Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaissance Convent - Reviews - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Nov, 2002

Virgins of Venice: Enclosed Lives and Broken Vows in the Renaisance Convent. Mary Laven. Viking. [pounds sterling]20.00. 284 pages. ISBN 0-670-89635-7. In the early sixteenth century, after the Republic of Venice lost virtually all her mainland territories, the city's leadership began a programme of self-examination.

Among those criticised were the city's numerous convents, said to be centres of 'whoring nuns' for whom enclosed convents were really nothing more than hotels. This criticism let to a reform of the convents pre-dating by decades that begun by the Council of Trent. The reforms did not heal Venice's age-old rift with the Papacy, which only intensified. This fascinating book examines convent life before, during and after the reforms. It also looks at the wider relations between nuns and the Venetian world they had left and relations between that world and the powerful institutions convents had become by the sixteenth century.