SUOR ARCANGELA’S INFERNO

On August 10, 1617 the Benedictine nuns of the Saint Anna Convent in Venice “deliberarono l’accettazione ad educande di Regina Donà e di due figliole del Signor Stefano Tarabotto” (Zanette 27). The elder of Tarabotti’s daughters, whose last name had an uncertain spelling like so many others in those days, was named Elena Cassandra and when she entered that monastery, which she would never again leave, she was only thirteen. At the time of her consecration, which took place three years later, Elena Tarabotti became Suor Arcangela and by this name she is remembered in Italian literature. Unlike many of the writers of her period and of the preceding century, however, she did not write poetry, but “svariate opere, alcune a carattere teologico, altre a carattere politico e mondano” (Medioli 10), and also several courageous denunciatory works on the condition of Venetian women in her time. Not all of her works have been printed and of some of them only the titles remain; of her manuscripts only the Inferno monacale has reached us in an eighteenth-century transcription. This pamphlet constitutes together with the Paradiso monacale published in 1643, and with the Semplicità ingannata, also called the Tirannia paterna, which appeared in 1654, a trilogy of condemnations of a world, of a society that prevents young girls from choosing a life which is suited to their personal inclinations and forces them to submit to the impositions of family “tyranny.”

It is glaringly evident from the vehemence and the indignation that pervade Tarabotti’s works that she writes with full knowledge of the subject and certainly not from secondhand information:

Il furore che ne fa fremere le pagine e il pianto che qualche volta vi si sente sono spiegabili solo come provocati da torti sofferti personalmente; i torti altrui o i torti collettivi non avrebbero potuto farle scrivere a quel modo. (Zanette 103)

Suor Arcangela, née Elena Cassandra, was born in 1604 to a well-to-do family, and “eredita dal padre la camminata claudicante” (Zanette 17), while from her forefathers, “navigatori e sfidatori delle tempeste” (Zanette 6), she inherits the strength that will sustain her throughout her life. The eldest of four brothers and five sisters she “viene destinata al chiostro fin dalla nascita” (Zanette 25) like her more famous fellow nun Marianna de Leyva, immortalized by Manzoni as the Monaca di Monza. While resentment for being forced to take monastic vows drives Marianna-Gertrude to a transgression of a sexual nature and later to complicity in homicide, in the case of Tarabotti the indignation for the wrong she sustained is transformed into a vehement act of accusation against her family and seventeenth-century society.

From the depths of her sombre “prison”—yet illuminated by the vivid light of her intelligence—she makes her ideas known and hurls her “j’accuse” by means of manuscripts like the Semplicità ingannata and the Inferno monacale, which she courageously lends to friends and acquaintances.

Elena Tarabotti is destined from birth to the convent due to her slight physical deformity which, added to her position as the first born, makes her difficult to place in the marriage market. In fact we must bear in mind that, in the seventeenth century, marriage served the almost sole purpose of forming an alliance between the families of the bride and groom: a political, economic and social alliance. Love and reciprocal attraction between the betrothed were neither expected nor requested, unlike the dowry which, on the contrary, constituted the foundation of the negotium. This juridical institution, started in ancient times so as also to offer the filia familias a part of the family patrimony, was tranformed through the centuries in a double-edged weapon that turned against her, in the sense that even the wealthiest families find the marriage of more than one daughter a too onerous economic obligation. Even Dante recalls in a well-known terzina the happy times in which “Non faceva, nascendo, ancor paura / la figlia al padre; che ’l tempo e la dote / non fuggien quinci e quindi la misura” (Paradiso XV, 103-04). In Florence the Tuscan bankers created in 1425 “il Monte delle Doti, specie di società di assicurazione presso la quale il deposito di 100 fiorini d’oro a nome di una ragazza dava diritto ad una dote di 250 dopo sette anni. Nel giro di un secolo molte atre città si dotarono di analoghi istituti” (Minarelli 171).

Fathers, finding themselves economically incapable of marrying off all their daughters, decided to send off to the convent sometimes the youngest, sometimes the eldest, sometimes the ugliest, making therefore an unavoidably unfair and arbitrary choice. As indeed Molmenti writes in his vast work entitled La storia di Venezia nella vita privata: “alcuni padri, non potendo disporre di molto denaro, si trovarono costretti filias in monasteriis carcerare, cum dignis lacrimis et plantibus ipsarum” (445).

