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Life and Death in a Venetian Convent:
The Chronicle and Necrology Corpus Domini, 1395-1436
Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni
Daniel Bornstein (ed. and trans.)
University of Chicago Press, 2000

  1.       "An age-old and enduring tradition sees convents as dumping grounds for girls who were sick, ugly, or otherwise unsuited for marriage. This tradition was very much alive in fifteenth-century Italy, among clergy and laity alike. "The man who has a misshapen or mutilated daughter gives her to Christ," the Florentine layman Franco Sacchetti commented sardonically; and he was echoed from the pulpit by the great Franciscan preacher Bernardino of Siena, who chastised his audience for this practice: "I have heard that if you have [a daughter] who is blind or lame or crippled, you at once place her in God's service: you put her in a convent." But it was not just physical deformities that led to forced enclosure of young women: economic pressures too could lead parents to place their daughters in convents. No respectable marriage could be contracted without a dowry, and dowries rose sharply and steadily throughout the late Middle Ages, leading patrician men like Dante Alighieri to long for the good old days when the birth of a daughter didn't stir fear in her father. A father cursed with too many daughters faced hardship or even ruin, and the financial interests of the lineage sometimes dictated that one or more of the girls enter a nunnery as brides of Christ (who, oddly, commanded a far smaller dowry than a mortal husband). Fathers saved money and kept the family patrimony intact; convents were filled and the regular round of prayer and worship was guaranteed; and the excess female population was ensured a decent livelihood and decorous life -- albeit one that these women had not chooses, and generally would not have chosen, for themselves." p. 1-2

  2.       "The new convent of Corpus Domini was consecrated on June 29, 1394 in a ceremony in which members of Doge Antonio Venier's family participated, and on that day twenty-seven women, a mix of adolescent girls, young unmarried women, and widows -- took their vows." p. 5

  3.       "We know almost nothing about Sister Bartolomea. She tells us that she was a twenty-five-year old virgin when she entered Corpus Domini on the day the convent was founded." p. 10

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    last updated Dec 1, 2000