Volume 43, Number 20 · December 19, 1996
The Power of Chastity
By Fiona MacCarthy
Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia
by Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Harvard University Press, 751 pp., $35.00
Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy
edited by Daniel Bornstein, edited by Roberto Rusconi
University of Chicago Press, 334 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Sister Wendy Beckett has been becoming a curious cult figure in Britain over the past year. She is a nun in her mid-sixties who lives in a trailer on the grounds of a Carmelite con-vent in Norfolk when she is not otherwise engaged in making films about art history for BBC television. Sister Wendy is the Lord Clark de nos jours. The BBC takes her around Europe from gallery to gallery and stands her in front of Botticelli's Primavera and Frans Hals's Laughing Cavalier. When this eager lisping figure in her wimple and nun's shoes rhapsodizes on such details as the 'lovely and fluffy pubic hair' of a Stanley Spencer nude, she silences the sniggers. Her sincerity is radiant. Sister Wendy still wears the full-length habit, which adds to her authority and mystery. Thick skirts swish around her ankles while she confronts Andy Warhol. There's the ever-present costume drama of religious black on white.[1]
Review, 3966 words
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