Un monastero di famiglia: Il Diario delle barberine della SS. Incarnazione (secc. XVII–XVIII). Valentina Abbatelli, Alessia Lirosi, and Irene Palombo, eds. With Gabriella Zarri. La memoria restituita 12. Florence: Viella, 2016. 464 pp. €46.
astery. The individual authors present rigorous research but rarely pause to reflect on the wealth of information. Two brief essays by Giorgio Tagliaferro and Deborah Howard, which are conceived as responses to Gottdang and Guidarelli, respectively, offer tantalizing hints of larger arguments to be made about the convent’s significance. But this reader would have wished for a greater effort at synthetic interpretation, either by the editors in the introduction or in a separate essay. The nuns of San Zaccaria used art and architecture to make an argument about their place in Venetian culture and society. Such an addition would do the same for the authors’ important but still somewhat cloistered scholarship.