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convents; without permission from the ordinary, lay women and men
could not enter the outer precincts, let alone the cloister proper. Accord-
ing to directives issued by bishops aimed at enforcing the Tridentine
decrees, doors to the outside were to be kept locked except when the
convent’s superior ordered them opened. Windows permitting nuns to
look out and others to look in were to be barred or bricked up. In other
words, convents were intended to be exclusively female spaces.
After Trent, some cloisters—particularly venerable, prestigious Bene-
dictine and Augustinian houses—remained relatively permeable. Parlatori
(visiting rooms), fitted with close-meshed grills and curtains rendering
visual and tactile contact between nuns and their visitors impossible,
were supposed to be monitored by ascoltatrici, senior nuns charged
with making sure that no untoward talk or behavior occurred. In Venice
and elsewhere in Catholic Europe, however, these regulations were not
always rigorously enforced.27 Ordinaries like Giovanni Tiepolo, Patriarch
of Venice in the early 17th century, recognized that well-born religious
women, many of whom had entered convents not by choice but through
force and fear exerted by their elders, must not be driven to desperation by
excessively rigorous regulation of their lives.28 A well-known painting by
Francesco Guardi, The Parlatory of the Nuns of San Zaccaria (1746, Museo
del Settecento Veneziano Ca’ Rezzonico), depicts unveiled nuns fully vis-
ible to their adult visitors of both sexes, along with a puppet theater for
the children. Clearly, the visiting room in this Benedictine convent was a
site of virtually unregulated mixed-gender sociability.
Not all convents in Venice and its subject territories resembled
San Zaccaria. Largely because they were much less permeable, the houses
of female congregations famed for austerity—above all, the Capuchins and
the Discalced Carmelites, both established in the 16th century—attracted
only women with genuine religious vocations. Take, for example, Santa
Maria della Neve, a Capuchin establishment in Brescia, where the noble-
woman Maria Maddalena Martinengo (1687–1737; beatified in 1900) elected
to spend her adult life. The convent’s constitutions restricted relatives to
one annual visit—more than enough for Martinengo, who would have
27 Anne Jacobson Schutte, “The Permeable Cloister?” in Elissa B. Weaver, ed., Arcangela
Tarabotti: A Literary Nun in Baroque Venice (Ravenna, 2006), pp. 19–36.
28 Anne Jacobson Schutte, “Between Venice and Rome: The Dilemma of Involuntary
Nuns,” Sixteenth Century Journal 41 (2010), 422.