Religione, donne, storia d’Italia

Résumé 0

The volume on Women and Faith was the first of the series of the History of Women in Italy. It focused on the relationship between women, Church institutions and beliefs which was something that militant feminists were not particularly interested in. Philosophers and women theologians developed a feminist thought in the field of religion, while feminist historians chose to shed light on the forms of religious dissent from orthodoxy and ecclesiastic institutions. The volume offered a synthesis of the ongoing national and international research and I will point first to its lacunae, and secondly to its high points. Its main shortcoming is the absence of minority religions in Italy, and especially the lack of attention for Jewish communities, the only ones on which there were some significant studies. Today’s interest for “other” religions beyond Catholicism measures the changed intellectual landscape that separates us from the Nineties. Owing to the fruitful encounter between Italian and North American scholars, Women and faith integrated religious history into the wider institutional, social and cultural history. In 1999 it was translated and published by Harvard University Press and had a deeper influence on religious studies in the US than in Italy. The emerging new theme of the book are nuns viewed in their refusal or acceptance of the religious profession, in their daily life inside important Italian convents in major cities, and within family strategies that allocated daughters to the marriage market or to the convent. The crucial role of convents in promoting women’s intellectual and artistic production is an important feature of the volume which offers a diachronic overview of religious female movements in Italy.