Inferno Monacale - The ‘Hell of Nuns’
Part 1: Tracing it back to Rome’s Consilium emendenda
Dr Clive Gillis
It was little more than a century ago that angry Cardinal Manning described a run of harrowing revelations of nuns escaped from convents as one of five contemporary signs of Antichrist.
Rome is now turning the tables. For instance Dava Sobel’s book Galileo’s Daughter, which concerns the astronomer’s relationship with his nun daughter, was recently a top seller, romanticising Counter Reformation nuns. But this was a special case. Although Galileo’s letters to his daughter, who was incarcerated in a Florentine convent, were destroyed for dear of the Inquisition, his daughter’s letters survive. Romanist historian Eamon Duffy describes this insight into Galileo’s feelings as “splendid and moving”. And indeed we are moved by his daughter’s insightful letters, faithfully dispatched together with supplies of his favourite plovers eggs, collars and shirts, fruit and game all conjured up from her convent prison.
Warehouses for discarded women
But Galileo was a unique man with one exceptional daughter. The noble nun’s sacrificial support for her famous father diverts us from the awful reality of covenant life after the Council of Trent. Sobel necessarily alludes, in passing, to some of its horrors. At least Natasha Walker of Vogue spotted that, fascinating as it was to get close to Galileo through his daughter, it did not conceal “the abyss that yawned” between their two lives.
Galileo actually had two daughters and a son from an illicit relationship with a Venetian noblewoman, much younger than himself, who later married someone else. Galileo procured a fiat of legitimisation for his son, but his daughters were doomed. This was routine for the whole upper and middle classes of the day.
Convents were simply “warehouses for the discarded women of middle class and patrician families”.
The doom of the Galileo sisters cannot be disguised. Galileo must have pulled strings to see them both admitted to the same convent at only 13 years of age. He no doubt wished the bright older daughter to protect the vulnerable younger. In admitting more than one daughter Rome ran the risk of a particular family gaining undue influence and blocking regulations abounded. Cardinal del Monte’s letter to Galileo “concerning your daughters claustration” is still extant. Galileo is told bluntly that any admission of his daughters before the canonical age of 16, “is not allowed…this rule is never broken and never will be … When they have reached the canonical age they may be accepted by ordinary dowry; unless the sisterhood already has the prescribed number; if such be the case it will be necessary to double the dowry. Vacancies may not be filled up in anticipation under sever penalties…”.
The novice mistress
We find the novice mistress was a neurotic self harming psychopath “overpowered by moods of frenzies,” who, “tried twice in recent days to kill herself … she is crazy and cunning at the same time … we live … in fear of some new outburst”. The older daughter sheltered the younger by giving her sole use of their shared cell while she endured the nightly ravings of the novice mistress on her sister’s behalf. The younger sister’s love of wine, eccentricities, moods and indeptedness through internal despair. Vivid details such as extracting their own decayed teeth leaving the older toothless at 27, the enduring of bitter cold, inadequate diet and the inevitable placement over them of the unstable novice mistress as spiritual mentor are harrowing. Galileo is frequently requested to send money as the black economy thrived on nuns desperate to purchase single cells or other privileges to escape the unbearable. The older daughter seeks money from Galileo to avoid sharing with the novice mistress and again later to divert disaster as the younger sought to be Cellarer in charge of wines. The more desperate the nuns the richer the convent as the nuns would beg, borrow and steal to relieve their misery. So much for the Convent romance.
Inferno Monacale
Locating the voice of an ordinary Counter Reformation nun to explain this wholesale imprisonment of young girls is no easy matter. However in 1990 an Italian academic press published a little known manuscript written by a typical incarcerated Counter Reformation nun Sister Arcangela Tarabotti. Her proper name was Elena Cassandra Tarabotti, and she vividly described her feelings and experiences in a Venetian convent sometime about 1640- 1650. She wrote frankly in a cathartic manner never expecting her words to reach the outside world. Her tragic testimony was simply entitled Inferno Monacale (‘Hell of Nuns’). There is apparently no English translation as yet. Elena’s cry is the first link in a chain that leads us right back to the Consilium emendenda as the origin of what she calls the ‘Nun’s Hell’. We traced the history of the Consilium emendenda, in BCN 78, December 9, 2005. It was a secret report on the state of Rome after the Reformation in which Rome’s own top people utterly condemned her as ‘an offence to all Christendom’.
