“GINEVRA, MY DEAR. WHAT A LOVELY SUR—OH!” ABBESS Scolastica gasped as I hurled myself into her arms.
“Oh!” I cried out as well. I hadn’t waited for her to put aside her crewelwork before diving at her. Her long needle lodged in my dress, attaching her stitched canvas to me by a golden thread.
“Goodness, child, hold still.” Scolastica plucked the needle out of my bodice. “How many times did I caution you to move gracefully, like the lady of good breeding you are? Were all our lessons in modest deportment and self-discipline for naught?” But she smiled fondly as she said it.
“I’m sorry, Mother.”
Scolastica put aside the exquisite piece she had been sewing—a colorful emblem of the Trinity surrounded by a garden of blossoms. How bent and crooked her fingers had become, how swollen the joints. “Mother, does it hurt you to sew with your fingers so . . .” Lord, she was right, I had learned nothing. I slapped my hand over my mouth, as if I could retrieve and lock in the rude question.
She patted my face before answering. “Embroidery helps me meditate on God’s kindness in granting me the ability to paint in silk thread. I wish this piece to be part of my shroud when the Lord calls me, so that I may take some of this temporal world’s beauty with me to heaven. It is not really allowed, but the Holy Father has been lenient in many things for us.” Scolastica lowered her voice and said almost mischievously, “I have even secured permission for eating meat when a good-hearted patron provides it.”
Indeed, the reverend mother was rather legendary for her power of persuasion with church leaders and outside patrons. She’d once been married and lived in a country villa adjacent to ours in Antella. After her husband’s death, she changed her name from Cilia to Scolastica and entered the convent, bringing two of her young daughters with her. At her pleading, my grandfather had extended Le Murate’s garden, walled in the convent perimeter, and built its main chapel and high altar. Then she convinced my father to spend even more on the convent, building its infirmary, kitchen, pharmacy, dormitory, and workroom.
Scolastica took my hands in her gnarled ones. “I hope you still work your own fabric canvas, Ginevra. Your crewelwork was some of the finest Le Murate ever saw. I know I must promote embroidery as God’s tool for morality, keeping women’s hands from falling idle or meddling where they do not belong. But I also think it pure artistry, pure creativity, which is a drop of divine spirit in us, surely. I remember well that beautiful band of our gold thread you embroidered into the neckline of a brown frock, making a commonplace dress exquisite.”
Blessed with such praise from her, I was doubly embarrassed to admit I had not done any needlework for weeks. “I—I have been distracted of late, Mother.”
“Ahhhh. So that is why you have come. To tell me of a distraction? The world outside these walls is filled with those, my daughter. What is troubling you?”
My eyes welled with tears. “Oh, Mother, I am so—”
“Abbess Scolastica?”
I startled at the sound of a male voice. Scolastica cocked her head, assessing my face, before turning to greet three tradesmen and an apprentice who stood in the parlor’s doorway, which led to the outside world. We sat behind a grate the Church required be between nuns and laypeople even in the convent’s one public receiving room.
“Good sirs.” She waved, beckoning them to enter.
They tiptoed toward her as if approaching a high altar. One was a scissors master, a whetting stone under his arm. Another was a battiloro, a gold beater, balancing paper-thin sheets of gold leaf. The third man brought yellow silk, and his apprentice carried a basket of empty wooden spools. All these things were necessary for the spinning of gold thread taking place in the workroom adjacent to the parlor.
“Reverend Mother.” The men knelt. The apprentice, though, gaped at her. Obviously it was his first visit to the convent. He managed to spill most of the spools onto the floor as he bent his knees.
“God’s blood!” he cried out.
His master cursed loudly and more graphically before cuffing the boy’s ear, which sent even more spools spinning across the wooden floor.
Then they both froze and looked to Scolastica, their eyes filled with horror, realizing they had blasphemed in front of the city’s most renowned nun.
But she merely burst out laughing. “Come, come, gentlemen, pick up your wares.” Holding on to my arm as support, she stood, taking a long breath of pain as she did. “I will escort you in.” Entrance to the inner sanctum of the convent was strictly forbidden—a rule that was bent for only the most important patrons and silk-thread tradesmen.
She smiled reassuringly at the apprentice. “Do refrain once inside from such language. My flock would feel the need to spend hours in prayer if they heard the Lord’s name used in vain. After all, that is the . . . the . . .” She prompted the boy to finish her sentence.
“The third commandment,” he squeaked.
“Indeed.” She turned to the apprentice’s master, her voice becoming stern. “No need for my chaste daughters to do penance for your weaknesses, is there, sir?”
“No, Mother.”
“Recite one hundred Hail Marys tonight. And no wine for a week.”
Scolastica put her arm through mine to lead the way into the workroom. The gold beater and scissors master shoved the reprimanded silk merchant behind them, making faces at him for his stupidity. Scolastica let out a slight snort of amusement.
In the workroom, warm light spilled through its windows onto several nuns cutting sheets of gold into narrow strips. Bathed in an adjacent pool of sunshine, two other sisters wound the gleaming strips tightly around a core of yellow silk to make golden thread. Their fingers were calloused from pulling and yanking the sharp-edged metallic strips tight to ensure that the thread was thin and supple enough to be cast through looms without snagging. One of them stuck her finger in her mouth to stop the bleeding from a new cut sliced into her flesh by the gold.
