Unwilling Vows and Judicial Strategies: Sister Anna Maddalena Valdina

Abstract

In 1640 Anna, daughter of the prince of Valdina, was put into a convent in Palermo along with three sisters. She was seven years old and would remain there until 1699. She first asked her father and then her brother to leave the monastic state to which she was forced for patrimonial reasons and to which she never resigned herself. Her story is inscribed within the phenomenon of the so-called forced monacations, to which the Council of Trent had tried to remedy. On the death of her brother, in 1693, Anna, about sixty years old, asked the archbishop of Palermo to grant the nullity of her religious profession and her return to the lay state. Thus began a very severe judicial dispute that triggers a violent jurisdictional conflict between ecclesiastical and secular magistracies, the Vatican Congregation of Bishops, the Sicilian magistracies and ends up reaching the king of Spain and the pope. The exceptionality of the case-study lies in the possibility of its close contextualization, thanks to the rich archival documentation produced by that judicial litigation, to the intervention of different magistrates and institutions, secular and ecclesiastical and numerous social actors (from the simple nun to the viceroy). In the course of this litigation, Anna produced numerous memorials that reveal her judicial strategies, her noble logic and other aspects of her volatile personality.

Keywords

• profesiones religiosas forzadas
• conventos femeninos
• estrategias aristocráticas
• conflictos jurisdiccionales