Convents In Renaissance Italy

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Convents in Renaissance Era Italy: A Blessing and a Curse

From fourteenth to eighteenth century Renaissance Italy, half of the aristocratic women lived in self-reliant facilities where nuns lived and prayed, also called convents. Whether women's families could not afford to marry them off, they were abused by their husbands, or they had fallen into poverty, all were accepted into the convent. Nuns would be educated and given the opportunity to practice the arts. Despite the fact that these women were often isolated from the outside world and kept under strict rules, they gained protection, independence and education unavailable to them outside of the convents.

Women who lived during the renaissance were considered to be the property of …show more content…
Girls as young as 14 were commonly married off to men in their thirties, “partly to ensure the bride’s virginity”(Husbands and Wives) .In turn, this led to many young women being widowed because their husbands were so much older than them. These marriages were more of a political alliance than an alliance of love. These marriages can be described as “crucial to the network of alliances that underlay a family’s prosperity and prospects and that, in turn, formed the fabric of loyalties, affection, and obligation that supported civic institutions.” (Kress, “Husbands and Wives). Families married their daughters to whoever they thought would be most beneficial. As can be expected, many women were unhappy in their marriage. These women were faced with a choice that they were not entitled to make: either get together enough money for another dowry and get re-married, or join a convent. Through the 15th-17th century, the popular choice was to join a convent. Religion began to become popular with the women at the time, as we can see through data. Data shows, “Studies on patrician monachization strategies in 5th century Florence, high female celibacy rates in early seventeenth century Milan, restricted marriage patterns Venetian, Florentine, and Neapolitan elites in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and skyrocketing convent populations everywhere suggest between 1550 and 1650, aristocratic girls were …show more content…
As time went on and convents grew more and more popular, the rules became more and more strict. These rules inside the convents caused nuns to grow further from society than they already were. The rules began to develop under the first convent, which was founded in 529 in Montecassino, Italy by Benedict of Nursia. Under its reign, the grounds for ruling and behavior was set. Another event that developed the rules was Saint Benedict’s book of monastic rules. Saint Benedict himself was a monk who established his own monastery. This book began to be used my nuns and monks all across
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