Nuns - all kinds of everyone

The life of a nun – in comparison to that of a wife – has many advantages. No cooking and cleaning; no skivvying at the kitchen sink or schlepping around the supermarket; none of the boring and interminable chores of running a household, starting with making lists, day after day after day, of what must be done. (I have left instructions for an inscription to be put on my grave: “She is at rest – she will never again push a trolley around Sainsburys.”)

The nun, by contrast, holds sacred the idea of vocation – the calling, as dictated by talents, which, as the New Testament story tells us, we must never bury. The nun may be a contemplative, but she may also be an intellectual: a musician: a mathematician: an artist: a writer: a doctor: and of course a teacher. And should she have any of these gifts, she is enjoined to be productive with them – not to spend her time cutting up vegetables and dragging out the garbage. A nun, anyway, will have servants to do that kind of thing – other nuns of more lowly status. These are the Marthas who see to the kitchen while the Marys – whom Our Lord said had chosen the better part – attend to the life of the spirit and the mind.

I speak, to some extent, historically, but to some extent from my own experience. I was schooled by nuns and the example set by these consecrated virgins was of confident female authority and a serious attention to the work of the mind. True, they were limited by their time and their milieu, but not more so than their lay contemporaries; indeed, those nuns who had been “on the missions” in Africa and India, had seen a little more of life than the spinster lay teachers, embittered, we felt, by the disappointment of an unchosen single state.

Silvia Evangelisti’s* scholarly study of nuns is itself limited by its time frame, which is convent history between 1450-1700, but it is broadened by its wider Continental context. Nuns, like other people, came in all shapes and temperaments: mystics and nutcases: queens and radicals: intellectuals and misshapen ugly daughters walled up in a convent for their families’ convenience. Sometimes there were far too many women in convents for it to be anything like a vocational choice: in Florence, between 1500 and 1799, forty-six per cent of women from the patrician families were in nunneries. In Milan, three-quarters of the daughters of the aristocracy lived in convents. Small wonder some became decadent.

Sometimes women were sent into convents because their fathers couldn’t, or wouldn’t, pay the dowry necessary for marriage – ah, patriarchy, of course! – and although the convent also required a down payment for bed and board, it was usually less than a grasping suitor.

Sometimes convents contained abandoned and battered women, and not a few contained retired prostitutes, and women who had been around. There is a beguiling account – which Ms Evangelisti does not include here – of Jeanne de Chantal’s decision to set up the Visitation Order of nuns, with two colourful companions: Charlotte de Bréchard had survived an extraordinary childhood as a lone survivor of a plague which killed all around her, growing up as a street child. Marie-Jacqueline Favre had led a life of aristocratic riotous pleasure and non-stop dancing until, one day, she saw death in the ballroom, and realised her call to live her life as a nun.

The story of Jeanne de Chantal’s own vocational call is here recounted with academic austerity: the more dramatic version is that Jeanne stepped over the prostrate body of her teenage son, who begged her not to leave the family, while Jeanne responded (as in a French movie) “C’est plus fort que moi!” There was also a significant family sequel: the distressed son eventually became the father of Madame de Sevigne, the first female novelist.

During the Protestant revolution, convents were forcibly shut, as it was a Lutheran view that they were useless places which imprisoned women. The social historian Lawrence Stone has suggested that Luther’s real motivation was that he disliked women being free from the control of men, and Ms Evangelisti concurs, in part. Convents were “places of female agency”, and often creativity, and Luther wanted women safely under the control of a husband.

Like all revolutions, the outcome was mixed: where convents were being used to dump women, the Lutheran impact was reforming. Yet many nuns protested passionately, and affirmed their vocations in the face of Lutheran coercion.

Nuns were feminists avant la lettre: some consider St Teresa of Avila a feminist (she was certainly Jewish, which is where she got her brains from). The Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who entered her convent aged 16, dedicated her life to studying – particularly Dante – and produced many works of feminist polemic, including Women Are No Less Rational Than Men, in 1654. She influenced another Venetian, the beautifully-named Moderata Fonte, who wrote The Worth of Women, in the later 17th century, arguing passionately for the education of women, and encouraging women to challenge paternal authority.

Nuns were always pioneers of women’s education and the author gives due acknowledgement to St Angela de Merici, who founded the Ursuline Order, which was to become the template for women’s education, and a beacon for Miss Beale and Miss Buss. Angela’s story is more dramatic than this academic account allows – like many pioneers she was orphaned young, and spent her formative years travelling around Italy on horseback.

“Nuns” is a serious and readable study of convent life: and it rescues from history the lives of women which British and American feminists have tended to ignore because they have generally searched in secular places.

It would benefit from a sequel, following the history of nuns up to the present time. The 19th century, with its missionary energy, is particularly rich. Memoir and autobiography in our time has shown that nuns can also be neurotic and cruel – indeed, just like the rest of us.

*Nuns: A History of Convent Life. By Silvia Evangelisti.
Oxford University Press. £17.99

Literary Review. March 2007.