AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Modern life is full of pressure - deadlines, doomscrolling, dating apps. It can make you want to return to a simpler time. Maybe a convent in 16th-century Spain. A new book makes the case that even though nuns in the 1500s may not have had to deal with screens, they did have to grapple with frenemies, overbearing church officials and shaky finances. In "Convent Wisdom," scholars Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita scour the writings of Renaissance-era nuns for nuggets of insights that can apply to current-day dilemmas.
Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita join us now. Welcome to the program.
ANA GARRIGA AND CARMEN URBITA: Thank you so much.
RASCOE: You both have PhDs from Brown University. That's where you met. How did you both end up so fascinated with nuns? And let's start with you, Ana.
ANA GARRIGA: For me, it was because I was studying in Spain, and I was focusing on early modern literature. And I was like, I want to read a woman that was able to publish in the 16th century, and the only option was St. Teresa of Avila. So after that, I was truly fascinated by the way all these women were able to revolt and to write.
RASCOE: So it was the nuns. They were the ones who were able to publish, and that's how you got interested in them.
GARRIGA: Yeah
RASCOE: And, Carmen, what about you?
CARMEN URBITA: I was studying at Oxford. I was doing my master's in literature. I still didn't know what I was going to do my PhD about, but I just came across this autobiography by a French nun called Jeanne des Anges. She was possessed by many, many demons, and I was really shocked at how - the fact that she wrote about it in a way that she made her demons her own.
RASCOE: She made the demons her own. What do you mean by that?
URBITA: You know, we've all watched these nunsploitation movies where you see demons possessing women in a very physical and very, you know, voyeuristic way. So I was fascinated to see this other side of possession. She talked about possession in her own terms. She talked about how these demons had to do with her own personality and her own traits. So I thought that was very, very interesting.
RASCOE: In the book, you point out that there weren't a lot of options for women back in this time. So why do you feel like the lives of these nuns in particular are relevant to today?
URBITA: I mean, if you were a woman in the 16th or 17th century and you didn't want to get married and risk your life giving birth, probably you just wanted to join the convent to live with your friends or your family members, the female family members who already lived there. Or you were fascinated by the lives of the saints who were really famous at the time, and you just wanted to emulate them and try to achieve sainthood. There were many reasons why you wanted to join the convent. But one of them as well was that it was the only place where women at the time would have the - well, the time and the means to write about their own experience and to share that with other women. We've tried to recover this female archive and continue to do what they were doing - just recover these writings for the ones who are coming right after. And maybe we'll find some answers or at least a little bit of peace for the present. I don't know.
RASCOE: There is a funny passage where, kind of using the 17th-century nun Sor Juana as inspiration, you lay out five steps to writing an assertive, non-people-pleasing email.
GARRIGA: (Laughter).
RASCOE: Tell me more about that.
GARRIGA: Yeah. Carmen and me are, like, extremely people pleaser. One of the first seminars that we took at Brown was a seminar that was exclusively devoted to the writings of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. That - it's probably, like, the most famous nun writer. She lived in 17th-century Mexico. She was, like, a very atypical nun because she was an intellectual and she took part in the intellectual circles of her time. And she was a master of rhetoric. So she wrote this very famous letter. Basically, she had to find a way to revolt against her superiors, and she did it in a beautiful letter that was, like, a perfect maneuver without being, like, too rebellious.
URBITA: It's like the sandwich technique. You say something that - it's going to make your reader feel great, and then you say something terrible about yourself because you're so humble. And then, when they're not expecting it, you say what you really want to say but in a very subtle way. And then you finish up with, again, you're being really laudatory and - yes.
GARRIGA: Let's not forget that Sor Juana ended up signing some of her letters as, I, the worst of all.
URBITA: Yeah.
GARRIGA: So...
(LAUGHTER)
RASCOE: OK. You know, a lot of the book also kind of catalogs the growing bond between the two of you. Were there any challenges or competition? Because, I mean, you guys are both studying, like, a very specific line of work.
URBITA: Well, before meeting, I thought, we're going to hate each other.
(LAUGHTER)
URBITA: Just 'cause we were doing exactly the same thing.
GARRIGA: I didn't want to tell that, but...
URBITA: Think we...
GARRIGA: ...It's true. Yeah.
URBITA: I think we both thought, oh my God. Who's this girl? We're going to hate each other. Something that we learned from our nuns is that the fact that these women had to live together for their whole lives made it harder to just get people out of their lives at the first difficulty. So we learned something of value there. There are better ways to try and work out things that may arise in any relationship - friendship or any other kind of relationship.
RASCOE: And one of you was actually coming to terms with your own sexuality as you were doing this research. I mean, how did reading about these sort of repressed nuns help with that realization?
URBITA: I mean, it was truly therapeutic. You know, it was life-changing, in a way. I was married. Then I got divorced during this time, and I came out of the closet. And it's hard to say that I realized, but yeah. In part, I already knew, but I had to face the truth.
GARRIGA: It's very funny to think that early modern nuns helped you...
URBITA: Get out of the closet.
GARRIGA: ...Get out of the closet.
URBITA: Yes. I mean, they can really change your life.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah.
That was Carmen Urbita and Ana Garriga. Their new book is "Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life." Thank you so much for joining us.
GARRIGA: Thank you for having us. It was great.
URBITA: Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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