Playing papal politics

As has been well established, Bologna and Rome maintained a contentious relationship during the early modern period. Though technically under the sovereignty of the Church, Bologna clung obdurately to its republican past, enabled by both cultural tradition and legal loophole, leading historians to label it a ‘republic by contract’. However, scholars have yet to grapple with the ways Bolognese women, especially women religious, participated in this pro‐civic, anti‐papal network. At the same time that the senators of Bologna, though often divided by factionalism, were unified in their disdain for the tightening of the papal collar, cloistered women found themselves under assault by a Church endeavoring to limit their autonomy in the tense decades following the Council of Trent (1545–63). This environment set the stage for a natural, if unexpected, alliance between the city's senate and its nuns. The two groups perceived the encroaching papal power as a threat to their sovereignty, and both recognized the strength that could be derived from a united Bolognese front. A batch of previously unstudied archival letters in Bologna's Archivio di Stato documents this partnership, revealing senatorial and monastic parties negotiating fruitfully – and with surprising parity – in the public sphere

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