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17th Century Europe, 17th Century Italy, Benedetta Carlini, Charlotte Rampling, Daphne Patakia, Homosexuality, Interesting Women, Monks and Nuns, Paul Verhoeven, Religious Stuff, Virginie Efira
Sorry for my very long absence. Covid completely up-ended my work load in ways that have made doing any writing for pleasure nearly impossible. But this weekend my husband dragged me out of the house to go see a movie, and I felt I simply had to blog about it.
(And my subtitle is a riff on an old Benny Hill skit that reimagines Little Bo Peep as a 70s porn film. For some reason, that skit impressed me way too much as a kid.)
Spoiler Alert: If you plan on seeing this film in the theater, you may want to wait to read this until you have done so, since my review discusses major plot points.
Benedetta (2021, dir. Paul Verhoeven, French with English subtitles) tells the story of a lesbian nun in 17th century Tuscany. She is dedicated to a convent in the small town of Pescia when she is ten. Already at this age she feels a special connection to the Virgin Mary; the night after joining the convent, she kneels in prayer before a statue of the Virgin; the pedestal holding the statue breaks and the statue topples over onto her, pressing its exposed breast close to Benedetta’s face.
A decade later, Benedetta (Virginie Efira) is content with her life as a nun, although she doesn’t get along well with Sister Christina (Louise Chevillotte), who seems to be the biological daughter of the Mother Superior Felicita (Charlotte Rampling in a great performance). But she begins having visions in which Jesus appears to her, often defending her from bandits or snakes. She also begins to discover her sexual attraction to the rather coarse novice nun, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), when she accidentally sees the novice naked while bathing.
Benedetta’s visions are often accompanied by seizures, and so Felicita decides that Bartolomea should share a cell (or more properly just a curtained-off enclosure) with Benedetta to help her if she has a fit. During one vision, in which Benedetta sees Jesus on the cross and realizes he has a vagina instead of a penis, she receives the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.
Although the convent’s priest believes what Benedetta is experiencing, Felicita is more skeptical, pointing out that genuine stigmata are always accompanied with the wounds of the crown of thorns, which Benedetta does not have. Benedetta leaves the chamber but is soon found collapsed on the floor, bleeding from wounds to her scalp. In an unearthly voice that seems to represent Jesus, she declares that Benedetta is being persecuted. That resolves the question of authenticity for most of the nuns, and word begins to spread through Pescia that she is a saint. The priest pulls some strings and gets Benedetta appointed abbess, relegating Felicita to the status of a mere nun, which she accepts with equanimity.
One of the benefits of being mother superior is that Benedetta and Bartolomea now have a private room, and Bartolomea wastes no time in introducing Benedetta to lesbian sex. Unable to pleasure her deeply enough, Bartolomea carves a statue of the Virgin Mary into a dildo and the two carry on, not realizing that Felicita can spy on them though a hole in the wall.
Although Felicita can accept her demotion, Christina can’t. She tries to denounce Benedetta to the priest in the confessional, falsely claiming that she saw Benedetta cut the stigmata into herself with a piece of broken glass. The priest persuades her to make the accusation in front of the other nuns, but Felicita refuses to support Christina’s version of events and the priest orders Christina to flog herself. The whole incident traumatizes her so much she soon commits suicide by throwing herself off the convent roof.
That persuades Felicita to take action. Even though the Plague has broken out in Tuscany, she travels to Florence and denounces Benedetta to the Papal Nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who arrives and conducts an investigation. He tortures Bartolomea, who eventually reveals everything to him and gives him the dildo as proof. He orders Benedetta to be burned in the town square. But the local populace are not willing to see their saint die, especially since she had promised that Pescia would be spared from the Plague as long as she was alive. Benedetta displays the stigmata and denounces the Nuncio as her persecutor, and the townspeople riot and free her and kill the Nuncio while Felicita, infected with the Plague, throws herself on the flames.
Afterwards, Bartolomea confronts Benedetta with a shard of pottery she found when she untied Benedetta from the stake. She accuses Benedetta of being a fraud and faking the stigmata. Benedetta responds that she doesn’t know what she does when she is having visions, and she returns to the convent, with an epilogue text telling us that she lived in solitary confinement for the next 30 years.
