Agullona, Margarita, 147 Alacoque, Margaret Mary, 148, 149, 151 Alba, Duke of, 62 Albert of Austria, Archduke, 63, 175, 177 Alcántara, Pedro de, 153 Alfonsa González de Salazar. See Salazar Amling, Carl Gustav, Fig. 2.1, 54 Ana de Christo, 86 Ana de Jesús de Lobera, 64, 65, 66, 74, 160, 164, 205 Ana de Santa María, 86 Ana Iacinta, 86 Ana María del Rosario, 86 Andrea Avellino, Blessed, 25, 31, 262 Angel de Salazar. See Salazar Angels 45, 49, 53, 91, 92, 94, 110, 138, 139, 153, 211, 225. See also Raphael, Archangel and Michael, Archangel Anna di Castello, Saint, 140 Anna, Saint, 140, 264 Anne de Saint Laurent de Saint-Leu, 160, 161 Anne du Saint-Sacrement Viole, 166 Añover, Rodrigo Lasso Niño, Count of, 63

Anthony of Padua, Saint, 89 Antonia de Toledo, 81, 82 Antonia Lucia, 107, 121, 133 Antonio, Giovanni, 31 Arese, Giulia, 114, 115, 123 Aresi, Paolo, Bishop of Tortona, 112, 114 Asceticism, 51, 56. See also Mortification Atslow, Cecilia, 237 Augustine, Saint, 15, 16, 74, 176, 193, 205 Augustinians (Recollect), 85, 176, 238, 245 Barbier, Barbara, 47 Barbier, Mathias, 47 Bartholomew, Saint, 23, 156 Bautista, María, 217, 224 beatas, 82, 83, 145, 147, 149 Beck Johannes, Abbot of Kaisheim, 253 Beck, Margaretha, prioress of abbey Oberschönenfeld, 253 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert, 18, 177 Benedict, Saint, 232, 264 Benedictines, 231, 232, 234, 239, 241–4, 271 Bernard, Saint, 24, 85, 91, 182, 193, 263 Bernardines (Recollect), 85 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Fig. 3.1, 60, 64, 65, 66, 270 Bérulle, Pierre de, 163–5, 271 Bianca Maria Sant’Agostino, 107 Blaise, Saint, 86, 87, 90, 91, 264 Blanchard, Alexia, 235, 238 Blood: noblility of, 13, 23, 42, 158; as a relic, 17, 22–4, 30, 56; sacrifice of, 34, 37, 39, 48, 51–3, 56; of Christ, 39. See also Eucharist Body. See Christ, Sexuality, Mortification Bonaventura, Veronica, 42 Bonaventure, Saint, 16 Boncompagno, Cardinal, 25 Bonfanti, Ottavia Fulgenzia, 121 Boonen, Jacob, Archbishop of Mechelen, Borromeo, Carlo, 18, 231

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Borromeo, Frederigo, Fig. 5.3, 5, 18, 97, 98, 102, 103, 108–15, 117–19, 122, 123, 271, 272 Brandis, Anna Margaretha von, 51 Brebeuf, Jean de, 153 Brûlart de Sillery, Nicolas, 167 Cairo, Francesco del, Figs 5.2, 5.4, 102, 103, 120 Calced. See Carmelites Calvin, John, 17, 262. See also Calvinist Calvinist, 251 Cantone, Serafino, 115, 117 Capuchins, 158, 162 Caracciolo, Fulvia, 23, 133 Carafa, Maria Agnese, 25, 29, 38 Carisio, Giovanni Battista, 112 Carmelites: Calced (Mitigated Rule), 219, 220; Discalced: 5, 6, 11; Visual Hagiography of, 59, 63, 65; the order in France, 155–73; Spirituality, 173–207, Boarders in convents, 211–25. See also Teresa of Avila Carpaccio, Vittore, 77 Carpentiero, Leonardo, Fig. 1.6, 26 Casati, Geronima Cattarina, 121 Castelo, Antónia Margarida de, 147 Catalina de Jésus y San Francisco, 146 Catherine d’Orléans, Princesse de Longueville, 161 Catherine de Saint Augustin, 146, 153 Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, Figs 5.2, 5.4, 4, 109, 112, 119, 120, 122–4 Catherine of Genoa, Saint, 149 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 2, 7 Catholic Reformation. See CounterReformation and Council of Trent Cecilia, Saint, Fig. 1.11, 35, 36, 110, 268 Cepeda, Francisco de, 217, 223, 224 Cepeda, Lorenzo de, 217, 219–24 Cepeda, Teresita de, Fig. 10.1, 6, 216, 217, 219–24 Cervantes, Miguel de, 92, 94 Chambers, Robert, 235 Champney, Anthony, 234 Chantal, Jeanne de, 143, 150, 170, 274 Charity. See Virtues Charles II of Anjou, 26 Chastity. See Virtues, Sexuality

