The Church of Sant’Agostino

The Life of the Nuns

As opposed to the male order, whose main interest was the apostolate and the care of the souls of the faithful, the female order was centered around the life of the cloister.
According to the Augustinians’ constitution, significant space was devoted to prayer. Strict rules governed diet and the observance of silence. Inside the convent, the various tasks were differentiated on the basis of the level of education of the nuns; the best educated sisters prayed in choir, read, and carried out intellectual activities, while the others, called converse, did manual labor and the most menial tasks.
Since they were cloistered nuns, they could not live by collecting alms, so their support and upkeep depended on real estate property deriving from the dowries of the nuns or left to them in wills.
From the fifteenth century, the convent of Santa Marta could also count on income from the miniatures painted by the nuns to decorate the choir books and antiphonaries for use in the cathedral, made at Lecceto Hermitage.