I really liked the movie up until the point where the Nuncio got involved, because at that point it degenerated into predictable clichés about tyrannical clergymen torturing and burning people. In particular it dwells at some length on a supposed torture instrument, the Pear of Anguish, which is used on Bartolomea. Supposedly these devices were inserted into an orifice and then cranked open, causing intense pain and damage to bone and tissue. But despite some uncertainty about what ‘pears of anguish’ were used for in the 17th century, they’re not torture devices because the few that aren’t 19th century forgeries aren’t designed to crank open but rather cranked closed; they spring open and don’t generate enough force to do anything more than be vaguely uncomfortable.
But before that, the film offers a nice view of the complexities of convent life: the daily lives of the nuns; some of the work they do; the complex personal politics of the space; and the interplay between faith, skepticism, and politics. The film has a nice running motif of seeing that Verhoeven develops nicely to explore the issue of different kinds of vision.
Benedetta’s visions as they are showed to us are not unlike the visions some medieval nuns reported, and the film consistently refuses to take sides in the question of whether Benedetta’s visions are genuine or whether she suffers from some form of mental illness or epilepsy. Unfortunately, about the time Benedetta becomes mother superior, the film stops showing us her visions, so that element of the film gets somewhat forgotten.
My biggest complaint about the film, which will not be a surprise, is that a film written by two men and directed by one can’t help but indulge the male gaze too much. The nudity slowly becomes more explicit, especially when Bartolomea is stripped naked to be tortured, and in the last conversation between the two nuns both of the women are entirely nude. The two fairly explicit sex scenes feel rather gratuitous. Verhoeven simply can’t resist the lure of the more salacious elements of the story and succumbs to the temptation to treat these ‘lesbians’ with a prurient interest.
Yeah, But Did It Happen?
A lot of it, yes.
In the early 1980s, historian Judith C. Brown discovered the records of two investigations into the nun Benedetta Carlini in the Florentine archives and was able to reconstruct a substantial amount of information about her. She was born in 1590 to a prosperous silk-worm farmer, Giuliano Carlini. Her birth was a difficult one and Guiliano vowed to dedicate the child to the service of the Virgin Mary if mother and child survived, which they did; ‘Benedetta’ means ‘blessing’. Giuliano, surprisingly, was literate and educated his daughter quite well, emphasizing her spiritual gifts.
As a young girl, she experienced strange things. A black dog mysteriously attacked her and then vanished, and a nightingale seemed to regularly imitate her singing. The family decided that the dog had been the Devil and the nightengale was sent by the Virgin. When she was 9, Giuliano decided that the time had come for Benedetta to enter a convent. She bid farewell to the nightingale and it flew away and was not seen again. She joined the Theatine house in Pescia, a group that were technically not nuns but laywomen living communally and following the Rule of St. Augustine, but Verhoeven can be forgiven for simplifying this detail, and to simplify I’ll just call the inhabitants nuns.
Soon after she joined the Order, Benedetta was praying in front of a statue of the Virgin when it fell over, which scared her but which she interpreted as evidence that the Virgin wished to kiss her. Beyond that, however, she seems to have been a fairly typical if highly obedient nun. Then in 1613, she began to report visions. In her first, she was in a heavenly garden with a beautiful fountain. In other visions, she was attacked by lions and other wild animals, only to be saved by Jesus, who appeared on horseback to defend her. These visions happened when she was praying, and others present reported that she seemed to be in a trance and often gesticulated and spoke incompressible words.
Benedetta and her confessor, Paolo Ricordati, agreed these were real visions, but wrestled with whether they were from God or the Devil. On Ricordati’s advising, she began to pray for struggles, because those would be more likely a gift from God rather than a seducing vision from the Devil. Two years later, her prayers were answered with painful attacks of paralysis. But in 1617, her visions resumed, this time being filled with frightening images of young men pursuing her with weapons; these visions could last for up to 6 to 8 hours. Eventually, she asked for help and it was agreed that a younger nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, was assigned to share her cell and to provide aid when Benedetta requested it.
In 1618, the nuns relocated to a new house, and Benedetta walked the entire route in a trance, seeing angels accompanying her and the Virgin greeting her at the new house. Three months later, she received a trance in which she saw the Crucifixion and received the stigmata, which Bartolomea described as looking like small rosettes.
