"Enamelled with the blood of a noble lineage": tracing noble blood and female holiness in early modern Neapolitan convents and their architecture (1). From: Church History | Date: March 1, 2004| Author: Hills, Helen | COPYRIGHT 2004 American Society of Church History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

The stark antithesis between the secular and the religious has been effectively challenged by scholarship of early modern Italy, which has shown the degree to which these fields necessarily overlapped. Nevertheless, studies of early modern female devotion, especially within convents, often present women as caught between competing claims of kinship and clerical authority, a conflict between family and convent, an opposition between the secular and the divine. (2) This paper argues ...