The Real Nun of Monza: Her Trial. A book by Lisa Roscioni

Rome. Beyond the phrase from Manzoni’s novel that brought her to our attention and continues to do so today (“the unfortunate woman replied”), who was Virginia De Leyva, the nun of Monza? Who was truly hiding behind the walls of the cloistered convent where the known facts – the clandestine affair, the pregnancies, the crimes – fail to convey the ‘whole’ of a complex personality that cannot be reduced to a single dimension? And who was really behind the bricked-up door of the cell where Virginia would spend thirteen years as a convict, only to unexpectedly refuse to leave at the end of her sentence, having served her sentence of silence in the Lombardy of Cardinal Borromeo and the Spanish government – a Lombardy where religious and temporal power propped each other up, in a tight interplay of balances and interdependencies? In La monaca di Monza, recently published by Laterza, Lisa Roscioni, a lecturer in Modern History at La Sapienza University, has analysed, one by one, the few surviving autograph writings and the documents from the trial in which Virginia – when the mechanism of violent self-protection through secrecy, in which the convent had been immersed for ten years, collapsed – was charged and confessed her guilt, yet never broken by events or by the ecclesiastical court, before which she instead organised her defence with incredible lucidity, even though, from the very outset, she had no hope whatsoever of avoiding the fate that awaited her – knowing, that is, that she would end up walled up alive at the age of thirty-two. How many Virginias were there, in those early years of the seventeenth century, the author asks herself and us, as she leads us by the hand from one written account to another, and from one testimony to another, through the only seemingly contradictory states of mind of a woman born into a family of high lineage who was destined for the convent as a child and suddenly grew up in the hidden, sickly and obsessive, for Gian Paolo Osio, yet always capable of making herself seem small or grand depending on who she was speaking to? The tones, mannerisms and vocabulary used by Virginia on the various stages where the drama of her life takes shape are examined and recounted in a crescendo of tension, culminating in a surprising epilogue that sheds light on the person: Virginia is not merely the girl forced to take her vows at the age of thirteen; she is not merely the arrogant feudal lady who would not yield even to the flattery – in her own words – ‘of the King of Spain’, and who does not hesitate to write, with insults and contempt, and from the height of her superiority, to the curate who initially acted as an intermediary between her and Osio. Virginia is not merely the tormentor of nuns from a lower social class, the lover of a reckless criminal and an accomplice to murder; she is also the young woman who suddenly becomes shy as she asks her friend to ‘keep an eye on’ the man loitering outside the window of the room from which she will soon emerge to meet him. The grim reality of revenge, the fear that the secret will come to light, the criminal vortex, the precipice, the abyss, the desperate attempt to present her story to the ecclesiastical judge as something other than the exercise of her own will, and the words with which the ‘life imprisonment’ behind a bricked-up door becomes a reversal and an affirmation of her personality before Cardinal Borromeo: Virginia de Leyva moves between different facets and versions of herself, descending into a personal hell yet remaining, somehow, ever true to herself. Viewing her through the lens of Virginia’s own writing, the author presents her to us in her ever-changing guise, and the nun of Monza reveals herself – beyond having been a child forced to live in hiding, a woman who wielded power in seventeenth-century Monza, a prostrate and penitent recluse – always and in any case, for better or for worse, as the fighter who, at a certain point, breaks her silence to say ‘I’.