Judith C. Brown
Immodest Acts
A Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy
Oxford University Press 1986
Stron 222, format: 15x22 cm
Książka jest używana: na pierwszej stronie podpis poprzedniego właściciela, stan bardzo dobry
Immodest Acts is at once an immensely compelling narrative and the product of a major historical discovery. Drawn from a rich array of primary documents, which the author found by accident, it illuminates an entire area of Renaissance social history, religious studies, and the history of sexual relations between women never previously explored.
Set in Pescia, a small town near Florence, in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the book tells the story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Theatine Convent of the Mother of God. Benedetta had dedicated herself to the service of God early in life, having been sent to the convent by her well-to-do parents at the age of nine. At age 23, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature and became wracked by physical pain. She was assigned a companion, a young nun named Bartolomea Crivelli, to help her in her travail. In time church authorities became suspicious of Benedetta's claims of supernatural contacts with Christ. The resulting ecclesiastical inquests revealed that Benedetta and Bartolomea had been engaged in a sexual relationship for years. The story of their relationship and Benedetta's fall from the honored position of Abbess is both moving and dramatic.
Historically, Immodest Acts sheds tremendous light on the possibilities open to women in pre-modern times: the channels available to their ambition, their lives within convents, their relation to authority, their economic and sexual options. Beyond that, it records the life of a religious visionary and mystic—shows us what those visions were and where they came from—and demonstrates how the Church establishment of the time, feeling increasingly threatened by charismatic experience, pursued those who, like Benedetta Car-lini, claimed to have it. It is also, from a time span of more than 1,500 years of Western history in which there are perhaps a dozen known references to lesbianism, the most thoroughly documented and fascinating case to date.
Contents
Introduction 3
1. The Family 21
2. The Convent 29
3. The Nun 42
4. The First Investigation 75
5. The Second Investigation
Epilogue 132
Appendix. A Note
About the Documents with
Selected Translations 139
Notes 165 Index 207
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