Letters to a Nun: Monastic Music in Early Modern Malta

Abstract

This article examines the performance of music in a Maltese female Benedictine monastery in the early modern period in relation to prevailing attitudes towards monastic music and polyphony. By placing these letters in their social and cultural context, it also offers fresh insights into female literacy in early modern Malta. The discussion centres on a set of fifteen unpublished letters that provide a rare example of a woman in early eighteenth-century Malta engaged in a written exchange of theological and philosophical ideas.