Forbidden Fashions

Invisible Luxuries in Early Venetian Convents

Isabella Campagnol

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780896728301
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Form-fitting dresses, silk veils, earrings, furs, high-heeled shoes, make-up, and dyed, flowing hair. It is difficult for a contemporary person to reconcile these elegant clothes and accessories with the image of cloistered nuns. For many of the some thousand nuns in early modern Venice, however, these fashions were the norm. Often locked in convents without any religious calling—simply to save their parents the expense of their dowry—these involuntary nuns relied on the symbolic meaning of secular clothes, fabrics, and colors to rebel against the rules and prescriptions of conventual life and to define roles and social status inside monastic society.Calling upon mountains of archival documents, most of which have never been seen in print, Forbidden Fashions is the first book to focus specifically upon the dress of nuns in Venetian convents and offers new perspective on the intersection of dress and the city's social and economic history.

One

Maridar o Monacar, To Marry or to Become a Nun? Nuptial Strategies in the Venetian Aristocracy

…Simple little girls

Innocent, or silly and very young

Have been made Nuns

With flattery and deceits

They dressed us as Nuns

…

Fathers and mothers drove us away

As their mortal enemies

…

This fate that rules the world

Blind, deaf, hard, and fallacious

Mother to some, stepmother to others

She takes away and gives as she likes

If there are sisters

One is lucky

The others are sent away

Little imprisoned Nuns

One sister is among pain and tears

The other among games and parties

One wears jewels and rich dresses

The other is veiled in black.¹

From their birth, the women of Venice had just two life prospects: either they got married or they entered a convent. And the choice was not theirs: the families chose their destiny, whether they liked it or not.

When, on December 17, 1680, Francesco Tiepolo wrote his will, he appeared rather concerned about his daughters’ future, strongly urging them to embrace monastic life, a choice he considered much wiser than a marriage, “in consideration of how expensive and risky for the families weddings could be.”² In other words, he was not apprehensive about their personal happiness, but rather about the negative effects their marriages could have on the family's patrimony. Financial concerns played a key role also in the final dispositions of other fathers, who explicitly gave their bad financial luck as the main reason for why their female offspring could not marry.

Zuane Falier, for instance, writes in his will: “I wish that my daughters Bianca and Cecilia be placed in a monastery when their time comes and if they so desire, but I beg them to go, because they will have a better life than if they married (and also because I do not have enough means to marry them)…and I urge and beg them to become nuns and to serve God that they will never have a better master.”³

Decades later, Zuane Badoer followed the same line of reasoning, stating that “since his family has been hit by numerous disasters,” his daughters will be much better off in a monastery.⁴

Badoer, Tiepolo, Falier: these last names belong to some of the most prestigious Venetian houses, and yet, in their last wishes, all of these fathers clearly point their daughters toward a cloistered life for what were essentially economic and “practical” considerations. The opinions, wishes, and desires of the girls do not appear to be taken much into account, and, even when they were, they seem suspiciously manipulated. In Francesco Contarini's will, dated August 2, 1647, it emerges that he was leaving “to my three girls at home a convenient dowry to enter a monastery, as by the grace of God, I see them inclined.”⁵ It certainly seems strange, if not unlikely, that three out of three daughters dreamed of a monastic life!

Finding suitable spouses for his daughters was at the top of the must-do list of every Venetian father: a parent unable to provide suitable dowries (and therefore proper husbands within their own social class!) would in fact suffer dishonor, blame, and embarrassment. Given the skyrocketing cost of dowries from the fifteenth century onward,⁶ the practice developed of shipping off to religious destinies “superfluous” young women who, for economic reasons, could not get married.

The same marriage strategy that aimed to preserve the wealth of the families also shaped the lives of the sons of the aristocracy. Nearly half of male nobles who reached adulthood in the fifteenth century appear to have remained bachelors: “to be precise, of 952 men from sixteen clans whose entry into adulthood can be documented, 412 apparently never married.”⁷ From the thorough studies of Davis on the Donà family, it emerges that, customarily, only the oldest son got married,⁸ while the other brothers usually remained to live in the family's palace, sometimes creating strange, mostly male households, while occasionally enjoying the female companionship of the famous courtesans for which Venice was known all over Europe.⁹ This rather unusual lifestyle prompted the creation of such literary works as De Coelibatu, written by Ermolao Barbaro around 1485. In it, male unmarried life was exalted and praised because of the freedom offered, a freedom that, according to the author, should have been purposefully devoted to humanistic or other types of studies.

These bachelors mostly worked in the family business, but also constituted a key presence in the government. “Their function as government officials may have been an extension of their role within the family: the function, namely, of holding government jobs and casting electoral votes in line with the family interests supervised by their fathers and married brothers.”¹⁰

Venice was most certainly not the only Italian city to apply these social strategies, but because it was a republic that prided itself on the freedom of its citizens, the moral issues raised by these questionable practices were discussed and, occasionally, challenged more openly than elsewhere, as in the literary works of “involuntary” nun Arcangela Tarabotti.

