TODAY Winter Wednesdays: Sexy Nun Music
The Sacred Erotic in 17 Century Italian Convent Performance
In the wake of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church launched a massive propaganda campaign to draw back as many of its former followers as possible. The Church encouraged renewed focus on the soul’s potential for union with the divine, and as a result, mystics, poets, artists, and musicians across Europe immersed themselves in eroticizing depictions of the soul merging with God. In this talk, Dr. Johnson will introduce how gestures towards divine ecstasy could manifest, using examples from literature and the visual arts throughout Europe, before focusing on musical evocations of the sacred erotic in 17th-century compositions by Italian nuns.