Christ, body of, 15, 17, 33, 37, 67, 88, 89, 90, 124; nuns’ imitation of, 39, 51, 54, 66, 74, 160, 178, 190, 193, 196, 203, 212; spouses of, 24, 109, 112, 113, 123, 228, 129, 130, 136–9, 151 Cistercians, 87, 90, 145, 158, 246 Clara Hortulana Hortulana of Empach. See Empach Clare, Saint, 87, 92, 140, 264. See also Franciscans Claustration: Effects of Tridentine Regulations on, 7, 33, 40, 48, 133, 134, 165, 166, 213, 245; in Neapolitan convents, 7, 12, 13, 20, 25, 26, 33; conflicts with music-making, 8, 88, 103, 117, 118; in Discalced Carmelite convents, 78, 161, 163, 212, 219; in German convents, 39, 40, 51, 52, 54, 245; in English Benedictine convents, 228, 231–4, 240, 243 Clavijo, Ana María, 81, 82 Clavijo, María, 81, 82 Clothing ceremony. See Consecration Colette, Saint, 2 Colettines, 2 Colford, Martha, 234, 239 Collaert, Adriaen, Figs 3.2–3.15, 4, 65, 190 Colodro, Francisco Benito, 149 Colombière, Claude de la, 149, 151 Colonna, Anna, 34 Colonna, Vittoria, 26, 34, 262 Combalet, Madame de, Duchesse d’Aiguillon, 166 Communion. See Eucharist Conceptionists, 87 Confaloniera, Angela Flaminia, 98, 102, 103, 107, 108, 112–15, 118–21, 124 Consecration ceremony, monastic, 130, 135–8 Constantine, Emperor, 21 Contemplation, 4, 46, 84, 135, 196, 198, 201, 202, 207, 245. See also Prayer, supernatural Contreras, Antonia de, 81, 82 Correa de Campo, Manuel, 87 Cospeau, Philippe, 163

Index

Coton, Pierre, 159, 160 Cotton, Margery, 236–43 Council of Trent (Tridentine reforms): 1, 2, 4, 12, 17, 21, 74, 76, 82, 84, 101, 217, 219, 270; effects on female sanctity in Bavaria, 33, 39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 50–52, 56; effects on Teresian order in Spain, 220–25. See also Claustration and Vocation, Tridentine Regulations Counter-Reformation (or Catholic Reformation), 2, 11, 37, 39, 40, 49, 60, 70, 130, 155, 156, 165–9, 171, 255, 266–8, 270, 271, 273. See also Council of Trent Covarrubias, Alonso, 82 Cozzolani, Chiara Margarita, 120 Cripa, Arcangela Maria, 121 D’Errico, Teodoro, 33 Da Messina, Antonello, 125, 189, 270 Damasus, Pope, 125 Damiana de St Christoval, 86 Dante Alighieri, 133 Dantisco, Isabel de Jesús, 214, 215 Dantisco, Juana (mother of Teresa de Jesús of Avila), 214, 215 Dantisco, Juliana de la Madre de Dios, 214 Daughters of Charity, 268 Daughters of St Elizabeth. See Filles de la Saint Elisabeth Daughters of St Madeleine. See Filles de la Madeleine Daughters of the Cross. See Filles de la Croix David, Jan, Fig. 9.8, 178, 193 Deacon, Potentiana, 235, 236, 240 Demon. See Devil Devil, 44, 45, 48–53, 62, 75, 76, 108, 131, 132, 134, 144–6, 150, 214, 230, 256, 257, 259, 271 Díaz, Mari, 145 Diderot, Denis, 1 Digby, Magdalen, 138 Dionysius, the Pseudo-Areopagite, 183, 190 Divine Office. See Eucharist Dominic, Saint, 87, 146, 264

