Magdalene nuns and Penitent prostitutes, Valletta [book review]

Abstract

I first came across the Magdalenes while reading for aPh.D at the University of Cambridge. It was a fleeting encounter, as the encounters of most men with these women in the early modem period tended to be. I was going through a document from the Tribunal of the Roman Inquisition of Malta dated 1606. The person under investigation was none other than the Spanish Hospitaller Chaplain Fra Pietro Rea Camarasa, Prior of the Conventual Church of St John.!t was alleged that some years before, when this priest was the confessor to the Nuns of St Ursula (not far from the Magdalene's church and monastery), his behaviour had been far from ideal. He had sex with the nuns, including the Mother Superior and among other things he enjoyed letting the nuns comb his beard. At one point - presumably because of his behaviour he was transferred away from the nuns of St Ursula to the Magdalenes, to the institution for repentant women. Whether from a seventeenth- or twenty- first-century perspective, it seems hardly the most sensible decision for a man of his inclinations; as one can imagine, his behaviour with the Magdalenes was similar as what it had been with the nuns of St Ursula.