Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)

September 7, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the early 2000s, anthropologist Francesca Sbardella was mapping the remains of a Breton Carmelite saint when, feeling unwell during a visit to a French monastery, a nun unlocked a grate and led her inside for tea. That moment of unexpected hospitality—combined with the profound alienation she felt watching the nuns’ gestures and movements—sparked a question: what is everyday life actually like inside a cloister? To answer it, Sbardella did something unusual. She obtained permission from the local bishop and the nuns themselves to live inside the monastery as if she were a postulant—a woman undergoing a trial period before entering religious life—rather than as a visiting scholar. The result is Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister, a book that reveals what standard historical and theological accounts miss: the small, repetitive, material practices through which nuns build a life oriented toward a God they cannot see.

What a Postulant Sees That a Visitor Cannot

Sbardella’s fieldwork method was key. A postulant in the Carmelite order lives under the same rules as the nuns for one or two months, taking on their rights and regulations. This status allowed her to participate in the daily routine without disrupting it. More importantly, it let her make mistakes—and those mistakes became her most revealing data.

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What you'll learn

1 (02:02) **Introduction & Guest Background** - Host Armand Gildas introduces Francesca Sbardella and the book, part of the New Books Network and Society for the Anthropology of Europe collaboration.
2 (04:16) **Origin Story: How the Book Began** - Sbardella recounts her entry into the cloister through research on relics, leading to a pivotal moment of feeling unwell and being let inside.
3 (08:09) **Methodology: Living as a Postulant** - Sbardella explains how she gained permission to live inside the cloister as a postulant, not just an observer.
4 (11:41) **Warning Sign: The Pen Drive Incident** - A concrete example of how a small mistake unveiled the moral and social architecture of the cloister.
5 (14:43) **Core Concept: Defining "Inhabited Silence"** - Sbardella defines silence not as emptiness, but as a form of language and a lived space filled with presence.
6 (21:05) **Daily Life: The Structure of Silence** - A description of a typical 16-hour-45-minute cloister day, with only 75 minutes of free speech.
7 (23:44) **The Mechanism: Coming to Terms with Absence** - Sbardella explains the strenuous, repetitive work of perceiving the presence of an invisible God.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. Francesca Sbardella experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman.

Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister (Berghahn Books, 2025) was translated from Italian by Claudio Bendazzoli, with a foreword by Simon Ditchfield and an afterword by Fabio Dei.

Francesca Sbardella is an anthropologist and historian of religion and a professor at the University of Bologna.

* This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books.

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