Interesting topic but I felt it could have been better. ( )

I've a lot less experience with reading non-fiction - especially for enjoyment, not cruising for essay material - than I do with fiction, so I find myself uncertain about how to encapsulate the things I did and didn't enjoy about this. In general, I felt it had too much focus on presenting the historical record, which in this case was primarily the records of church inspections and investigations of Venetian convents. So there were a lot of "take the interesting case of Sister X", or "here's what the inspector said about Y convent", but I felt frustrated by the close focus. I wanted to be a step further back, looking at broader context, and the wider meanings of these isolated incidents. While the author gave quite a bit of explanatory context, especially for things that directly impacted on the convents and nuns, there was still a lot missing (comparative circumstances in monasteries, for instance). Where the broader stuff was filled in, I enjoyed this tremendously. In the chapters where it was lacking - and especially toward the end, as the author started digging into sexuality in the convents without any real notes of the "regular" practice of sexuality at that time and place - I felt bogged down in voyeuristic detail with any notion of its real meaning.

Anyway, I'm off to read more about Venetian society of the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries or so, because there was some wacky stuff going on there, and I am all about the wacky stuff people do to themselves. ( )

Quite Interesting ( )

slow moving... we will see ( )

A short work, at not quite two hundred pages in paperback, but still an excellent and very readable history of female religious in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Laven is wonderful at balancing her tone between popular history and more scholarly works, tempering a rigorous examination of the sources with compassion and humour. There were times when she could have stood to flesh out some of her points a little more, but having written on the history of female religious myself, and knowing how hard it is to find any relevant documentation, I can't fault her too much on that score—especially since she often acknowledges just how difficult it often is to find out what went on behind closed doors. A great starting point if you have any interest in the subject, and well worth reading even if you haven't. ( )