Obviously a physical handicap constitutes “un ulteriore pretesto per toglierle dal mondo” (Conti Odorisio 101), of which Tarabotti herself is painfully aware when she writes in the Semplicità ingannata: “Vengono condannate al monastero le zoppe, le gobbe, le sciangate quasi che il difetto di natura sia difetto d’esse” (63). All this unhappiness stems from the erroneous impression that woman is intellectually and often morally inferior, thus reducing her status to that of a minor according to the laws of the time. She is considered incapable of controlling her instincts and therefore unable to live without the guidance, the tutelage and the supervision of a man, whether he is her father, her brother, or even her son. As a consequence, “there was no independent role for her, unless she wished to risk her reputation” (Labalme 139), and even her physical integrity, because it was common that groups of young hoodlums attacked, raped and beat women (often widows) deprived of the protection of their families.

The dearth of alternatives also may, under certain circumstances, persuade the young girl to enter a convent, because “fra le donne non era raro, poi, un certo spavento del matrimonio medesimo, delle gravidanze a catena” (Minarelli 120), as in the case of the famous Suor Juana de la Cruz where she herself chooses the monastic life principally because of her indifference towards marriage. As Angelo Morino rightly reminds us in his preface to Risposta a Suor Filotea: “il matrimonio e l’entrata in convento sono ancora gli unici due poli, legittimati dal codice, fra cui si gioca e si consuma la realizzazione del destino femminile” (xvi). A woman alone represents a danger, a possibility of disturbance to the constituted order, that order which sees women only and always as a defective appendage to the male. Young women of the past centuries had still another possibility in life, that of remaining unmarried, but if one thinks what negative connotation the word spinster still carries today, in whatever language it is pronounced, one realizes that it was really the “extrema ratio.” “Non sposarsi o non affidarsi a ‘Santa Madre Chiesa’ significava continuare a vivere nella casa paterna senza un ruolo ben definito, senza uno status sociale, senza un’identità precisa, ma come un peso, come un essere incompleto” (Diberti-Leigh 39), in a situation that at the death of the parents worsens due to dependency on one’s brothers and sisters-in-law. One needs only read almost any English novel of the last century to realize how unhappy the condition of the spinster relative was, and Tarabotti herself was aware of it when she wrote in her Inferno monacale: “alcuna, rimasta sotto la cura de’ frattelli [sic] per fugir la fattica di far con esso loro l’officio di vil serva prende un volontario essiglio” (36). Marriage is therefore considered a natural and optimal state; while going into a convent is a solution to fall back on, and in Venice “tutte le figlie meno l’ultima erano destinate al chiostro” (Zanette 27). Living under the protection of the Church did not guarantee happiness—and of this, one is certain after reading, besides Suor Arcangela’s Inferno, the serene letters of Suor Maria Celeste Galilei—but it at least offered a respectable social position, sheltered from the abuse of men and of nature. The nun was deprived of her freedom, but the wife, so envied by Tarabotti, was certainly not in a much better position. Furthermore the religious woman (in name if not in practice) was at least assured of a decent if not luxurious life; the food, for example, in an age when not everyone had enough to eat, was assured, even though, as Suor Arcangela laments in her Inferno monacale, it is tasteless and meagre, “picciolissima portion di carne . . . della peggior, che si coce la sera e si magna la mattina” (54). Monastic life, especially if it is not sustained by vocation, is dull and monotonous but also calm and longer than average, because it is not threatened by what, until a century ago, was one of the most frequent causes of death among young women: childbirth. Tarabotti herself affirmed that nuns live “fino all’età decrepita” because as she wrote with clearly polemic intent:

oltre che per gli abiti e per la tristezza, paiono già morte, onde la Parca, tali credendole, allonga più del ragionevole il lor vivere. Di più, il vitto parco, il non mutar aria e l’esercitio continovo nell’obedienze rittarda loro la bramata e mille volte implorata morte. (50)

Her whole pamphlet, which bears the highly significant title of Inferno monacale, is dominated by the desire to let the world know about this monstruous abuse that fathers and the State perpetrate against their “virgin” daughters. Suor Arcangela maintains, and rightly so, that only those who enter the convent voluntarily, “like Santa Chiara e Santa Caterina da Siena,” should be accepted; while it is not fair and it constitutes a serious offense to Divine will the fact that “gli uomini le imprigionano per non incontrar dispendii e per poter raccomodare le case loro con ogni sorte di lussi, delizie e sovrabbondanti vanità, anzi per avere più comodo di saziare le infami voglie con le ingorde meretrici” (Conti Odorisio 202).

