On the Convent Threshold: Poetry for New Nuns in Early Modern Italy

Abstract

In early modern Italy the entry of a woman into a nunnery was celebrated with lyric poems composed by male friends and would-be friends of the woman’s family, and, on occasion, by the woman herself. This genre of occasional verse marking nuns’ vestition and profession ceremonies has generally been overlooked by scholars, despite the considerable attention paid to early modern nuns in recent decades. Many of these poems were printed and served a public function, demonstrating how convents were embedded within early modern cultural networks. The poems, replete with Petrarchan tropes, anagrams, and play on the women’s names, illustrate the adaptability of secular literary modes in the wake of the Council of Trent. Rare poems by the women themselves — generally more private works that survive only in manuscript — go beyond the limits of the genre and offer a sometimes surprisingly intimate glimpse of how these women artfully responded to their own experiences.

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