277

Dominicans, 13, 24, 29, 62, 86–9, 90, 176, 182, 246, 247, 249, 250, 252, 264 Doria, Nicolás, 164 Dowry, 89, 92, 94, 95, 103, 107, 121, 214, 223, 237, 238 Dürer, Albrecht, 77, 189 Duval, André, 146, 152, 155, 156, 159, 164, 165, 168–70, 263 Eckher, Johann Franz, Prince-Bishop, 43, 44, 45, 56, 270 Ecstasy, 46, 110, 159. See also Rapture and Prayer Education, women’s, 5, 40, 65, 103, 119, 120, 134, 173, 176 Egidio, Saint, 34 Elizabeth, Saint, 264. See also Filles de la Saint-Elisabeth Empach, Clara Hortulana of, 4, 39–59 Empacher, Joachim, 42, 47 Enclosure, monastic. See Claustration Ernst, Juliana, 257 Eucharist: relation to relics, 12, 15, 17, 20; nun’s devotion to and reception of, 20, 24, 34, 46, 47, 49, 121, 122, 150, 151, 153, 221, 240; St Teresa’s relation to, 75, 76, in medieval culture, 67; in musical performance, 4, 82, 84, 86, 88–92, 113; in Constitutions, 87, 92 Fasting. See Mortification Fayet, Geneviève, 170 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 258 Feuillantines, 158, 171, 262. See also Cistercians Filles de la Croix, 169 Filles de la Madeleine, 162 Filles de la Saint-Elisabeth, 168 Filomarino, Cardinal Ascanio, 25 Fisher, John, Bishop of Rochester, 201 Flagellation. See Mortification Fogliani, Anna Maria, 102, 103, 107, 113, 121, 123 Fortunata, Saint, 27, 28, 264 Francesco di Paola, Saint, 25, 31 Francis, Saint, 153, 262, 263, 265. See also Franciscans

278

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Franciscans: First Order of St Francis or friars: 2, 41, 44, 83, 88, 112; Poor Clares (Second Order of St Francis or Discalced Franciscan nuns). See also Clare, Saint), 2, 3, 4, 39, 41, 44, 45, 84–7, 89, 92, 110, 147, 150, 250, 269; habit: 94 Fuente, Alonso, de la, 62 Gage, Teresa, 233, 234 Galle, Theodor, Figs 3.2–3.15, 4, 65, 190 Gallement, Jacques, 164, 165 Gallois, Louise de, 165 Gaudioso, Saint, 27–9 Gawen, Frances, 234, 235, 237 Gaytán, Antonio, 211, 212 Gaytán, Mariana, 211 George, Saint, 43 Gervasius, Saint, 112 Giacomo della Marca, Blessed, 31 Giordano, Luca, Figs 1.1, 1.8, 11, 12, 32, 272 Gómez Camargo, Miguel, 88, 268, 272 Gondi, Marquise de Maignelay, Charlotte-Marguerite de, 158, 162 Gondi, Philippe-Emmanuel de, 167 Gracián, Jerónimo, 151, 175, 205, 211, 214, 215, 217, 219, 223 Gregorio Armeno, Saint, Figs 1.1, 1.3, 1.8, 1.9, 11, 12, 13, 32, 33, 262, 272 Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint, 20 Gregory the Great, Saint, 16 Grimaldi, Francesco, 30 Habit (religious dress), 24, 26, 33, 44, 94, 212–14, 217, 219, 220 Hawkins, Benedicta, 244 Helena, Saint, 21, 24 Helfta, Gertrude of, 138 Henri III, King of France, 156 Henri IV, King of France, 156, 157 Heresy, 45, 156, 157, 160. See also Prayer, objectless Herold, Elisabeth, prioress of abbey Oberschönenfeld, 245–60, 262 Herrera, Pedro de, 86, 263 Hewicke, Ursula, 234, 238, 239, 240 Hovius, Mathias, Archbishop of Mechelen, 232, 233, 241, 261, 269

