Craig Monson says his book, five tales about unruly nuns, might while away a plane flight. He is too modest. "Nuns Behaving Badly" wears its learning with a smile, but it throws a sharp light into dark Roman Catholic corners. Convents in 16th- and 17th-century Italy were largely dumping-grounds for spare women: widows, discarded mistresses, converted prostitutes and, above all, the unmarried daughters of the nobility. Aristocratic families were loth to stump up dowries for more than one daughter. The rest were walled away. In Milan in the 1600s, three-quarters of the female nobility were cloistered. At the same time the church was cracking down on lax discipline, in nunneries as much as anywhere.
展开▼
