Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21857/moxpjhzj4m
Kinship, Estate and Recruits: The Female Convent of St. Chiara in Copertino and the Integration of the Castrioti family to the Italian South (16th – 18th c.)
Nada Zečević
orcid.org/0000-0002-9132-534X
; Department of History & Centre for the Study of the Balkans, Goldmiths University of London, London, United Kingdom
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* Corresponding author.
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on power relations hinted as taking place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the walls of the female monastery of St. Chiara in Copertino near the south-Italian town of Lecce. This monastery was endowed by the noble Castrioti family, whose ancestors immigrated to Italy from Albania during the late 1460s, following the death of their leader George Castrioti Scanderbeg and the subsequent Ottoman conquest of this region by the Ottomans. A search of the nuns’ social backgrounds and their familial connections, as recorded by the local notary evidence which largely supplements the family’s and ecclesiastical scattered sources attests to the hidden tensions and conflicts in this endowment. The family’s ambition to control the monastery through their abbesses and their local familial alliances, accumulated monastery’s wealth and education reflected well the monastery’s inner relations, as well as the family’s strategies of integration, first into the local seigneurial nobility, then the town’s early modern civic structures.
Keywords
Castrioti; nunnery of S. Clara in Copertino; nobility; early modern period
Hrčak ID:
318581
URI
Publication date:
27.6.2024.
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