entry Nov 2013
Three items on convents: (1) Cities & Virgins (2) Scandal in Naples (3) Escape from the Cloister, -both 2 & 3 by L. Mangiafico
1. Cities & Virgins
"Cities and Virgins: Female Aristocratic Convents in Early Modern Naples and Palermo" by Helen Hills in Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1999), pp. 31-54 Published by: Oxford University Press.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360682
These are my comments on a fine essay by Helen Hills in the Oxford Art Journal. It is not an abstract or a synthesis, merely some comments on what I found interesting. It is by no means a substitute for the real thing (for which I refer you to the JSTOR reference, above).
The church of Regina Coeli in
Naples
Elsewhere I have an entry on the Rebirth of Rome in the
Middle Ages. At the time I researched it, I remember being
informed of the somewhat helter-skelter approach to the
urbanization of the Eternal City. Cities and Virgins:
Female Aristocratic Convents in Early Modern Naples and
Palermo now make me aware that there were similar
approaches in those cities. There was significant building
that was not necessarily mandated from the Spanish viceroy
at the top; much development in the age of the Neapolitan
Baroque started in the middle, at the level of the
aristocratic convents, helping to shape the city around
them.The author, Helen Hills, asks the question of how female aristocratic convents and the women residing in them contributed to the interplay of the development of the city, architecture, social class, and particularly gender in the development of the cities of Palermo and Naples. She makes the point that the role of gender has largely been overlooked in the history of urbanism—that is to say, gender-specific contributions, not whether there were individual brilliant woman artists or patrons of the arts. Of course, there were, but was the role of women as a class, specifically women in religious houses, different. Her answer is yes. Why? That is the point of the essay.
We consider first the session of the Council of Trent (Trento, in northern Italy) in 1563 and the effect it had on women. To refresh your memory, the Council of Trent met 25 times between 1545 and 1563 to deal with the Protestant Reformation; it was the beginning of the so-called Counter-Reformation. In a hurry by 1563, the council left until the very last session the question of women in convents and then dealt with the issue in a very retrograde fashion, reinstating a papal decree from 1298 (almost three centuries earlier!) that women in convents should be strictly enclosed, walled off from the outside world and not be permitted to leave the cloister except in dire emergencies. This set back the tradition of the increasing amount of involvement by nuns in the outside community that had developed over the previous three-hundred years; it ignored the fact that, especially in Naples, the life of the nun was a way for a poor family to preserve its honor—that is, having a daughter active within the church, but not socially isolated from family and community. It was also a way for rich families to avoid paying extravagant dowries when they married a daughter off. She could enter a nunnery instead, for a much smaller “conventual dowry” and still keep her property.
The new isolation had, says Hills,
Thus, there were not just high walls with rusticated gates on the outside — I love that term…rusticated, made to look rough and sturdy, strong, fortress-like and uninviting!— but, within, there were elaborate portals, narrow stairways, doors, bars, gilt iron grilles resembling cages, all meant to emphasize not just that the sisters were cut off, but to “advertise” that their virginity, their purity, was being protected.
…direct architectural results…[it] redirected the energies of some convents from direct engagement with the world through teaching or charitable works, to making their presence felt in cities through building programmes of unprecedented urbanistic and architectural ambition…[This includes]…the effects of such urbanization on both sides of closed doors…contributing to the nature of interior space, its handling, and decoration.
For various reasons in Naples, as noted, there were a fair number of women of financial means living the cloistered life. These aristocratic nuns frequently brought property and money to the convent. Some of them had the money to pay for expensive works of art for their religious houses. Hills says, “...Rich families sometimes directed monies towards buildings or decorative programmes for convent churches through nuns related to them…the impact on the convents of an inheritance system…was considerable and it is manifested visually.” In some cases, the wealthy families of nuns funded the construction of entirely new churches with lavishly decorated interiors by the best artisans of the period. Some of the churches cited by Hills as examples of this type of system in Naples are S. Gregorio Armeno, S. Maria della Sapienza, Croce di Lucca and Regina Coeli.
The question then turns to how these flamboyantly beautiful convents and churches fit into—indeed, helped to shape—the urban environment and social relations of the day. By 1650 there were 37 convents in Naples, many of them built in the same area in or near the historic center of the city. They gobbled up territory such that few civil dwellings or other buildings existed in their midst. They were so tightly packed that they were like tiny citadels, “conventual enclaves.” Civic buildings, gardens and other public spaces were taken over and, thus, these convents had power to shape the physical domain around them. They dominated streets and squares, and they vied with one another to get the most prestigious worshippers among the noble classes in their congregations. They even sued one another for encroachment!
