Negotiated Unions and Hostile Takeovers: Studying Religious Women’s Choices in Late Medieval Italy

This article examines unions of convents, both within and across monastic orders, to understand the priorities of religious women in those communities. Unions could be negotiated between the houses involved or could occur at the instigation of one nunnery over the objection of the other. The cases in this study, drawn from fourteenth and fifteenth century Bologna, demonstrate two important patters in monastic unions: the importance of maintaining the nunnery as an autonomous unit, if possible, and a surprising willingness of religious women to change monastic observance and order affiliation to gain an acceptable situation for themselves when unions with other communities became necessary.