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doi:10.1017/S0009640711000254 Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art, and Arson in the Convents of Italy. By Craig A. Monson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xvi + 241 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Runaways. Arsonists. Magicians and masters of disguise. These are not toe first words that come to mind when thinking about Renaissance religious women. Yet Craig Monson, a well-respected musicologist, tells five true stories drawn from the Vatican Archives that describe some Italian nuns in precisely these terms. Unlike the Venetian literary nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652), who used her pen to expose the cruelty of a system that warehoused surplus daughters in convents, the nuns we encounter here took more drastic measures to escape the rigid confines of convent life in early modem Italy. Monson does not sensationalize what are already extraordinary stories; nor does he focus exclusively on the sexual peccadilloes that have become virtually synonymous with nuns' transgressive behavior. Instead, he explores imaginative acts of resistance by desperate women without vocation who sought to remedy fife situations that seemed beyond repair. Deeply researched and written with flair, this book powerfully conveys both the stultifying effects of forced professions in post-Tridentine Italy and the lengths to which involuntary nuns might go to elude them.
In relating these tales, each of which forms a separate chapter, Monson eschews the label of microhistory along with its theoretical tool kit, preferring instead to place himself in a storytelling tradition dating back to Boccaccio. Both the advantages and limitations of this approach are evident in the first tale,...