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Negotiating Separation: Nuns, Letters, and Enclosure in Early Modern Italy
Maddison’s research investigates the communicated experiences of separation in the correspondence of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century nuns in Italy to explore what monastic enclosure (clausura) ‘felt’ like to inhabitants of the cloister. Rather than treating clausura as a discipline imposed—and adopted—uniformly, this project instead frames it as an ongoing practice that was continually renegotiated by nuns: spiritually, through the cultivation of distance from worldly distractions; emotionally, in managing being apart from families of origin and fostering the virtues expected within the cloister; socially, within the dynamics of their own communities; and physically, as the structures of their convents evolved. In this way, separation will be conceptualised not only as a physical state of being, but also an affective state of feeling separated from the world beyond the cloister walls.
Principal supervisor: Professor Susan Broomhall
Co-supervisor: Dr Kristie Flannery
Associate Supervisor: Associate Professor Jacqueline van Gent