The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion, and the Arts in Early Modern Europe.

In recent years, several scholarly publications have expanded general knowledge of the roles and achievements of Renaissance women. A few titles suffice to indicate the focus of these well-received additions to the public awareness of feminist cultural and historical issues: Rewriting the Renaissance (1986), Refiguring Woman (1991), Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective (1990) come to mind, but there are many others. However, most of these recent works do not stress the religious experience of women, although it was clearly a significant aspect of their existence, or the relationship between the religious life and cultural production. Therefore, it was a pleasure to explore this fascinating and informative collection of essays mostly dedicated to devout women and nuns, some wellknown, others unknown, but all women who managed to produce meaningful writing, music, and buildings. The crannied wall of the title is an apt metaphor for the contents of this collection. Its ten essays offer historical, literary, philosophical, iconographical, and musical glimpses through the invisible walls of time into the lives of women for whom very real walls functioned as prisons, islands, shelters, challenges, and psychological boundaries. The book's semiotic wall defines the physical reality of convent life as well as its isolationist function but it can also be taken as a metaphor for the female condition of subservience and dependency. Religious walls are proudly built by the Roman matrons in Carolyn Valone's article about female patronage but they are used to silence Craig Monson and Robert Kendrick's musician nuns. Some articles describe the scaling of walls, that is, the overcoming of socially imposed behavioral paradigms: Katherine Gill delineates the alternatively devout lifestyle of two uncloistered pinzochere while Anne Schutte describes the unfortunate consequences of Cecilia Ferrazzi's choice not to enter a monastery, leading her to the Inquisition. Still others expose the psychological and theoretical foundations shoring convent walls, such as the essential distrust of the female sex explored in G. S. Williams's piece on Paracelsus, Wier and Bodin.

What emerges from the essays is the realization that women were asked to meet the demands of a multiplicity of authorities, both religious and secular, and to conform to socially endorsed but constricted roles or suffer the consequences. A strong expression of frustration and imposition emerges from the pages, although the book does not expressly confront the element of sexual politics inherent in many of the essays. The repeated references to physical and/or intellectual enclosures are, however, balanced by the exposition of the shrewd strategies and personal commitments of the women described, such as Patrick Macey's Dominicans who honor Savonarola, against ecclesiastical opposition, by performing his hymns, or Elissa Weaver's playwrighting nuns who muse artistically on the unknown life beyond their walls.

These brief comments give an idea of the diversity of topics and approaches found in the ten essays of The Crannied Wall. However, there is some inaccuracy m the book's sub-title. Whereas two articles deal with northern Europe, more than 8o% of the text concerns the experiences of Italian women, ranging from Rome to Milan, across several centuries. While the dominant genre is biography, the central focus is on the cultural contributions made by the women depicted, rather than on their spiritual or mystical experiences, although the two are often interrelated. The essays were all clearly present ed and well-organized, adding to their stimulating contents, so stimulating that at times this reader was disappointed that more information and greater detail were not provided, possibly the result of the essays' origins as conference papers. Each article is accompanied by extensive and up-to-date footnotes. Altogether, these scholarly addenda form an excellent panorama of current scholarship for the study of the female religious experience in Renaissance Italy in particular. One regrettable lack is the absence of a bibliography that would have been truly useful.