Sisters in Spirit: The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio and Their Consorority in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence

Strocchia, Sharon T.

doi:10.2307/4144022

Cited by 4 publications

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“…These "artificial families" 156 served to strengthen the ties between the members, 157 soften class relations, blur social differences, and promote what Sharon Strocchia calls "fictive kinship. " 158 They were even invaluable suppliers of social services, such as dowries for poor girls and assistance to the sick and the destitute. They comforted the condemned to death, ransomed Christian slaves held in Muslim lands, and distributed food and alms to the poor.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confraternal Organisation in Early Modern Malta

Ciappara¹

2018

CONFRAT

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This article analyses how Maltese confraternities were set up, their composition and their internal organization. Most were inclusive and comprised the adult population of the parish, both males and females though a few companies were restricted to the elite or to particular craftsmen. They cooperated with each other and could even allow their members to join other companies, but they could also be great rivals. The Council of Trent had put parish priests at their head, but the brothers contested their leadership and were frequently in dispute with them. At the end of the eighteenth century the confraternal movement was in decline in Europe, but in Malta the brotherhoods remained active.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Confraternal Organisation in Early Modern Malta

Ciappara¹

2018

CONFRAT

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“…She and others have found that convents were complex institutions where individuals on the inside and the outside competed for control, authority, and independence, doing so through the spoken and written word (Johnson 2014, pp. 2-18;Tylus 2009;Strocchia 2002). Only fully contextualized reconsideration of these spaces-and of the voices used inside, even projecting outside, those spaces-shall permit us to see women in religious life as they were and not just as they were supposed to have been.…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

“In The End, God Helped Me Defeat Myself”: Autobiographical Writings by Camilla Battista da Varano1

Hudon¹

2018

Religions

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Camilla Battista da Varano (1458-1524), a mystic and Franciscan nun, spent most of her life in Camerino in east-central Italy. Now a saint-since 17 October 2010-she composed two autobiographical treatises across a ten-year period mid-way through a literary career that spanned the end of the fifteenth and the early part of the sixteenth centuries. In one, La vita spirituale (My spiritual life, 1491), she delivered a complete spiritual life story, tracing her religious devotion from the ages of eight to thirty-three. She described her relationship with a number of men, including her father and several clerics who-to one degree or another-inspired and guided her devotional life. By the time she wrote, she had been a professed Franciscan nun for seven years. She presented herself at that point as one who had undergone visionary, mystical experiences and as a woman who had both benefitted and suffered under the control of men like her father and her spiritual directors. In the other, Istruzioni al discepolo (Instructions to a disciple, 1501), she told the story of her affectionate relationship with a male disciple she was directing spiritually but used a literary conceit to hide her own identity. She wrote about the spiritual director the male disciple loved and admired in the third person, apparently in a self-deprecating manner inspired by humility but thinly veiling her obvious self-confidence. In these texts, and in other of her devotional treatises, she claimed the ability to provide spiritual direction of her own and wrote in bold imagery, creatively manipulating scripture at times. She exercised a do-it-yourself approach to discernment of God's will and even to the process of confession. She criticized inattentive spiritual directors and asserted that both her visions and the impetus for her devotional writings came directly, unmediated, from God. But Camilla also exhibited deferential attitudes and strong connections to traditional Franciscan theology while including female authors in that tradition she apparently admired, like Caterina da Bologna (1413-1463). She also wrote at times with vivid expressions of obedience to the variety of men who held some authority over her. She was, apparently, not an individual easily understood through the standard images usually associated with late medieval and early modern women. A fuller portrait of Camilla is emerging as scholars today seek to recover her original voice.

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“…These initiatives paralleled and contributed to broader changes in the Florentine religious landscape that reinvigorated parish associations in the early sixteenth century. 82 Pazzi's premature death in April 1513 -reportedly from sorrow over the recent Medici restoration to power -ushered in a prolonged period of Medici ascendance that signalled both the end of the Florentine republic and the nuns' privileged role in civic ritual. Leo X appointed as archbishop his cousin Giulio de' Medici, who viewed his office as a resource to be exploited.…”

Section: The Making Of a Masculine Churchmentioning

confidence: 99%

When the Bishop Married the Abbess: Masculinity and Power in Florentine Episcopal Entry Rites, 1300–1600

Strocchia

2007

Gender & History

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From 1286 to 1583, the citizens of Florence staged a curious ritual to celebrate the installation of a new bishop. Played out over two days, the bishop's entry gave visual expression to his institutional power, announced his personal values as chief pastor and legitimised the sacrality of the local institutional church. Part of the rite's power stemmed from its dual nature. It was simultaneously a rite of adventus -the arrival of an apostolic emissary or temporal lord -and a rite of possesso -the taking of legitimate possession. Investiture ceremonies also touched the sacred, dramatising the institutionalised charisma from which the bishop drew his power. By making explicit reference to local miracles and charismatic sites, entry rites permitted bishops all over Europe to identify themselves with their illustrious predecessors, around whom rich deposits of legend, iconography and civic ritual had accumulated. 1 Probably no other type of procession in late medieval and early modern Europe demarcated the sacred topography of a city so clearly and kept its sacred legends as alive as episcopal entries did.However, these rites were not sacred in an otherworldly sense but were deeply enmeshed with power relations of various kinds. The installation of a new Florentine bishop helped map the shifting contours of power exercised by aristocratic families and the republican city government over the local church. In fact, Florentines used the rite itself as an instrument by which to balance familial and civic claims against those of the bishop. 2 These ceremonies thus offer an important index to the nature and tenor of church-state relations. Much of the documentation for Florentine episcopal entries stems from litigation surrounding these events, in contrast to the narrative sources describing similar rites elsewhere in Europe. Judging from the perennial quarrels that erupted, the installation ceremonies for Florentine bishops offered an important locus for the visible expression of power and for its public renegotiation throughout the late medieval and early modern periods.Within the Florentine rite, one episode stands out for the ways it linked gender constructions with political power and religious culture: the symbolic marriage (sposalizio) of the incoming bishop to the abbess of S. Pier Maggiore, the city's oldest Benedictine

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Sisters in Spirit: The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio and Their Consorority in Early Sixteenth-Century Florence

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Confraternal Organisation in Early Modern Malta

Confraternal Organisation in Early Modern Malta

“In The End, God Helped Me Defeat Myself”: Autobiographical Writings by Camilla Battista da Varano1

When the Bishop Married the Abbess: Masculinity and Power in Florentine Episcopal Entry Rites, 1300–1600

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