Obviously the spirit of denunciation, of sacrosanct indignation that permeates the pages of the Inferno monacale has a detrimental effect on the author’s objectivity; in that Suor Arcangela’s world is all darkness, never penetrated by the light of hope or by the serenity of resignation. Her rage, which is that of a betrayed woman, blinds her and makes her see the universe divided in a Manichean manner; on one side there are the deceived, betrayed and wounded daughters, condemned to the hell-on-earth of the convent; on the other the betraying, avaricious, egotistical fathers condemned to the real inferno, the one after death. Against them the Venetian writer hurls terrible threats and foresees horrible punishments, mindful perhaps of the fact that her middle name is Cassandra! Thus, in fact she begins her treatise:

Io, più che Angela in quanto al nome e serva indegna di Sua Divina Maestà, inspirata da lui con motivi di pura verità, vi predico i fulmini del Suo sdegno. Non ridete per chè io sia femina per ché anco le Sibille predissero la morte di Christo . . . Ma lasciamo questo per ché io non ho humore di Sibilla né voglio che mi stimate pazza: accettate quello che è di già vostro, non avendo altri architetti l’Inferno monacale che il Diavolo e le vostre tiranie.

Vi dedico dunque quell’Inferno, a cui perpetuamente condanate le vostre visere, per preludio di quello che dovete goder etterno. (29)

While waiting for these men, unworthy of the name of father, to expiate their guilt in the hell of the dead, Suor Arcangela describes to us, with increasing indignation, her inferno on earth. The monastery is “una cloaca di immonditie et incomodità . . . un’ardente fornace” (33) ed anche “un abisso . . . una stigia palude” (34); where the nuns, in the same manner as the damned in hell, give themselves up to every kind of evil action and “non manca lo stridor di denti nelle mormorationi e risse che fra loro occorrono, oltre alle imprecationi contro ai congiunti che cagionarono, ai superiori che permisero” (37). The awareness of having been deceived and the certainty that the sentence will be eternal, transforms the young woman who enters a convent, confused by paternal delusions (“alle bambine di poca età fingono luochi solacevoli e poco differenti dal Paradiso terrestre” [32]), and uncertain, but still “innocente agnelletto,” into an enraged creature who feels that she has nothing left to lose and behaves consequently. The girl’s hair, “suo più caro ornamento,” is cut (and in Tarabotti’s case it must have been beautiful, judging on how she dwells on this detail); her body is covered by a rough black tunic, her head by a “scufia . . . che all’uso di questa patria nell’altre donne è un lugubre contrasegnio della morte de’ cari mariti” (42). She lives in a dark, gloomy building (“all’ombra fredda e morta del chiostro,” Manzoni had written), where, by precise provision of the ecclesiastical authorities, the windows must be inacessible, barred or placed as high as possible. She has the right to her own little cell, but may not lock the door, may not read books other than prayerbooks or those allowed. The novice eats overcooked food in modest quantities, and as if that were not bad enough, mealtimes are interrupted only by the voice of the nun “che legge una regola in alta voce . . . per il più che noia per ché della morte, dell’inferno, di vermini e piaghe si sente trattenere” (53). In the cloister everything is appearances, thus the pious group reading contrasts with the “obscene” reading of “libri amorosi di cavalleria” (60) done in private. Even “l’obidienza è solo imaginaria” (39), “l’amor di Dio è finto” (51), everything is different from what it seems, because the convent, as Suor Arcangela writes with an almost Pirandellian intuition, “è un teatro pieno di diversi cervelli, anzi un grandissimo hospitale di pazzi” (55). For the nun-writer there is no doubt, all the fault for the capricious and, at times, almost immoral behaviour of her sisters, is to be ascribed to those who so shamefully betray them; from their fathers to their mothers (guiltier of omission than commission), their brothers, their superiors and lastly the government of the Serenissima. Not surprisingly she dedicates her Tirannia paterna, published posthumously in 1654 (and immediately placed in the Index), to the Republic of Venice, “nella quale più frequente che in qualsiasi altra parte del mondo, viene abusato di monacar le figliole sforzatamente” (27). The Inferno monacale, in its turn, is “un tremendo atto d’accusa contro i babbi del tempo, che imprigionavano le figlie nei chiostri, e contro la Repubblica Veneta che del sacrificio di tante vittime aveva il suo metodo di governo” (Zanette IX). This pamphlet, which is still little known, is a work that “denuncia, con quella precisione che è uno dei suoi meriti maggiori, i meccanismi sociali ed economici che portano le ragazze senza vocazione in convento” (Medioli 11).

