Judith Brown records her rise and fall with a mixture of personal sympathy and historical detachment, unfolding the biography within a vivid picture of convent life and the Roman Catholic Church during the upheavals of the Counter-Reformation.īorn in an Apennine mountain village, Benedetta joined the convent as an outsider, though the town of Pescia lay in the plains only seven miles from her home. She was sentenced to the convent's prison, where she died some 35 years later.īenedetta Carlini's story is a rare example of the life of a nonaristocratic woman of the period and, according to the author, the most complete account among the handful of lesbian love affairs on record from antiquity until modern times. The documents concerning Sister Benedetta consisted mostly of transcripts of a series of inquests, carried on between 16, first by the provost (the town's chief ecclesiastical official), and then by the papal nuncio to determine whether the nun, abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, was a true divine visionary or the victim of a ''diabolical obsession.'' In the course of the investigation she was charged with other grave offenses: fraudulent miracles (including self-inflicted ''stigmata'') a dramatic wedding ceremony with Christ as her bridegroom, and carrying on a passionately erotic love affair with another sister in the Theatine order.
''Immodest Acts'' is based on papers that Judith Brown, a historian at Stanford University, discovered in the state archives of Florence while researching the economic history of the region and the Medici rule.
Ambition, however, eventually led to downfall and disgrace in a clash with the church authorities. Her quest for power, pursued by the limited means open to such a woman in Renaissance Italy, set her on the path to sainthood. Although her era was not very sympathetic to the claims of common people, especially common women, Sister Benedetta, as she emerges in Judith Brown's fascinating and highly readable account, seems to have been exceptionally strong-willed and ambitious. In her own way, Benedetta Carlini, a young nun and a religious mystic in the Tuscan town of Pescia at the beginning of the 17th century, was such a person. IN every time and place, there are certain people who have an instinct for shaping the materials of their circumstances, however simple, into deeds that command attention.
IMMODEST ACTS The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy.
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