Dragged at knifepoint
At the time that Elena wrote, over 3,000 nuns out of Venice’s total population of 150,000, were incarcerated in as many as 50 Venetian convents, at best through gross deception and at worst having been dragged there at knifepoint. Elena daringly addresses her plaint to, “The Most Serene Republic of Venice”. She protests boldly against the flower of Venetian womanhood being forcibly imprisoned. She touchingly describes the moment of enforced consecration for all nuns as a funeral. “But turning again to the funeral ceremony, that in little or nothing is different from a (real) funeral. (The young unwilling novice) is prostrated on the stone floor. She is covered over by a black drape and a lighted candle is placed below the feet and at her head. Above her the Litany is being sung. Every sign points to a life extinct. She feels just as (if she were at) her own funeral. Under this coffin she accompanies (the singing of the Litany) with tears and gulps (sobs) sacrificing all her senses to her passion and pain . .. The course of her misfortune is irremediable.” (Author’s translation).
The tyranny of their fathers
And who or what is to blame for this outrage? Elena states clearly it is, “The tyranny of the fathers”. The Nuns Hell opens with a special dedication to fathers and parents who force young women to become nuns. She describes the cunning involved. Like paedophile grooming, young female relatives are taken to meet despicable nun aunts, themselves victims of enforced claustration years earlier. They meet in the neutral convent courtyard. These cynical old nuns, both out of spite and monetary inducement from the family, use ‘every art’ to befriend their young female relatives. Over a period they seduce them with an arsenal of lies concerning the wonderful life that ties ahead. So deceived were these little girls that they looked happily forward to the day they would commence their wonderful new life. Elena describes these wicked old nuns ‘weaving the most fabulous yarns undreamt of by even the most gifted and famous of poets’ to conjure the convent into ‘an earthly paradise’. Apparently the bitter old nuns even went to the length of tying sweets, sugared almonds and fruits to the tree branches to foster the deception of a life in an earthly paradise lying ahead.
Greed of family and Church
Why did the fathers do this? Prof Sperling of Hampshire college USA has studied numerous contemporary court cases. She confirms just ‘how greedy a nun’s relatives could be ... Most often a brother profited from a sister’s enforced monachization. This was part of a strategy to pass estates down through the male line which harmed widows, spinsters and sisters’. In the short term it protected the heredity purity of the aristocracy, but eventually the lack off offspring became critical. The Venetian elite could no longer service all the governmental posts in the Republic which had been built upon purity of blood line. Finally in 1648 the Republic had to admit rich outsiders to the governing class destroying the whole edifice at a stroke. Venice, because of its unique status, is the grossest example of something which happened to some extent across the whole of Counter Reformation Europe.
So where does the Church of Rome fit into this? Clearly Rome gained immense wealth from these blood money dowries as the greedy Romanist aristocracy of Europe willingly paid to keep its blood lines pure and safeguard the future of its family lines. No one demurred at forcibly incarcerating women totally against their will. The gratitude of the Romanist rich in turn ensured their support for Rome’s expansion and co‑operation in opposing Protestantism. Rome was in effect supplying prisons for unwanted family members in a context where a cloak of respectability could be given to the vilest of practices. There is a correlation between the concentration of Counter Reformation convents in an area and the success of Rome in stemming the Protestant advance.