These developments deeply impressed the nuns. They voted to select Benedetta as their new abbess (which didn’t involve demoting their previous abbess). By Lent of 1619, Benedetta was in the habit of preaching sermons to the nuns, a highly irregular thing for an abbess to do. She preached in a trance, encouraging the nuns to scourge themselves as she did so. She spoke not as Benedetta Carlini but as an angel. Ricordati was troubled by this development, but felt that since Benedetta was not preaching per se but rather speaking as a prophetess channelling the words of an angel, it was acceptable.
In March of that year, she had a vision in which Jesus removed her heart. Three days later, he replaced it with his own heart, one that felt much larger. He also ordered her to never eat meat, eggs, or grains and drink only water. He also assigned her a guardian angel, Splenditello, who carried a branch that had flowers on one side to represent the good things she did and thorns on the other to represent her sins; when she erred, Splenditello would strike her with the thorny side, making her feel physical pain.
In May of 1619, Benedetta announced that she was to marry Jesus. (Note that by this time, she was about 30, not about 20 as she is in the film.) After a week of preparations (in which the nuns borrowed numerous items from other religious houses in the area), there was a complex wedding ceremony conducted; this too Father Ricordati was ok with. During the ceremony, Benedetta saw Jesus, the Virgin Mary, numerous saints, and many angels appear, and Jesus put a golden ring on her finger; she narrated all the details to the assembled nuns. Then she preached a sermon speaking as Jesus, declaring that Benedetta was the “empress of all nuns” and that those who did not believe in her would not be saved. The whole ‘marriage with Jesus’ element is something Verhoeven chose to entirely omit from the story, which is a pity because it plays an extremely important role in the actual events.
Benedetta’s behaviors are certainly unusual, but hardly unprecedented. Late Medieval and Early Modern nuns of a more mystical bent frequently had visions; Benedetta’s older contemporary, St Teresa of Avila, is perhaps the most famous example in her period, but Italian nuns such as St Catherine of Siena and St Angela Foligno also had such experiences, and Benedetta and her fellow nuns were highly aware of St Catherine’s example and many of her experiences mirrored Catherine’s, including prolonged fasting, visions, and stigmata. Female mystics frequently spoke of Jesus as the “bridegroom” or “lover” of their soul, and marital imagery was a common way to describe union of the soul with Jesus. And Benedetta was clearly familiar with St Catherine; she was eventually made the house’s patron saint. The two truly unusual elements in the story are the elaborate wedding ceremony, and Jesus and angels speaking directly through Benedetta, but apparently even these elements did not strike Ricordati as automatically problematic, especially since Benedetta had been able to demonstrate some control over the phenomena, thereby conforming to St Paul’s statement that Christians do not receive a spirit of disorder but of order.
However, Benedetta’s marriage ceremony coincided with her house’s application to be elevated to a full convent, and that process drew her to the attention of the papal authorities, who had requested that the provost of Pescia, Stefano Cecchi, give them a report. Cecchi was fully aware of the wedding ceremony, and was apparently uncomfortable with it, because he had tried to restrict who could be present at it. Then he forbade anyone to discuss the ceremony, and decided to conduct a formal investigation of the matter.
He examined Benedetta’s stigmata and determined that they produced fresh blood when the dried blood was washed off. He visited her a total of 14 times over the following months, and became more perplexed by her stigmata, because sometimes they seemed to be healing and other times they bled freshly. At one point she exited the examination and then rushed back in with blood pouring down her face and in great pain. Ultimately Cecchi concluded that she was a true visionary. The pope elevated the house to full status as a monastery and Benedetta was confirmed as its abbess. This whole series of events is simplified in the film into a single examination that happens before Benedetta becomes abbess; indeed, it’s really why she becomes abbess.
Two years later, Benedetta died. Ricordati came immediately and commanded Benedetta to live again, and to the nuns’ surprise, she revived and described another vision she had had. Perhaps Ricordati was familiar enough with the symptoms of Carlini’s seizures that he was able to recognize her as being merely unconscious. This incident also happens in the film, but later, during the second formal examination.
The second examination began sometime between August of 1622 and March of 1623. A new papal nuncio, Alfonso Giglioli, became interested in Benedetta for reasons that are unclear. He was far more skeptical of her than Ricordati or Cecchi. During his investigation, Giglioli identified several contradictions in her visions. The ring that she eventually produced as her wedding ring was a shabby one, quite different from what she had described.
