Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent Hardcover – March 10, 2003 by Mary Laven
 
Documents the experiences of late-Renaissance Venetian nuns, many of whom were upper-class women immured against their will, exploring how convents of the period were often political hotbeds and the sites of illicit love affairs in their resident's efforts to find fulfillment. 17,500 first printing.
 
From Publishers Weekly
This engrossing book unveils a world of convent communities far richer and more complicated than the nuns' vows of poverty, chastity and obedience would seem to allow, wherein women led "lives caught between renunciation and self-indulgence, monotony and flashes of high colour." The author explains how, in the 16th century, Venice's 50-some convents were seen as "places of vice and indiscipline," and a "spiritual liability" that called for visits by church and state authorities who would chart infractions and demand reforms. Using visitation reports, trial records, personal letters and diaries, Cambridge historian Laven weaves a fascinating social history of these women's hidden existence-lives that included "gossip-mongering," befriending prostitutes, cross-dressing, sharing beds with one another, writing love letters to priests and even cutting holes in convent walls to allow their lovers in. The problem, Laven says, was that Venetian convents served as "dumping grounds for unmarried noblewomen," many of whom had no calling to the religious life. Stripped of wealth and position and cut off from the outside world, these young women longed, more than anything, for communication-and taking lovers, sometimes, was simply the best way to get it. Laven writes with powerful empathy for the nuns, neither glorifying them nor reducing them to helpless victims. And in asserting that nuns' struggles were ultimately to define themselves as individuals against the strictures of their community, Laven makes a compelling feminist argument without employing any overblown feminist rhetoric.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
 
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