Sarah Dunant on the Secret Life of Nuns, at 5x15

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Sarah Dunant on the Secret Life of Nuns, at 5x15

20 Sep 2010

Speakers: Sarah Dunant

In this fascinating talk, the novelist Sarah Dunant brings to life the trials of Renaissance-era convent life, exploring the various freedoms – intellectual, sexual, artistic – that helped nuns endure their imprisonment. Expensive dowries meant that many families couldn’t afford to marry off more than one daughter, and their sisters were condemned to the convent, entering as teenagers and staying there until they died. So convents were repressive, barbaric dustbins for cumbersome daughters – but also “incredible places” for the writers, musicians, artists and philosophers whose creativity would have been stifled in the outside world because of their gender. Deprived of rights or status, the nuns created inner worlds, even constructing a new, fluid ideal of masculinity out of the suffering, victimised Christ they had ‘married’.