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A review by siria
The Nuns of Sant'ambrogio: The True Story of a Convent in Scandal by Hubert Wolf
4.0
The title and marketing of The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio (at least in this, its English translation) I think set many readers up to expect something much more seamy and titillating than the book actually contains. To be sure, there is a lot of eye-raising information here—beautiful young women poisoning German princesses, bisexual nuns alternately engaging in frottage with other women and French kissing their Jesuit confessors. Surely enough to make any pious matron clutch at her pearls.
But what Wolf is interested in is not so much the sexual shenanigans—which at any rate we know about only from court documents and letters written with the benefit of hindsight—but about the contexts which gave rise to them and the consequences which they had. Pius IX, the then pope who introduced the dogmata of the Immaculate Conception and of papal infallibility, and his circle were heavily involved with the case and its cover-up. For a medieval historian such as myself, Wolf's account of the ways in which female mystics and male theologians played off one another was thoroughly familiar; so too, as someone raised an Irish Catholic, was seeing the ways in which the Catholic Church worked to hide sexual abuse without ever dealing with its causes. Wolf's archival research is meticulous and truly impressive, and has no doubt caused some squirming in the Vatican. Who knows what else lies hidden in the church's archives, waiting to be discovered?
Wolf's writing is dense and the cast of characters huge. I don't think that the general reader who has only a passing interest in religious history will find this easy going, but taken as a whole I found this an engrossing and thought-provoking read.
But what Wolf is interested in is not so much the sexual shenanigans—which at any rate we know about only from court documents and letters written with the benefit of hindsight—but about the contexts which gave rise to them and the consequences which they had. Pius IX, the then pope who introduced the dogmata of the Immaculate Conception and of papal infallibility, and his circle were heavily involved with the case and its cover-up. For a medieval historian such as myself, Wolf's account of the ways in which female mystics and male theologians played off one another was thoroughly familiar; so too, as someone raised an Irish Catholic, was seeing the ways in which the Catholic Church worked to hide sexual abuse without ever dealing with its causes. Wolf's archival research is meticulous and truly impressive, and has no doubt caused some squirming in the Vatican. Who knows what else lies hidden in the church's archives, waiting to be discovered?
Wolf's writing is dense and the cast of characters huge. I don't think that the general reader who has only a passing interest in religious history will find this easy going, but taken as a whole I found this an engrossing and thought-provoking read.