Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy

by Craig A. Monson

When eight-year-old Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana (1590–1662) entered one of the preeminent convents in Bologna in 1598, she had no idea what cloistered life had in store for her. Thanks to clandestine instruction from a local maestro di cappella—and despite the church hierarchy’s vehement opposition to all convent music—Vizzana became the star of the convent, composing works so thoroughly modern and expressive that a recent critic described them as “historical treasures.” But at the very moment when Vizzana’s works appeared in 1623—she would be the only Bolognese nun ever to publish her music—extraordinary troubles beset her and her fellow nuns, as episcopal authorities arrived to investigate anonymous allegations of sisterly improprieties with male members of their order.

           

Craig A. Monson retells the story of Vizzana and the nuns of Santa Cristina to elucidate the role that music played in the lives of these cloistered women. Gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers, these nuns used music not only to forge links with the community beyond convent walls, but also to challenge and circumvent ecclesiastical authority. Monson explains how the sisters of Santa Cristina—refusing to accept what the church hierarchy called God’s will and what the nuns perceived as a besmirching of their honor—fought back with words and music, and when these proved futile, with bricks, roof tiles, and stones. These women defied one Bolognese archbishop after another, cardinals in Rome, and even the pope himself, until threats of excommunication and abandonment by their families brought them to their knees twenty-five years later. By then, Santa Cristina’s imaginative but frail composer literally had been driven mad by the conflict.

           

Monson’s fascinating narrative relies heavily on the words of its various protagonists, on both sides of the cloister wall, who emerge vividly as imaginative, independent-minded, and not always sympathetic figures. In restoring the musically gifted Lucrezia Orsina Vizzana to history, Monson introduces readers to the full range of captivating characters who played their parts in seventeenth-century convent life.

 

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Music, Religion, Christianity, Womens, Italy

296 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2012

About the author

Craig A Monson has been fascinated by Renaissance and Baroque European history and culture (particularly of England and Italy) for half-a-century, and by Native American history and culture (particularly of the southwest and northern plains) since the late 1940s. His most familiar books are Nuns Behaving Badly: Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy (2010, named a “Best Book of 2010” by the Newberry Rare Book Library, Chicago), Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music and Defiance in 17th-century Italy (2012), and Habitual Offenders: A True Tale of Nuns, Prostitutes, and Murderers in 17th-century Italy (2016, named a finalist [non-fiction] for The Bridge Book Award, 2017). Educated at Yale, Oxford, U.C. Berkeley, and Navajo Community College, he taught at Yale, as visiting distinguished professor at Amherst, and at Washington University in St Louis, where he retired as Paul Tietjens Professor of Music in 2015. When not teaching, researching, and writing, he has built the occasional harpsichord, completed an award-winning restoration of an 1840s Greek Revival house in New Haven, CT, restored a late-1870s townhouse in St Louis, MO, and restored half-a-dozen vintage campers and travel trailers, dating from the late 1930s to the early 1960s. When not in St Louis, he spends his time in Italy and in Santa Fe, NM, where he passed several summers and winters in a tipi in the Cerrillos Hills, and where he now lives off-and-on in a restored 1953 Lighthouse Duplex travel trailer, (with two upstairs bedrooms).

Reviews

[Susan Waller · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating story of women trying to hold on to a little bit of power over their own lives, against intransigent church hierarchy. For me, it went into too much detail, both about church inner-workings and personal scandals.

I had no idea:
After roughly 1550, hundreds—perhaps thousands—of organists, singers, and composers can be traced within the records of Italy’s nunneries, records that largely remain unavailable to the general public. The more talented of these sacred divas may have kept out of sight, but in their own times, they were regularly on the minds of music lovers.

[Tena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truthfully, I was expecting "Diva" to mean "vain or undisciplined," but it was actually used literally: "a principal female singer in an opera or concert organization." Very well researched. It read a bit dryly for me, however there were plenty of fascinating details abounding within that kept me interested. Disclaimer: I won this in a GOODREADS giveaway. I would't have read it on my own initiative but the cover intrigued me when I received it.

[Mills College Library]

780.88271 M755 2012