ABSTRACT

This chapter establishes the efforts of those women who joined the numerous Roman religious communities in the developing picture of female agency in post-Tridentine society. In early modern Rome, women's control over their wealth and possessions and their personal autonomy, were constrained by the realities of a patriarchal social and legal system reinforced by a powerful Roman Catholic Church hierarchy. Religious communities allowed nuns in Rome and elsewhere to develop, control and maintain sanctuaries based on the needs of women. The most successful of individual nuns were similarly able to maintain and manipulate their interactions with the outer communities of family and church, as well as the inner community of the convent to provide a few comforts and some sense of self-sufficiency and control over their own lives. It was through their networks, their sometimes strictly regulated connections, that nuns achieved a level of agency and autonomy both within and without convent walls.