July 15, 2009

Masterful history explores key time in development of religious life

By Rachelle Linner

Silvia Evangelisti, a lecturer in history at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, is a specialist in women’s religious life of the early modern period, and in this masterful study she identifies and explains the impact of secular and ecclesiastical history on female monastic communities.

Her concise analysis of these broad issues is coupled with precise details that afford a glimpse into the richness of convent life. “Nuns: A History of Convent Life” is a tapestry that succeeds in combining serious scholarship with a writing style that is accessible to the lay reader.

“Enclosure” was the most important defining factor of convent life in the period Evangelisti explores, 1450-1700, and appropriately it is the cohesive theme of this study.

loister was an early feature of monastic communities and especially stressed for women, who were “radically exhorted never to leave their convent and to practice full, unbroken enclosure.” These practices “relied on a long-standing Christian tradition that associated female chastity with the protection of a closed environment, whether this was a domestic one or a monastic one.”

Enclosure “assumed a new relevance” at the Council of Trent in 1563, Evangelisti writes. Legislation extended enclosure “to all female religious, including tertiaries, who often lived uncloistered and performed care work in the service of the civic community, assisting the poor and the dying.”

Evangelisti offers fascinating evidence of how some communities resisted the Tridentine reforms and details how enclosure altered both the physical space of convents but also the nuns’ relationship with society. “Enclosure challenged the economic status of convents, representing a real practical problem for nuns’ lives. The loss of direct contact with society led to a dramatic fall in all activities, economic as well as religious.”

If enclosure is the central theme of this book, the paradox of religious life is its subtext. “Silence was required by monastic regulation as it fostered contemplation and full dedication to God. It was therefore the natural condition for religious women whose main task was to pray and interact with God on behalf of all human beings. Precisely in these silent and cloistered environments, however, nuns found the means to write.”

They also developed and performed elaborate theatrical and musical productions, another means to “create palpable and impalpable links with the outside worlds. For the nuns these celebrations were a way of enhancing their symbolic presence in society.”

The period that Evangelisti writes about also saw the emergence of the founding nun. “There are numerous examples of very determined nuns leaving their convents and moving to other cities, and even other countries, in order to found new communities.” Nuns were “closely intertwined with the main political and religious developments of their time” and “convents were amongst the first institutions to be transplanted to the colonies.”

The book’s concluding chapter focuses on the active apostolate. Although the church promoted the contemplative life, “from the late Middle Ages onward women practiced a range of different forms of religious life, including the more flexible option of joining a community but taking simple vows only.” This “socially oriented form of commitment” fostered “an active spirituality in direct contact with the world, rather than pure contemplation. They served God by praying as well as performing charitable service for the benefit of the most vulnerable members of society.”

The identity of these communities was challenged by the Tridentine emphasis on enclosure, and Evangelisti narrates the histories of Angela de Merici (1470-1540), who founded the Ursulines, and Mary Ward (1585-1645), whose English Ladies failed to attain approval for an Ignatian mode of life that would allow women “to participate in active spiritual renewal and fight for the Catholic faith.”

Evangelisti writes with authority and insight into the 250-year struggle to negotiate the complex tension between enclosure and worldly involvement, silence and speech, class and wealth, contemplation and action. “Nuns” is a fascinating history of a period that gave us the style of religious life we know today, a history that models how women can learn to live with paradox and change as they give form to their desire to worship and serve.

Rachelle Linner, a freelance writer, lives in Boston.