Convent Architecture in Renaissance Florence

FAIN: FT-54236-06

Saundra Weddle
Drury University (Springfield, MO 65802-3712)

My project examines Florentine Renaissance convent architecture as the setting of a range of private and public activities that expressed Florentine attitudes toward these communities and the women who inhabited them. I will examine the documentation and surviving built fabric of convent complexes, and primary sources that describe how convent spaces functioned. I will focus on the communities of Sant'Ambrogio, Santa Caterina di San Gaggio, Le Murate, and San Pier Maggiore, where public rituals intersected with convent architecture. The result will be a monograph that considers how Florentine contexts informed convents' form and function between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Associated Products

The Chronicle of Le Murate (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 12) (Book)
Title: The Chronicle of Le Murate (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 12)
Author: Sister Giustina Niccolini
Abstract: This chronicle, completed by Sister Giustina Niccolini in 1598, is one of a small number of surviving documents that presents a nun's own interpretation and synthesis of historical events. It recounts the roughly two hundred-year history of Florence's largest convent, which attracted boarders, nuns and patrons from Italy's elite families. The manuscript also provides a rare view of life behind the enclosure walls and of the nuns' interaction with the world outside. The messy vitality of this account is an important pendant to the more formal and predictable convent chronicles that dominate the genre.
Year: 2011
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Type: Edited Volume
Type: Translation
ISBN: 0772721084
Translator: Saundra Weddke
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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