Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (review)

Abstract

Sperling tells the dramatic story of how large numbers of Venetian noblewomen were forced into convents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This occurred just as both church and secular authorities were establishing new and sometimes draconian policies that severely limited these women's social, economic, and physical independence. Other historians have explained these "involuntary monachizations" as primarily the result of exorbitant dowries that had become the practice among the patrician class, which made feasible the marriage of only a few women in any given family. But Sperling argues that these "involuntary nuns" played a more central role in a complex system of political and social strategies. Borrowing the term potlach (potlatch) from anthropology, she describes the Venetian ruling class as engaged in a complicated system of reciprocal gift giving. In this "potlach alla veneziana," women's bodies were the objects at hand, given either to other families in marriage or to convents. The latter "gifts" helped make possible the former, but Sperling also asserts that the "sacrifice" of a woman to the convent, where she could neither reproduce nor cement alliances in any immediate fashion, was potlach at its most extreme, expressed in the "spectacular waste" of women's bodies. She writes that "the most highly developed and most noble form of competitive gift-giving is the conspicuous destruction of wealth, [thus] the ritual waste of patrician women's reproductive capacities can be seen as potlach" (p. 59). For Sperling, Venetian patricians were not forcing their daughters into convents simply to avoid having to pay another enormous dowry. Instead, they were taking a long view, treating these monachizations as part of a series of strategies designed to further the male line.