Humiliate, order of the, 4, 5, 97, 101, 111–19 Humility. See Virtues Humour, 130, 132 Ibáñez, Pedro, 153 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint see also Jesuit Order, 63, 74 Incarnation, 5, 6, 11, 15, 212. See also Eucharist Ingleby, Anne, 232, 233, 237, 239 Isabel de Jesús Dantisco. See Dantisco Isabel de Jésus, 146 Isabella Clara Eugenia, Infanta of Spain, 63, 175, 177 Isabella de Spiritu Sancto (née Isabella de Uquina), 175, 202, 265 James, Aurea, 244 James, Saint, 146 Jeanne de Jésus Séguier, 161 Jerome, Saint, 34, 77, 78, 125, 143, 189, 270 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus, Joannes-Baptista, Hubertus, 173 John of Meda, Saint, 102 John of the Cross, Saint, 59, 174, 176, 190, 193, 214, 270, 272 John the Baptist, Saint, 74, 85, 86, 153 John the Evangelist, Saint, 74, 85, 86 Joseph, Saint, Fig. 10.1, 213, 216, 217, 221, 223 Juan de Jesús María (the Calagurritan), 6, 172–207 Juan de Miseria, Fig. 10.1, 217 Juana de San Gerónimo, 86 Juana, younger sister of Teresa de Jesús of Avila, 212 Juliana de la Madre de Dios Dantisco. See Dantisco Junius, Johannes, Burgomaster of Bamberg, 247, 249 Junius, Maria Anna, 245–60, 265 Kahlhart, Ursula, 51 Keim, Burgomaster of Bamberg, 249, 250 Kirchhueber, Barnabas, Fig. 2.1, 41–57, 263 Knatchbull, Lucy, 234–6, 238 Kunigunde, Saint, 258

Index

Lanfranco, 30 Lay Sister (Laywomen/men), 145, 152, 153, 155, 156, 160, 163, 166, 167, 169, 212, 213, 237, 243, 254 Lenthall, Dame Agnes, 227, 232, 233, 235, 238, 239, 242 Lerma, Francisco Gómez de Sandoval, Duke of, 86, 90–92, 263 Lindmayr, Anna Maria, 43, 45, 273 Lindmayr, Philip Franz, 43 Lipsius, Justus, 258 Litta, Alma Felice, 121 Litta, Archbishop Alfonso, 107, 121 Litta, Bona Prudenza, 121 Llopis, Francisca, 153 Lohausen, Major General of the Swedish army, 251 Louise de Jésus Jourdain, 161 Lucia, Saint, 136 Lucifer. See Devil Lucius, Saint, 112 Ludwig IV, Emperor, 42 Luillier, Madeleine, Dame de SaintBeuve, 162 Luna, María de, Duchess of Infantado, 82 Luther, Martin, 17. See also Lutheranism Lutheranism, 257, 260 Maddalena de’Pazzi, 151, 152 Madeleine de Saint-Joseph de Fontaines, 165 Madeleine, Saint, Daughters of. See Filles de la Madeleine Maderno, Stefano, Fig. 1.11, 36 Mantilla, María, 81, 82 Manzoni, Alessandro, 97, 98 Marabotto, Cattaneo, 149 Marguerite de Saint-Joseph, 159 Marguerite du Saint-Sacrement. See Acarie Marguerite Sainte-Gertrude d’Arbouse, 167, 263 María de Arellano, 81, 82 María de la Natividad, 86 María de San Francisco, 86 María de San José de Salazar. See Salazar María de Santa Cruz, 89, 90 María de Santo Domingo, 146 María de Santo Thomás de Aquino, 86

