I was once told by a male colleague that you were most likely to find "erotica" on top of the wardrobe in your hotel bedroom in Paris. I looked and duly found a pornographic journal depicting nuns. Shock, horror: I was young, a convent girl, and it was my first brush with pornography. But nuns! Had it been published then, Virgins of Venice and its tales of convent shenanigans might have enlightened me: sure, this was just modern photography used (like the Old Masters used paint) to illustrate aspects of
Irony aside, the juicy bits of this serious work of historical research are all in the last third of the book. What we get first is an account of the civil and social life of Venice at that time, and the role convents played in it.
Sixteenth-century Venice was a wealthy, mercantile city with a population of 150,000, rigidly tiered in three castes: the nobility, the citizenry, and the plebs. The noble (and ruling) caste had remained unchanged at some 200 clans for three centuries, and it intended to stay that way. Therein lay the basic rationale for, and function of, the 50 nunneries of Venice.
This is a tale of the noble class, for whom status and the preservation of family fortune were pre-eminent. They would only marry within their caste and dowry inflation limited the number of brides per family to one or two of the more marriageable daughters; the rest were dumped in a convent.
In L'Inferno monocale (Convent Hell), Suor Ancangela Tarabotti, a Venetian nun of the 17th century, wrote of "the tears and sobs" of young girls as they lay prostrate before the altar at their forced induction into convent life. She railed against the practice, claiming that it made these imprisoned women embittered and prone to "vanity and vice". At any one time, half the female nobility of Venice, some 2,000 women, were confined in what Mary Laven called these "virgin colonies".
Nearer home, in the convent where I went to school, there were three sisters, daughters of a prosperous merchant, who had been escorted, one by one, to the convent door as they reached adulthood. Perhaps one had a vocation, but there was at least one embittered woman among them.
But what was this "vice" that Tarabotti mentioned? These high-born nuns brought money and goods to the cloisters to soften the rigours of convent life. But they also brought visitors - of both sexes. In some nunneries they enjoyed parties, entertainments and same-sex relationships; nuns became pregnant, and convents were described as brothels by contemporary writers. Laven found reports in the Vatican archives of complaints about the immoral activities of nuns.
Here the author suggests the influence of another upper-class Venetian practice. Sons were also discouraged from marrying, to avoid the dispersal of family fortunes. Professionals and merchants, these unmarried sons, almost half of the male nobility, lived in bachelor houses. With limited sexual opportunities, they undoubtedly consorted with the large population of prostitutes, but they were also frequent visitors to the incarcerated virgins. Both nuns and prostitutes were "unkept women".
Laven writes of "the allure of nuns", of flashers outside convent windows, male visitors talking dirty in the parlour and procuring nuns for companions, the rape of nuns as a pastime of the nobility. But, she says, in the archives the "prominence of violence amongst the description of the crimes . . . raises important questions about whether the nuns were agents or victims in this sexual riot".
Ethna Viney is a writer and critic
Ethna Viney
Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent. By Mary Laven. Viking, 284 pp. £20 sterling