Nuns against the Tridentine enclosure: Italian Solidarity networks of religious resistance

Autor / Autorin: 
Isabel Harvey

In 1563, during the final session of the Council of Trent, the decree De Regularibus e Monialibus re-established the strict enclosure of convents. This first step in the project of disciplining the regular orders by a Church faced with mass desertion opened a period of reform that stretched far beyond the seventeenth century. Thus, the Council of Trent, with its prescription for impenetrable and enclosed convents, imagined an environment that was constant, isolated, and reclusive. Far from being understood and applied homogenously, Tridentine reform aroused passions and crisis, in which a frequent response was solidarity through writing and publication. How did cloistered women resist the Tridentine enclosure, and how did they create solidarity networks, at once real and fictive, in order to combat what they perceived as a political, social, and spiritual crisis?

Datum: 
07/30/2015
working paper: 
working paper