279

Maria de Victoria, 43 Marie de Jesus de Breauté, 157, 163–5, 261 Marie de Jésus de Tudert, 160, 161, 163 Marie de l’Incarnation. See Acarie, Barbe Marie de la Trinité d’Hannivel, 167 Marie de Saint-Charles de Veuilly, 168, 264 Marie de Saint-Joseph (née Nicole Fournier, 157, 159, 161, 162 Marie du Saint-Sacrement (née Valence de Marillac), 159, 161 Marillac, Louise, 170 Marillac, Michel de, 161 Martínez, Francisca, 81, 82 Martínez, Juana, 81, 82 Matthew the Evangelist, Saint, 129, 130, 131, 135, 140, 149 Mauritius, Saint, 112 Max Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria, 41 Medici, 3, 11, 273 Mellini, Angela, 147 Mendoza y Castilla, Beatriz de, 223 Mendoza y Castilla, Orofrisia de, 223 Mendoza, Brianda de, 82, 84 Mendoza, Duke of Infantado, Iñigo López de, 82 Mendoza, Francisco de, 223 Mercedarians (Discalced), 83, 87 Mesens, Jacob, 173 Michael, Archangel Saint, 134 Miracle, 16, 30, 63, 64, 75, 76, 97, 259 Mogliano, Pietro da, 159, 161 Monteagle, Baron, 237 Morras, Josepha María, 88 Mortification, 24, 54, 90, 149, 157, 160, 162, 174, 183, 186, 193, 207, 240. See also Asceticism Mussolini, Benito, 98 Mysticism. See Prayer Narducci, Giovanni, 66 Nava Y Saavedra, Jerónima, 150 Nazarius, Saint, 112 Neudecker, Sigmund, 43 Ninci, Clementia, 133 Olivares, Antonia de, 81, 82 Olmos, Juan de, 150 Oratorians, 29 Ortega, de Pedro, 86

280

Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe

Padilla, Casilda de, 214 Pamphilj, Cardinal, 31, 32 Parker, Frances, 237–9, 243 Parmigianino, 125, 129, 268, 269 Patrizia, Saint, 4 Paul V, Pope, 177 Paul, Saint, 20, 31, 36, 54, 62, 116, 231, 262, 270 Paul, Vincent de, 167, 170 Paula, Saint, 87 Pelizzona, Aurelia Maria, 124 Penance, 47, 197, 221, 222. See also Mortification Percy, Mary, 227, 233–7, 239–43 Pereira, María Antonia, 145 Petronilla de San Antonio, 86 Philip II, King of Spain, 62, 67 Pinel y Monroy, María, 88, 89, 265 Piscicelli, Laura, 27 Pius XI, Pope, 98 Pizan, Christine of, 133 Polyphony (plainchant), 4, 8, 83–5, 98, 102, 116, 118, 119 Pontac, Diego de, 87, 92 Poor Clares. See Franciscans Porcelli, Francesco, 23 Possession, demonic. See Devil Poulton, Eugenia, 238 Poverty. See Virtues Prayer: Discalced Carmelites prayer practices, 173–216; intercessory prayer, 7, 41, 46, 47–9, 53; mental prayer, 83, 174, 183, 190, 198, 201, 202; objectless prayer, 5, 205; supernatural prayer (see also contemplation), 148, 159, 174, 183, 186, 189, 198, 202; vocal (chanted) prayer, 83, 202 Prince of Darkness. See Devil Profession. See Vocation Protasius, Saint, 112 Protestantism: Protestant attitudes to female monasticism, 1, 2; to relics and saints, 15, 17, 46; to German Catholics, 39, 57, 246, 247, 249, 257, 258; Catholic attitudes to Protestantism, 50, 156, 167, 232, 240; Protestant laypeople, 153 Puccini, Vincenzo, 152 Puente, Luis de la, 201, 202

Purgatory, 46–8, 56, 60, 63, 74, 78, 151, 268 Puricelli, Giovanni Pietro, 102 Quintana, María, 146, 149 Raphael, Archangel Saint, 94 Raphael, Sanzio, 100, 268 Rapture, 18, 52, 60, 155, 159, 171, 198, 203. See also Ecstasy Reischl, Klara, 43 Religious dress. See Habit Resurrection. See Salvation Ribera, Archbishop Juan de, 147 Ribera, Francisco de, 74 Riccardi, Giovanni Battista, Fig. 5.1, 101 Ricciardi, Cherubina, 136, 261 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu, 166 Ripa, Cesare, 174, 193 Riva, Clara Prassede, 121 Rojo, Miguel, 87, 94 Rolla, Giorgio, 97, 108, 122 Ross, Colonel von, 250 Ruggieri, Giovanni Battista, 147 Rusca, Antonio, 98, 108 Rusca, Carlo Francesco, 108 Rusca, Cecilia Costanza, 108 Rusca, Claudia Francesca, 5, 7, 97–125 Sacrament. See Eucharist Sacraments, 62, 75, 76, 121, 152, 153, 170 Salamanca, University of, 176 Salazar González, Alfonsa de, Fig. 4.1, 92, 94, 95 Salazar, Angel de, 220 Salazar, María de San José de, 216, 219–21, 223, 274 Salazar, Pedro de, 82, 83, 84, 86, 265 Sales, François de, 143, 150, 169, 274 Salvation, 4, 15, 16, 18, 95, 130, 133, 135, 152, 159, 241, 243, 244, 255, 267 Sánchez Ortega, María-Helena, 146, 149 Sans de Sainte-Catherine, Dom, 171 Santiago, Filipe de, 147 Satan. See Devil Scherpenheuvel, 11 Schraffnaglin, Maria Monica, 56 Scoppa, Orazio, 26

