ALL THE CHARACTERS in this novel are imaginary, as is the convent of Santa Caterina, though its history and architecture draw on Sant’Antonio in Polesine, in Ferrara, which still exists today as an enclosed Benedictine community.
The history in which the novel is embedded, however, is all fact.
One of the final decrees of the Council of Trent before it disbanded in December 1563 was a rushed but detailed reform of nunneries, in response to the fierce challenges and criticisms thrown up by the Protestant Reformation. These changes, which were extensive, took time to be implemented, depending on the zeal of the local bishops, the order, the convent, and the opposing influence of local families.
But eventually reform did come. In the city of Ferrara, the power of the d’Este family protected the convents for a while, but the failure of Duke Alfonso III to produce a legitimate heir, despite three wives, meant that in 1597, after his death, the city and its dominions were absorbed into the Papal States. By the turn of the century, when rampant dowry inflation resulted in almost half of all noblewomen in Italian cities becoming nuns, convent life had changed forever.
Inspections—or visitations, as they were known—brought in the new rules. All contact with the outside world was brutally restricted: stray holes or windows bricked up, grilles put in place everywhere. Walls were made higher (sometimes with the last courses of bricks put up without mortar, in case anyone should try to lean a ladder against them, to climb in or out). Churches were redesigned so that the congregation saw nothing of the nuns within. Parlatori were similarly divided, with grilles and drawn curtains so that families could no longer freely mingle. Performance and music suffered particularly. In some cities, plays and all forms of polyphony were banned, and convent orchestras—apart from a single organ—prohibited. Inspectors visited nuns’ cells and confiscated furniture, books, and all kinds of “luxuries” and private possessions.
This repression did not go unchallenged. Once the inspectors had gone and the gates were closed, in many convents a certain laxity returned, and the battle went on over a number of years. In some places the nuns refused such changes; in a few they even fought physically to retain their freedoms. They were, however, always subdued.
In terms of documentation, a few voices of protest have survived. In the early 1600s, Arcangela Tarabotti, the eldest of six daughters and lame from birth, wrote a polemic on the evils of enforced convent entry that was published some twenty years later. Perhaps as poignant and more succinct is the following fragment from a letter sent in 1586 by a nun from Santi Naborre e Felice convent in Bologna to the pope himself:
Many of us are shut up against our will and deprived of all contact with the outside world. Living with such strictness and abandoned by everyone, we have only hell, in this world and the next.
This novel is dedicated to those women, and to the legion of others who came before and after them.