An essay on 17th-century nuns reignites the debate on how the present interprets the spirituality of the past, navigating sarcasm, memory, and the risk of anachronism
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on May 21, 2026
Imagine that, following an environmental catastrophe, a thousand years from now an alien arrives on a deserted Earth, now devoid of human beings, who have long since gone extinct. After wandering among many ruins, the alien stumbles upon a book. Opening it, the alien reads: “And the sun plunged into the lake.” It was a book of poetry. The alien, however, was unfamiliar with the literary genre of “poetry”; he knew nothing of Dante, Leopardi, or Pascoli. And he began to ask himself questions: Was this vanished civilization so primitive that it didn’t know the Earth revolves around the sun? Or: Had they built small artificial suns that, during certain special festivals, were cast into the lake? And yet more bizarre hypotheses. They would have understood everything if they had known what a poem was, for humans.
This parable by my late Old Testament professor, Albert Dreston, came to mind as I was reading the book by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, The Wisdom of the Convent (Mondadori, 268 pages, €19.50). These two brilliant young Spanish women have attempted to describe life in women’s monasteries during the Baroque era in the same way that hypothetical alien might have explained the meaning of those verses without knowing the literary genre of “poetry.”
In their university studies of comparative literature, they discovered a distant civilization now long vanished; sifting through the papers of those nuns, they found texts, letters, and diaries they did not understand; and knowing nothing of the spiritual and mystical mystery of that ancient civilization—its history, theology, the faith, or the real lives of those ancient women, they attempted often haphazard exegetical exercises that prevented them from understanding what that “sun plunging into the lake” was, distorting its meaning—all seasoned with a healthy dose of sarcasm they could have spared us, despite claiming here and there to have “appreciated” those ancient nuns. We can even grant a certain degree of good faith and good intentions to the two authors, but the result, unfortunately, is not only disappointing but also very dangerous.
The book’s literary genre is a weaving together of metaphors and the words of today’s youth with those of the nuns of yesterday—“The 17th-century nuns knew full well that no one can survive by filling the ruthless cells of an Excel spreadsheet for forty hours a week”; “Your publisher? Your marketing director? His spiritual director? It doesn’t matter”—makes the book at times impossible to read, so much so that getting to the last chapter is a truly arduous task.
Much becomes clear about the nature of this essay—which Mondadori, for some mysterious reason, chose to publish in Italian—if we look at the project’s origins during the 2020 pandemic: “Launching a podcast about 16th- and 17th-century nuns in which we wove together personal anecdotes, pop culture, and generational angst... Something irreverent yet meticulous, a great melting pot of different things.”
One of the long “irreverent yet meticulous” stories concerns Saint Veronica Giuliani, who, in 1677, arrived at the age of seventeen at the Poor Clares convent in Città di Castello (which I recently visited for a conference). The very young Veronica is ridiculed, humiliated, and mocked by these two young women who prove themselves not only unfit for complex analysis but devoid of any sense of female solidarity or compassion, yet driven by a taste for the extravagant in their quest to appear original in their virtual world of views and likes: “Veronica often received portions miraculously topped with cat vomit, dismembered mice, hairballs, cockroaches, worms, and leeches that blackened the broth with their purulent blood,” and then they continued with their modern-day take: “Picky as we are, we inevitably felt a knot in our stomachs reading the accounts of the Capuchin Poor Clares who described Veronica’s eating habits in detail,” but, they continue, “somehow we couldn’t help but empathize with her.” What is the reason for their self-proclaimed empathy? Here it is revealed: “Anyone who has ever succumbed to the dietary charm of starting the day with a shot of turmeric and ginger or a turnip juice, and anyone who has cultivated their own symbiotic colony of smelly bacteria and yeasts to purify the body with homemade kombucha, should not judge Sister Veronica’s diet too harshly.” And so, “from the very first episode, we’ve always opened the podcast by asking each other a very simple question: What did you eat today?” No comment is needed; the text, sadly, speaks for itself in its banality.
The book continues with accounts of certain “unusual friendships” among those women, immediately and simplistically interpreted as erotic love. And so we read sentences like these: “We’d be lying if we said we hadn’t fantasized a thousand times about the encounters between the nun and the countess, imagining them as charged with erotic tension, much like the scenes in the Netflix series Juana Inés. Unfortunately, the cruel limitations of the archive do not allow us to outline that hypothetical idyll with rigor and detail, but this certainly did not prevent us from spending entire evenings eating pizza, analyzing every tiny clue capable of fueling our hope that the much-vaunted close friendship between her and the countess actually concealed an intense love story.” It’s best to stop here; I’ve probably already transcribed too many words from this “book.” Just one final mention: their comment on the “gift of tears”—to which they add “crocodile tears”—regarding the Dominican nun Sister Maria de Santo Domingo (known as the Blessed de Piedrahíta, c. 1485–c. 1524). After quoting a very intimate passage from the nun, they comment: “After all, what is that little cry you enjoy curled up under the covers during yet another rewatch of *Titanic* if not a ‘sweetest anointing’?” And so they unveil their theological-psychological theory: “It doesn’t matter in which century you read these lines; every girl knows that when the spirit is tormented and afflicted, nothing can soothe it like a couple of hours spent whimpering.”
