While digging through the State Archive of Florence, Renaissance historian Judith Brown learned about Benedetta Carlini. Carlini, the archive’s entry read, was a nun from 17th-century Italy who “pretended to be mystic, but who was discovered to be a woman of ill repute.” Some further digging revealed that, after her visions were pronounced fraudulent by representatives of the Vatican, Carlini was found to have fornicated with another nun.
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That last bit caught Brown’s attention. Female mystics under investigation by the Catholic Church were often accused of fornication, but almost always with a monk or friar. In the late-medieval world — a time and place dominated by men fearful of female sexuality — lesbianism was so inconceivable that people simply refused to acknowledge its existence. Its rarity in historical documents of the time indicated that Carlini’s path to sainthood was not interrupted by baseless rumors.
In an attempt to better understand the life of this extraordinary person, Brown looked for every reference to Carlini that she could find. The result of her endeavor, a book called Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, not only elucidates religious and historical attitudes toward human sexuality, but also outlines the procedures and reasoning that the Catholic Church once used to determine whether a person’s prophetic visions were, indeed, the work of God.
Despite being a work of serious and highly relevant scholarship, Immodest Acts reads like a meticulously crafted crime story — a testament to Brown’s talent as both a writer and researcher. Carlini’s story unfolds in the same way as it did in life: chronologically. It starts with her miraculous birth in the Italian countryside and rise as a saintlike figure, and it ends with her downfall at the hands of a religious order that not only questioned her powers but feared them.
The life and visions of Benedetta Carlini
Like any aspiring saint, Carlini’s youth had a supernatural quality to it. She was born in 1590 in Vellano, a sleepy town in central Italy. Her birth was difficult, and when her father was told neither mother nor daughter might survive the process, he promised God that, if they did, he would arrange for the child to become a nun. This was several decades before the Council of Trent determined that women should enter convents of their own volition, not by coercion or predetermination.
At the age of nine, Carlini joined a community of unmarried women living on the outskirts of the nearby city of Pescia. There, under the oversight of Theatine fathers, community members devoted themselves entirely to the service of God. Their daily lives consisted of prayer, fasting, and communal work. The women were prohibited from interacting with the townspeople that surrounded their convent and frequently flogged themselves with whips to recompense for their sins.