Arcangela
The Rebel Nun Who Defied the Vatican and Set the Renaissance World Ablaze
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Arcangela
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Summary
Set amid the extravagance of 17th-century Venice, Arcangela unearths the story of an iconoclastic nun who became a literary sensation when she took on the most powerful forces of her society, only to be completely sidelined from history. Forced into the cloister at age thirteen—a fate she understood as life imprisonment—Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652) spent her life fighting against the wrongs done to her and other women.
Through her own creativity and political savvy, Arcangela cultivated a robust intellectual and social network that brought her into dialogue with some of the most influential people of her day. She refused to be silenced as Venice slid from its former glory into decline, and religious authorities expanded their crackdown on books and ideas throughout Italy.
In defiant books with titles such as Convent Hell, The Tyranny of Fathers, and Women Are Human, Arcangela developed a bold, proto-feminist critique of patriarchy and wrestled with the legacy of Augustine, Dante, and Machiavelli. Her ideas were hotly debated at the time and later suppressed by the Vatican and discarded by a philosophical lineage oriented toward men.
Her lifelong project of writing women into the mainstream was forgotten. Until now.
Here, the world’s leading experts on Arcangela offer a gripping reconstruction of her life and hard-fought literary battles. Ray and Westwater's story bursts from the page and restores the rebel nun to her rightful place in history.
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Reviews
I have spent my career studying women whose power survives only in the margins of men's records. Arcangela Tarabotti had no throne, only a cell in Sant'Anna, yet her case against “paternal tyranny” was so dangerous that the Church banned it for three centuries. Ray and Westwater restore her without dulling her ambition, her snobbery, her fury, and her devotion to her friend Regina. A vital book about a woman who saw, long before most, how faith, family, and money conspire to control women's lives.
Immersive . . . a deep dive into the industrious, ambitious life of a 17th-century nun whose writings challenged the status quo . . . Arcangela railed against the common practice of forced monasticism, the corruption of the convent system more broadly, and the oppressive treatment of women throughout life and society . . . With details gathered over decades of collaborative research, the scholars produce an enriched and exhaustive depiction of Venice, its power brokers, and its religious stewards.
Out of a 17th century Venetian convent comes the urgent, trenchant voice of Arcangela Tarabotti, one of history’s lost heroines. Sentenced for want of a dowry to cloistered nunhood at the age of sixteen, Arcangela nonetheless courageously succeeded in smuggling out and publishing impassioned treatises defending a woman’s right to choose her own path. Meticulously researched and vividly brought to life by Lynn Westwater and Meredith Ray, Arcangela captures the spirit of a woman who refused to surrender her soul.
What a rebellious character, what a powerful intellect, what extraordinary vision Arcangela Tarabotti possessed! Forced by her father to live in a convent most of her life, this clever and ambitious nun managed nevertheless to become a real force in the political and intellectual life of Seventeenth century Venice. She challenged the rigid and repressive society of the time—the height of the Counter-Reformation—with her sharp intelligence. Her writings on the tyranny of the patriarchy, on the hellish life of enforced monasticism, on the oppression and inequality of women were profound and lasting. Her voice comes to us now at once intimate and prescient – in a word, modern. Kudos to Lynn Westwater and Meredith Ray for bringing Arcangela vividly to life for us. And placing her squarely where she belongs: in the pantheon of early European feminism.
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