[The above video is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in
this video.]
In the year 1600, at the tender age of nine, Benedetta Carlini was sent to a nunnery in the small city of Pescia in north-central Italy. What today might be considered cruel and highly unusual was then a way for Benedetta’s somewhat well-to-do parents to provide their daughter with protection. After several years at the nunnery which Brown describes as fairly unremarkable, Benedetta began to have a series of increasingly disturbing visions, including being sexually harassed by demons. Sister Benedetta was eventually assigned a companion named Bartolomea Crivelli (also a sister in the convent) whose presence, as the subtitle hints at, would later become problematic for her. Bartolomea’s job was to assist Benedetta through her “periods of ecstasy,” and was present when she supposedly received the stigmata and exchanged mystical hearts with Christ.
Naturally, this caught the attention of a Counter-Reformation Catholic Church whose main goal was maintaining a sense of propriety. Two separate people (men, naturally) were set out to Pescia to investigate what was happening. Stefano Cecchi was the first to investigate Benedetta over a number of visits throughout late 1619. Cecchi’s main purpose was to ensure that she was remaining within theologically accepted boundaries, which she was extremely conscious of doing, knowing that moving outside of them would have put her reputation, and more importantly her life, in danger. Cecchi, satisfied that Benedetta was not a heretic, left quietly to resume his position as the provost of Pescia. At least for a while, things appeared to return to normal inside the convent.
At some time between August 1622 and March 1623, the papal nuncio sent several representatives, led by Alfonso Giglioli, to examine Benedetta’s claims again. In 1620, she had become an abbess at the incredibly young age of thirty, but had been deeply troubled by the recent death of her father. The nuncio’s representatives proceeded much in the same way as in the earlier set of visits. Their final ruling on Benedetta’s case isn’t even given until the beginning of the epilogue:
“The story of Benedetta Carlini is shrouded in mystery for the next forty years. No records exist of the nuncio’s pronouncements, and it is only the chance survival of one fragment of one nun’s diary that allows us to know the outcome. On August 7, 1661, that nun, whose name has not come down to us, wrote in her diary: ‘Benedetta Carlini died at age 71 of fever and colic pains after eighteen days of illness. She died in penitence, having spent thirty-five years in prison’” (p. 132).
At this point, you might be wondering, “And the lesbianism? What about the lesbianism?” Its relevance and Brown’s discussion of it are extraordinarily fleeting. Bartolomea gave testimony that Benedetta sexually molested her and engaged in frottage with her while possessed by the spirit of a male demon known as Splenditello. While Benedetta and Bartolomea’s sexual behavior merits perhaps a few sentences in the book, in the Introduction and peppered throughout the text, Brown discusses how Benedetta used Splenditello’s “maleness” as a foil to explain away her rape of Bartolomea (and according to Bartolomea’s testimony, that’s exactly what it was). The book remains ambiguous as to whether Benedetta deliberately used her male demon as an excuse, or whether she actually thought he possessed her, but the nuncio’s representatives seem unconvinced as they accuse her of “pretending” to be a mystic, and being a “woman of ill repute.”
One wonders what Brown’s motivation was in giving the book such a gratuitous title. The content of the book, a scholarly interpretation of a set of documents couched deep in the State Archive of Florence entitled “Papers relating to a trial against Sister Benedetta Carlini of Vellano, abbess of the Theatine nuns of Pescia, who pretended to be a mystic, but who was discovered to be a woman of ill repute,” isn’t really commensurate with the sensationalism of the title. The book provides an intelligent analysis of a lot of topics, from early seventeenth-century life to cultural assumptions of sex and gender. I almost wished the publishers would have chosen one of those horribly academic titles to give a better impression of what it was all about. I vote for “Transgressing Normative Gender Identities Through Self-Conscious Afflatus in Renaissance Italy.” But then someone’s going to pick it up thinking that “afflatus” means something dirty. Sometimes you just can’t win.
Naturally, this caught the attention of a Counter-Reformation Catholic Church whose main goal was maintaining a sense of propriety. Two separate people (men, naturally) were set out to Pescia to investigate what was happening. Stefano Cecchi was the first to investigate Benedetta over a number of visits throughout late 1619. Cecchi’s main purpose was to ensure that she was remaining within theologically accepted boundaries, which she was extremely conscious of doing, knowing that moving outside of them would have put her reputation, and more importantly her life, in danger. Cecchi, satisfied that Benedetta was not a heretic, left quietly to resume his position as the provost of Pescia. At least for a while, things appeared to return to normal inside the convent.
At some time between August 1622 and March 1623, the papal nuncio sent several representatives, led by Alfonso Giglioli, to examine Benedetta’s claims again. In 1620, she had become an abbess at the incredibly young age of thirty, but had been deeply troubled by the recent death of her father. The nuncio’s representatives proceeded much in the same way as in the earlier set of visits. Their final ruling on Benedetta’s case isn’t even given until the beginning of the epilogue:
“The story of Benedetta Carlini is shrouded in mystery for the next forty years. No records exist of the nuncio’s pronouncements, and it is only the chance survival of one fragment of one nun’s diary that allows us to know the outcome. On August 7, 1661, that nun, whose name has not come down to us, wrote in her diary: ‘Benedetta Carlini died at age 71 of fever and colic pains after eighteen days of illness. She died in penitence, having spent thirty-five years in prison’” (p. 132).
At this point, you might be wondering, “And the lesbianism? What about the lesbianism?” Its relevance and Brown’s discussion of it are extraordinarily fleeting. Bartolomea gave testimony that Benedetta sexually molested her and engaged in frottage with her while possessed by the spirit of a male demon known as Splenditello. While Benedetta and Bartolomea’s sexual behavior merits perhaps a few sentences in the book, in the Introduction and peppered throughout the text, Brown discusses how Benedetta used Splenditello’s “maleness” as a foil to explain away her rape of Bartolomea (and according to Bartolomea’s testimony, that’s exactly what it was). The book remains ambiguous as to whether Benedetta deliberately used her male demon as an excuse, or whether she actually thought he possessed her, but the nuncio’s representatives seem unconvinced as they accuse her of “pretending” to be a mystic, and being a “woman of ill repute.”
One wonders what Brown’s motivation was in giving the book such a gratuitous title. The content of the book, a scholarly interpretation of a set of documents couched deep in the State Archive of Florence entitled “Papers relating to a trial against Sister Benedetta Carlini of Vellano, abbess of the Theatine nuns of Pescia, who pretended to be a mystic, but who was discovered to be a woman of ill repute,” isn’t really commensurate with the sensationalism of the title. The book provides an intelligent analysis of a lot of topics, from early seventeenth-century life to cultural assumptions of sex and gender. I almost wished the publishers would have chosen one of those horribly academic titles to give a better impression of what it was all about. I vote for “Transgressing Normative Gender Identities Through Self-Conscious Afflatus in Renaissance Italy.” But then someone’s going to pick it up thinking that “afflatus” means something dirty. Sometimes you just can’t win.
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