The nuns, when questioned, also pointed to some odd behavior. Despite having announced her strict diet, one nun claimed to have seen her furtively eating salami and mortadella. Another said that when she preached and urged the nuns to courage themselves, she never actually struck herself with the scourge she felt but rather seemed to smear it with blood from her hand. Damningly, two nuns claimed they had repeatedly spied on Benedetta through a hole in a door and had witnessed her renewing her wounds with a needle. (There is a hole in the bedroom wall in the film, but Felicita uses it not to spy on Benedetta’s stigmata but on her sexual activities.)
The most startling testimony, however, came from Sister Bartolomea. She said that repeatedly, after she had disrobed, Benedetta would call to her for assistance and when she came over, Benedetta would throw her down on the bed, climb on top of her, and rub their bodies together. When Benedetta did this, she would speak as Splenditello and tell Bartolomea that what they were doing was not a sin because he was doing it, not Benedetta. Benedetta, when question by the investigators, denied having any memory of what she did when Splenditello was controlling her. This is the point where Verhoeven really deviates from the facts. Splenditello never plays any role in the movie at all, and in the film it is Bartolomea and not Benedetta who initiates sex. There was no dildo. The nuncio himself never showed up in Pescia, never tortured Bartolomea, never attempted to burn Benedetta, and was not killed in a riot (he actually died in 1630).
By November of 1623, the investigation had ended and the nuncio had issued a ruling. Benedetta’s stigmata had vanished and she said that she was no longer receiving any visions, although she does not seem to have admitted any imposture. It was concluded that all the apparent miracles were intentionally fabricated by Benedetta. She was removed as abbess. But exactly what the nuncio did beyond that is unclear because she mostly disappears from the records at that point. In 1661, a nun recorded in her diary that Benedetta had died at age 71 of a fever after spending 35 years in prison, by which she likely meant solitary confinement. If that nun was correct, however, that means that Benedetta was not put into solitary confinement in 1623, because that would have been 38 years earlier. Brown speculates that Carlini must have done something in 1626 that merited more harsh treatment than whatever she received in 1623, but we can only speculate about what might have happened. But the townspeople were apparently still quite interested in Carlini, because they sought to get access to her body and the nuns had to bar the monastery doors until she could be buried. Bartolomea died in 1660.
Much of the scholarly debate about Carlini has turned on the question of how to interpret her sexuality. Brown read her as being a lesbian, using the character of Splenditello to express her own lesbian desires, and therefore viewed her through the lens of the history of women’s spirituality and sexuality. But some critics have argued that doing this reads Carlini through a contemporary lens of sexual identities that would have been entirely foreign to Carlini herself; the very concept of ‘lesbians’ did not exist in the 17th century and it’s not even clear that Carlini, Bartolomea, and the investigators recognized Bartolomea’s description as being about sex. For most people of the era, sex required a penis being inserted into some orifice, so in the absence of a penis, they may not have recognized sex as happening. (And it’s worth noting the Verhoeven evidently can’t imagine lesbian sex without a substitute penis.)
Historian Brian Levack has approached Carlini from a very different standpoint. In his work on exorcism in the Early Modern period, he argues that demonic possession provided female ‘victims’ an opportunity to depart from normal social rules about meekness, passivity, and restraint by enacting a wide range of taboo behaviors, including convulsions, blasphemy, vomiting, exhibitionism, and so on. Thus possession was an opportunity for victims to perform a drastically different social role than the one they normally were bound by. (In a previous blog post, I discussed a similar reading of the Salem Witch Trials.) Levack thus views possession as a form of performance, situating Benedetta’s actions not in the history of sexuality but rather in the history of religious theater, and it is worth noting the degree to which Benedetta’s visions and seizures had a literally theatrical element to them; the most obvious example is her wedding ceremony, but also her move from the old house to the new one and a couple of religious processessions she orchestrated.
