Open Monasteries for Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy: Two Roman
Examples

Katherine Gill
 
 
 
 

Idealizing, satirizing, and gothicizing images of women's religious communities
have tended to dominate the modern literary imagination. The phantom "Nun" of
Charlotte Bronte's Villette skitters through the shadows along her walled
enclosure. For Choderlos de Laclos, the genteel, regulated innocence of the
convent stands as a foil to depraved society in his Les Liaisons Dangereuses. In
her Women in the Wall, twentieth century novelist Julia O'Faolain imbues the
Merovingian cloister of Queen Radegunda with the atmosphere of a dungeon and
instills its austere inhabitants with dark, post-Freudian masochism. Nineteenth
century feminists, on the other hand, as wary as Catherine of Siena of the
biological and social consequences of the marriage trap, recast nunneries as
modern utopias, busy "cities of ladies" offering protection from male dominance
and a bright freedom for self-cultivation. Such starkly contradictory images have
a long history: throughout the Middle Ages papal bulls addressed women's
religious communities as "prudent virgins," poised with lamps trimmed for their
heavenly bridegroom; contemporary satirical writers portrayed them as brothels.l
One of the reasons that literary fancy has veered to extremes when contemplating
the nun and her habitat may be that historical writing has offered so little to
catch and hold the imagination. One recent study describes female monasticism as
it appears in papal documents from the twelfth through the fourteenth century as
"abstract and repetitive." Another concludes that, if one tries to reconstruct
female monastic life from rules written for nuns, all communities present "the
same face."2 Whether light or shadowed, many of our traditional images of female

page 16

monasticism are ultimately monochromatic.3 In them we miss the dynamism of
spiritual quest, the strategies of economic makeshift, and the extra- and
intramural networks (both affective and political) that regularly characterized
convent life. We hardly see the tension and invention resulting from the fact
that, institutionally, women's monasticism was a bastard child to male religious
orders.4 Therefore, we may find it hard to imagine how women behind the effacing
walls could have contributed significantly to the culture on the other side. But,
as some of the essays in this volume illustrate, walls could be quite pervious.
Moreover, our images of nuns framed foursquare by cloister walls only partially
illustrate the story of religious women in European history; the wall is, in
fact, for the pre-Tridentine period, somewhat anachronistic. It is the purpose of
this essay to focus on noncloistered communities of women in late medieval and
early modern Italy and to offer two fifteenth-century Roman examples. By the
beginning of the sixteenth century these types of communities, peppered almost
every Italian town and were known as monasteri aperti, "open monasteries."5 There
were several types of women's communities that a cinquecento Italian would have
designated as monasteri aperti. Some consisted of nuns who, although they had
professed solemn vows, did not observe strict enclosure and had not observed it
for as long as anyone could remember; these regarded the freedom to exit as a
right acquired by custom. Others had acquired license by petitioning the papacy
and receiving an exemption from the obligation of enclosure.6 Finally, there were
communities of laywomen who took no solemn vows and who might or might not have a
formal ecclesiastical tie in the form of accountability to a monastic order, a
bishop or the papacy. In some cases, lay monasteri clearly belonged to a Third
Order and rightly bear our associations with the status of tertiary; in other
cases they do not. The women who created and joined this last variety of open
monastery were manifold and so diverse as to thwart sure classification. They
might be wealthy widows or unmarried women who wished to exercise their minds in
meditation and their patronage on religious projects. Frequently, they were women
from middle-class families associated with one or more charitable or even
semiprofessional enterprises.7 They could be former prostitutes, concubines, or
simply women whose unsettled lives had left them outside a clearly respectable
category. In both ecclesiastical Latin and local vernaculars, they went by many
names: mulieres religiosae, mulieres de penitentia, sorores, pinzochere, bizoke,
mantel-

page 17

late, terziarie, monache di casa, monacelle, sante, and santarelle (to name a
few).8 Sometimes women chose the life of a pinzochera in emulation of the
monastic state, but women also chose it because they did not want to be
enclosed.9 As nuns living without clausura could glide toward the category of
laywomen living in community, so the spectrum of lay forms of religious life is
wide and subtly delineated. At the end of the sixteenth century, in the wake of
the Council of Trent, "open monasteries" were a subject of hot debate at the
papal court, a debate Pius V more or less ended with the bull Circa Pastoralis,
which decreed universal imposition of clausura on women's communities.10 In the
name of restoration, the application of this decree struck a near fatal blow to
an institution that had deep roots in the history of Christianity. Before turning
to Rome and my two quattrocento examples of open monasteries, I will review those
roots.

