Sister Benedetta joined a convent at age nine. The enthusiastic author makes more of her discovery than seems justified: it's difficult to see how any study that touches on lesbianism, even in a convent, deals with ""hitherto unexplored areas of women's sexual lives."" Nonetheless, Brown has unearthed a compelling tale, and she does a fine job of research and writing about the nether side of Renaissance Roman Catholicism.
The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama.Brown (economic history, Stanford) stumbled across the bizarre story of Sister Benedetta Carlini (1590-1661), Abbess of the Theatine Convent of the Mother of God, while browsing through the State Archives in Florence. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomeo.
Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history.īorn of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. Brown was an event of major historical importance.
The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.
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