Review: Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
Sacred Hearts
by Sarah Dunant
An absorbing story of convent life in the sixteenth century, Sacred Hearts takes us inside the walls of Santa Caterina and the private lives of its nuns. (Assuming you can call the life in a convent ‘private’, which Sarah Dunant quickly shows is a dubious proposition when the slightest gossip can ripple through its residents in a manner of hours.) In the first few pages we meet our main characters, the dispensary mistress Suora Zuana and newest resident, Serafina. Brought to Santa Caterina against her will, Serafina is desperate to escape and reunite with her lover, but her beautiful singing makes her an asset the nunnery is loathe to lose. Suora Zuana befriends the miserable girl and begins teaching her the knowledge of herbs, which Zuana learned from her father many years before his death forced her into her current home. But even as Serafina begins to adjust to life in the convent, she is constantly planning and keeping her eyes open for opportunities to escape.
The politics and intrigue in this book are intense. You have scheming women and power struggles within the convent, as a nun named Umiliana tries to wrest the convent in a more Spartan, disciplined direction. She butts heads again and again with the abbess, a noblewoman well-versed in the art of collusion. Madonna Chiara, as the abbess is called, negotiates between the small world of the convent and the conflicts of the squabbling Italian noble families and the all-powerful Church, but one can never be sure if she’s serving the convent’s needs or her own desires.
In my imagination, a convent is a place where women sit around all day praying and meditating on the cross, surviving on the charity of church donations to eat and drink. But Dunant’s richly populated novel depicts a community that is vibrant and bustling. The nuns earn coin making medicine in the dispensary for the bishop, and performing plays and concerts for Ferrara’s wealthy elite. Since many of the women are of noble families, they come to the convent with the luxuries of their rank. Rich silks and velvet are used in their garments, lovely dyes are used for clothes and to color sugary marzipan sweets, and pampered little lapdogs are even kept by a few women. But the Counter-Reformation seeks to cut out these worldly ‘extras,’ adding tension to a story already full of passion and repression.
I found Sacred Hearts to be quite entertaining. It has a bit of a slow start, and I think this is largely due to the introduction of so many characters right away. It took me a little while to keep all the nuns and their duties straight. But by the halfway point I was completely absorbed in the world of Santa Caterina. The book was only released two weeks ago, and it is already on nearly one hundred wishlists at Paperbackswap.com, so I bet this will be quite a popular book this summer.
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