Liturgical spaces and devotional spaces: analysis of the choirs of three catalan nuns’ monasteries during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Abstract

Choirs in female monastic and convent communities are spaces whose complexity has been highlighted because of their multipurpose and multifunctional nature. Although they are within the community’s private sphere of prayer of the divine office, it has also been noted that they play a liturgical role as the space from which the nuns ‘hear’ and follow the celebrations taking place in the church and even in the choral altars. The devotional–liturgical binomial is joined by other contrasting terms, like esglesia dintra–sgleya de fora, indicating a duality, as follows: the claustration (as an enclosed, internal and private space of the nuns) and the external church accessible to priests and laypeople, as well as private devotion versus community devotion. The Poor Clares of the monastery of Sant Antoni i Santa Clara actually mentioned the choir altar as nostro altar, underscoring the close bonds that joined them to a liturgical table in this private space, as opposed to those of the esglesia defora. The objective of this article is to study the choirs of three female monasteries in Barcelona during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—Sant Pere de les Puel·les (Benedictines), Sant Antoni i Santa Clara and Santa Maria de Pedralbes (both Clarissan)—from a holistic standpoint, including spaces, functions, goods, furnishings and decorations.