Craig A. Monson
just not getting anywhere with this, I think there's a bit of a disconnect between the type of book this is and the way it was marketed, It's very, very academically written with a few odd bits where it starts to feel like a novel, There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not exactly the light reading I was expecting, I may come back to it at some point, because I actually did learn quite a bit, I am willing to admit that the marketing copy "Witchcraft, Arson. Going AWOL" and the sensationalist title are what initially drew me to this book, And while what it contains is far less sensational, it was still a fascinating look at something I previously knew absolutely nothing whatsoever about.
Right from the start, I learned that huge numbers of women, rich or poor, inth century Italy ended up in convents, because their parents would groom one daughter for marriage and send the rest to the convent where dowry requirements were much less taxing.
It took me more than a few paragraphs to really engage with each chapter each one features the goingson at a different Italian convent, but once I did the pages flew by.
I learned that magic was often a woman's only means of feeling a sense of ownership over her life and that convents were not "warehouses for women" but also semisweatshops, where women did work like raising silk worms for no pay.
I learned that women with musical talents became nuns because this was virtually the only outlet for them that wasn't shameful and even music was taken from them off and on depending on who was running the Catholic church.
I learned that the church hugely feared lesbianism among nuns, and that problems between rich nuns often occurred as they tried to outdo each other in creating and giving rich gifts tapestries, silver, even whole new buildings to their cloister.
Monson is an interesting writer I can tell he's a quirky guy who expects everyone to be just as excited about the nuggets he finds buried deep in his research as he is.
While doing an impressive job of explaining such nuggets, he does little to make them relevant or illuminating, expecting the reader to do at least that much of the work.
He doesn't care if the reader cares, he just wants to share, I pictured him as a goofy, nerdy professor type with a small but very excited group of student hangerson, Which made the photo of him at the back of the book with goatee, cowboy hat and sunglasses more than a little jarring.
Overall an enjoyable read, and quick,
Themes: nuns, Italy,s, Catholic church, women, music, class, control, religion, history, archives A little more technical than the cover would seem to imply, this is a fascinating study for an academic readership.
It would help to know a bit about Italian history before picking it up, but it has stories of women who didn't always live by the rules.
More thoughts at: sitelinkSects and Violence in the Ancient World, brilliant sitcom material! Craig Monson seeks to relay the stories of five “badly behaved” nuns in Seventeenth Century Italy, whose tales he found while doing research in the Vatican Archives.
He aims first for the book to bring to light these women who have been lost to obscurity for such a long time.
The second aim is to highlight that the hierarchical systems maintained by the Catholic Church with external control of convents were and are incapable of managing what goes on inside the sacred walls where no man may tread.
In Seventeenth Century Italy, families really only had two choices when it came to what to do with their female family members.
They could either marry them off and pay large dowries, or they could pack them off to the convent, This still required a dowry, but only a fraction of the amount needed for marriage, Because of this, Monson points out, many noble families only arranged marriages for one daughter, sending the rest to a convent populated with women from similar affluent families.
In fact, one story highlights a rich man who willed his house to be transformed into a convent in order to house his large number of female relatives.
The newly minted nuns could still keep most of their belongings by giving them to the abbess who returns them “on loan” to the woman.
Austerity was not typical for these Italian convents, but they still had their share of chafing restrictions,
One of these restrictions is the somewhat hypocritical views of what a nun should occupy her time with, Many chose music in fact when a woman becomes a full nun she is considered a “choir nun” first, But for some reason women singing was considered dangerous, promoting vanity for the singer and distracting her from her true audience God and not the townspeople who flocked in the street outside to hear the beautiful melodies.
One story seeks to punish a nun who became “too obsessed with music”, and not for the glory of God alone, Their punishment for beautiful polyphonic music was met with opposition from their Bishop, first restricting the frequency of the singing to just special feast days, then to monophonic music only to be heard during services.
This act completely silences a once renowned choir, so of course there would be pushback, Why should embroidery and poetry be considered holy and fit occupations and music as flirting with the Devil What I found by reading this book is there is no straight answer because the opinion and the treatment of the music tended to vary by town, Bishop, or the makeup of the Sacred Congregation in Rome.
This must have been maddening for the nuns,
Another thing this book points out is how bored these nuns likely were, They could invent a scandal just to alleviate some of the crushing monotony of monastic life, There were only a few things a nun could do within the walls of their convent and I am sure they
got old pretty quickly.
