Caterina Vannini in the Neoplatonic Paradox: Music, Mysticism, and Enclosure in the Early Modern Convertite 

  • Eliza Jane Callander

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

Abstract

The Sienese musician and former prostitute Caterina Vannini (c. 1562-1606) entered the convent of the Convertite in 1584. She then enclosed herself in a small cell within her convent, creating a boundary within a boundary; her response to increasing restrictions on women’s spatial freedoms after the Council of Trent was not to resist but to embrace and exaggerate them. Vannini became renowned for her mystical episodes while singing and playing the lute, attracting the interest of the Archbishop of Milan, Federico Borromeo. With the development of Neoplatonism in this period, women’s musicianship could function as a conduit to the divine, an erotic phenomenon, or both; this paradox caused musical activity in the Convertite convents to be heavily restricted. Thus it is surprising that when Vannini became a nun, she continued to sing and play, inducing ecstasies in herself. Vannini’s activities will be contextualized by the available evidence for musical activity in Convertite convents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as how the Mary Magdalene trope was exploited in Counter-Reformation conversion narratives. Vannini embodied contrasting elements: her voice is that of a nun and a courtesan, embodying both sexual desire and repentance; she is both the debased proto-anchoritic Thaïs and a close spiritual advisor to an archbishop. This study will examine how Vannini transformed herself from a child prostitute to a renowned mystic within the unique parameters of her “super-enclosure,” demonstrating similarities and differences between Vannini’s mysticism and that of her near contemporaries. I will argue that Vannini intentionally imitated much earlier, and therefore more established, practices of women’s mysticism and anchoritism. In doing so, she was in effect able to bypass contemporary anxieties surrounding the Neoplatonic paradox in order to anchor her own shifting existence on two contradictory planes, the erotic and the sacred.
Date of Award21 Mar 2024
Original languageEnglish
SupervisorMary Bellamy (Main Supervisor) & Katherine Lewis (Co-Supervisor)

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