This is a time of inflated dowries which means that many families can only afford to have one daughter married, those left sent to convents where the dowry intended to pay for their upkeep for the rest of their lives is not so great. Then there is Suora Benedicta, the choir mistress, a gifted composer and musician, and Suora Magdalena, almost forgotten in her cell, an aesthetic given to ecstasy and visions who, in the past, has been visited with the stigmata. Suora Zuana is the dispensary mistress, an intelligent woman skilled in herbs and healing, who has brought with her into the convent the thirst for knowledge of the power of nature to heal the body learned from her father, a professor of medicine at the University of Ferrara. Suora Umiliana, the novice mistress, feels the changing winds outside the convent and would prefer a more austere regime that would bring the nuns closer to God.

Madonna Chiaria is the abbess of Santa Caterina, born of a noble family she has lived in the convent since childhood, a consummate politician, her first allegiance is to the convent. Within its walls are a variety of women, all seeking God, yet each with her individual aspirations. The convent operates as any city state, with the same problems of finance, factions and cliques, shifting loyalties and jealousies and gossip. Life inside the convent is as stratified as secular society with choir nuns, women of good birth who bring with them dowries and influential names, and the conversa, ‘lay’ nuns who in effect are servants performing the menial tasks that keep the convent running. The Church reformers have not yet set their eyes on Santa Caterina so, although the nuns are enclosed, many are still in touch with the world around them. Sacred Hearts is set in the Benedictine convent of Santa Caterina in Ferrara in 1570, a time of upheaval with changes brought about by the Counter-reformation, the Church’s response to the Protestant Reformation, threatening to alter the way the nuns lives are lived.

Sacred hearts by sarah dunant