Immodest acts Book

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.