Un velo di silenzio : l’identità delle comunità monastiche femminili nel tardo Medioevo

The title of this research is “A veil of silence”, because it aims to investigate the identity and daily life of female religious communities in Italy from an archaeological point of view. Usually, traditional historical studies are based on written sources, often elaborated in an official contexts by religious authority. This kind of documentation describes nunneries from the outside. The chronological range is between the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Age, from the 13th to the 16th century, when the social role of nuns deeply changed. The “religious women affaire” literally exploded in the 16th century, at the dawn of the Council of Trento, when all nunneries were permanently conformed through standardized and detailed norms, in particular concerning the closure. The area of investigation is the Po Valley and the Adriatic Coast in Northern Italy. The research is based on different sources: historical and archaeological studies, late medieval and early modern texts, archival records, archaeological finds and sequences. Open-source GIS projects had been realised to manage the information.