A Veil of Silence

Florence's soundscape is a testimony to the grotesque gender polarization in the cradle of the Renaissance. In the fifteenth century, the ability to make a noise was considered a masculine attribute. Male Florentines were expected to shout and assert themselves, while women were supposed to be silent, and also invisible. Women who were not, prostitutes above all, were vilified. Florentine men were typically aggressive and short-tempered, apt to meet grievances by hurling stones and shouting abuse. In the city, life was lived on the streets, at high volume. There was a constant hullabaloo of traders bawling out the day's bargains, bells clanging, lads yelling, fighting, and playing football, whores screeching, and drovers shouting at their animals. The seventeenth century added the rumble of iron-shod coach wheels over paving stones to this cacophony. Repeated visitations of plague, famine, and war meant that there were many parentless Florentine boys surviving on the streets as best they could, doubtless noisily.Many of their sisters, however, were cooped up in various prisonlike charitable institutions, since, in the view of the authorities, women needed to be protected, especially from sexual encounters, whether voluntary or otherwise. An additional advantage was that bottling them up supplied a handy supply of cheap labor. Thus, within the city, high walls enclosed many different women-only spaces, where nuns and others lived lives of silent contemplation, or silent and virtuous toil, in oases of quietude. Or at least, that was the idea, but the incessant racket of the city inevitably seeped through convent walls, which in practice were not as thick, high, and impenetrable as they might have been. This failing was doubly unfortunate, as far as the nuns were concerned, because they believed the intrusion was not merely distracting, but dangerous. Renaissance theories of sound associated noise pollution with corruption and illness. Wealthy and refined people maintained country villas in the hills around the city, where they could escape the hubbub and listen to music and birdsong to recover their mental and physical equilibrium. Nuns, trapped in their enclosures, did not have that luxury. One thing this book brings out is the strangeness of Renaissance thinking about sound, which was polarized by class as well as gender. While almost any noise made by someone of the working class was treated as a problem, there were loud noises — bells, music, and gunfire — produced by the city's leading institutions that were held to cleanse the city from working-class sound pollution.The number of women who were tidied away in Florence is astonishing. By 1552 one in every twenty Florentine women was a nun. There were also walled communities of orphans, penitent prostitutes, widows, and others. In all these communities, the rules that governed their lives were sharply at odds with society on the other side of the walls. Nuns were not supposed to chatter, quarrel, laugh, or shout. Since only some of these confined women can have had an actual vocation for monastic life, the equation of silence with virtue must have come very hard to anyone with a normal appetite for self-expression. Florence was an authoritarian society, where church and state aimed between them to produce an orderly society by controlling almost every aspect of what people did. As far as noise is concerned, Rombough's book reveals that they failed

Sound (geography) · Sound system · The Renaissance · History of Emotions Research · Medieval Literature and History · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies