A Short History of the Renaissance in Europe by King Margaret L.;

Author:King, Margaret L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

More than a century later, the young women who found themselves trapped in a religious vocation they would not have chosen for themselves discovered a champion in the Venetian Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652). Sent to a convent as a child, she was made a nun in 1620 against her will. In her later writings, most notably her Paternal Tyranny (published posthumously in 1654 under the title Simplicity Betrayed), she lambasted the greed and arrogance of fathers who so mistreated their daughters. Tarabotti presents the case of the coerced nun thus:

It is well known that the majority of nuns cannot attain perfection because they are forced to the religious life by the force exerted by their fathers and kin…. Most of them are not moved … by the call of the Gospel … and surely God has shown himself to hate any act which is not born of a voluntary disposition…. Only those who are willing nuns … even if against the will of their relatives, like Clare of Assisi and Catherine of Siena, who renounce the world even if they must be buried behind holy walls; but men imprison others so as not to bear expense and so as to be able to surround themselves with every sort of luxury, delicacy, and superabundant vanity, even in order to have more means of satiating their vile desires with swollen whores, to dissipate their wealth at the games, drowning themselves in the consummation of every one of their unjust desires.

(M.L. King, Women of the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 89)

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