Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent

by Craig A. Monson

Piecing together 200 years of convent history, this engaging narrative tells the story of the nuns of Santa Cristina della Fondazza—gifted singers, instrumentalists, and composers who used music to circumvent ecclesiastical authority and to forge links with the world beyond convent walls. Craig Monson reconstructs the daily lives of Italian nuns, often in their own words, and relates their musical life to the broad social context in which it unfolded. He introduces a virtually unknown nun composer, relating her family history and how the convent allowed her creativity to flower. The study is meticulously researched, marvelously detailed, and entertaining to read.

In sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century Bologna, approximately one-seventh of the entire female population lived behind convent walls. Santa Cristina became home for a number of gifted women musicians, many from among the upper classes, who sought "respectable" musical careers. Monson documents the struggle of these women as they fought to maintain their musical and ritual traditions in the face of persistent opposition from church officials. Figuring prominently in the story of Santa Cristina is Lucrezia Vizzana (1590-1662), Bologna's only published nun composer, who entered the convent at the age of eight.

This study is as much about social and cultural history as it is about music. The discussion ranges widely beyond musicology to draw upon art, social and political history, labor history, theology, and gender studies.

394 pages, Hardcover

First published September 19, 1995

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).