What, then, are we to make of texts like this?
Anyone who has studied the lives of cloistered nuns and sisters during the Counter-Reformation era is well acquainted with their extreme penances, hair shirts, and devotional practices—accounts that today cause us a certain, if not considerable, ethical and theological embarrassment. But to try to say something sensible, respectful, humane, and non-humiliating, one would need to start with the theology of expiation dominant in the Catholic Church of the time, with the books of confessors for nuns, with the theology of hell and purgatory and “vicarious suffering,” and thus with that Baroque church’s strange conception of God. Only by beginning with a serious and in-depth study of that church, that theology, and that society (nb: in families, women were not granted a very different life, especially if they were poor) is it possible to understand something true about those “poems,” about the sorrows and even the love of those women of old. For the most part, those nuns and sisters were victims—of society and of the church—manipulated by a mistaken, non-biblical, and non-evangelical idea of God, used by powerful men to manage and control hundreds of thousands of women, sometimes perhaps in good faith. Those women, especially the poor ones (less so the noblewomen), were the cast-offs of the system of their time. Those diaries should be read through this social and theological lens. Without forgetting, however, that some of those women were nonetheless capable of reaching heights of humanity, spirituality, and freedom, even while confined and secluded in environments that were cramped in every sense. It is therefore not only embarrassing but ethically grave that two middle-class women of today, who study in Spain and the United States and are thus part of the intellectual elite of their generation, use the writings of other women from the past for their blogs and books without compassion.
But, ultimately, by reading these books and others like them, we should begin a profound reflection, as a church, as Christians, and especially as Christian women. More books like this one will be published—probably many—because a small, prurient trend is emerging in the new media regarding that world. Books and podcasts that will harm the Church’s memory and present, as it sees its tradition, its saints, and its holy women ridiculed. The charismatic feminine tradition is also, despite its shadows, a heritage of humanity, as well as of the Church. In those monasteries, for many centuries, far more took place than what is recounted by the uncertain pen of these two young women. Some were outstanding—not only in recipes, which many still understand—but in the arts, in literature, in music: one need only think of the nun-composers of the seventeenth century, such as Chiara Margarita, Cozzolani Assandra, Barbara Strozzi, Maria Xaveria Peruchona, Francesca Caccini, and Isabella Leonarda; just as they excelled in spirituality, embroidery, work, and the education of girls, when they were not allowed to attend school.
But to prevent a trivial “chuckle” from erasing an immense heritage—which is currently facing a particularly difficult, fraught and painful, a profound and serious process of re-examining the centuries of the Counter-Reformation, its theologies and spirituality, would be necessary—in order to purify memory, to understand what is to be saved and what is instead to be forgotten after bidding it farewell with piety and respect, if only for the oceans of pain endured by those women. We must therefore acknowledge that many of those practices, those traditions, those ways of understanding God, Jesus, and holiness, were the fruit of dark and un-evangelical centuries in the life of the Church.
Without falling into the error of anachronism, we must nevertheless distinguish between those practices that were acceptable yesterday but not today, and those that were unacceptable—because they were abusive—both yesterday and today.
Those centuries are now past, thanks above all to the Second Vatican Council, and thanks above all to the tenacious fidelity of the women of yesterday. But to “redeem” complex and error-filled times past, the passage of time is not enough. For the pain has passed, but the experience of having suffered remains and is inscribed in the heart of today’s women’s monasteries and convents, and thus in the body of the entire Church. An explicit process of purification is therefore needed, following true discernment, at the end of which we, as a Church, should ask for forgiveness from those women of the past—vicarious apologies on behalf of theologians, bishops, and priests who, more or less in good faith, transmitted and imposed an idea of God far removed from the Bible and the Gospel.
Having worked on these issues for years now, I am increasingly convinced that only this long and serious process of reconciliation with that past (and with part of the present, which here and there continues to resemble the Church of the Counter-Reformation all too closely) can foster a proper preservation of the Church’s memory and tradition, of its charisms, and of women, and perhaps pave the way for a new springtime of monastic life, both similar to and distinct from that of the past. And only then, perhaps, will we also be able to understand some of the beautiful verses of the poems written—with their lives, their pain, and their love—by those women of the past.
Photo Credit: © Tommaso Reggiani