The practical motive that drives fathers to marry off only the youngest daughters, with a strange system of “maggiorascato” in reverse, derives from the desire to disburse the established sum for the dowry as late as possible, in fact, until the last born takes a husband the “padre-padrone” needs not deprive himself of his house, his fields, his “beautiful” gold ducats. Just as beautiful, but vibrating with disdain and very effective, are the pages in which our rebellious nun describes two different moments of women’s lives: marriage and entering a convent. Great is the pomp that accompanies the wedding of the “privilegiata . . . di colei destinata alle lascivie,” and she adds with polemic intent: “vagliono interi tesori le pianelle, fiocchi e stringhe della destinata a sposo terreno” (46). While quite different is the treatment reserved for the other daughter “infelice, priva della chioma donatele dalla natura, fra quattro cenci di povera lana, viene venduta per ischiava senza sperar mai liberarsi” (43). And, as if this were not bad enough, “per la figliola o sorella maritata . . . si lascariano (sic) . . . odori, giardini, gondole, livree, musiche, comedie e mille sensualità quasi oscene” (48). While the girl destined to the cloister, Tarabotti claims with involuntary humor, would consider herself fortunate “l’haver un eunuco per marito . . . riputarebbe gratia singolare un poco di libertà, una sola serva, vitto e vestito senza aver da sospirarselo e guadagnarselo con le proprie mani e lavorando, come al più delle monache avviene” (49).

The tragedy acted out against the backdrop of the cloister is Tarabotti’s, nobody doubts this, but Suor Arcangela’s greatness consists in having been able to extrapolate from the personal element material for a collective denunciation. “Dall’analisi della sua dolorosa esperienza, affrontata con lucidità ed acume, essa arriva alla condanna del potere tirannico paterno, della complicità del principe e quindi della Ragion di Stato” (Conte Odorisio 101). Our writer challenges the infamous “Ragion di Stato” with harsh words:

Alhora molti havrano da pentirsi d’haver in questo modo chiusi gl’occhi sopra questi interessi per la sola Raggion di Stato, ch’è una scena inganatrice, un’ombra infernale, una contrafatta chimera del Diavolo, un mostro nemico, anzi destruttore delle buone e sante operationi, un’infamissima magia che riempie gli oridi sepolchri de’ chiostri di misere ed innocenti donne! (42)

The “Ragion di Stato” had found its theorist in Ludovico Settala, who in his treatise De ratione instituenda et gubernanda familia had sustained the necessity of drastically reducing marriages among aristocrats in order to keep their vast patrimonies intact. The arguments used by Suor Arcangela to confute Venetian traditions are paradoxical, but only with a paradox (worthy of Swift’s pen) can she express all her righteous indignation:

E poi, già che nel far serragli di donne e in altre barbarie imitate i costumi dei Traci, dovereste anche imitarli in uccidere i parti subito nati, un solo conservandone per ogni familia, essendo molto minor peccato che sepelir vive le femine! Guai a voi cui l’interesse politico ha levato la giustizia dei sentimenti. (93; emphasis mine)

If the faults of the State are serious, no less so are the responsibilities of the Church. The Council of Trent had established that twelve years of age was “il limite invalicabile” for entering the convent, as Zanette reminds us, but it was always possible to obtain a dispensation, as in the case of Suor Maria Celeste Galilei, another girl who had become a nun by paternal choice. Moreover, as Manzoni reminds us, excommunication was the penalty for whoever forced his daughter’s will, but this remained a dead letter. The ecclesiastical authorities knew very well that the monastery, in most cases, was nothing but a “deposito” of girls, but according to tradition the girl not destined to be married had to enter the cloister and everyone, except the interested party, was satisfied with that solution; the family because it was freed of a burden, of a responsibility; the Church because it gained, if not a soul, at least a “spiritual dowry” and two arms for work; the Government because it mantained the status quo. In this respect, we should consider the letter, written in 1629, by the Patriarch Tiepolo to the Doge and the Senate:

ho usato di permettere tutte quelle agevolezze che io ho sempre potuto . . . e questo al fine che vivessero se non più consolate, almeno assai meno discontente, riflettendo in me stesso che se fossero d’altro sesso ad esse toccherebbe il comandare e governare il mondo che si sono confinate fra quelle mura non per spirito di devotione ma per impulso dei loro, facendo della propria libertà un dono non solo a Dio ma anco alla Patria, al Mondo e alli loro più stretti parenti; che in quei stretti forni delle loro celle, dove stanno a cuocersi la vita ed a crucciarsi l’animo . . . che se duemille e più nobili che in questa città vi sono rinserate nei monasteri come quasi in pubblico deposito havessero potuto o voluto altramente disponere di loro stesse, che confusione! che danno! che disordine! quali pericoli! (Zanette 35-36; emphasis mine)

The Church, therefore, being aware of this state of affairs, formally concerned itself in trying to ascertain the existence of a genuine vocation by means of a priest, known as the vicar of the nuns. But everything had already been decided beforehand, in some instances, even at the moment of birth, as Tarabotti well knew: “Ad alcune non ancora generate—o essecrabile crudeltà paterna!—vien da’ genitori assignato il monasterio per habitatione, onde, non così tosto nate, odono intonarsi all’orecchie il nome di monacha anche prima che ’l sappino profferire” (35). These words might have been read by Manzoni because they resound, almost identically, in his splendid re-evocation of the case of the monaca di Monza: “La nostra infelice era ancora nascosta nel ventre della madre, che la sua condizione era già irrevocabilmente stabilita. Rimaneva soltanto da decidersi se sarebbe stato un monaco o una monaca” (278).

The father, absolute lord of his household, could decide the future of his children with the passive acceptance of his wife, who was herself subject to his authority, and with the complicity of the organs of the constituted power. Not by chance the first book by Tarabotti was entitled the Tirannia paterna and not materna. In her Inferno monacale the Venetian writer touched briefly on the mothers, who were at the same time accomplices and victims, with words that partly justified them, “e le madri coprono a queste durezze per tema del marito” (46). Yet there is no justification in the case of the superiors, those who should protect the future nun from the violence pepetrated against her by her own family; they too are deaf and blind, they don’t hear the laments of the novice, they pretend not to see her tears. The condition of the nun “malgrè soi” trapped in a gigantic spider web, woven by the indifference, the avarice and the avidity of those who surround her, is truly dramatic. Everyone is willing to deceive her and she has no one to turn to in order to be defended from this monstrous intrigue, plotted against her. As soon as the novice arrives in the convent, Suor Arcangela writes, she is kissed and hugged (but also Jesus was kissed by Judas) by her fellow-sisters, all the better to be “imbavagliata.” Inevitably the girl, feeling betrayed by everyone, reacts with either rebellion or depression; suicide attempts are not infrequent in the convent, a fact of which not only Tarabotti, but also Suor Maria Celeste Galilei makes mention in her beautiful letters to her father.

All this “racchiuso fuoco” (70) of contrasting passions, from the mourning for a world that the novice has not been allowed to know, to indignation for the violence endured, gives rise to the bizarre and rebellious behavior that the Venetian author is able to analyze and describe in the convent. In this house of betrayed women, Tarabotti writes, there is a lack of sincerity and Christian charity, while verbal aggression, envy and gossip abound. To all these tensions one must add the torment of repressed sexuality, at which our author hints discretely with a Latin quotation taken from Saint Paul “Datus est michi stimulus carnis.” There are as well the tempters of the nuns, the “monachini” to be precise, who attempt to take advantage of this sexuality, apparently without outlet, for their obscene purposes and whom Manzoni represented in the grim figure of Egidio.

Tarabotti, who is a good observer of the human heart compares the convent to the court: here there are depraved men, there desperate women, but desperation may lead in some cases to depravity. Considering that the government of monasteries is given not to the most devoted of the nuns, but “a chi più lo ambisce,” the superiors having become so not because of their exemplary life, but thanks to their ambition, “permettono degli abusi. Ad una parte delle più libere e scapestrate, invece di corretioni, portano aiuti e favori e con altre . . . mostran di non veder gli scandalosi diportamenti, anzi li scusano.” Therefore “ogni una vive secondo il suo appetito” (74) and since human nature “è sempre più pronta . . . all’imitatione del male che del bene” (75), it follows that life in the convent is anything but exemplary, and of that “Le fonti storiche e letterarie offrono abbondanti testimonianze” (Minarelli 259).

