To Find God in Work? Female Social Stratification in Early Modern Italian Convents

Abstract

Early modern female monastic communities hosted two different groups – technically ‘classes’ – of nuns: choir nuns and servant nuns. Choir nuns usually came from an urban elite background, and occupied the most important administrative and governing positions in the community. Servant nuns, in contrast, often came from humble backgrounds, and entered the convent with the specific duty of performing all the manual and heavy domestic jobs. In return for this work contribution, these nuns could be admitted into monastic profession with a reduced dowry, or even with no dowry at all. For these nuns the religious house represented a work opportunity, and a guarantee of social and economic security. The communal monastic regime was therefore a stratified microsociety, which reproduced the most common social dynamics that governed the world outside. Inside as well as outside the convent, unmarried women shared similar conditions: privileges on the one hand, manual work and servant status on the other. This article examines the complex social and religious dynamics within convents, and in particular between the two main groups of servant and choir nuns. Drawing on a sample of prescriptive texts on convent life, my analysis develops along two dimensions. First, I examine the stratification behind convent walls in connection with the ideal of female religious life promoted by the Catholic Church, in the decades following the Council of Trent. The major reform programme launched by the Council in the middle of the sixteenth century sponsored a renewed spiritual european history quarterly 