Now something that had not occurred to me. By 1650 Naples was the second most populous city in Europe (after Paris), with attendant problems of overcrowding and lack of hygiene. (That much I knew.) The mushrooming of religious institutions in a city already saturated with them did not help. The author puts much of the responsibility on the desire of the Spanish rulers of their vice-realm of Naples to use religious orders to help combat heresy and public disorder in the face of the recent outbreaks of plague. Public disorder was partially due to conflict at the bottom — Masaniello's Revolt, for example — but also at the top with the desire by the ruling classes to retain feudal privilege in an age when feudalism was on the way out in the face of absolute monarchies. In Naples, feudal lords were ordered to resettle in the city, where the king could keep tabs on them. When the Spanish took over Naples at the beginning of the 1500s, they brought a feudal aristocracy with them. There was then rivalry and conflict at the top, between the old and the new feudal classes. Convents, in a way, became a tool in the battle as more and more noble families sought to retain their wealth by dumping their daughters into convents in order to save paying out dowries to their husbands. There was no such surge in “daughter dumping” among poor families. Hills calls it an “aristocratic solution to an aristocratic problem addressed in religious terms.” At this point, I wonder—and am not really sure—if this "aristocratic solution"—was at least one of the things that extended the life of feudalism in southern Italy.
Moving to the specific role of gender, Hills says,
The respectability of the convent is intimately connected to a further aspect of female virginity as representing family honour. Historians and anthropologists studying Mediterranean societies have shown how important sexuality and sexual behaviour are in social delimitation and that it is especially women’s sexuality and behaviour that are subject to control…As the nobility clung to power by increasingly restricting marriage to fewer daughter in each family during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so the regulation of the sexuality of excess daughters became the source of mounting anxiety. And it is above all to the safeguarding of the family honour that the fortress architecture of female convents is conspicuously dedicated.
The symbolic meaning of virginity is a source of extreme conflict as one moves from culture to culture in the world. How convent and church architecture in Naples relates to this struggle is interesting. Chosen virginity may be a sign of spirituality within the Christian tradition; on the other hand, imposed virginity presupposes some sort of woman’s guilt, some kind of contaminator of male honour. By willingly populating fortress convents, the women residents emphasized the aspect of choice, and thus the spirituality. Even the high positioning of the nuns’ choir—the space in the church reserved for nuns—in Neapolitan baroque churches elevated those women, physically and spiritually, to special prominence. The architecture of the religious house, itself— the physical shape of the interior—became a tribute to their spirituality at the same time as they were influencing the urban world around them.
2. (Nov. 2013) Get thee to a nunnery, part II
(This item and the next are from Luciano Mangiafico, who follows this website with frequent comments. Luciano is retired from the US foreign service and is the author of Contemporary American Immigrants: Patterns of Filipino, Korean, and Chinese Settlement in the United States, and Italy's Most Wanted: The Top 10 Book of Roman Ruins, Wonderful Wines, and Renaissance Rarities. After reading the above item on "Cities & Virgins," he offered the following comment.)
Read with interest your take on the effect of nunneries on the architecture and urban fabric on Naples. Cooping up so many women in enclosed spaces against their will also had other effects, as evident by the Nun of Monza,* problems within Venetian nunneries, and so on. Naples was not exempt as exemplified by the following, from one of my own musings.
*[Edit. note: The "Nun of Monza" refers to a character in Manzoni's novel The Betrothed, a nun sent to a life in a convent by her father just so he could keep the family fortune intact.]
Scandal in Naples
The church of St.
