Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Nuns, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition
- Chapter 1 Female Religious, Claustration, and Santa Chiara of Carpi
- Chapter 2 The Outbreak and Maleficia
- Chapter 3 The Confessor and Love Magic
- Chapter 4 The Exorcists and the Demons
- Chapter 5 Sisters Dealta and Ippolita under Attack
- Chapter 6 Bellacappa's Defense
- Chapter 7 The Waning of the Possessions
- Conclusion
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 2 - The Outbreak and Maleficia
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Nuns, Witchcraft, and the Inquisition
- Chapter 1 Female Religious, Claustration, and Santa Chiara of Carpi
- Chapter 2 The Outbreak and Maleficia
- Chapter 3 The Confessor and Love Magic
- Chapter 4 The Exorcists and the Demons
- Chapter 5 Sisters Dealta and Ippolita under Attack
- Chapter 6 Bellacappa's Defense
- Chapter 7 The Waning of the Possessions
- Conclusion
- Appendix A
- Appendix B
- List of Abbreviations
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The 1630s began rather inauspiciously for Carpi and the surrounding region. In 1630 northern Italy suffered a serious bout of the plague, images of which were immortalized in novelist Alessandro Manzoni's descriptions of Milan in I promessi sposi. The plague arrived in Modena in June, and Carpi was ordered quarantined on the twenty-first of that month, as efforts were made to restrict as much as possible movements of people into and out of the town. Over the next few months, thousands succumbed to the plague in Modena, Carpi, and the neighboring countryside before it subsided in November. Nuns in early modern Italy tended to enjoy remarkable longevity and even a certain invulnerability to the plague, both of which can be attributed, at least in part, to clausura, which shielded female religious from many contagions. In Carpi, too, Santa Chiara seems to have been largely spared the wrath of the plague of 1630. One Clarisse died in June and another in July, but it is not clear if they were victims of the plague.
Although witch-hunts have at times been associated with fears of the plague, pestilence does not seem to have been a significant factor in the witchcraft scare in Carpi. Carpi's demonic woes did not first appear until more than five years after the waning of the plague and reached a crescendo only in 1638. Given this delay, it seems unlikely that the plague itself played a significant role in witchcraft fears and accusations.
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- Information
- The Scourge of DemonsPossession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent, pp. 37 - 72Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2009