Convent spaces and religious women: A look at a seventeenth-century dichotomy.

摘要

Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori is a seventeenth-century Roman convent that was built between 1642-1667 and was founded by a woman, Duchess Camilla Virginia Savelli Farnese, the wife of Duke Pietro Farnese. It remains as a paradigm that seventeenth-century female monasteries were spaces of freedom and peace for religious women, where the nuns exerted their agency (that is, the power to discern and to choose). They were not penitentiaries with inmates, as some have considered them to be. Camilla's agency created a place in which women could seek the ancient Christian pursuit of purity of heart and experience spiritual perfection. The women at S.M. dei Sette Dolori were not unique. They were following in the footsteps of many women before them as far back as Mary, the sister of Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. Indeed, the dichotomous nature of convents---confinement and freedom---is a fundamental element of Christian monasticism.; This dissertation will contribute to current scholarship regarding female monasticism in order to support and highlight the religious women who exerted their agency to choose a life they so desired; to explicate further how the dichotomous nature of convents is endemic to true ascetic monasticism; and to untangle some of the misperceptions imposed upon this lifestyle. Two art forms will be examined: Santa Maria dei Sette Dolori represents seventeenth-century female monasticism, and Giacomo Puccini's opera, Suor Angelica , represents the persistent and pervading misinterpretations and misconceptions of seventeenth-century convent life as incarceration. An interdisciplinary approach will be employed, utilizing architectural analysis and theory, social history, archival examination, musicology, and feminist theory and rhetoric. Applying these methodologies to the specific artworks mentioned above will expose misinterpretations, clarify misunderstandings, and offer alternative meanings, thus exhibiting that the convent is not a prison and its women are not inmates.