ABSTRACT
In the previous chapters, I have examined the forging of female communities through religious patronage, focusing on friendships between women who helped to bridge the convent walls and create communities of women committed to the spirit of devotion. The Beata Osanna was the subject of public veneration through the circulation of her biographies and the arca that held her body in San Domenico. She was also a figure for more private female contemplation through the painting made for the nuns of San Vincenzo. Some time after San Domenico was suppressed in 1798, her body was moved to San Vincenzo and then later transported to the cathedral of Mantua. 1 In all cases, public and private, she existed as a devotional meeting place for women. The friendship and spirit of collaboration that existed between Isabella d’Este and Margherita Cantelma had found its first expression of mutual piety in the cult surrounding the Beata Osanna Andreasi and it became a “partnership in piety” that led to the establishment of the Mantuan Monastery of Santa Maria della Presentazione. The Augustinian canonesses of the “casa Cantelma” started as an elective sisterhood, initially bound only through the mutual desire on the part of some women to pursue a life of spiritual devotion. The history of that monastery, however, demonstrated the seismic shifts in female spiritual practices brought about through the pressures of Catholic Reformation, where female communities, like the one at the Presentation, were increasingly sequestered within the confines of their individual monasteries, the clamorous public voices of the mystics and their devotees were quieted, and to some extent, the spiritual avenues for women were made straighter and narrower.