One story depicts a group of nuns who create a scenario of a missing viola, involving folk magic to find out who stole it in addition to a great deal of finger pointing.
Another nun sneaks out of her convent at night to attend the opera, as that sort of entertainment would never have come to her.
So while some internal disagreements and inappropriate acts were just that, they could be used as fodder for an official inquest which was much more dramatic and entertaining and could go on for months.
The book Monson has produced is very entertaining, Reaching into history for stories about people who didnt always follow the rules of the Church to the letter connects to how the Church is operating today.
While the transgressions are different, such as the excommunication of three nuns who got ordained as priests or forcing out a group of nuns protesting the closing of their convent, the same external Church hierarchy is still present.
Rome can issue edicts all it wants, but enforcing them locally is even more difficult today without an intimidating enforcer or inquisitor, Therefore, nuns will continue to behave “badly” in the point of view of the Church, in my opinion primarily because of the inequality of male and female religious that was as present in the Seventeenth Century as it is today.
Don't let the salacious title fool you this was a surprisingly wellwritten, erudite read, Overly concerned with music for my interests but very good for those that click with it, I'm not sure I'm going to finish this book, I got it for my Mom this year for Mother's Day, It sounds fun but I'm not loving it so far, Anyone expecting a scandalous page turner will be sorely disappointed, The author found these tales in the Vatican library while doing musicological research, The scandals are mild by any standard, especially today's, but in the boredom of the Vatican library probably seemed horrid, Examples are calling upon the devil to find a missing violin, burning down a convent to escape, slipping outside of the convent to participate in an opera, or two lesbian nuns who escape the convent together.
Anyone who completes the book should receive several thousand years off of Purgatory, I went into this book looking forward to sordid scandals and a variety of strange events that took place in convents, What I got instead was convoluted historical facts, A feminist microhistory masquerading as something sexy, Which somehow makes it more intriguing What does it say about our times that the dust jacket of a book aboutth andth century nuns in Italy has to show a nun being spanked if it has a hope in hell of selling Spoiler: no nuns are spanked in this book.
It's much better than that, Charmingly rewritten rag from the Vatican Library,
Later: Monson's making light of the nuns' pathetic attempts to enjoy themselves by dabbling in illicit magic is sickening, I'm feeling really claustrophobic. First, about the dust jacket, The front cover features a fauxNational Enquirer typeface, and the reverse, a monk flagellating a barebottomed nun bottom tinted yellow.
The authors photo shows him in a pullover, shades, and a cowboy hat, Lets hope this sort of thing does not become a common expedient for marketing “crossover” academic books, For one thing, the young woman at the library checkout desk gave me a sidelong glance,
There is little about sex here though teenage boys in search of titillation are free to use their imaginations, Instead, the author, a musicologist, has written up five stories he gleaned from theth andth century “Proceedings before the Papal Congregation of Bishops and Regulars” at the Vatican Library.
The tales include stories about nuns who use folk magic in an attempt to find a stolen viola, a violent row over some chapel embroidery, a nun who masquerades as a priest to attend the opera, and cloister members from the same aristocratic family escaping their familydonated convent by burning it down.
Monson writes well if too chattily for my taste offering reflections on his research in the Vatican Library as well as attempts at contemporary relevance.
The authorial voice is often necessary to fill gaps because the primary sources are investigative documents written by the nuns male superiors, men who were uninterested in tidying up loose ends of the incidents they related.
There is much of interest here: sidelights on monastic music and the raising of silkworms, for instance, What one will not find is much about religion, Apparently all the women featured here were relegated to the cloister by families trying to save dowry money, None seems to have had a religious vocation, It is easy to conclude from the reading of this book thatthcentury Italy would have been a much happier and more sensible place if nuns and their male superiors had simply married one another and spent their lives raising large families who could sing and play musical instruments.
Right from the start, I learned that huge numbers of women, rich or poor, inth century Italy ended up in convents, because their parents would groom one daughter for marriage and send the rest to the convent where dowry requirements were much less taxing.
It took me more than a few paragraphs to really engage with each chapter each one features the goingson at a different Italian convent, but once I did the pages flew by.
I learned that magic was often a woman's only means of feeling a sense of ownership over her life and that convents were not "warehouses for women" but also semisweatshops, where women did work like raising silk worms for no pay.
