Mary Laven

I've a lot less experience with reading non-fiction - especially for enjoyment, not cruising for essay material - than I do with fiction, so I find myself uncertain about how to encapsulate the things I did and didn't enjoy about this. In general, I felt it had too much focus on presenting the historical record, which in this case was primarily the records of church inspections and investigations of Venetian convents. So there were a lot of "take the interesting case of Sister X", or "here's what the inspector said about Y convent", but I felt frustrated by the close focus. I wanted to be a step further back, looking at broader context, and the wider meanings of these isolated incidents. While the author gave quite a bit of explanatory context, especially for things that directly impacted on the convents and nuns, there was still a lot missing (comparative circumstances in monasteries, for instance). Where the broader stuff was filled in, I enjoyed this tremendously. In the chapters where it was lacking - and especially toward the end, as the author started digging into sexuality in the convents without any real notes of the "regular" practice of sexuality at that time and place - I felt bogged down in voyeuristic detail with any notion of its real meaning.

Anyway, I'm off to read more about Venetian society of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries or so, because there was some wacky stuff going on there, and I am all about the wacky stuff people do to themselves.… (mehr)