Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice.

Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Women in Culture and Society.) Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xxi + 417 pp. $65 (cl), $24 (pbk) . ISBN: 0-226-76935-6 (cl), 0-226-76936-4 (pbk).

In the current debate about whether the early modern convent was an idyllic refuge offering women opportunities for leadership and creative endeavors or a "monastic hell" into which most denizens were forced, Jutta Sperling stands in the second camp. This study, a revised version of her dissertation (Stanford, 1995), proposes that female monasticism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice served exclusively male interests: not only the financial priorities of nuns' relatives and ecclesiastics but also (and this constitutes her distinctive contribution) the maintenance of the state's image.

She begins by utilizing the anthropological concept of potlatch, first advanced by Michel Mauss in his study of the gift (1925), then applied to kinship by Claude Levi-Strauss (1949), and eventually extended to "the traffic in women" by Gayle Rubin (1975). Dowry inflation, invoked by contemporaries and modern scholars to account for patricians' consigning a growing proportion of their daughters to convents with "deposits" much less costly than marital dowries, thereby eliminating further claims on the family patrimony, does not in Sperling's view constitute a sufficient explanation. What might seem to us a "rational" alternative, bestowing their young women on social inferiors with dowry expectations less exorbitant than those of fellow patricians, was unthinkable because it would have abrogated their commitment to endogamy and tarnished family honor. Instead, they engaged in a complex, self-deluding, and ultimately self-destructive form of gift/counter-gift, "wasting" their daughters', sisters', and nieces' generative potential by consigning them to convents. Through this public gesture they aimed to reciprocate "the divine grace God had conferred upon the city" (69). In consequence, the declining patrician birthrate led eventually to the demise of the caste and the Republic.

Since the application of paradigms from other disciplines to historical questions sometimes proves illuminating, I kept Ockham's razor in its sheath, hoping to find some empirical support for the author's contention in the second chapter on the myth of Venice. Alas, I did not find it. Summarizing well-known texts thoroughly analyzed by previous scholars, Sperling argues that two figurations of Venice were in vigorous competition during the sixteenth century: an intact female body recalling the Virgin Mary versus "the sensual, inviting body of Venus" (83). The sole piece of evidence she offers on Venus is an oration delivered in 1559 by Luigi Groto, "the blind man of Adria," whose unprecedented figuration was taken up by no one else. That the coronation in 1597 of Dogaressa Morosina Morosini Grimani signaled the intact Virgin's final victory over sexually active Venus, as Sperling claims at the end of this chapter, remains unpersuasive, for she has constructed a "battle" that never actually took place.

In the last three-fifths of the book Sperling operates primarily on the terrain of political and economic history, where she is more at home. Venetian secular and religious authorities' efforts to discipline comportment in and around convents, she shows, began in the early sixteenth century. Although the Tridentine decrees of 1563 mandating strict active and passive enclosure of nuns lent support to this campaign, they did not, as Sperling asserts at one point (128), bring about a dramatic change in female monastic life. Moving effectively among various available sources (patriarchal legislation and visitations of female religious houses; rulings of the state magistracy in charge of convents and suits filed against them; prescriptive literature; and surveys of monastic property conducted in 1564 and 1769), she shows that the attempt to achieve nuns' perfect enclosure and complete submission was an ongoing struggle, never completely won by the forces of discipline.

Minor errors erode Sperling's credibility and cast doubt on her copy-editor's diligence. The elder Pier Paolo Vergerio of Capodistria, for instance, was not "a Florentine writer" (73); staia of wheat, a solid, should not be converted into liquid measures (175, 241). Some English renderings of Italian and Latin terms are infelicitous. The author and her press may encounter legal trouble with the illustrations: of the twenty-four included, they acknowledge permission to reproduce only six. Since contemporary estimates of the female monastic population are few and far between, Sperling's confident assertion that monachization peaked in the early seventeenth century and went into precipitous decline after 1646 cannot be accepted uncritically.

Its numerous weaknesses notwithstanding, this first published study in English of monachization in a major Italian city over a long period of time must be welcomed. Both reaction against the dubious aspects of Sperling's ambitious book and emulation of its strengths will surely stimulate further work on the multifarious functions of convents in early modern society.