Educazione, edificazione, intrattenimento: tracce di teatro nei monasteri milanesi in età spagnola

During the seventeenth century the Church repeatedly intervened to discipline stage practices among Milanese female monasteries, in particular to safeguard the reclusion and to prevent any contact between nuns and external audience. From the half of the century the ecclesiastical law started to permit spiritual representations in monasteries. Nuns however prepared profane plays too and practiced theatre also during carnival and in the occasion of Spanish queens’ visits. The essay examines printed texts of representations composed by laic and religious authors between the end of the sixteenth century and the second half of the seventeenth century: the archiepiscopal vicar Girolamo Rabbia for S. Orsola’s nuns; the poet Giovanni Soranzo; the Minore Osservante monk Fausto Ferrari; the barnabita Giovanni Nicolò Boldoni; the poet Carlo Torre; and the traces of Sister Rosa Maria Felice Maggi’s dramatic writing – probably in dialect – in the Turchine monastery.