Index

Sebastian, Saint, 136 Sendín, Juan, 86 Sessa, Duke of, 87 Sexuality, 1, 150, 153, 227, 228–9, 241, 242, 273 Sfondrati, Agatha, 36 Sfondrati, Cardinal Paolo Camillo, 36 Silence. See Virtues Simón, Jerónimo, 153 Smulders, Sister Margaret, 1, 231, 270 Society of Jesus, 3, 18, 29, 40, 50, 54, 63, 75, 76, 112, 148, 149, 152, 157, 159, 177, 178, 201, 234–6, 243, 258, 268 Song of Songs (Song of Solomon), 112, 113, 115, 123, 130, 134, 136, 169 Southcott, Elizabeth, 233, 235, 237–40 Spizer, Anna Sabina, 45, 52 Stengel, Georg, 54 Taddea, Giovanna, 24 Tecla Francesca Roma, 111, 112, 115, 123 Temptation, 33, 48, 95, 131–3, 165, 222, 224. See also Devil, Sexuality Teresa of Avila, Saint, 4, 5, 6 Teresians. See Carmelites Tertiaries (Third Order) of St Francis, 43, 82, 145, 168, 231 Theatines, 25, 29–31 Third Order. See Tertiaries Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 133, 175, 176, 180–82, 189, 190, 196, 197, 205, 165 Tilly, General Johann Tserclaes, Count of, 257 Tintoretto (née Jacopo Robusti), Figs 6.1–6.3, 129, 139, 140, 271, 272 Toledo, Fernando de, 62 Tomás de Jesús, 176, 177, 183, 186, 192, 198, 201, 202, 205, 207, 270 Ubaldini, Maria Costanza, 131, 135, 137, 261 Urban VIII, Pope, 32, 40, 44 Ursula, Saint, 130 Ursulines, 3, 158, 160, 163

281

Valier, Agostino, Bishop of Verona, 32 Van Eyck, Jan, 125 Van Haeften, Benedict, 193, 196, 197 Vaquero, Miguel González, 148, 149, 150, 263 Vavasour, Mary, 233, 235 Vega, Lope de, 86, 87, 94, 265 Veil. See Habit, Consecration Ceremony, Vocation Vela, María, 145 Ventura de Castro, José, 145 Vicentino, Nicola, 112 Virgin, Mary (Mother of God), 49, 76–8, 232, 257, 258 Virginity. See Virtues Virtues (virtus), 16, 17, 18, 134, 153, 160, 174, 176, 180, 183, 186, 189, 193, 197, 235, 242, 271; Charity (i.e. Love of God), 1, 40, 53, 94, 121, 131, 135, 152, 157–9, 162, 170, 196, 197, 211, 216, 232, 250, 268; Chastity, 197, 228; Humility, 4, 44, 54, 89, 109, 131, 152, 197, 254; Poverty, 65, 89, 186, 212, 245, 251, 252, 257; Silence, 66, 86, 90, 186, 201, 212, 214, 232, 240, 241, 243; Virginity, 17, 33, 41, 137, 246, 247, 249, 250 Visitandines, 169 Vocation: Tridentine Regulations on, 6, 214, 220; adversity in securing, 131, 236–9, 241; musical projection of, 113–14; reasons and guidance for, 141, 166, 168, 169, 244; vocation contemplative (incl. challenges to Teresian vocations), 158, 186, 189, 212– 17, 220–25; wish for an apostolic vocation, 168, 169 Ward, Francis, 235, 236, 240, 242, 243 Wintour, Marys, 235 Wörl, Appollonia, 252–4, 259 Zimbrón, Margarita, 81, 82