Finally, it is worth at least pondering the gender roles Benedetta maintained. Although she was a nun and underwent a spiritual marriage to become a literal bride of Christ, she occasionally adopted the persona of two male figures, Jesus and Splenditello. When she was Jesus, Benedetta was both bride and groom in one body, and when she had sex with Bartolomea, she played a male role both by initiating sex through seduction/deception and by being on top of Bartolomea. Is it possible that we should view Benedetta not as a lesbian but as an example of what we today would call a trans man or gender-fluid person? Unfortunately, that’s a question we can’t answer because the investigators didn’t ask Benedetta about how she understood her gender. She never engaged in any form of cross-dressing or breast-binding (that we know of), but she did engage in attempts to control her body through fasting and, apparently, through self-mutilation, both practices which some trans individuals today struggle with. Her seizures, the physical pain her body experienced, and her dramatic death and revival might also point to a sense of alienation from her body. And to borrow a point from Levack’s approach, her behavior while having visions and being possessed allowed her to temporarily put off her highly-restricted feminine identity and engage in male-coded behavior such as drawing attention to herself, preaching, taking a leadership role, and initiating sex. Thus it is not unreasonable to consider whether Benedetta was seeking to express a sense that she was male even if her body was not.
Benedetta does a nice job of calling attention to a fascinating and very obscure woman. The film does a very good job of exploring convent life and exploring some of Benedetta’s experiences. But by making Bartolomea the sexual aggressor and excluding the details about Splenditello, I think Verhoeven misrepresents Benedetta in a fairly key way, and the whole third act departs from the most fascinating elements of her story in favor of a clichéd false ending that seriously diminishes my appreciation for the film.
Want to Know More?
An Historian Goes to the Movies 
Are you interested in reviewing The Last Duel? I think it’s right up your alley.
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Clarification: by “right up your alley” I don’t mean you’re necessarily going to like the movie. I mean you’re familiar with the period it depicts.
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I’d like to get around to it. I haven’t read the book yet. I do take donations with a request to review a particular film or tv show.
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You’re back!! I was so excited to log on here and see this post.
Benedetta sounds like a fascinating woman, and very worthy of a movie, but it does sound like unfortunately this movie succumbed to the temptation to add too many cliches, and details that seem to have been added just to be shocking.
I think an uncomfortable but necessary question we have to ask, alongside questions about Benedetta’s identity, is whether she was a rapist.
The description of her advances on Bartolomea didn’t sound very consensual to me, and when I looked up the actual words of Bartolomea’s testimony, that becomes even more clear: “When Bartolomea would come over, Benedetta would grab her by the arm and throw her by force on the bed. Embracing her, she would put her under herself and kissing her as if she was a man, she would speak words of love to her […] And thus by force she held her…” The description of how she claimed it wasn’t sinful because she was Splenditello is also very reminiscent of how other religious figures throughout history have sexually abused their followers while claiming it was some kind of religious experience.
Now, all of this is complicated because it’s fully possible that Bartolomea was simply scared and framed the encounters as non-consensual because to say otherwise would have put her in danger, too. But I think an obvious question here is why, if she was Benedetta’s willing lover, she would come forward with this accusation at all. She wasn’t tortured like her movie counterpart, and it doesn’t seem (from.what I can tell) like anyone was accusing her of this, so why say anything of the sort? Why not protect her lover and herself by keeping quiet?
Maybe she was simply so scared by the investigation that she thought she’d better reveal everything she knew (in the least damaging way to herself possible). But I think it’s equally plausible that she was telling the truth about being manipulated and forced. And it’s worrying to me that, from what I can tell, no one seems to be asking this question. Everywhere, they seem to be referred to as a mutual relationship, as an affair, as partners. The movie, as you note, makes Bartolomea the sexual aggressor. I understand that people would rather have an empowering LGBT figure in a consensual relationship than an LGBT sexual predator, especially since there are already such damaging stereotypes about LGBT people being sexual predators. Certainly we don’t want to feed into or be seen to validate those stereotypes. At the same time, the reality is that some LGBT people have historically been sexual predators, just like some cis/het people, and the fact that they’re LGBT doesn’t mean we should ignore that.
Sorry for the long comment, but it’s a delicate and complicated issue that I think we need to think carefully about.
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I think that’s a very hard question to answer, substantially complicated by the fact that their definition of rape is very sharply different than ours. The contemporary notion of rape as non-consensual violation of a person’s body autonomy in a sexual way is extremely recent—it really began to emerge in the 1970s, although you can find it existing in a shadowy way much earlier. In Benedetta’s day, ‘raptus’ (the Latin word they would have used) included the notion of what we would call sexual assault, but also what we would call kidnapping—it was a crime that involves taking a woman away from where she was -without the consent of the man who had authority over her-. In other words, it was a violation of consent but not necessarily her consent (although the question of whether she had resisted was a factor as well).