A key role in the actuation of these policies was, from the early Renaissance and until the end of the Republic, played by Venetian convents that stood in as boarding schools for girls and “warehouses” for women who could not marry. According to Antonio Ottoboni, a gentleman who lived in the seventeenth century, this custom was absolutely necessary, being the only way to effectively safeguard the innocence of the girls whom, he thought, needed “to be locked in exemplary monasteries as soon as they enter adolescence because women are a merchandise that needs to be jealously guarded since they are so easily ruined.”¹¹ In keeping with this belief, local patrician families for centuries routinely sent their daughters of about ten years of age within the safe cloistral walls of one of the many convents of the city. The purpose was to “polish” their education by having them learn the essentials of sewing, embroidery, lace-making, singing, and music and to keep them in a protected environment until their future was decided, usually between the age of fourteen and twenty.

There were two life options open to them, simply expressed in Venetian dialect as “maridar or monacar,” to marry or to enter a convent. The third option, continuing to lead an unmarried life in the paternal house, was a rare exception, only reluctantly accepted by the families because of the risks involved with the presence of an adult single woman in the house.

Only one daughter was usually selected for marriage: she was either the youngest, in order to allow the family to keep profiting from the monetary part of her dowry for as long as it was possible, or the most beautiful or talented. The other sisters were destined for a religious future, and, according to a realistic estimate, more than a third of them were locked in the cloister without any sort of divine calling.¹²

The girls themselves were acutely aware of the real motivations behind the choices of their families:

“My mom wants me to become a nun

To save for my sister's dowry,

And to obey my mom,

I am cutting my hair and will become a nun.”¹³

Should the parents decide against the secular marriage of a girl, the transition from “figlia a spese” (boarding girl) to novice was frighteningly easy:¹⁴ the girl was simply never “retrieved” from the convent where she was being educated. She just remained in the familiar environment she knew, where she had friends and, most often, close relatives, such as aunts and cousins or even sisters, ready to offer an essential support system, extremely valuable in the new nun's adaptation to religious life and with the help of which she could start to build her own “family” inside the convent.

The fact that we do not find a lot of public documentation regarding the protests of the involuntary nuns against this imposed life is not surprising. To them, initially at least, what was probably more worrying was the thought of leaving the world they had known since childhood to live with a complete stranger who was often ten to twenty years older than his bride.

The “lucky” girls destined for marriage did not have, in fact, any say in the selection of their future husbands: the arrangements were made by their fathers and, occasionally, brothers who aimed to conscript their nubile kinswomen into strengthening their family's position, with little or no regard for the woman's wishes. “The needs of the family were the dominant consideration, and…the inclinations of a teenage potential bride were of little account.”¹⁵ What really mattered was the union between the two families and the strengthening of political and economic alliances.¹⁶

Furthermore, a patrician marriage was undoubtedly a very complex event that did not involve just the families of the bride and groom, but rather the Venetian aristocratic class as a whole, up to the doge himself, to whom, until 1501, patrician brides were routinely introduced and who acted as “public testimonial” of the union.¹⁷

These “bridal shows” were so impressive that part of the reputation of the city rested on them. In the celebration of aristocratic weddings there were expectations to be fulfilled and rituals to be followed: “The display of wealth and the observance of ritual in the binding of two patrician families reflected in microcosm the wealth and civic rituals of the city, as well as reciprocal arrangements between potential allies which formed the bedrock of the Venetian political system. For this reason every aspect of the process was viewed critically for its larger political and propagandistic implications.”¹⁸ Public and private interests were intricately interwoven, and, if marriage constituted the hinge connecting government and elite families, dowries represented the crucial indicator of a family's position within the political and social environment.¹⁹ As they used to say, “while arranging a marriage it is necessary to consider the amount of the dowry first, and the woman after, because her virtues do not enrich the house of the husband as much as her dowry.”²⁰

Patrician women, instrumental in the realization of this policy, therefore played at the same time two very different social roles: excluded from their own lineage, which they left upon marriage, they played through marriage a key role in defining their families’ social strategies at the center of which were their own dowries.

The dowry represented the daughter's share of her father's patrimony. “Unlike her brothers, who were forced to await their father's death to collect their inheritance, a Venetian woman received her share when she married or entered a convent.”²¹ At the signing of the wedding contract she, in fact, would give up any sort of claim on the rest of the paternal patrimony: the dowry was then conveyed to her husband as the bride's contribution toward the maintenance of the new household. Only a widow could reclaim her dowry from her acquired family, to pass it on to her own daughter or dispose of it as she saw fit.²²

In the second half of the fourteenth century the average dowry was about one thousand ducats,²³ but, from the fifteenth century onward, despite the best efforts of the government to stop the spiraling process, the figure appears constantly on the rise. A law dated August 22, 1420, set the limit for the dowries at an official maximum of sixteen hundred ducats. The only possible exception was for a plebeian wife marrying a noble; in that case, in order to help the shaky finances of aristocratic, but impoverished, families, the limit was raised to two thousand ducats. The imposition of a threshold was deemed necessary because many fathers, having insufficient funds to provide for the dowries, resorted to sending their desperately crying daughters to monasteries in order to offer them a decorous position in society.²⁴

The efforts of the legislators were therefore clearly aimed at protecting the fa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Maridar o Monacar, To Marry or to Become a Nun? Nuptial Strategies in the Venetian Aristocracy
• Chapter 2 - Weddings and Clothings: A Comparison
• Chapter 3 - Nuns and Fashion
• Chapter 4 - Textiles, Embroideries, and Laces in the Convent
• Chapter 5 - Conclusions
• Appendices
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author