Hand-Colored Convent Costume Books
Although they are rather late for JHU’s Women of the Book Collection, which generally covers the earlier period circa 1450–1800, these works—one an accordion-style folding panorama, the other a multivolume, hand-colored book—are two of the earliest imprints that depict nuns’ habits in living color. There are other earlier examples, such as Vincenzo Bonanni and Arnold van Westerhout’s massive, three-volume 1706–10 visual compendium of nearly 325 ecclesiastical habits, which includes all of the female monastic orders, but their absence of color militates against a full aesthetic appreciation of any one particular order’s religious habit. Because nuns have wedded themselves to Christ, their habits are external signs of an avowed internal union with the traditions and rhythms of the religious life they have undertaken that is lived in dedication to interiority, prayer, and spiritual reflection. The entire habit is the literal embodiment of the nun’s three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience—a visible symbol of her renunciation of individual earthly possessions and of unity in holy community.
Over the many centuries of female monasticism, the nature and symbolic consistency of ecclesiastical habits evolved considerably. By the early modern period and the proliferation of a number of new post-Tridentine orders, a great deal of innovation went into designing habits that symbolized in distinctive ways the particular orientation, mission, and rules of each of those orders. Long-standing medieval orders such as the Franciscan mendicant Poor Clares (founded in 1219), for example, wore rough, ash-colored tunics and scapulars girded with a rope tied with three or four knots, the latter a symbol of Saint Francis’s rope belt, his sole possession. As a discalced order, they, like their Franciscan brothers, also wore sandals rather than shoes.
In sharp contrast to the simplicity of the Poor Clares, arguably the most complex medieval nuns’ habits were worn by members of the Order of St. Brigit, founded in 1346, which consisted of a white camisia, gray tunic, cuculla with sleeves reaching to the tip of the middle finger, and a gray mantle. On their heads they wore a “Crown of the Five Holy Wounds” of Christ, formed by a white Greek cross passing over the head from forehead to back and from ear to ear, dotted with five red circles.
The much later contemplative Order of the Immaculate Conception, founded in 1511, is distinguished by the bright-blue mantle worn by its nuns over white habits and white scapulars. The habit of these so-called blue nuns was chosen by its foundress, Saint Beatrice of Silva, which evoked her first inspiration to create the new order immediately after she had a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary telling her to do so. (The Virgin Mary is almost universally represented in Christian art wearing a blue dress.) A member of a still later order dedicated to the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, or Sacramentarians (Monaca Sagramentata), appears in the nun’s panorama wearing a white tunic, a bright-red scapular, and long black veil entirely covering her head and shoulders.
The proliferation of many more female monastic orders in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries very likely inspired the appearance of these two hand-colored publications, as ever more variegated color schemes emerged to help distinguish the sisters of more recent foundations from earlier ones. Thus, the predominance of muted earth tones, as well as black, white, and gray habits of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, gradually gave way to more complex color combinations, the incorporation of symbols (crosses, the IHS holy name of Jesus monograms, the order’s heraldic arms), and other accessories (long rosaries, badges).
The accordion panorama itself is a spectacular piece of ephemera; though it measures only 8.5 cm when closed, it easily unfolds to reveal eighteen hand-colored images of nuns in their ecclesiastical habits and their respective orders identified below. The more traditional, triple-decker anthology presents a dazzling array of hand-colored lithographs illustrating some seventy-seven Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox religious orders, usefully juxtaposing the habits of their male and female members.
The inclusion of both of these very different visual encyclopedias of nuns’ habits also highlights the distinguishing features of different orders, from the medieval Dominicans, to the Tridentine Discalced Carmelites, to entirely regional houses such as the Oblata di Tor de’ Specchi. The last refers to the female monastery, founded in central Rome in 1425 by St. Francesca Romana as a Benedictine Oblate Congregation of Tor de’ Specchi (tower of mirrors), a term quite specific to the nature of the windows of an ancient tower that existed within the original Roman complex.
—Kelsey Champagne, Earle Havens
Bibliography
Julie Hotchin, “The Nun’s Crown,” Early Modern Women 4 (Fall 2009): 187–94; Andrea G. Pearson, “Nuns, Images, and the Ideals of Women’s Monasticism: Two Paintings from the Cistercian Convent of Flines,” Renaissance Quarterly 54:4 (Winter 2001), esp. 1385; Margit Thøfner, “The Absent Made Present: Portraying Nuns in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in Sarah Joan Moran and Amanda Pipkin (eds.), Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries (Brill, 2019), 128–66; R. A. S. Macalister, Ecclesiastical Vestments: Their Development and History (Elliott Stock, 1896), esp. 245–53.
