Nunnan av Monza

by Mario Mazzucchelli, Magda Lagerman (Translator)

1963. First edition thus. 230 pages. Pictorial dust jacket over green cloth. Black and white photographs. Pages with some foxing and tanning, particularly to endpapers and textblock edges. Binding remains firm. Boards have light shelf wear with minor corner bumping and crushing to spine ends. Book has slight backwards lean. Clipped jacket has light edge wear with minor tears, chipping and creasing. Some rubbing and marking to surfaces.

Genres: Biography

223 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of my father's books and I first read it as a young girl. Re-reading it now I still love it.

I understand that there have been several films made of this book as it has all of the ingredients for a rather sensational film. The stage is set at the turn of the seventeenth century when a young girl from Lombardy enters the convent of the Humble Benedictine Nuns of Monza.

By chance, Sister Virginia (as she becomes known) just happens to look out of the convent windows and sees Gian Paolo, who happens to live in the palace next door. An amazing story follows but I don't want to spoil this in any way and will leave it to the reader to enjoy this exquisite book.

The denouement is exceptional, however justice prevails!

This is one of those rare books that once read can be re-read at any time.

[Richard Bartholomew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mario Mazzucchelli's account of Virginia Maria de Leyva is a forensic and psychologically acute case-study of a series of events that occurred in a convent in Spanish-controlled northern Italy at the start of the seventeenth century. The author is too astute to be taken in by the romantic story of a nun who got in too deep after falling in love with a local gangster; de Leyva may not have been in control of the passion awakened in her when she came into contact with Gian Paolo Osio – she thought she had bewitched by being tricked into kissing a baptised magnet stone, and in attempt to release herself from Osio's spell she said she "fed on his excrement and ate it cooked with liver and onions" – but this is a woman who maintained an affair for several years by ruthlessly managing her convent environment. She marginalized those who disapproved, and provided a vicarious thrill (and perhaps more) for her closest collaborators – and in the end she was willing to implicate herself, and others, in acts of murder.

Condemned to confinement in a walled-in cell for fourteen years, de Leyva emerged repentant – but as her strength returned, punishment somehow merged into martyrdom, as the criminal spun herself as a reformed sinner. Cardinal Federigo Borromeo, who passed sentence on her, was managed "with such psychological skill that in less than five years he had come to consider her as almost on the threshold of saintliness."

The book was translated into English by Evelyn Gendel (best remembered today as Sybille Bedford's partner), and her short introduction puts Mazzucchelli's contribution in context: Alessandro Manzoni had been given access to the Church's dossier on the case after publishing his fictionalised version of the story in The Betrothed, but when a historian reproduced a small part of the documents in 1854 the ensuing scandal caused the dossier to be "hastily withdrawn." Mazzucchelli was the first person to be given access thereafter, in 1957.

Mazzucchelli's book is a popular account that gives references in only a very general way, but its source quotations and summaries are extensive, and drawn from (in Gendel's words) "an astonishing rag-bag: official papers and documents; petitions and counter-petitions; letters of appeal, raving letters of rage; bans, edits, summonses;... legal records of every sort… all sorts of oddments." These in turn led the author to the Archives of State and to private collections of papers, including those of the family of Cardinal Borromeo (according to the author blurb in the Penguin edition, Mazzucchelli, described as a "historian, biographer and art collector", lived in a house previously owned by Borromeo's family and visited by the Cardinal himself). The book also draws critically on previously published accounts, particularly that of Giuseppe Ripamonti in his Historiae Patriae of 1640.

Part one tells the story of the crime, and gives proper attention to the wider socio-political and ecclesiastical environments: de Leyva was a noble, farmed out to the convent of Santa Margherita at an early age following her father's remarriage, but retaining her status and worldly interests as "heiress of the Lord of Monza". Her lover came from a family "rich and respected, in spite of a family history that reads like a long, outrageous clash with law and order." A third figure in the story is Paolo Arrigone, a corrupt priest who helped Osio with his lovemaking and himself to some of the other nuns. Arrigone advised Paolo to get de Leyva to read to Il Graffio, a bogus religious guide "which claimed that chastity was a virtue only for the physically immature, and not essential – at least in certain circumstances – even for a nun."

Much of part two – "Trial and Sentence" – is largely a procedural, chronicling the investigations that revealed de Leyva's complicity of murders committed by Osio to conceal the affair; these included a nun who threatened to blab, whose severed head turned up at the bottom of a well. The last part deals with the aftermath of de Leyva's confinement and then her successful efforts towards rehabilitation after her release.

Mazzucchelli is also sensitive to the role of belief, and not just at the level of superstitions about witchcraft. In particular, he considers the motives of her prosecutors by drawing attention to the different aims of canon law and civil law, with the former concerned with "the perfection of man's soul", and designed to "instil repentance rather than to protect society." One theme in the story concerns tensions between the approach taken by the ecclesiastical authorities and the secular rulers – both of whom had to be mindful of de Leyva's powerful family and Osio's network of bravos.

Mazzucchelli manages to tell a sensational tale with insight and subtlety – and without resorting to the kind of prurience that has inspired at least one sexually explicit "nunsploitation" movie on the subject.

[Hagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lust is one hell of a drug. One of the many insane moments in history that read like fiction.

"Gian Paolo's coveted swift adventure with a nun had been transformed into something quite different. He was impatient with the muffled, unsatisfactory meetings, with her continued resistance and the interminable saintly masquerade. But, imperceptibly, he himself was becoming ensnared by his intended victim. He was unable to abandon her, and his manoeuvres continued.....Virginia still deluded herself that she was resisting. She lacked experience, she could not know that feelings alter in intensity, that lovers often pass through moments of indifference when they seem to pause, almost as if to take a breath, before being swept on. Yet she knew by intuition that the most difficult moment in a love affair is the passage from the ideal to reality."

[Mariya · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great read. Scandalous!!

[Luke Devenish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this twenty-five years ago and found it outrageous. I retread it again this week and found it tragic until the extraordinary post wall-in turnaround, when I found it inspiring for becoming a story of a Renaissance feminist shit-kicker who really could make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. The section devoted to the investigation is tedious for repeating the story we've already experienced, until we get to the shock of Gian Paulo trying to drown one complicit sister before pushing another one down a well! Hardcore nunsploitation on the page. What's not to relish here?

[sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

_händelserik_ klosterroman med nya intriger i varje avsnitt, ALLA LÄS!!!!