An added complication here is whether, in the absence of a penis, the women were understood to be having sex at all. I don’t think the two women involved could have conceived this as a violation of sexual consent because raptus was pretty much exclusively a crime committed by men.
A third complication is, to analyze this in the modem frame of consensuality, whether Bartolomea would have had a sense of being able to consent—and the woman herself clearly felt her consent was not a factor. First, nuns are required to obey their abbesses in all things, because obedience to the abbess is training for obedience to God. Legally and morally, Bartolomea’s consent is controlled by Benedetta from the moment she became abbess. Additionally, Splenditello as a representative of God has to be obeyed as well.
So by the standards of their day, no, Benedetta is not a rapist. She didn’t kidnap Bartolomea and didn’t violate her with a penis and Bartolomea has no consent to give or refuse to her abbess—the abbess controls her consent.
By modern standards, it’s still a fuzzy issue because Benedetta can presume Bartolomea consents to whatever she orders. By the contemporary standard of vigorous affirmative consent, yes, Benedetta does seem to be engaging in sexual assault. Abbesses don’t have such sweeping control of consent today and lesbian sex is a recognized thing, so a modern Benedetta would probably be accused of rape by a modern nun.
But I always come back to the principle that we must understand historical people on their own terms on not on ours. 21st century Americans do not get to be the moral arbiters of all human culture for all time. So while we have to acknowledge that what’s happening looks a great deal like what we would think of as rape (especially given Bartolomea’s apparent discomfort about what was happening), I think we need to be cautious about labeling it that way because no one at the time is likely to have seen the activity as meeting any element of what they would have seen as ‘raptus’.
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I feel like if we can’t label it as rape because it wouldn’t have been seen as such back then, though, we shouldn’t even be allowed to call it sex or speculate about whether Benedetta was a lesbian, or outside the gender binary. After all, those too are using modern definitions and boundaries to talk about what happened.
If we’re going to acknowledge that what happened between Benedetta and Bartolomea was a form of sexual activity – which from what I’ve seen, everyone discussing this seems to – then I think it’s valid to then ask the follow-up question of whether it was consensual. Because at that point, we’re already using modern terminology and categorization and it doesn’t make sense to suddenly stop when the issue of consent comes up.
Even if we just go by how they would have seen things at the time, though, I think we can’t just rule out the issue of consent. If we take Bartolomea’s testimony at her word, she seemed quite clear that she was forced into something she didn’t want, whether or not she saw that as rape per se. If she really felt that Benedetta’s authority over her was so complete she had no right to say no, why bother to specify twice that Benedetta grabbed her and held her down by force? Why say that Benedetta had to offer justifications for why this was okay? IMO such things would have been unnecessary if Bartolomea had no ability to question or object to what Benedetta was doing.
It’s also worth noting that the investigation seemed to clearly view it as an unacceptable use of Benedetta’s authority as abbess, so I think it’s fair to say that even then they had a concept that “Because the abbess said so” didn’t automatically make something okay, and that if an abbess or other religious authority went beyond the normal bounds of their role, they weren’t justified in doing absolutely anything to the people under them.
It’s a tricky balance, because we want to take history on its own terms and yet we also inevitably view it through our terms. I agree with you that 21st-century Americans don’t get to be the moral arbiters of all time, and yet I also think we can’t just leave our morals at the door. For example, we certainly wouldn’t hesitate to say that slave-owners raped their slaves, despite the fact that they legally owned them. So we’re always bringing some of our contemporary ideas to how we look at history, and that certainly seems to be the case with Benedetta’s story. So much of the interest seems to come from the parts of this story which are relevant to contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality, and if we allow for that then I think we have to include contemporary ideas of consent. But even if we put all of that aside, I think even in her own time what she did would have been viewed as a violation, even if it wasn’t exactly seen as rape.
Basically, I think if we’re going to ask if Benedetta was a lesbian, we have to ask if she was a lesbian rapist. And if we’re going to put those contemporary terms aside, by the standards of her own time she’s still an abbess who violated the normal boundaries of abbess behavior and, if we take Bartolomea’s testimony at her word, forced a subordinate into physical intimacy that she didn’t want.
