to satisfy
some spiritual necessity of their being; unfortunately, the picture is
untrue. In many of these convents, and particularly in those where vice
was known to flourish, the membership was largely recruited from the
ranks of the nobility, it being the custom to send unmarried,
unmarriageable, and unmanageable daughters to the shelter of a cloister,
simply to get them out of the way. Women who had transgressed, to their
own disgrace, the commonly accepted social laws, whether married or
unmarried, found ready protection here; a professed nun was under the
care of the Church and had nothing to fear from the state, and this fact
was not unknown. To show how clearly this condition was understood at
the time, it is interesting to note that when the scandal concerning the
convent of Santa Chiara was first made public, an easy-going priest, who
had acted as a go-between in many of these intrigues of the cloister,
said that he could not see why people in general should create so much
confusion about it, as these were only "affairs of the gentlefolk [_cosi
di gentilhuomini_]"!

The public disgrace of Santa Chiara was due to the evil ways of one of
its members, Sister Umilia, a woman who had had some experience in
worldly things before she turned her back upon them. Her name was
Lucrezia Malpigli, and, as a young girl, she had loved and desired to
marry Massimiliano Arnolfini; but her parents objected, and she was
affianced to the three Buonvisi brothers in consecutive order before she
finally found a husband, the two older brothers dying each time before
the wedding ceremony. After her marriage, to her misfortune, she met, at
Lucca, Arnolfini, the man whom she had loved as a girl at Ferrara, and
it soon appeared that the old love was not dead. Within a short time her
husband was stabbed, by Arnolfini's bravo, as he was returning with her
from the church, and rumors were at once afloat implicating her in the
murder. Guilty or not, she was frightened, and before four days had
passed she had taken refuge in the convent of Santa Chiara. Safe from
all pursuit, she endowed the convent most liberally, cut her hair, and
became the Sister Umilia, who was described as a "young woman, tall and
pale, dressed in a nun's habit, with a crown upon her head." For
thirteen years little was heard of her, and then a telltale rope ladder
hanging from the convent wall led to disclosures of a most revolting
nature. It was discovered that the su