Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Theatines was a visionary who suffered from stigmata: or did she.....

We really do not know until the end of the book, where we read of the investigations into her miraculous day & night time visions, and it is then we learn of the testimony of her roommate and the sexual acts perpetrated in the name jesus & of angels with ridiculous names....

Seriously, I believe that people have visions.... and most everyone who knew this woman believed her visions, but then she seemed to get a little carried away with her power and investigations began.

The book was easy to read and it was interesting.... ( )

Das Leben einer lesbischen Nonne in Italien zur Zeit der Renaissance

Sor Benedetta: entre santa y lesbiana. Entre 1619 y 1623 ( )

The subtitle lied. Benedetta Carlini was not a lesbian. She was a mystic. And possibly a sexual predator. She didn't have the category of lesbian, she seems to have experienced heterosexual arousal vis-a-vis Jesus as well, and the lesbianism was not the only thing that made her fucked up. There was also a king hell lot of narcissism, "holy anorexia," and self-mutilation.

Ballsy, though. I have to give her credit for having the nerve to give herself stigmata as part of her years-long campaign to be acknowledged as a saintly visionary in the tradition of Catherine of Siena.

Brown really should not have gone for the sex appeal in the subtitle & introduction. It's a relatively minor part of the story and undercuts the central tension of this microhistory: is Carlini faking the visions? Will she be found out?

Not a good introduction to microhistory or the history of sexuality, but a good solid piece of the former. ( )

Immodest Acts is subtitled The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy—which, while intriguing and liable to make you pick it up in the bookstore, is unfortunately rather misleading. The majority of this slim book is focused not on the sexuality of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a seventeenth century abbess and mystic from the Tuscan town of Pescia, but rather on her quest for power and recognition as a mystic and her subsequent fall from grace. (Her alleged lesbian affair is discussed in about ten pages.)

Carlini's story is undoubtedly an interesting and unusual one, and the records of the contemporary inquests into her visions—Carlini claimed to have visions of Christ and of angels, to have contracted a mystical marriage with Christ and to suffer the stigmata—are fascinating with what they show us about how power worked in the Catholic Church of this time and place. While at first Carlini's claims were believed, suspicions were eventually raised, and she spent the last 35 years of her life imprisoned within the convent, not only because of her fraudulent mysticism but because she had used her claims of divine authority to force another nun to have sexual relations with her.

Brown's analysis doesn't really live up to the interesting nature of her source material, though. I think the use of the term "lesbian" to describe Carlini is too anachronistic to be useful, especially since she seems to have been more of a sexual and emotional abuser than anything else. Nothing about the relationship between Carlini and Sister Bartolomea appears to have been consensual.

Carlini's life tells us more about the pursuit of power than about what it was like to be a woman who loved other women in Renaissance Italy—indeed, there is remarkably little by way of contextualisation and comparison throughout. Immodest Acts was written when the historiography of women's/gender/sexuality studies was in its comparative infancy, and it shows. I can't help but think that if a historian had come across these documents more recently, they'd have done something much more interesting with them. ( )