"The places of variety, rebels to all systematization"

The almost exclusive identification of women's religious experience with the
enclosed convent has, until recently, distracted historians from the variety of
settings in which women have sought to order an existence directed toward
penance, salvation, and God.1l Throughout the Middle Ages, women created and
adopted a variety of parainstitutional forms of religious life. The
fourth-century Roman women who patronized Saint Jerome practiced a well-read
asceticism within their own households. Saint Ambrose's sister Marcellina, to
whom he owed his education, lived as a consecrated virgin, sometimes in her Roman
family home, sometimes at Ambrose's episcopal headquarters in Milan. Pontificals
of the central Middle Ages record the liturgical ceremony in which widows and
virgins, the successors of the fourth-century Roman women, received an episcopal
blessing before embracing a religious regime in their own homes.l2 Groups of
pious women, or of men and women together, managed hospitals that were often
affiliated with monasteries. Laywomen could offer themselves as conversae into
the service of monastic institutions, thereby achieving a semireligious status.l3
Although the theme of penance marked all these early medieval alternatives, with
some sporadic exceptions, the power of this theme remained generally quiescent
among the laity. From the twelfth century, however, the cultural authority of
penitential conversion, with its quotidian extension into novel ways of living,
gained intensity and ubiquity. When the Second Lateran Council

page 18

(1139) officially condemned the domestic monasticism of consecrated virgins and
widows as "pernicious and detestable," Europe stood on the threshold of a current
that would revive this ancient practice in a new guise.14 Penitence became the
path along which laywomen discovered alternative ways to dedicate themselves to a
religious life in the late Middle Ages. The "penitential movement" is a catchall
phrase that is used to refer inclusively to a host of religious initiatives
undertaken by the laity, particularly in Italy, beginning in the twelfth
century.l5 These initiatives include confraternities; eremitic retreat outside
the city walls; solitary or companioned reclusion within the city, at its gates,
its bridges, or in a regulated domestic setting; and voluntary poverty and
mendicancy.l6 Although none of these forms of life were altogether foreign to
Christianity, the sheer number of lay persons who strove to adapt monastic and
Gospel models to their particular social conditions was new. Saint Francis,
formerly seen as the instigator of the "penitential movement," is now recognized
as the inspired heir of a momentum that had begun to gather force several decades
before him. Facere penitentiam, to do penance, served as an instrument of
self-transformation, signaling and enabling a change of life, freeing an
individual from many of the obligations and expectations adhering to his or her
previous secular status. In the age of Francis of Assisi this meant the voluntary
acceptance of the ascetic regime traditionally imposed by the church on
publically reconciled sinners. Its hallmarks were self-mortification,
distinctively simple dress, a life segregated from society, and, for men, the
abjuring of public office, arms, and commercial activity.l7 Women gravitated
toward the penitential life in great numbers. Over the decades, with the emblems
of the penitent, women managed to craft a public persona that permitted them to
work out their own salvation in a variety of settings. The authority of the
penitential posture allowed women an honorable way to live outside the confines
of their families and their societies' ideals of the feminine. As a social
position, it remained viable for centuries. The historiography of the
"penitential movement" blends and, at times, becomes indistinguishable from that
of another "movement," the "women's religious movement" of the late Middle
Ages.18 Although initially this phrase was associated with the early history of
the Beguines of Northern Europe, laywomen who lived an ascetic life either in
communities or alone without taking vows, it has come to be used with wider
application. It is now generally recognized that, beginning in the twelfth

page 19

century, women all over Europe were participating more intensely and
experimentally in religious life and that this had a powerful impact on
spirituality, religious ideals, and practices everywhere. The "women's religious
movement" of the late Middle Ages is now recognized to have been widespread. It
was particularly strong in Italy.19 In 1216, James of Vitry, a regular canon from
Liege traveling through Italy, was the first to observe the analogy between the
Beguines of the north and certain groups of religious women in Italy.20 The
"spiritual son" and hagiographer of the proto-Beguine Marie of Ognies, James,
having been powerfully impressed by the visionary gifts and ascetic life of one
innovative laywoman, was quick to notice women with similar aspirations in other
regions. Although James had no trouble embracing many different kinds of
laywomen's associations into a single affirming view, other observers were
confused and skeptical. In 1274, the Franciscan, Gilbert of Tournai, wrote:
"there are among us women whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or
nuns, because they live neither in the world nor out of it."21 Even James of
Vitry, although he did not share the puzzlement or skepticism of some, was keenly
aware of the vulnerability of women who sought to stake out a middle ground
between lay and religious status. In his second sermo ad virgines, he reveals
that the early vernacular names for this new kind of religious laywoman carried
connotations of derision.