When studying at the convent school, I’d tried to write a poem likening the sisters to the Fates spinning a person’s strand of life. I noted that they bled to produce beauty for others. The verse was embarrassing in its exaggerated and overwritten metaphor. But witnessing the familiar scene once more, I was again struck by its paradox—cloistered sisters, dedicated to self-imposed poverty and stark modesty, spinning the richest of gold thread for luxurious brocade cloth. They provided the cheapest labor to the city’s merchants, allowing them huge profits and thereby stoking Florence’s overall wealth.
Once a privileged laywoman living in the outside world, Scolastica had well understood the city’s thirst for such beautiful fabric and recognized the potential benefit to her flock. Le Murate became the first of Florence’s convents to produce gold thread and remained its best thirty years later. With the florins generated by its thread production, Scolastica purchased food and supplies but also books. She’d even managed to buy a portable organ for the chapel and hired musicians to teach her nuns how to sing the new polyphony—a rare touch of musical sophistication for a nunnery. That very moment I could hear voices trilling the psalms of David in the chapel.
“Ginevra!”
I turned to the other end of the room, where literate sisters were copying manuscripts.
“Juliet?” I rushed to hug a girl who had been one of my closest friends in the boarders’ dormitory. We had spent many hours whispering through the night together. She had been the prettiest of all of us, with a mane of the softest hair falling to her waist. Any sane man would fall in love with her for her tresses alone. But she was the fourth daughter of her family, and there had been no dowry money left for her. Now, her wimple hid everything save her face, and I knew her head had been shaved underneath. All that silken hair was gone. But her lovely face was anything but sad.
“How I’ve missed you,” she said. “Come, look what the Mother Superior is letting me do.” Juliet pulled me to her table, and I gasped at the border of angels she’d painted on the margins of the manuscript—figures as gorgeous as anything I’d seen the day of the joust.
“Juliet, your illustrations are magnificent. I did not know you were so gifted an artist.”
She beamed. “And look at this,” she whispered, glancing toward one of the older, sourer nuns bent over her work to make sure she wasn’t eavesdropping. “I am compiling a book of sayings for the abbess—quotes from Saints Augustine and Gregory but also from the likes of Seneca and Socrates!”
By her hand, birds of paradise nested around a snippet of Socrates’s philosophy: The unexamined life is not worth living.
“And”—Juliet leaned close to my ear—“Mother Superior said I may also write a play from what I learn from the quotes to entertain our sisters when we celebrate Easter this year.” She clapped her hands silently, like a child thrilled with a new gift. “I have learned so much reading these passages. My family never would have allowed me access to such books.”
I couldn’t help feeling a tug at my heart as I recognized that Juliet had become Scolastica’s favored protégée—just as I had once been. I knew how much joy her encouragement brought a young, intellectually and spiritually hungry girl. I missed it.
“Is not her work marvelous?” Scolastica approached from behind, slipping her arm through mine for support. “I know the new printing press can produce many copies of a book at a time. A miracle indeed, and yet, what a shame to lose the glory of this handmade art.”
Juliet’s face lit up at the compliment.
“Come, sisters,” Scolastica announced. “Time to go to the laundry and receive your clean tunics for the week.” When the women glided out silently, heads bowed, she turned to me. “Now we have time for a chat, my dear. Help me to my cell, where it can be a private one.”
Small, whitewashed, and ornamented only with a crucifix hanging on a wall, the abbess’s cell contained a low bench-bed, a wooden chair, a washbasin, and a cabinet I knew hid her favorite books, sacred and secular. That was all. We sat down facing each other on the thin mattress. I had not forgotten how hard this bedding was despite the fact Scolastica had somehow obtained permission for wool rather than straw mattresses. Seeing how she grimaced as she shifted to get comfortable, I felt a flare of anger that she could not enjoy a real bed.
“Mother, I wish you could sleep with me on my feather bed.”
“You sleep alone, child?”
I sucked in my breath. She always did cut right to the marrow.
“Yes, Mother,” I murmured. “But I do not mind.” How could I admit that even though Luigi’s disinterest made me worry that I might be horribly unattractive, I was still relieved by my solitude? Luigi’s touch had been uninspiring to the point of making my skin crawl.
“I hope you will be able to conceive children by him?”
I turned crimson. “I . . . I do not know, Mother.”
“Ginevra,” she said gently, “children are one of the greatest joys this world offers a woman. Especially in arranged marriages. Is your husband capable?”
“I . . . I suppose?”
“Is he able to perform properly?”
I shrugged and began twisting handfuls of my skirt in embarrassment.
“Child.” Scolastica put her hand over mine to stop my fidgeting. “Do you suspect your husband is a Florenzer?”
“Indeed, Mother, he was born in Florence, you know that.”