Rome wants power
But what is the link between the Consilium emendenda and this iniquitous incarceration of women? The Church of Rome is shown in the Book of Revelation as a woman riding, with varying degrees of difficulty, the European political beast. Rome is not just interested in money. She is interested in power. The real force that maintained the sheer hellishness of the hell that Elena and many thousands of similar women had to endure, owed more to Rome’s ambition to rise all powerful again from the devastation wrought by the Reformation than to the desire to tap into the wealth of the nun’s families. Never again were Protestants across Europe, who were committed to marrying, rearing children in the sight of God and making their communities prosper through hard work, going to openly mock the degeneracy of Rome’s virgins.
The revelations of the Consilium were the seed from which grew a severe Counter Reformation austerity, only much later to be circumvented by the Jesuits. It was this climate of hypocritical morality which goaded Pope Pius V (the excommunicator of Elizabeth I ) to enforce the Council of Trent’s dour measures against the weak and indefensible generally and against nuns in particular.
Hard business decisions
Celibacy, defensible only by twisting Scripture and in reality impossible to follow, had resulted in the basest scandals which in turn had ushered in the Reformation. The Reformation was now threatening Rome’s very existence. Like any Board of Directors, the Papal curia, having commissioned a report to devise strategies to save their business, were facing some hard decisions. Amazingly the Consilum's authors actually considered dropping celibacy for all monks in orders and totally for women. This was top secret at the time. The suggestion came from respected intellectuals like Erasmus who took the view that Rome should smartly jettison celibacy as being more trouble than it was worth. Erasmus, we recall, had early espoused the Reformation but later remained in the pale of Rome. He wrote acidly against celibacy in his works Encomium matrimonii 1518 and later Institutio christiani martrimonii 1526 in which he elevates the married state above virginity.
A hell for all to see
The Consilium’s authors realised that if things did not change, the papacy would be swept away. So if celibacy was to continue Rome must be in entire control both of the institutions and the lives of those in them. Monasteries and convents must be squeaky clean. That is of course impossible. But defenceless, imprisoned women, coerced into celibacy by heartless Romanist families, could be put into a hell for all to see and a hell so dreadful that no Protestant could question its austerity and by implication its purity.
And if achieving this public hell meant all out war with the aristocratic families of Europe, from whose ranks these pitiful girls came, so be it. No matter if such powerful families might wish some small control and a little amelioration of dire harshness in exchange for the huge dowries they were paying to get there womenfolk imprisoned. Power mattered even more than money and Rome had to get power.
We shall see the abominable results in Part 2, DV.
Back to Top
Inferno Monacale - The ‘Hell of Nuns’ Part 2
Sacrificing Women For Reasons Of State
Dr Clive Gillis
The authors of Rome’s awful indictment of herself, the Consilium de emendanda ecclesia, were terrified lest the Reformation should overthrow the Roman Church altogether (see BCN 9 December 2005). We have to remember that the Consilium was Rome’s own judgement on herself.
The Consilium even suggested abolishing priestly celibacy. It says of monasteries and nunneries, “Acknowledging that amongst nuns and virgins in cloisters ……open disgrace takes place with offence to one and all ….. which grieves Christendom ….. monastic orders …. must be ….. abolished for many of them have gotten into such bad condition and disorder that they are a grave offence ……. therefore it is our opinion that all convent orders should be abolished”.
So why were they not abolished?
H.C. Lea, the Victorian historian of the Inquisition, observes that, “the changes recommended in the Consilium attacked too many vested interests for even the papal power to give it effect”.
The showdown came at the ensuing Council of Trent. This council dragged on from 1545 to 1563 when the luxuriously entertained delegates, “did little more than shift absurdity from one place to another and effectually correct none”. The Consilium’s moment of human compassion towards women was lost amongst politics. The Trent council was, ‘the farthest possible remote from religion of any, kind or degree,” in Rome’s history. Never has, “more self interested policy ... more immoral and dishonourable intrigue .... more flagrant injustice [towards reformers] and more violent and indecorous internal contention,” occurred in any council. Rome has produced medals of all her infamies ‑ The St Bartholomew’s Eve massacre, the hunting down of the Hussites, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and dozens more. Yet no explicit medal was ever produced to commemorate Trent.