In the case of Suor Arcangela we must not think that she rebels against convent life for lack of religiousness; on the contrary, in another work of hers, the Paradiso monacale, our nun examines the fulfillment that derives from entering the convent to follow one’s true vocation. Here, in her denunciation of the forced taking of monastic vows, she arrives at conclusions that modern readers might find obvious, but at that time must have sounded revolutionary; “Il dissuader animi così rissoluti nel servigio di Dio è da me stimato sacrilegio non disugual a quello che commettersi nel far che le meschine per ragion diversa spargono lagrime e singulti” (101).

The Inferno monacale that begins with the description of the tears and laments of the “anime . . . condanate a patir etterno martir di pene” (31), ends with a Latin quotation, taken from a Psalm, that expresses the same concept, those who enter the convent not by choice “Discendunt in Infernum viventium” (104), a quotation that perhaps suggested to the author the title of her pamphlet. From the beginning to the end, therefore, Tarabotti never has a moment of uncertainty; according to her life closed in a monastery is a hell without hope, without joy, and her treatise, that consists of about sixty pages in the 1990 printed edition by Francesca Medioli, insists on this desperation-exasperation of the forced nun. Tarabotti’s Inferno is divided into three parts of almost identical length and in it the author alternates moments of denunciation and condemnation, with long, learned and boring quotations, in which she seems to pride herself on her knowledge. We must bear in mind that Suor Arcangela’s constant recourse to ancient authors is not just a (deplorable) characteristic of hers, but of entire generations of writers. She had not received a proper education (and this she greatly regrets), therefore she fears that her assertions, while true, will not be accepted by her contemporaries if not upheld by the authority of writers and philosophers more learned and famous than she.

Tarabotti, ironically after having written that nuns die at a “decrepit age,” passes away unexpectedly in 1652, at only forty-eight years of age. Her many works, which had assured her of a certain fame and allowed her to enjoy the freedom she so aspired to (freedom of thought, freedom to write, not that of movement), fell into oblivion and a great number have been lost. The letters, published in 1650, remain and some of her treatises which have already been mentioned. Of others, such as Il Purgatorio delle mal maritate, which completes the trilogy on the condition of women in the seventeenth century, only the titles remain and we hope that some scholar will find them one day buried among other “scartafazi” contained in the archives or in private libraries.

Elena Tarabotti, like many other authors of past centuries, deserves to be studied, even though the value of her works is, pehaps, more historical and sociological than literary or philologic. From her writings emerges the strong polemic temperament of this courageous nun, who dares describe injustices sustained and who criticizes not only those who commit them, but also those who permit them. All this is done in an age in which neither the Church nor the State accept objections to their actions, as is witnessed by the tragic death of Giordano Bruno, whose autodafé in February 1600, casts a sinister glow upon this century, at its very beginning!

Works Cited

Conti Odorisio, Ginevra. Donna e società nel Seicento. Roma: Bulzoni, 1979.

Diberti-Leigh, Marcella. Veronica Franco, donna, poetessa e cortigiana del Rinascimento. Ivrea: Priuli e Verlucca, 1988.

Duby, George and Perrot Michelle. Storia delle deonne dal Rinascimento all’età moderna. Bari: Laterza, 1991.

Galilei, Suor Maria Celeste. Lettere al padre. Torino: La Rosa, 1983.

Labalme, Patricia. Beyond their sex. Learned Women of the European Past. New York: New York UP, 1984.

Manzoni, Alessandro. I promessi sposi. Milano: Rizzoli, 1961.

Medioli, Francesca. L’inferno monacale di Arcangela Tarabotti. Torino: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1990.

Molmenti, Pompeo. La storia di Venezia nella vita privata. Bergamo: Istituto d’arti grafiche, 1927.

Morino, Angelo. Prefazione. Risposta a Suor Filotea, di Suor Juana de la Cruz. Torino: La Rosa, 1980.

Zanette, Emilio. Suor Arcangela, monaca del Seicento veneziano. Roma-Venezia: Istituto per la collaborazione culturale, 1960.