I learned that women with musical talents became nuns because this was virtually the only outlet for them that wasn't shameful and even music was taken from them off and on depending on who was running the Catholic church.
I learned that the church hugely feared lesbianism among nuns, and that problems between rich nuns often occurred as they tried to outdo each other in creating and giving rich gifts tapestries, silver, even whole new buildings to their cloister.
Monson is an interesting writer I can tell he's a quirky guy who expects everyone to be just as excited about the nuggets he finds buried deep in his research as he is.
While doing an impressive job of explaining such nuggets, he does little to make them relevant or illuminating, expecting the reader to do at least that much of the work.
He doesn't care if the reader cares, he just wants to share, I pictured him as a goofy, nerdy professor type with a small but very excited group of student hangerson, Which made the photo of him at the back of the book with goatee, cowboy hat and sunglasses more than a little jarring.
Overall an enjoyable read, and quick,
Themes: nuns, Italy,s, Catholic church, women, music, class, control, religion, history, archives A little more technical than the cover would seem to imply, this is a fascinating study for an academic readership.
It would help to know a bit about Italian history before picking it up, but it has stories of women who didn't always live by the rules.
More thoughts at: sitelinkSects and Violence in the Ancient World, brilliant sitcom material! Craig Monson seeks to relay the stories of five “badly behaved” nuns in Seventeenth Century Italy, whose tales he found while doing research in the Vatican Archives.
He aims first for the book to bring to light these women who have been lost to obscurity for such a long time.
The second aim is to highlight that the hierarchical systems maintained by the Catholic Church with external control of convents were and are incapable of managing what goes on inside the sacred walls where no man may tread.
In Seventeenth Century Italy, families really only had two choices when it came to what to do with their female family members.
They could either marry them off and pay large dowries, or they could pack them off to the convent, This still required a dowry, but only a fraction of the amount needed for marriage, Because of this, Monson points out, many noble families only arranged marriages for one daughter, sending the rest to a convent populated with women from similar affluent families.
In fact, one story highlights a rich man who willed his house to be transformed into a convent in order to house his large number of female relatives.
The newly minted nuns could still keep most of their belongings by giving them to the abbess who returns them “on loan” to the woman.
Austerity was not typical for these Italian convents, but they still had their share of chafing restrictions,
One of these restrictions is the somewhat hypocritical views of what a nun should occupy her time with, Many chose music in fact when a woman becomes a full nun she is considered a “choir nun” first, But for some reason women singing was considered dangerous, promoting vanity for the singer and distracting her from her true audience God and not the townspeople who flocked in the street outside to hear the beautiful melodies.
One story seeks to punish a nun who became “too obsessed with music”, and not for the glory of God alone, Their punishment for beautiful polyphonic music was met with opposition from their Bishop, first restricting the frequency of the singing to just special feast days, then to monophonic music only to be heard during services.
This act completely silences a once renowned choir, so of course there would be pushback, Why should embroidery and poetry be considered holy and fit occupations and music as flirting with the Devil What I found by reading this book is there is no straight answer because the opinion and the treatment of the music tended to vary by town, Bishop, or the makeup of the Sacred Congregation in Rome.
This must have been maddening for the nuns,
Another thing this book points out is how bored these nuns likely were, They could invent a scandal just to alleviate some of the crushing monotony of monastic life, There were only a few things a nun could do within the walls of their convent and I am sure they
got old pretty quickly.
One story depicts a group of nuns who create a scenario of a missing viola, involving folk magic to find out who stole it in addition to a great deal of finger pointing.
Another nun sneaks out of her convent at night to attend the opera, as that sort of entertainment would never have come to her.
So while some internal disagreements and inappropriate acts were just that, they could be used as fodder for an official inquest which was much more dramatic and entertaining and could go on for months.
The book Monson has produced is very entertaining, Reaching into history for stories about people who didnt always follow the rules of the Church to the letter connects to how the Church is operating today.
While the transgressions are different, such as the excommunication of three nuns who got ordained as priests or forcing out a group of nuns protesting the closing of their convent, the same external Church hierarchy is still present.
Rome can issue edicts all it wants, but enforcing them locally is even more difficult today without an intimidating enforcer or inquisitor, Therefore, nuns will continue to behave “badly” in the point of view of the Church, in my opinion primarily because of the inequality of male and female religious that was as present in the Seventeenth Century as it is today.
