This volume of nine essays, reflecting years of careful research and collaboration among scholars in the US, Italy, and England, explores how and why alliances and networks were formed between convents in early modern Italy and individuals or groups in the world outside. This collection also highlights how and why relationships were cultivated within the same convent to serve the needs and interests of each constituency. The authors of these essays provide resounding proof that early modern nuns acted both at the center and margins of a variety of complex networks comprised of nuns, priests, family members, noblewomen, patricians, and laywomen of various social classes in order to secure benefits for themselves and the communities they belonged to.

Initially presented as papers at the 2013 Sixteenth-Century Society and Conference (SCSC) in two panels (“Convent Networks” and “Dynastic Convents”) and as conceptual ideas at the 2015 SCSC during the roundtable discussion “Interrogating Monastic Enclosure,” these essays challenge the notion that enclosure meant complete isolation for early modern Italian nuns. The authors of these essays resist the tendency in scholarly research to focus on regulatory attempts by the Council of Trent to keep convents separate from society. Instead, they argue that nuns in early modern Italy continued to establish and maintain a variety of complex associations. As Marilyn Dunn puts it in her essay, the idea of convent networks in the early modern period may seem at odds with contemporaneous treatises such as La monaca perfetta, which advised nuns to distance themselves from their families, remembering them only in their prayers (296), and yet this advice was most likely offered precisely because relational dynamics were important to religious women.

Editors Marilyn Dunn and Saundra Weddle assert in their introduction that the aim of this volume is to demonstrate the nature, purpose, and organization of the kinds of alliances that existed in early modern Italy. They state that their understanding of networks in historical contexts is informed by Paul D. McLean's The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Duke University Press, 2007) and that they seek to implement a conceptual structure of qualitative analysis based on John Scott's paradigm (Social Network Analysis, Sage, 2017), which focuses on “individual, collective, and institutional actors within the contexts of their relationships in order to assess their nature, durability, and implications as they change over time” (20). By identifying actors, patterns, and connections that are related across time and space, this collection effectively presents material and analyses that will be useful to scholars of history, culture, religion, literature, art, music, politics, and society.

The themes that are discussed are valuable not only for early modern Italian studies but also for geographically defined disciplines that seek to make similar observations and comparisons regarding agency, competition and collaboration, and influence and identity (individual, family, corporate) within convent networks. These themes include religious affiliation, spiritual advising, intercessory prayers, shared veneration and resources, cultural interests, art patronage, urban expansion, land reclamation, real estate investment, gift exchanges, and business transactions.

Each of these studies offers detailed assertions that build on the groundbreaking research on Italian convents of Gabriella Zarri, Elissa Weaver, Sharon Strocchia, Mary Laven, Jutta Sperling, P. Renée Baernstein, Carolyn Valone, Sally Anne Hickson, Kate Lowe, Silvia Evangelisti, Craig Monson, Robert Kendrick, and Anabel Thomas, all who have written extensively on the interpersonal strategies that nuns employed to sustain secular and religious interests within and outside of the convent.

This volume will be much appreciated in early modern scholarship for its uniquely broad consideration of case studies from all across Italy. The usual urban centers of Florence, Venice, Rome, and Milan are treated, but some of the most interesting observations come from lesser-known locations such as Brescia, Mantua, Soncino, Borgo San Lorenzo, Paradiso, Ferrara, Prato, Pistoia, Bologna, Siena, Marino, and Avezzano. Furthermore, each essay makes use of rich archival material—letters, convent chronicles, biographies, financial records, works of art, music, and architectural plans—much of it newly discovered or understudied, all of it expertly analyzed.