Sacred Hearts

Ruth brought me this to read when she visited recently. It is an interesting read following my recent stay with contemporary sisters at their Birmingham convent.

SACRED HEARTS by Sarah Dunant

1570 in the Italian city of Ferrara, and the convent of Santa Caterina is filled with noble women who are married to Christ because they cannot find husbands on the outside. Enter 16 year old Serafina, howling with rage and hormones and determined to escape. Her arrival disrupts the harmony and stability of the convent, as overseen by Madonna Chiara, an abbess as fluent in politics as she is in prayer. She assigns the novice into the care of Suora Zuana, the scholarly nun who runs the dispensary and treats all manner of sickness, from pestilence and melancholy to self-inflicted wounds. As an unlikely relationship builds between the two women, others figures stand watching and waiting; most notably theå novice mistress, Suora Umiliana, a crusader for God and ever stricter piety and the mysterious, decrepit Suora Magdalena, incarcerated in her cell with a history of ecstasy and visions.

Walled in

A masterfully created tale of convent life in 16th-century Italy has Donna Leon captivated (Donna Leon in Guardian)

Reading Sarah Dunant's latest novel, set in the Italian Renaissance, one is forced to wonder whether Orwell might have had cloistered life in mind when he created the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sacred Hearts takes place inside the Benedictine cloister of Santa Caterina, in 16th-century Ferrara, among women who have internalised the law that all must be done "for the good of the convent". This is a world in which "the very purpose of convent life is to iron out the sense of the individual", and the abbess believes it is proper "to hate one's own will".

Thus the cards are stacked against the strong-willed new novice, Serafina, who finds herself, at 16, enclosed within the walls of the convent, where there are "no rutting, drunken husbands poking at tired or pious wives". Serafina, who leaves behind the man she loves, realises there will also be no husband, no passion, and no children. She brings as part of her dowry an extraordinary vocal talent, which will be put to use in divine worship and during the less frequent occasions when the convent fishes for gifts and donations by entertaining its richest patrons with vocal and theatrical spectacles.

Serafina is there against her will, and it is this will that must be stamped out until she is brought to acceptance of the fact that "He loves me". She is befriended by Suora Zuana, the intelligent and compassionate nun in charge of the infirmary, herself once an unwilling novice; and opposed by Suora Chiara, the wilful and clever abbess, an adroit strategist who is attempting to preserve the convent's faintly permissive autonomy in the midst of the reformist tempest launched by the Council of Trent.

Dunant convincingly presents Serafina's body and will as the field upon which this larger battle will be fought. Through the twists and turns of events, the reader is never allowed to forget the importance of this one girl's destiny, nor is the sense of suspense ever allowed to slacken. Will she escape back into a world where pleasure is not viewed as a sin?

Though a modern reader will see how easily something like the stigmata in the novel might be faked, it never occurs to Suora Zuana to think about just how creepy it is, nor to question the basis of her essentially misogynist world. Suora Zuana's description of fasting reads like a modern treatise on anorexia, yet she remains true to her times by seeing it as a manifestation, however excessive, of religious rigour. It is also made abundantly clear that this world, limiting and confining as it is, presents the women in it with the chance of freedom from the restraints of the wider society.

Dunant endows her characters with a humanity that captures the concern, not just the interest, of the reader. They want and suffer, laugh and cry, just as we do and mostly for the same reasons. Yet they remain women of their own time, endowed with their peculiar sympathies and prejudices. Sacred Hearts masterfully creates a world and that smaller place within it which attempts to offer sanctuary, rather than mere imprisonment, to the women inside its walls.