Don't let the salacious title fool you this was a surprisingly wellwritten, erudite read, Overly concerned with music for my interests but very good for those that click with it, I'm not sure I'm going to finish this book, I got it for my Mom this year for Mother's Day, It sounds fun but I'm not loving it so far, Anyone expecting a scandalous page turner will be sorely disappointed, The author found these tales in the Vatican library while doing musicological research, The scandals are mild by any standard, especially today's, but in the boredom of the Vatican library probably seemed horrid, Examples are calling upon the devil to find a missing violin, burning down a convent to escape, slipping outside of the convent to participate in an opera, or two lesbian nuns who escape the convent together.
Anyone who completes the book should receive several thousand years off of Purgatory, I went into this book looking forward to sordid scandals and a variety of strange events that took place in convents, What I got instead was convoluted historical facts, A feminist microhistory masquerading as something sexy, Which somehow makes it more intriguing What does it say about our times that the dust jacket of a book aboutth andth century nuns in Italy has to show a nun being spanked if it has a hope in hell of selling Spoiler: no nuns are spanked in this book.
It's much better than that, Charmingly rewritten rag from the Vatican Library,
Later: Monson's making light of the nuns' pathetic attempts to enjoy themselves by dabbling in illicit magic is sickening, I'm feeling really claustrophobic. First, about the dust jacket, The front cover features a fauxNational Enquirer typeface, and the reverse, a monk flagellating a barebottomed nun bottom tinted yellow.
The authors photo shows him in a pullover, shades, and a cowboy hat, Lets hope this sort of thing does not become a common expedient for marketing “crossover” academic books, For one thing, the young woman at the library checkout desk gave me a sidelong glance,
There is little about sex here though teenage boys in search of titillation are free to use their imaginations, Instead, the author, a musicologist, has written up five stories he gleaned from theth andth century “Proceedings before the Papal Congregation of Bishops and Regulars” at the Vatican Library.
The tales include stories about nuns who use folk magic in an attempt to find a stolen viola, a violent row over some chapel embroidery, a nun who masquerades as a priest to attend the opera, and cloister members from the same aristocratic family escaping their familydonated convent by burning it down.
Monson writes well if too chattily for my taste offering reflections on his research in the Vatican Library as well as attempts at contemporary relevance.
The authorial voice is often necessary to fill gaps because the primary sources are investigative documents written by the nuns male superiors, men who were uninterested in tidying up loose ends of the incidents they related.
There is much of interest here: sidelights on monastic music and the raising of silkworms, for instance, What one will not find is much about religion, Apparently all the women featured here were relegated to the cloister by families trying to save dowry money, None seems to have had a religious vocation, It is easy to conclude from the reading of this book thatthcentury Italy would have been a much happier and more sensible place if nuns and their male superiors had simply married one another and spent their lives raising large families who could sing and play musical instruments.
Witchcraft. Arson. Going AWOL. Some nuns in sixteenth and seventeenthcentury Italy strayed far from the paradigms of monastic life, Cloistered in convents, subjected to stifling hierarchy, repressed, and occasionally persecuted by their male superiors, these women circumvented authority in sometimes extraordinary ways.
But tales of their transgressions have long been buried in the Vatican Secret Archive, That is, until now.
In Nuns Behaving Badly, Craig A, Monson resurrects forgotten tales and restores to life the longsilent voices of these cloistered heroines, Here we meet nuns who dared speak out about physical assault and sexual impropriety some real, some imagined, Others were only guilty of misjudgment or defacing valuable artwork that offended their sensibilities, But what unites the women and their stories is the challenges they faced: these were women trying to find their way within the Catholicism of their day and through the strict limits it imposed on them.
Monson introduces us to women who were occasionally desperate to flee cloistered life, as when an entire community conspired to torch their convent and be set free.
But more often, he shows us nuns just trying to live their lives, When they were crossedby powerful priests who claimed to know what was best for thembad behavior could escalate from mere troublemaking to open confrontation.
In resurrecting these longforgotten tales and trials, Monson also draws attention to the predicament of modern religious women, whose “misbehavior”seeking ordination as priests or refusing to give up their endowments to pay for priestly wrongdoing in their own archdiocesescontinues even today.
The nuns of early modern Italy, Monson shows, set the standard for religious transgression in their own ageand beyond,