A Calendar of Religious Observances at Venetian Nunneries

Singing Nuns and Soft Power: British Diplomats as Music Tourists in Seicento Venice

“…In recent decades, music historians have, analogously, eschewed a traditional musicological emphasis on the works of well-known male composers by reconstructing the vibrant, multidimensional aural world of early modern nunneries. These studies have revealed convents to be major sites of cultural production and civic pride throughout seventeenth-century Italy, where monastic women performed in their external churches, made music in more private devotions, played a variety of instruments, composed their own music, staged musical convent dramas, and taught and took music lessons (see, e.g., Monson 1995;Kendrick 1996;Reardon 2002;Glixon 2017). So rich and magnetic were these activities that outside listeners clamored to hear musical performances in convents, and the Tridentine Church continuously worked to suppress this musicking.…”

“…Cloistered women in these cities exercised considerable political agency as both musical performers and patrons. They drove Italian musical innovation, shaped the ritualization of local religious culture, and brought prestige to their city-states by acting as symbols of public piety and musical divinity (see Kendrick 1996;Glixon 2017). How their music-making was deployed in international and cross-confessional relations, however, remains all but unexplored.…”