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by Melissa Moreton
PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of Iowa
My research concerns the role religious women played in the production of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, as scribes, illuminators and early printers. It is commonly understood that much of the classical and Christian writing that survived from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was copied and preserved by monks. However, it is less well known that female scribes and illuminators accounted for a significant contribution to this production throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance and into the early modern period. Nuns also participated in the printing of books in the early decades after the advent of printing. It is these contributions, particularly the production of secular and religious texts by Italian nuns, which is the subject of my dissertation.
More than fifteen female religious houses have been identified as sites of book production in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy, and almost two thirds of these are located in Florence. Nuns’ book production in Renaissance Florence took place in a variety of female religious communities, including Dominican, Benedictine, Vallombrosian, Brigittine, Clarissan and Augustinian. One convent in particular, the Dominican house of San Jacopo di Ripoli, embodied both the technologies of manuscript production and printing. The San Jacopo nuns produced liturgical manuscripts throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, working on scribal production, musical notation and sometimes illumination. In the 1470s a printing press was also established at their house by two friars from San Marco, a male Dominican house on the other side of town (known for the famous friars associated with the house, Fra Angelico and Savonarola and its patronage by Cosimo de’Medici who commissioned a library there). The nuns played an important role in the patronage of this early Florentine press, providing a site for production, commissioning religious works and sometimes working as compositors, setting the type for secular works such as Pulci’s Morgante and perhaps other humanist and classical works as well. Active for eight years, the San Jacopo press was only the second press ever to be established in Florence and the first to produce a substantial body of work, printing over 100 secular and religious titles (12,000 volumes) as well as pamphlets and broadsides.
Colophon identifying nun-scribe Sister Angela, of the convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli, in a Florentine manuscript of c. 1500
At Le Murate, a Benedictine house in Florence’s Franciscan neighborhood of Santa Croce, the nuns produced devotional and liturgical manuscripts from the early 1470s through the sixteenth century. Some of these were luxury manuscripts, given as gifts to wealthy and influential patrons – for example, a Medici pope, wealthy local businessmen or aristocrat with family ties to the nuns in that house. As gift objects, these manuscripts created and solidified ties of patronage, connections that were essential to the financial survival and prestige of the religious community. Another site of book production was the Brigittine double monastery of Santa Brigida al Paradiso just outside of Florence, which housed both monks and nuns. The scriptorium was active during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, producing mostly devotional and theological texts, with at least 48 manuscripts identified with scribal signatures by Paradiso nun-scribes. Some Florentine women’s houses produced both scribal and illumination work.
My research concerns the role religious women played in the production of manuscripts and books – as bookmakers, scribes, early printers – and intellectual participants in the lives of their communities. Evidence of their work serves to remind us of women’s role in the transmission of classical and early Christian literature and also presents historians with a wealth of information concerning the nuns’ levels of education, literacy, religious and artistic life and practice. However, their contributions go beyond their own religious communities. The nuns’ intellectual and artistic pursuits, business acumen, as well as their ability to forge alliances through their craft production allowed them to survive, thrive and make a significant impact on life both inside and outside their convents. Nuns collaborated with secular male illuminators, religious counterparts and bookbinders to produce their books – from affordable early printed books for secular and religious readers, books for internal convent use and the education of the nuns, books for humanist book owners and members of other religious communities, to high end luxury manuscripts used to solidify ties of patronage. As the makers of books, the nuns of Renaissance Florence became essential contributors to the burgeoning community of scholars, artists and intellectuals who shaped Italian and European history in this period and into the modern era.
Melissa Moreton
PhD Candidate, Department of History
University of Iowa, Iowa City
melissa-moreton@uiowa.edu