With this addition to The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, Meredith K. Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater make an important contribution to the already significant body of modern publications by and about the seventeenth-century Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti (1605–52). The editors have each published previously on Tarabotti’s oeuvre, and collaborated to realize an Italian edition of Tarabotti’s letter book, Lettere familiari e di complimento (2004). The English edition brings to an anglophone audience the work of a rare author, not only female, but also a professed nun, who participated in the humanist tradition of letter writing, a literary genre whose publication was dominated by men and focused on secular subjects.
The volume’s introduction explains, and a letter to ambassador of France Nicolo Bretel de Grémonville confirms, that Tarabotti shrewdly used publication of her correspondence with men and women in Venice and beyond to counter criticism of her other published and unpublished writings that emphasized the brutality of forced monachization. More broadly, however, Tarabotti attempted to construct her own literary identity by demonstrating her familiarity with a wide range of sources, while also publicizing her connections to powerful patrons and other authors, including leading members of Venice’s Accademia degli Incogniti. Unsurprisingly, the self-deprecation common to early modern women writers and the obsequious tone that characterizes so much correspondence from the period pervade the letters. But there is an iron fist in the velvet glove of ingratiating language. Tarabotti passionately attacks patriarchal social norms and deceitful men in order to defend women in general or her own reputation in particular.
The letters’ value is not only biographical and literary. The missives provide insights into convent economy with a discussion of Tarabotti’s role as an agent mediating between lacemaking nuns and their clients; they also depict nuns’ efforts to broker marriage alliances. But Letters provides relatively few details regarding life at the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna in Castello, and in this sense the book is unlike known writing by other early modern nuns, whose chronicles focus on institutional history. Because Sant’Anna framed the experiences that led Tarabotti to describe convent life as a living hell, it would be useful to know more about the house and its community. Not mentioned is that more than a century before Tarabotti entered the convent in 1623, Sant’Anna was one of eight houses identified for reform through the introduction of observant nuns. Archival sources describe prolonged conflict at some of the targeted houses, and further study of the reform campaign might shed light on Tarabotti’s experiences at Sant’Anna.
The editors follow the lead of Jutta Sperling, Mary Laven, and Anne Jacobson Schutte in suggesting that authorities used convent architecture to prevent nuns’ contact with the world outside the enclosure. Patriarchal visitation records could be exploited to refine this position. For example, the account of Lorenzo Priuli’s 1593 visitation to Sant’Anna recommends the obstruction of views to and from the convent through the construction of parapet walls and the installation of trombe, or shutters, including in the dormitory, where nuns “could be seen, even in their own beds” (Archivio Storico Patriarcale di Venezia, Visite Pastorali, b. 1, 131r–135r). But such prescriptions do not necessarily indicate change. Did convents respond to patriarchal orders by making the adjustments to the architecture of their houses? Seventeenth-century account books, including those from Sant’Anna, seem to focus on church construction, projects that were more visible, and therefore more attractive to potential patrons than the utilitarian renovations proposed by Priuli (Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Sant’Anna, b. 4). If the changes proposed by Priuli and his successors were carried out, one could well imagine how isolated and oppressed Tarabotti and her sisters would have felt.
Central to the Tarabotti narrative are Tridentine decrees and the sixteenth-century constitutions authored by Priuli and Bishop Antonio Grimani, which restricted nuns’ contact with lay people through the exchange of letters and conversations at the parlor grate, and demanded strict oversight, either by the abbess or another senior nun. Ray and Westwater mine these sources to better understand nuns’ communication in general, but the absence of records describing Sant’Anna’s practices prevents us from knowing precisely how and why Tarabotti could circumvent such orders.
Appended to the letters is a commemorative text entitled Tears upon the Death of Regina Donati, a freestanding work written to honor Tarabotti’s friend and fellow nun at Sant’Anna, republished here for the first time. Demonstrating her canny understanding of and ability to adjust to her circumstances, the author planned and decided to publish the Tears, a work of great emotion, along with the Letters, recognizing that its subject matter was beyond the Inquisitor’s reproach, thus potentially softening opinion of the more unconventional Letters.
Ray and Westwater have done more than produce a clear and readable translation of the Letters, whose complicated syntax and florid language pose particular challenges. They bring to bear their considerable knowledge of Tarabotti’s works and of the epistolary genre in general, providing the reader with a fuller picture of the author’s aims than the Letters alone could.
