Female monasteries and silent prayers on the borders of Naples kingdom

Abstract

From the recent increase of studies, more richly focused along time about female monasteries that historiography has proposed for twenty years, a special interest is concentrated on the role of laboratory of configurations that the monastic setting represents: an interweaving of destinies of family strategies, politic circumstances, unexpressed subjectivities but also original writings. With this research work a case from a city of the kingdom of Naples, L’Aquila in the XVII century is presented. L’Aquila is situated on the border of the papal State, therefore a place of transition of ideas and cultural models betwen the capital city and the Adriatic. The female religious world that is going to be presented goes around the cases of Maria Teresa Ciampella and MaddalenaVentiquattro  to clarify spiritual sources and inquisitiveness that characterized either L’Aquila as the peninsula and Europe in the end of XVII century. This investigation points to the uncertain but intense mystic dimension that offers lots of examples