Arcangelo a Baiano today
(photo: wiki/Baku)
(photo: wiki/Baku)
Conventual
scandals did not lack in Naples, either. In the
15th century both King Alfonso and subsequently his son,
King Ferrante, battled the power and chicanery of monks
and the misdeed of nuns with limited success. The writer Masuccio
Salernitano (1410-74) in his collection of 50
stories, Il Novellino, described monks and nuns as
cheaters, thieves, and fornicators, and states, "nuns are
the exclusive property of monks". Monks even tried to
cheat King Ferrante by trying to persuade him to persecute
Jews by concocting a false miracle by St. Cataldus, but
the king got wise to the fraud.A much worse and violent scandal took place in 1556 in the Convent of Sant'Arcangelo a Baiano, located then near the site of the current central railroad station in Naples. The convent, built in the 13th century by the French Angevin kings to celebrate their defeat of the previous Swabian dynasty, was run by Abbess Laura Baiano and included as nuns a number of noblewomen who had been forced by their parents to take vows. Some were daughters of the most prominent families of the city, accustomed to a life of luxury and good times and were not at all pleased to find themselves locked behind conventual walls, dedicated to a life of prayer and sacrifice. This group included Agata Arcamone, Giulia Caracciolo, Livia Pignatelli, Chiara Frezza, and Laura Sanfelice.
The first three listed above were indeed caught sexually entertaining male guests within the convent and were referred to the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples who lectured them and meted a mild form of punishment. Apparently, the girls' families were not so easily assuaged by what they considered slander to their honor and two of the male lovers, Antonio Tarracina and Giacomo Crispo, were murdered by hired assassins.
Inside the convent, unknown parties (probably other nuns) poisoned the abbess and two nuns, and the priest assigned by the cardinal to reform the institution, Andrew Avellino (1521-1608; later St. Andrew Avellino), was assaulted and seriously wounded by other nuns' lovers who were no longer able to visit their paramours. As rumors continue to circulate that the nuns were still engaged in sexual orgies, and violence continued to plague the convent, the pope ordered the institution closed in 1577. The convent building, now semi-abandoned, is said to be hounded by the ghosts of some of the nuns, including that of Agata Arcamone, who disappeared mysteriously shortly before the closing of the convent.
The church annexed to the convent, St. Arcangelo a Baiano [photo, above], during the troubled times had a reliquary containing some of the blood of St John the Baptist, which had been brought to Naples by the French Angevin kings. The blood liquefied from its solid state each year on June 21, St. John's feast day. When the convent was closed, the reliquary was moved and is now in the church of St. Gregorio Armeno in Naples.
[Also see how Benedetto Croce tells the story of the scandal.]
In 1864 Florentine
publisher Gasparo Barbera printed I Misteri del
Chiostro Napoletano (Mysteries of The Neapolitan
Cloister), a book by Neapolitan, Enrichetta Caracciolo.
lliteracy in Italy was 70% and economic conditions limited
book purchases so a thousand copies of a new work made it
a bestseller. Ten years after the first edition, the
Caracciolo book was in its eighth printing and 20,000
copies had been sold just in Italy. It was translated into
the major European languages and received a favorable
notice from the dean of Italian poets and novelists,
Alessandro Manzoni.Enrichetta
Caracciolo was the daughter of Fabio Caracciolo
(1756-1838), a military officer and Teresa Cutelli
(c.1793-1854), of Sicilian nobility. The Caracciolo family
was well-known in Naples but was not wealthy, thus the
family made do as best they could. Enrichetta was born in
Naples in 1821, fifth of seven daughters. By then her
father was Marshall in the Neapolitan army and after
Enrichetta’a birth, the family moved to Bari in Apulia,
where he commanded the army garrison. He was
eventually made a garrison commander in Reggio Calabria,
where he stayed until his death in 1839.
This
image of Enrichetta
Caracciolo appeared in the
first edition of I Misteri del Chiostro Napoletano.
first edition of I Misteri del Chiostro Napoletano.
The family then went
back to Naples where, unbeknownst to Enrichetta, her
mother decided that this 18-year-old girl would enter the
Convent of San Gregorio Armeno. For hundreds of years, the
Caracciolo family had sent some of their daughters there
to become nuns. The decision to seek Enrichetta’s
admission to the convent, where two of her aunts were
nuns, was seen first as temporary, but became permanent
when her mother remarried. Thus, in 1841 Enrichetta became
a novice and in October 1842 took her vows as a nun.She did not fit. She was independent, well-read, and had little in common with other nuns. She had no contact with the outside world except a confessor and yearned to escape from the monotonous convent. But the more she disobeyed the rules, the more they punished her. In 1846 she tried to renounce her vows, petitioning Pope Pius IX. Her request was denied, mainly because the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Sisto Riario Sforza was opposed.
