Blood and Milk on Thy Tongue: Suor Domenica da Paradiso's Theology of Divine Love and Vocality in the Laude of La Crocetta (c.1515-1553) (2025)

Mystic, preacher, and theologian Suor Domenica da Paradiso (1473-1553) struggled against and triumphed over masculinist ecclesiastical authorities at every step of her religious life. As a woman preacher, her voice faced censorship during her lifetime, and her voice as a musician has been neglected throughout history. Nevertheless, she understood vocality as a manifestation of divine love which extended far beyond the convent wall. Based on archival research in Florentine archives, I identify Domenica’s theology of love and vocality, and its manifestation in a previously unstudied book of anonymous lauda texts (vernacular spiritual songs) written in Domenica’s convent of La Crocetta during her lifetime. While it has previously been claimed that the Crocetta archive lacks evidence of a musical culture beyond the minimum liturgical requirements during Domenica’s life, this thesis brings to light new evidence of a strong culture of lauda composition beginning when she founded the convent in 1515. In fact, Domenica herself was known to improvise laude. The lauda manuscript features texts without music notation or other instructions (e.g. cantasi come) and are not in typical musical forms. They do, however, refer to themselves as being sung, even including a lauda about the singing of laude. Most songs in the manuscript are love songs about the divine.Chapter 1 (“‘Singing in a Certain Marvelous Way’: Creating Laude in La Crocetta”) identifies the probable authors of the lauda manuscript using investiture records, death records, an account of Domenica’s miracles, and miscellaneous files titled simply “ricordi.” The chapter concludes with an analysis of the opening poem based on scholarship about early modern musical embodiment. The poem uses bodily imagery to describe the process of aligning oneself with God through singing the following laude. Chapter 2 (“‘I Give You My Body, Which You Have Created’: Divine Love, Bodily Spirituality, and Love Songs about Christ”) uses Domenica’s letters, sermons, and theological manuscripts to place her sense of divine love within the context of wider Dominican mystical women’s devotion, with a focus on Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) as her model. Domenica utilised intense bodily imagery throughout her spiritual teachings and practices, often focusing on the senses. I analyse selected laude as textual sources reflective of Domenica’s love-based devotional practices. Chapter 3 (“The Tongue Inflamed: Spiritual Nourishment and the Vocality of Love within Domenica da Paradiso’s Theology”) uses various theological sources such as Domenica’s Visione del Tabernacolo, Meditazioni e divine Intelligenze, Giardino del Testamento, and Reportorio in a discussion of her understanding of vocality, and how it was inextricably linked to love. As Domenica continued to preach in spite of attempts at censorship, vocality took on particular importance: she understood the voice as a physical manifestation of the love of Christ which could not be silenced. This involved metaphors in which the tongue is a pen that writes with the ink of love, and in which the tongue is inflamed by the heart. In many cases, the voice—sung and spoken—also provides spiritual nourishment through sound, which Domenica likens to Christ’s blood and the Virgin Mary’s breast milk in the Visione del Tabernacolo.Based within an archival fondo which was created and—for most of its history—cared for by women, my methodology returns women’s voices to their own histories. By focusing on vocality and love within Domenica da Paradiso’s theology and music we can gain a better understanding of the role of vocality, music, and devotion within women’s homosocial communities, thus gaining insight into the systems and experiences of sixteenth-century womanhood more broadly.

Harmonising the Soul: Singing Laude for the Devotional Ascent

Iconocrazia, 2023

This essay discusses the work of Dominican Fra Serafino Razzi (1531-1611) as an advocate for singing for the devotions. While historians recognize Razzi's critical contribution to the lauda (devotional songs in Italian) in the publication of his Libro primo delle laudi spirituali of 1563, less known are Razzi's ideas on the integration of singing within the devotional ascent, in particular, the intention of laude singing as preparation for the mystic visio dei. Razzi was among the 'most illustrious Dominicans' in sixteenth-century Italy: a learned theologian with a humanist education, a confessor and preacher with a pastoral approach, and a prolific published author, including sermons and devotional manuals. Music occupied him throughout his long, industrious life: Razzi wrote about music, collected laude, and created new laude via the contrafact process, compiling six books of laude. His ideas echo Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas, and mystic Johannes Tauler. Sources for the paper include Razzi's devotional works, sermons, and annotations to various laude within his lauda collections.