Nuns left until last
The trifling question of celibate orders and those lowly creatures, the nuns, was delayed from 1545 right until the very end of the council in 1563. The Alpine winter was setting in. The final 25th session was to be the last. Vast quantities of unfinished business guaranteed it to be the most hectic. The sated and tetchy delegates were at their lowest ebb and could not bring themselves to pay attention. The agreed date for ending the Council, the 9th December, was so near Christmas that the delegates were locked into whirlwind performances. By the end of November, “everything was tending with precipitate and indecorous speed to the termination of the council”.
Many would have been happy to have scrapped the 25th session altogether. The French and the Spanish were fighting and the French were demanding “a speedy close”. At the end of November, news arrived that the pope was “dangerously” ill. In fact he only had a bad cold but the rumour grew with the telling and had the desired effect of heightening the sense of haste and confusion. Conditions were thus perfect for the manipulators. All of Rome’s big earners, such as purgatory, indulgences, invocation and veneration of relics and saints and sacred images, were shunted into this session. Vested interests could rest assured that any consideration of them would of necessity be cursory, and reform, if any, would be trifling. The nuns were about the last item on the agenda.
Rome terrified
Needless to say, Trent rejected the idea of abolishing nuns. But if nuns were not to be a liability, the conditions of their containment would have to be strict beyond measure, and that regardless of the power and wealth of line from which these the women were the rejects. Rome, terrified of Protestant derision, was determined to leave no chink in its rigorous regime of incarceration. Nothing that could give rise to the slightest scandal would be overlooked. Rome was determined that never again would it be said by outsiders that, “violation” of nuns was “teeming” in convents which were “not convents but public whorehouses”.
Trent’s rigour was to be draconian and demonstrable. For as the Council of Trent said, if celibacy was persisted with and the “foundations of all religious discipline are not carefully preserved, the whole building will necessarily topple”. The dire warning of the Consilium still had power to influence. Trent did persist and an Anathema was called down upon any who should fail to assert virginity to be a higher state than marriage.
Prison camps
Trent’s nun legislation was obsessive in detail. “No nun may go out of her convent on any pretext ... except approved by the bishop ... no one of any kind or condition or sex or age may enter ... without permission of the Bishop or Superior in writing under pain of excommunication”. The Bishop was to have absolute oversight of convents. He was, required regularly to inspect them with the thoroughness of a modern prison camp guard. All doors, windows and rotary turntables were to be secured with double and triple locking “and not the slightest fissure” remain for two way glances. Elaborate key holder regulations were established with guarding arrangements. There must be only one, or at the most two, entrances if part of the convent faced river or sea. If the bishop found more, he “must immediately wall them up and block them so they may no longer be used”. A record exists of the nuns of San Rocco and Santa Margarita in Venice having the ventilating holes in their latrine filled in, despite the heart of Mediterranean summers, lest by craning their necks they could glimpse the street below. These women were pitilessly denied even the embrace of their own female relatives.
The regulations were as paranoid about nuns getting out as about amours getting in. There were all sorts of ridiculous anti voyeurism measures. The nuns were enjoined never, “to step a single pace,” beyond their enclosure. They could hear the mass through heavy grilles and only their disembodied voices were heard. Their lives were to be joyless, largely silent, and their time spent in bare solitary cells. Up to four unannounced spot searches were to be made by the Superior each year to purge the cells of prohibited, “books, clothes, writings, dishonest paintings, dogs, birds, or other animals”. To allow for this, all cells, had their locks and catches removed and candles had to burn all night within them. On the ridiculous assumption that older nuns would be trustworthy, they were appointed to undertake spot inspections to detect sharing of cells by younger women.
Rome’s paranoia is well illustrated by Pius V (the excommunicator of Elizabeth 1) who followed up Trent by the Bull Circa pastoralis of the 29th May 1566 confirming that once inside, nuns are to be securely imprisoned for life. The clausura decrees, Decori 1570; Deo sacris 1572 Ubi gratiae 1575, all frantically followed one upon another to ensure no loophole of hope existed for the prisoners. And it seems that even that did not fully calm Rome’s fears, for shortly after St Bartholomew’s massacre Pope Gregory XIII , “issued a clarification” consolidating earlier decrees.