When a young woman has determined to protect her virginity, even after her
parents offer her a husband with riches, she tramples [this option] under her
foot and spits [on it]. But the wise of this world, namely prelates, secular
priests, and other malicious men want to bring her down and to derail her from
her good plan, saying: this one wants to be a beguina, as she is called in
Flanders and the Brabant; or a papalarda, as she is called in France; or
humiliata, as it is said in Lombardy; or bizoke, as they say in Italy; or
coquenunne, as they say in German territories. And so by deriding them and
defaming them they strive to divert them from a holy way of life.22

James's exemplum is significant. Not only does it reveal the international scope
of the women's religious movement, but it incorporates two contradictory
attitudes toward the phenomenon: admiration and suspicion. These attitudes would
color the environment in which pious laywomen lived for centuries. The challenge
of the uncloistered religious woman

page 20

was to navigate a difficult border zone, tacking between boundaries of gender and
status, in societies whose hearts were passionate and inconsistent about just
those boundaries. While the ideals and the traditions of the penitential and
women's religious movement can help us to understand the success of beguines and
bizoke, and their institutional and theological creativity, the power of these
movements could not propel them safely through the paradoxes of their societies.
Italian pinzochere seem to have fared better and longer than their European
counterparts, but their persistence was marked with conflict. James of Vitry's
exemplum reminds us that what could be praised could not always be allowed; and
what could be imagined, or remembered, could not always be achieved.

Italy

The emblems of the "women's religious movement" in Italy are the figure of the
recluse and that of the pinzochera. They represent the contemplative and the
active dimensions of the same cultural current.23 The extraordinary number of
local and official saints who lived as recluses, pinzochere, or alternately as
both, testifies to the success of women in steering this current.24 While the
stigma of alleged association with heresy caused the numbers of Northern Beguines
(and papalarde and coquenunne) to diminish, the bizoke held their own in Italy.
The late trecento and quattrocento saw a renewed popularity of this modus vivendi
in central Italy. Here, informal religious communities or nonregulated domestic
monasticism existed as a possibility, a cultural option, up through Trent and, in
increasingly exceptional cases, beyond. This did not mean that "open monasteries"
and spontaneous associations of pinzochere did not meet difficulties in
maintaining their autonomy from episcopal, monastic, and civil authorities. Many
were compelled to accept restrictive rules, to become "closed monasteries." But a
large number managed to avoid the issue, to acquire exemptions from enclosure,
or, with minimal accommodation, to go about business as usual. Various sources
indicate that while she persevered, in popular perception, the pinzocbera trod
the gamut from sanctity to satire to sorcery. James of Vitry's Life of Mary of
Oignies served as a model for at least two Italian saints.25 One, Catherine of
Siena, later became a model for subsequent pious women, some rather notorious.
The other, Clare of Montefalco, barely overcame allegations of heresy to achieve
eventual canonization. A long didactic poem, Reggimento e costumi di donna,

page 21

written by Francesco da Barberino in the early trecento, expresses strong doubts
about whether any woman can become a pinzochera, a domestic recluse, or a
conversa without succumbing either to the temptation of exercising religious
authority or to the temptation of lust.26 The perception that the pinzochere
defied gender expectations is reflected in a sixteenth-century Italian dance
entitled "The Pinzochera," which required women to dance traditionally male
parts, and vice versa. In the genre of Renaissance "sexy songs," the Iyrics of
"The Pinzochere Who Have Been to Rome," declare the skill of the Florentine
pinzochere in cosmetics, midwifery, and magical healing. The singers boast of
secret knowledge by which they can accomplish amazing feats and influence
people.27 The song also suggests that the pinzochere have assumed this social
posture in order to sport an undeserved mask of respectability. If we turn from
hagiography, literature, and rowdy songs to other sources, the pinzochera remains
a polyvalent social type. Wills, contracts, and donations attest to the respect
she could command from her neighbors and to her involvement in religious
patronage and philanthropy. The witnesses interviewed for canonization processes
of women such as Santa Francesca Romana corroborate their legends. But there are
other kinds of processi as well. One inquisition process from the 1520s reveals a
woman from a town outside Rome who could well have sung "The Pinzochere Who Have
Been to Rome" with the blunt tenor of autobiographical statement. This Bellezza
Orsini was arrested after she allegedly had cast a spell on a young man while
they were both traveling, together with a mixed group from their town, on an
Easter pilgrimage to Rome. Describing herself as a "vestita" and a "convertita"
associated with local Franciscans, Bellezza protests before the inquisitor:

I cure and I give medications for every infirmity; I know how to heal syphilis,
broken bones, a person afflicted by some evil shadow, and many other infirmities;
I never do anything but good, and to do better I took the habit of the [Third]
order of blessed Saint Francis.... Serving God is what I am about and that is why
I entered this order and made myself one of the convertite; I don't want to do
evil anymore.28

Another pilgrim to Rome and a contemporary of Bellezza, Martin Luther, has
provided us with yet another perspective on the mantellate of Rome. In his Table
Talk, Luther praises charitable hospitals in Italy.

page 22

In Italy the hospitals have everything one needs; they are well constructed, one
eats and drinks well there, and one is served with solicitude; the doctors are
competent.... The cleanliness is admirable; glasses are held with only two
fingers. Veiled gentlewomen come to care for the sick. These efforts are good and
praiseworthy, but the bad thing is that the Italians believe that in this way
they can merit Paradise.29

While Luthur's dinner table swipe is almost offhand, another Protestant circle
has left us an image of the veiled pinzochere that is as black as it is
polemical. Le Monde Papistique is a work of satiric cartography emanating from
Geneva in the mid-1560s.30 Part of an elaborate piece of Protestant propaganda,
its sixteen plates parody Catholic practices and the accoutrements of papal
power. In one plate, the city walls of Rome frame for our disdain groups of
pinzocaires who appear to have overrun the cityscape.(see fig.1).  Dead center,
in front of a broken gap in the wall, stand three veiled pinzocaires with the
faces of wolves. Behind them, cattle and pig pinzocaires dangle rosaries from
their snouts, bitch pinzocaires nurse their whelps, and suspicious groups scurry
along gathering their emblematic mantles around them.31 A second plate depicts
Rome as Inferno, with the Tiber as the river Styx and popes and cardinals in the
process of being ferried over. A group of pinzochere and pilgrims has just
disembarked. In these plates, the satirist(s) play on a cultural aversion to
women unmoored from male authority, from family and convent.32 But at the same
time they indicate the degree to which the pinzochere had become identified with
Italian Catholicism and with the city of Rome. Portrayed in one of their most
characteristic activities, the act of making pilgrimages to local and far off
holy places, the pinzochere are parodied in the same frame as Rome's clerical
elite. Again, as with James of Vitry's sermon, Protestant propaganda likewise
conveys that the social and religious roles of the pinzochere could be both
supported and suppressed. But these dichotomous attitudes, like those generated
by the "movement" discussed previously, in the end only inform us about the
general cultural environment. The real history of the bizoke lies in myriad
specific contexts, in local settings, in the efforts of handfuls of women here
and there. For, even more than convents, the institutions of the pinzochere
reflect particular places and particular women.

page 24

Rome and the Oblates of Santa Francesca

From the twelfth through the sixteenth century, Rome sustained a constant mix of
domestic recluses, resettled (resident) pilgrims, female administrators and
founders of hospitals and hospices, and pinzochere of various social and national
backgrounds.33 Indeed, the mixture may have been particularly rich in Rome, where
so many foreigners imported their native religious traditions. Here the great
need to accommodate pilgrims was met by hospices, which were both run and sought
out by pinzochere. Religious leadership was often a family affair and the
residence of members of the papal court in Rome often brought female relatives
and sponsors. These women might put down roots among pious women in Rome, where
they could enjoy the prestige and the company of the men they supported. Close
papal surveillance seems only to have begun in the mid-fifteenth century, and
even then unsystematically. In Rome, the most renowned laywomen's community dates
from the 1420s and traces its origins to the visionary ascetic Francesca Bussa
de' Ponziani, better known as Santa Francesca Romana.34 Although Francesca is
often called the founder of what began as a "congregation" of women living
separately in their husbands' or fathers' homes, she seems to have been more a
charismatic source of inspiration and encouragement than an administrator, and we
find a number of other women involved in the process of negotiating papal
recognition and in the property exchanges that enabled various members of the
group to settle together in a common residence. Francesca, whose husband lived
until four years before her own death in 1440, lived only sporadically in the
house of her community, which came to be known as the "oblates of Tor de'
Specchi." A wife and mother, Francesca's religious and public authority derived
from her active and admired role in several Roman hospitals,35 her courage in the
face of political upheavals that rocked Rome in the early decades of the
fifteenth century, her intense private devotions, and her visions. During the
thirteen years following Francesca's death, a commission of the papal Curia
conducted three investigations or canonization processes to determine her reputed
sanctity (1440,1443, and 1451). Of the 181 witnesses who gave testimonies
regarding her sanctity, twothirds were women.36 Close study of the witnesses and
early members of her community has revealed a startling insight. The great
majority of Francesca's supporters turn out to have been closely related to a
group