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Those are fair points. It’s clear that Bartolomea and the men who heard her testimony were disturbed by what she described. It’s unclear whether they understood it as sex but hesitated to say so because homosexuality was too taboo to refer to explicitly or if they couldn’t make sense of it because they couldn’t conceive of lesbian sex but still felt there was something significantly wrong about it.
And I think that applies to the rape issue here as well. Did they see it as ‘rape’ in our terms—a violation of consent? I don’t think so—rape was a crime a man committed against a woman under another man’s authority. There was no penetration and no penis. But they certainly felt something improper happened, and it was serious enough that they chose to demote her as abbess.
One final complication is, was Bartolomea telling the full truth about what happened? Once it was clear she might get in trouble, she had some motive for depicting herself as an unwilling partner. This is an extremely common problem with the history of homosexuality in the Early Modern period—trial
records and other semi-legal documents like this case are our primary window into same-sex intercourse, and the nature of the sources means we can’t be 100% confident of the honesty of the testimony.
And I agree that calling Benedetta a ‘lesbian’ is problematic in the sense that the word today refers to an ‘identity’ that some women choose to adopt, but that identity only emerged in the late 19th century and therefore can’t apply to Benedetta. I think we -can- talk about ‘lesbian sex’ however—female in female intercourse—and in that sense it’s reasonable to call her a ‘lesbian’—a woman who engaged in what looks very much like sexual activity with another woman. We just don’t have another word that distinguishes the sex act from the identity. And, as I’ve said, there is the thorny issue that an approach like this risks stripping LGBT people entirely out of history.
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It’s impossible to identify Benedetta’s sexual orientation or identity at this late date. But the fantasies of Christ as rescuer and bridegroom and of a male angel beating her sound like heterosexual fantasies to me. And of course only female partners were available to Benedetta. Imposing modern ideologies on her is a real problem.
For me the really interesting question is how much of her behavior was deliberate impostiture and how much was self delusion or mental illness.
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So I agree and disagree with you here. On the one hand, we don’t have enough information about what Benedetta thought about her sexual desires/activities to fully parse her orientation and gender in our terms. And of course, our terms would mean little to her.
But at the same time, saying we can’t identify it means that LGBT people have no past that reaches back beyond 150 years or so. To LGBT people, the question of whether she was lesbian, bisexual, trans or something else matters a lot, because it reaffirms our belief that “we’ve always been here”, that we have a past that can be written about and analyzed and that history and culture can’t erase us.
But the question of whether she was having genuine visions of some sort or was entirely a fraud is extremely interesting. I’m hesitant to invoke mental illness, because medicalizing things like religious experience removes the pressure to understand and explain her experiences. If she’s mentally ill, we don’t need to explain her actions and on some level cannot explain them, because she’s crazy. I’m more interested in the question of, regardless of her sanity, why her experiences manifested in the particular way they did. Was she consciously imitating Catherine of Siena? Did claustration help her achieve a sense of empowerment that allowed her to transcend her understanding of her gender? Or was she simply fabricating signs that gave her control and allowed her to express her sexual desires? So many questions we can’t answer.
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Of course LGBT existed, sort of. By which I mean they wouldn’t recognize the modern categories and give us funny looks. But I object to the practice of reading everybody and anybody as belonging to one or the other of those categories when the evidence will not bear it. Actually, come to think of it I kind of object to labeling people altogether. Benedetta was Benedetta! An unwilling nun with lots of issues stemming from her situation. Slapping a modern category label on her does not imo help us understand her problems.
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Good to see you back in style! I probably won’t ever watch this, but it sounds like it might be a good double feature with Ken Russell’s The Devils….
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Wikipedia offers a backgrounder of this type of film (“Nunsploitation”) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunsploitation and “Vulture” nominates an 18-title collection of the best of them at https://www.vulture.com/2021/12/the-best-nunsploitation-films-ranked.html
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One of the examples of male-coded behavior you list is that of initiating sex. While that certainly would have been considered immodest, would it have been seen as male coded? I had thought (and I could be wrong), that the attitude in the late medieval and early modern was that women were, on average, more lustful then men. See, for instance, the various Arthurian legends where virgin knights are tempted by women, or a whole bunch of stories in the Decameron.
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