During the revolutionary patriotic disturbances of 1848-49, Enrichetta sided with the revolutionaries and tried to smuggle subversive tracts into the convent. The pope then let her leave the convent of San Gregorio Armeno and live in an educational Catholic school for young women, the Conservatorio di Costantinopoli. She still had restrictions: no reading of non-devotional works, no writing letters, not even playing the music of Rossini on the piano. She rebelled, of course, and was sent back to the nunnery. She simply walked away. They threatened her with arrest and a return to the convent, so she moved to Capua, to a religious home for women, protected by Cardinal Francesco Serra di Cassano. When he died in 1850, she went home to Naples to stay with her sister but was arrested and forcibly taken to the Ritiro [Retreat] di Mondragone (near Naples), a home for widows of noblemen. She was not even allowed to go to her mother’s funeral. She tried to commit suicide. In November 1854, she was allowed to leave, allegedly for medical reasons. She feared re-arrest during the next few years and changed residence 18 times.
The Bourbon kingdom of Naples fell to the forces of Garibaldi in 1860. When he entered the city of Naples in September 1860, she finally quit the religious life. She was in line to be appointed by Garibaldi, the self-proclaimed "dictator of Naples", to be inspector of educational institutions, but that post did not materialize once the new Italian government took over. In the meantime, she married a nobleman of German extraction who had supported the movement to unite Italy, Giovanni Greuther (1805-85) of the Dukes of San Severino.
Enrichetta kept active in public affairs, writing for dailies in Salerno and in Palermo. She published a Proclamation to Italian Women (1866) in support of the Third War of Independence against Austria, and was prominent in the Neapolitan Committee for Women's Rights. Enrichetta Caracciolo died in 1901 in Naples, virtually unknown.
What made
I Misteri del Chiostro Napoletano a publishing
success? First, the title. It promised something long
hushed up. It was a clever device, after earlier successes
such as of Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris
(1842) and Carlo Collodi’s The Mysteries of Florence
(1857). I Misteri del Chiostro Napoletano was,
after all, the story of a young girl forced to become a
nun, a girl who saw the convent as a prison, where she was
deprived of her youth and freedom, and where she fought
against a heartless cardinal who kept her locked up. It
blended romanticized autobiography with history, dealing
with the suffocation of the individual and with the
dictates of powerful malign forces. And it appealed to the
spirit of liberalism and the anti-clericalism of those
years. In a way, it was similar to Denis Diderot’s La
Religieuse (1796) Giovanni Rosini’s La Monaca di
Monza (1829), and Alessandro Manzoni’s own version
of that story.The
book played a notable role in the secularization of public
life in the newly united Italy in the face of active
opposition from the Church, which saw the loss of its
state (the Vatican States) as a threat to its
independence. State and Church were engaged in a struggle:
the Church used religious sentiments to fight the
secularization of life in the nation, while the government
abolished monastic orders, took over welfare and
charitable institutions, confiscated church properties,
restricted Catholic control of education, and put clerics
under criminal civil law.
Internationally the book was a great success. It fed strong anti-Catholic sentiments in the Unites States, for example. The book fit into the pattern of stories of nuns being victimized or engaging in inappropriate behavior. One such book was Maria Monk's (1816-49) The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836), with its tales of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and infanticide in a Catholic nunnery in Montreal, Canada. In the U.S. Monk's book was second in sales only to the Bible (!) until the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
Internationally the book was a great success. It fed strong anti-Catholic sentiments in the Unites States, for example. The book fit into the pattern of stories of nuns being victimized or engaging in inappropriate behavior. One such book was Maria Monk's (1816-49) The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed (1836), with its tales of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and infanticide in a Catholic nunnery in Montreal, Canada. In the U.S. Monk's book was second in sales only to the Bible (!) until the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
References
1. Barbera, Gaspero. Memorie di un Editore. Brindisi: Edizioni Trabant, 2013.
2. Brigandi, Alessandra. "Caracciolo Enrichetta"in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Volume 19 (1976).
3. Calderan, Valentina. Donne che hanno fatto l’Italia, Ph.d thesis, Ca` Foscari University, Venice, 2018.
4. Caracciolo, Enrichetta. Memoirs of Henrietta Caracciolo: Of the Princess of Forino, Ex-benedictine Nun. London: ed. by Richard Bentley, 1865.
5. Caracciolo, Enrichetta. I Misteri del Chiostro Napoletano. 1864.
7. Treccani Biographical Encyclopedia. Entry on "Enrichetta Caraccioli".
8. Vernaghi, Alice. L’indomito esercizio della ragione e l’oscurantismo del chiostro. Enrichetta Caracciolo.
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