Scolastica laughed gently. “Perhaps we did our job in keeping you innocent of the world too thoroughly. Let me explain. Because of our city’s attachment to the ancient Greeks and Romans and their idealization of the male figure and close friendships among men, some Europeans have started calling men who love each other—in all senses of the word—by the name Florenzer. Do you suspect that—” She stopped abruptly and studied my face. “Ah, I see. It is not your husband you have come to discuss, is it?”
This time I managed to wait until she opened her arms toward me before I cuddled up against her. I poured out the story of the joust, the Medici dinner, and the ambassador. “His Excellency seemed so taken with my verse, Mother. And he is . . .” I hesitated to admit how handsome and charming he was. “He is . . .”
“A man,” Scolastica said with a small laugh. “And a diplomat looking to seal a strong bond between Venice and Florence. Think with that brilliant mind of yours. What better way, my dear, to become fast friends with Lorenzo de’ Medici than by joining in the Magnifico’s poetry and philosophy circles and choosing a Platonic lover to idolize as Lorenzo does Lucrezia Donati, or Giuliano does Simonetta Vespucci?”
I pulled away from her in embarrassed disappointment. “You mean I am nothing but a . . . a pawn on a chessboard? That he really does not think highly of . . . of my poetry . . . or me?”
“Child.” Her voice was full of affection. “How could he not be taken with your poetry? It is so fine. Or not enamored of that face?” She pinched my cheek. “Of course, these reactions of his are surely true. But Ginevra, you must also recognize forces that lie behind actions and roll them forward. And you must safeguard your virtue or lose heaven.”
She grew serious. “Such—shall we call them—‘unsanctioned’ love affairs are commonplace in Florence, since marriages are essentially business deals for affluent families like ours. Peasants are more able to let affection or friendship guide who they marry, God bless them. We are not. But while a man grows in reputation for his conquests, a woman simply becomes of ill repute. You must recognize that and be wary.”
“Am I to never know love then?” I said. Was I never to know the bliss described in the sonnets I’d memorized? Never experience the promise and surrender of a real kiss?
Scolastica’s eyes twinkled bright within the constellation of wrinkles surrounding them. “I did not say that, daughter.” She still had a young girl’s dimples when she smiled. “After all, I had a husband and beautiful children myself before retiring here to devote myself to God. I knew love of all kinds—wife, mother, friend, and . . .” She lifted my chin so I looked directly into her eyes. “I knew a heart-stopping Platonic love myself, the height of chivalry. Never consummated physically and the most elevating of devotion. My soul is far richer for it. Some things are even better than”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“or at least as good as a kiss and what follows.”
I looked at her with shock.
She gently patted my face before continuing. “But Platonic love is a complex notion, my dear, fraught with pitfalls and dangers as well as glory for the woman. It is a terrifying thing to be—in essence—seen as responsible for a man’s soul. After all, that is the individual man’s responsibility, is it not, to lead a life that takes him to God? Too often a man can proclaim this Platonic ideal and use the show of piety and self-control it creates to hide and continue all sorts of behaviors that the Lord would not smile upon.”
She paused a moment to make sure I had taken in her words. I nodded.
“Too often we women think that we can save the men we love from themselves, or that it is our responsibility to do so. All we can do is try to influence by our own behaviors and choices and keep ourselves intact spiritually and mentally. Now, that being said, my dear, there is love to be found within these truths with the right man. With the right man both of you grow, inspiring each other. With the right man, such love and friendship is genuine, born not of calculation or some sort of advancement politically or socially, but of understanding and giving. Like our Lord’s love for us. Just be sure that it is this kind of Platonic love, Ginevra, before you give your heart.”
I burned to know what man in her past she referred to, but her look told me not to dare ask. “But how will I know when it is real?”
“You will know it when you feel it, Ginevra. It is like nothing else. But heed the boundaries I described as best you can. Wear virtue like armor in a joust for eternity and for your own sense of self.” She squeezed me tight and then pulled away to stand. “There is something I have wanted to give you.”
From her cabinet, Scolastica pulled out a carefully folded black scarf. “Take this scapular. Wear it to mark yourself as a beloved conversa, a noncloistered laysister of our convent, free to come and go. As a Benci, Le Murate’s greatest benefactor, you are always welcome to the room your grandfather made for your aunt Caterina. You may come here anytime for reflection and prayer. So many people see our walls as confinement, but you know the supportive community among our sisters, the study of thought possible for women in a convent’s seclusion, released from men’s politics.”
She placed the dark scarf upon my shoulders. “Outside, my dear, you may be placed within a gilded cage of men’s perceptions of you. They will stand and admire you—which is a blessing and a curse. It can be a lonely thing to be turned into an ideal, especially when one is young and has a heart that beats and yearns. But don’t forget that from that perch, you can see and experience the wonders of this mortal world, wonders that men control—its art, its literature, its music.
“Most importantly, you make the choice of songs you sing within the cage. With your mind and gifts, it can be an exquisite litany. Sing of us. Sing of yourself. Sing of what treasure lies inside women’s hearts and minds if men but look beyond their preconceived notions. We think, we feel, we bleed when hurt. We have courage when tested. Someday men may laud rather than fear that. That is my hope.
“So sing, Ginevra. Make them listen.”