It did not work
Did it work? Of course not. An early intimation that these pressurised hothouses were about to blow up reached England about 1608. A godly, erudite, protestant English diplomat in Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, who had favour with Rome and Greek Orthodoxy alike for his impeccable honesty and extensive learning, suddenly found himself writing home with some amazement: “This week hath produced here a very unexpected piece of justice, which yet I think will discover more evil than it will amend. On Wednesday last in the night were broken up eleven several doors by the public officer, for the apprehension of so many persons (whereof nine were gentlemen of principal houses) accused to have lasciviously haunted the nunnery of St Anna and thence to have transported those votaries (nuns) to their private chambers in masking attire . . . And the parties (men) not being found in the said night in their houses ... were publicly summoned ... Thus far the State hath proceeded already ... to recover some reputation ... by exemplary severity”.
Worse and worse
The latter state of the convents became more degenerate than the former. Men broke down walls, tunnelled underneath enclosures, bribed access, or gained legitimate access to but failed then to leave. Sometimes men would be hidden in convents for long periods being fed and secreted in storerooms by nun accomplices. Rome could not contain the scandal. The penalties for, “having had carnal commerce with a nun,” or the lesser charge of being, “found inside a convent of nuns,” became increasingly harsh. The state categorised these crimes against the “Brides of Christ” as “sacrilege”.
Numerous legal reports exist of men unable to gain entry to convents involved in heavy petting through the grilles and exposing themselves from adjacent vantage points. Lesbianism no doubt exceeded this heterosexual activity. However such was the lascivious carnality of Roman priests that it did not seem to have occurred to them that anyone other than themselves could be a temptation to the nuns. Professor Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts points out this anomaly. Her study of one of the few trials for lesbianism amongst these nuns concerned a mystic nun whose lesbianism only emerged incidentally during her trial for mystic practices.
Bizarre places
As time passed the Counter Reformation convents became bizarre places, in many ways little different from home, and with a distinctly secular atmosphere. Family groups began to dominate nunneries in parallel to their family’s power outside. The most aristocratic nuns separated themselves, eating together and providing more luxuries for their own cells which they would even bequeath in their wills to other family members. All this intensified the misery of their social inferiors.
Some of these women were intellectually able, and, freed from the restraints of rearing families, they sublimated their energies into literature and the arts. Professor Weaver of Chicago has produced an elegant study, Convent Theatre to early Modern Italy, showing how these bored women wrote and performed erudite plays loaded with classical learning. Sadly the plays became increasingly secular in theme as their souls calloused over. The nuns would dress up in outrageous worldly costumes and the convent parlour would seat the audience.
Professor Monson’s Crannied Wall describes how musical nuns took both to composing and performing works, some of genuine merit. Various convents, despite the pope’s railing against the practice, suddenly boasted illicit orchestras with “lutes, guitars, violins, trombones, in addition to harpsichords”. Even large organs were smuggled in piecemeal. The following letter from an archbishop to the Inquisition is typical of the period: “It happened in a nunnery under my control ... two nuns without my knowledge had a very large organ built and brought in secretly ... and installed on one side of the choir ... and began to play it ... with dishonour”.
When so many women were incarcerated, some would inevitably have exceptional talents and the popes found themselves receiving appeals from the brightest to allow further study. But the overall effect of clausura upon these hapless souls was mind numbing, witnessed to by the Punch and Judy show in Guardi’s painting. Such was the hell of counter reformation nuns.
Footnote. The author would like to thank Mr David Relf who sent him an old copy of Edith O Gomm’s Perils and Trials in September 2004. This was the inspiration for these articles.
Back to Top
http://www.ianpaisley.org
Email: eips_info@yahoo.co.uk
Return to EIPS Main Menu
No comments:
Post a Comment