Prayer and the Mediation of Female Subjectivity in the Convents of Florentine Tuscany

• In Event: Sounding Out the Renaissance Convent: Strategies of Female Speech and Sonic Regulation in Florentine Tuscany

Abstract

In what sense could a Renaissance woman own her own words? This paper explores prayer as a genre of utterance over which convent women held particular cultural authority. Recent historiography surrounding Renaissance subjectivity and mercantile ricordanze has suggested that property ownership and the record-keeping practices it entailed were critical conceptual building blocks in the shaping of male selves. Seen to be marginal participants in these activities, women have often been overlooked in explorations of the relationship between notions of credit and debt and self-narration. From within convents, however, women not only took charge of day-to-day administration of property, their core devotional duties were also imbued with the precepts of transactional exchange. Drawing upon archival evidence of nuns’ record-keeping in Prato, Pistoia and Florence, this paper shows how convent women fashioned prayer as a tradable commodity, one which required the intersection of will, words and the female body.

Author

• Emma Nicholls, University of Cambridge