A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan.

P. Renee Baernstein. A Convent Tale: A Century of Sisterhood in Spanish Milan.

New York and London: Routledge, 2002. xxii + 270 pp. index. map. bibl. $27.50. ISBN: 0-415-92717-X. Honorable mention, the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize for 2003-04.

This history of the Angelic nuns of San Paulo Converso explores the personal experience and social dynamics of enclosure in one of Milan's most influential convents from the 1530s to the mid-seventeenth century. Baernstein's elegant and highly accessible book explains how enclosure is both "part of a wholesale revolution in church governance" (7) and a complex, on-going negotiation involving social elites and church and state in their exercise of power and authority. Her account underscores that enclosure is one of the most important cultural changes of the Tridentine era.

The book is organized around the remarkable women who guided the convent through distinct phases: (1) the founding in 1535 in the open and decentralized religious climate of pre-Tridentine experimentation, (2) the struggles with the Inquisition and the imposition of episcopal control in the 1550s, (3) the apogee of Counter-Reformation rigor during Carlo Borromeo's "revolution" as archbishop of Milan from 1565-84, (4) the corresponding brilliant tenure of Sfondrati women (1565-90) who placed the convent at the center of their "family's complex political business" (116) which included the election of an uncle, Niccolo Sfondrati, as Pope Gregory XIV in 1590.

Baernstein's treatment of the pre-Tridentine reform climate in Italy in the 1530s is especially valuable. She makes the "pre-enclosure" or "open convent" (41) an important object of research that should stimulate further study of the wide range of religious options exercised by both women and men before the advent of the centralized Tridentine model.

Baernstein's appraisal of Borromeo's particular personal commitment to enclosure suggests a revisionist view of his tenure as archbishop of Milan. Depicting Borromeo as more revolutionary than reformist (chap. 3 and n. 8, 217), Baenstein argues that enclosure was Borromeo's most powerful tool for challenging the local aristocracy and for claiming "full authority over all spheres of the sacred" (80).

More than this, Borromeo appears to have seen female impurity as a principal source of disorder in the world. Order in the soul depended upon an ordered society where not only men and women were to be carefully separated from each other but where all classes of people were categorized and segregated (90).

Borromeo's term for enclosure, "holy segregation," (79) is very telling. His Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis went so far as to specify the proper width of bars of the convent grills (80) and, in architecture, fostered the double church structure designed to separate the nuns from the host and from the outside world (87, 131, 164).

In this complex world of dependency and creativity, the Sfondrati nuns made their convent "the main fulcrum of the family's power in Milan" (119). Sfondrati political ascendancy, combined with the backing the family gave to Borromeo, freed the Angelics from the intrusions and limitations that most convents under Borromeo faced.

Sfondrati nuns themselves joined in the encomium of Borromeo. In rewriting their own history books and in patronizing the arts they made Borromeo a virtual cult figure (163). Fascinatingly, however, they seem to have acted not so much to acquire privileges, but rather because they understood how to work the culture created by the new religious climate for all it was worth and thus placed their community "at the heart of the Borromean revolution" (109).

From the rich correspondence of the nuns, Baernstein argues that the convent functioned as a crucial clearing house for relevant gossip and insider information that facilitated the family's social and political rise. Successes in procuring indulgences for the altar of the family chapel were "a shrewd effort at public relations" (132). Sfondrati nuns acted as "family treasurers," holding onto and disbursing large sums of money in the administration of family benefices--a telling reminder that Trent was unable to dismantle the lucrative system of multiple benefices that formed a sizeable portion of aristocratic income.

This book is essential for all historians of early modern Catholic reform. It is ideal for classroom use and will also be especially appreciated by historians of early modern Italian politics. While historians of women have long been familiar with the cultural and human cost of Tridentine visions of order and hierarchy, this book demonstrates with economy, with grace, and with a fine sense of paradox, that all historians have much to ponder in the complex gender politics that shaped the convent of San Paolo Converso.

ANN W. RAMSEY

Independent Scholar