Soundscapes of the Silenced
November 15, 2024 at 08:17PM“Experience demonstrates that every time resident women talk with others, they are more restless.” Keeping women sedate by keeping them separate and silent: as common a tactic today as in 16th century Florence; everything old is new again, and vice versa. Erin Maglaque’s review of a new book on women and sound in Renaissance Italy peels back the layers of a less-talked about form of religious asceticism and control, one where there are no hair shirts or decade-long fasts, just… silence. But total silence is impossible — even breathing makes a sound — so what was really going on in these isolated spaces?
All historians learn to live with the longing to know what’s vanished, but surely historians of the senses are in pursuit of the most transient of all: the archaic sensorium. Lots of questions can be answered by the archives, but “What did Renaissance Italy sound like?” is not one of them. Or more precisely: we can know the sounds of the past only in theory, through abstraction, by our insufficient intellect alone. We can know that Florentine sex workers were required by sumptuary law to wear bells on their hats, but what we want to know—not that the bells rang but how, and how it felt to be advertised by their tinkling—that is unknowable.
For historians interested in the lives of premodern women in particular, the problem intensifies.In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florence, one in five women lived behind the walls of an institution. The rule of the cloister: silence. It is hard enough to hear the bells, the music, the voices. But to listen in the archives for the sound of hushed women? What is there to make out? Maybe a knife dropped clumsily on the stone floor of the convent refectory, a brief pause in the nuns’ chewing. We might catch the scrape of a ladder, the heavy and final thud of a key in a lock, as the abbess of the convent of Le Murate brought a ladder with her each evening to “go everywhere to see who was talking,” to lock the women in their cells for the night.
But what of the women themselves? Their silence was loud; it echoed throughout the city. Nearly half of Florence’s noblewomen were cloistered. The seventeenth-century Venetian writer Arcangela Tarrabotti argued that parents were “burying [girls] alive in the cloister for the rest of their lives.” She would have known: her father forced her into a convent at sixteen. One in five women. The statistics are sterile, but the sound of absence hums: their voices missing from the kitchens, the markets, the churches, the streets of Florence, muted instead inside convent walls.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/15/soundscapes-of-the-silenced/
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