Dominican Contemplazione and the Musical Lauda: Fra Serafino Razzi

Explorations in Renaissance Culture, 2013

ra Serafino Razzi (1531-1611) was a key figure in Dominican culture in Florence and beyond. Though he lacked extensive musical training and never held a music post, he played a significant role in the creation and dissemination of the musical laud a, a devotional song with Italian or Latin texts. The laud a had reached the height of popularity in Florence during the late fifteenth century, where it was sung in confraternities, religious houses, and noble circles. It became associated with the Dominicans, and after Girolamo Savonarola's death, it was sung mostly in the Dominican convents.! Razzi collected and composed laude (both texts and music) and also arranged new workscontrafacta-from older songs. Besides sending laude to Italian religious houses, Razzi had also laude published to improve distribution. His first publication, in 1563, is a lauda anthology transmitting older works mostly from the late fifteenth century as well as more contemporary pieces. 2 One of his final publications was the lauda anthology, Sanctuario di laudi 0 vero rime spirituali (Florence, 1609). His most ambitious collection of laude, however, is the autographed manuscript, Palatino 173, in the Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, a work transmitting two hundred laude with annotations in four separate books dated between 1586 and 1596, each dedicated to a different convent (three of which were in Florence). Razzi's collections provide one of the strongest contributions to the lauda genre, for not only are they key to the transmission of many fifteenthcentury laude, including works by Savonarola and travestimenti spirituali of carnival songs by Lorenzo de' Medici and others. They promoted a specific and particular devotional purpose, that of contemplazione, a purpose that may have influenced Razzi's lauda musical style. This study will examine the devotional purpose Razzi promoted for the lauda and his lauda style. Razzi entered the Dominican convent of reformer Girolamo Savonarola, San Marco in Florence, as a novice in 1549 and was ordained in 1558. This was followed by four years studying of classical and theological texts in Pistoia and in Florence at Santa Maria Novella. Razzi spent years preaching in various parishes in Tuscany and also held appointments as prior, confessor, and vicar general for religious houses throughout the Italian peninsula, mostly in Umbria and Tuscany, particularly Florence. A prolific writer, he produced over one hundred books and tracts on an extraordinary variety of topics: sermons, poetry, history, biography, lives of the saints, philosophy, devotions, music, commentaries on Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, and even healthy eating and travel (in which he documented his own peripatetic life).3 Razzi wrote a biography of Savonarola, copies of which were widely circulated in Dominican circles.

Pursuing a Savonarolan Thread: Patrons, Painters, and Piagnoni at S. Caterina in Cafaggio

Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy, 2020

A Lineage of Apocalyptic Queens: The Portrayal of Birgitta of Sweden in Domenica Narducci's Sermon to Caterina Cibo (1533)

The Legacy of Birgitta of Sweden Women, Politics, and Reform in Renaissance Italy, 2023

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license.

Preaching in a Poor Space: Savonarolan Influence at Sister Domenica's Convent of La Crocetta in Renaissance Florence, in Patronage, Gender and the Arts. Essays in Honor of Carolyn Valone, edited by Katherine A. McIver and Cynthia Stollhans, New York: Italica Press, 2015.

Sister Domenica da Paradiso founded La Crocetta, a Dominican-affiliated convent, in Florence in 1511. The architecture reflected Girolamo Savonarola's focus on simplicity in his imagined but never built convent. The convent also provided a safe space for Sister Domenica to engage in her unusual activity of preaching and giving sermons to her conventicle of secular followers and her nuns.

Forming the Local Cult from the Religious Center. Osanna da Cattaro and Serafino Razzi

Book Counter-Reformation Sanctity in Global and Material Perspective, ed. by Ruth Sargent Noyes, Routledge 2024., 2024

This chapter examines the religious, political, and cultural context of the formation of the cult of the local santa viva, the blessed Osanna (1493–565) from Kotor (present-day Montenegro). The Vita of the Dominican anchoress, who converted from the Eastern Orthodox confession, was written by friar Serafino Razzi from the convent of San Marco in Florence, after his mission in Dubrovnik and Kotor (1589). Analyzing the hagiography and historical narratives, this chapter discusses the flourishing of the devotion and posthumous reputation of the Osanna cult within the local community in regard to the Dominican goals and papal politics directed from Italy.

Domenica da Paradiso and the Prophetic Discipline of the Body and Soul

Body, Gender, Senses: Subversive Expressions in Early Modern Art and Literature, 2024

Although some assumptions changed by the end of the Renaissance, women’s sex-ual difference was understood as deeply rooted in their bodies, particularly intheir lower body heat, and was usually seen as indicating a natural inferiority. The idea that materiality has a history helps to frame the long-standing identification between women and their bodies, which isfound as far back as Aristotle and Aquinas. Women’s capacity to procreate was interpreted as a sign of weakness, making the body not only an anatomical fact, but also a symbolic construction. The case of the sixteenth-century woman prophet Domenica da Paradiso can shed new light on the subjective movements that made so many women think of their own body, and women's bodies in general, not as a mark of inferiority, but rather as an instrument of spiritual and intellectual advancement. Moreover, her writings allow us to deepen our understanding of Renaissance women's ideas on and practices of the dialectic between body and intellect that continues to be key to reconstructing the experiences of late medieval and early modern women.

Female Visionary Saints: an alternative Interpretation. Female sanctity, Visionarism and Hysteria in the Medieval and Modern Age

Pazze di Lui – Mad for Him: Hagiographic Stereotypes, Mental Disturbances and Anthropological Implications of Female Saintliness in Italy and Abroad from the 13th to the 20th Century, Mattia Zangari (Ed.), Tübingen: Narr 2024 [= Orbis romanicus, hg. v. Bernhard Teuber und Andreas Dufter] , 2024

Isabella Gagliardi Discretio, diagnosi e patente di santità alla prova della "pazzia" (secc. XI-XIV) Maurizio Gronchi Sante e malate, non solo d'amore? Uno sguardo storico-teologico. .. .. .. .

Observant Reform and the Cults of New Dominican Saints in the Southeastern Adriatic

Observant Reforms and Cultural Production in Europe. Learning, Liturgy and Spiritual Practice. Pietro Delcorno, Bert Roest (eds.), Nijmegen: Radboud University Press, 2023

Painting and Humanism in Early Modern Florentine Convents

"Artiste nel chiostro. Produzione artistica nei monasteri femminili in età moderna", ed. by Sheila Barker with the collaboration of Luciano Cinelli, O.P., 2015