page 25

of prominent municipal leaders who had lost all their political authority (and,
in some cases, their lives) when they had attempted a coup against Boniface IX in
1398.37 As Arnold Esch, the scholar who has analyzed this most closely, puts it:
" [the] generation humiliated by the pope in 1398 [is made up of] the fathers of
those whom we later find reunited around Santa Francesca Romana."38 The networks
of political and economic interests that united certain sectors of Roman men were
accompanied by complimentary networks of women. After the political
disenfranchisement of fathers, uncles, brothers, and husbands, these networks
endured and manifested themselves dramatically in the community and cult of
Francesca Bussa. Rarely are medieval sources so vociferous regarding women's
experience as are Francesca's canonization processes (especially the first) and
her vernacular Vita.39 Here we confront difficult childbirths, sick children,
infertility, near tragic accidents, hunger, despair, and factional and family
conflict. This is the world through which Francesca moved as a healer and a
visionary . Wives  and mothers are the ones approached her when crises struck,
asking her, in essence, to do what they would do, only more powerfully.40 They
are the ones who, long afterward, talked about what she had done, who privately
and publically remembered. We hear very little about the fierce eddies of the
political crises in Rome, with their accompanying violence, exiles, and
executions. Instead we are given a rather wider river of life, one in which the
heavens also are occasionally reflected. What if there had been municipal
meetings? What if there had been chroniclers in this dark period of Roman
history? What if the fathers had triumphed? What if the sons and brothers had
told the story? No doubt the characters would have been the same, but the plot
would have been altogether different. In the story of Santa Francesca Romana we
observe a society reconstructing itself. Certainly this was also a function of
the community founded by Francesca's circle. Having lost the civic footing that
powerful husbands and fathers could provide, the widows and daughters formed an
institution that was part clan, part confraternity, part convent. The collection
of visions recorded by Francesca's confessor was instrumental in keeping her
memory vivid and in shaping the identity of the community she left behind.4l
Reading the visions out loud to each other was a regular practice of the
pinzochere at Tor de' Specchi. Some of her visions were also illustrated: first
in the 1450s in a series of panel paintings, three of which survive; and then
among a series of frescos

page 27

finished in 1468, which still adorn the small private chapel within Tor de'
Specchi. One of the panels, which was later reproduced in a fresco, conflates two
visions as recorded by Francesca's confessor (see fig. 2) 42 In the upper half of
the panel, Francesca receives a blessing from the Virgin, who authorizes her
desire to establish a lay community. Here the Virgin has assumed the role of the
ancient bishops, whose blessings once had authorized the entrance of laywomen
into a nonmonastic religious life. Francesca's petition to the Virgin is
supported by three saints: the penitent Magdalen, Saint Paul, and Saint Benedict.
Mary Magdalen and Paul both had been latecomers to the religious life, both
famous for dramatic conversion episodes, both convertiti. Saint Benedict would
have been more familiar to Francesca as the struggling and demon-harassed hermit
presented by the dialogues of Saint Gregory than as the author of a monastic
rule. Besides, the Benedictine Rule in its original form had not required strict
enclosure. Benedict could signify Francesca's own fierce night battles with the
devil and her role as a founder; he could as well represent the monks of Santa
Maria Nova in Rome who gave their blessing to her new foundation.43 In the lower
portion of the panel, we see a scene from a second vision. Dogs and cats are
interfering with a work of weaving. These Francesca understood as forces working
against the successful establishment of the community; as in James of Vitry's
anecdote, some of the gainsayers were clergy. In her vision, Francesca's guardian
angel lifted the strands and assured her that the work she had begun would be
finished. This image would have served as a reminder of the community's early
struggles and would have offered reassurance when trouble recurred