Benedetta Carlini

Benedetta Carlini was born on 20 January 1590 (St. Sebastian night),[3] in the remote mountain village of Vellano [it], located in the Apennines, 45 miles (72 km) northwest of Florence.

[4] Benedetta was an only child in her middle-class Italian family; Giuliano provided in his will that after his own and his wife's death, his house should be turned into an oratory dedicated to the Mother of God.

The group lived in a retreat in a private house, where women led a communal life engaged in prayer, spiritual exercises and the production of raw silk.

Originally a letter that Augustine of Hippo addressed to a group of nuns led by his sister, who were experiencing difficulties in the governance of their convent, the Rule does not regulate in detail all aspects of monastic life.

[23] In 1614, just before the Pescia Theatines received permission to build their convent, Benedetta, now a young woman of 23, reported to her mother superior and father confessor about her supernatural visions.

Visualization of people, places and events in the life of the Holy Family was recommended in prayers manuals by Luis de Granada, St. Charles Borromeo and others, which Benedetta occasionally read.

But instead of encounters with Jesus and angels, Benedetta now was pursued at night by handsome young men who wanted to kill her and who beat her all over with iron chains, swords, sticks, and other weapons.

[32] During the Lenten season of that year, Ricordati was regularly visiting the convent to hear Benedetta give sermons to the other nuns while they purified themselves with their whips as part of their penance.

Had Benedetta not been in an altered state of consciousness, Paolo Ricordati would not have allowed her to give sermons because "it is shameful for a woman" to speak in a Christian church, even for an abbess.

But Ricordati unexpectedly let her proceed, and other nuns had already started to decorate the convent because, in one of her recent ecstasies, Benedetta had spoken of the impending marriage and possibly couldn't remember this in the normal state of conscience.

[38] Because the community did not have a whole set of things needed for a solemn mystical marriage ceremony, they sent a servant off to borrow the altar cloth from several people outside the convent.

Word of what was happening spread and many people wanted to participate, but, no one, not even Father Ricordati, was allowed by the provost to enter the convent during the preparation or the ceremony itself.

Then this supernatural man, invisible for all but Benedetta, gave an entire sermon and represented her as his bride and servant, who is the greatest that he has in the world, and told all to obey her.

They knew that St. Catherine's marriage with Christ had left no visible evidence either, but the desire for publicity was unusual for a true mystic and seemed suspicious, especially if other people there didn't see any supernatural person or objects.

Benedetta's contemporaries were well aware that because women were denied a place in the social and public discourse of their age, they thought to make their voices heard in other ways.

For example, Maria de la Visitación, the nun from Lisbon, also had the stigmata and became one of the most influential European women of the 1580s, consulted by rulers and high church officials, before she was discovered to be a fraud.

[44] Not only the nuns of the Congregation of the Mother of God were concerned about Benedetta's religious experience, but also the leading ecclesiastical official in the town - provost of Pescia Stefano Cecchi, and Pescian secular authorities.

When the nuns were cloistered and could not leave the convent area even for a short time, a board of outside administrators had been established in the fall of 1620 to aid Benedetta with some of her tasks.

Investigators did not find in Carlini charity, humility, patience, obedience, modesty, and other virtues to the eminent and heroic degree which usually accompany the true spirit of God.

And even Benedetta's visible stigmata could be not the marks of Christ but of the devil because these appeared not during the fervor of prayer, in the harshness of the wilderness, or during a long period of solitude, but when she lying softly in bed where the enemy of God resides.

The nun, who had been standing nearby, noticed that Benedetta didn't strike herself even once, and that to make it seem as though she had she smeared the whip with blood from her wounds in her hand.

Yet that two women should seek sexual gratification with each other was virtually inconceivable despite such cases had been described in the legal commentaries of Antonio Gómez, Gregorio López and Prospero Farinacci, which had been printed and widely circulated throughout Italy in the previous decades.

[74] While the ecclesiastical investigators who wrote the last report on Benedetta seemed disposed toward leniency and emphasized her lack of consent and will, the final judgement need not necessarily absolve her from guilt.

[76] Information pertaining to the Nuncio's decision and Benedetta's later life are limited, with the only written account being found on the fragment to a diary belonging to an unnamed nun.

The guilty sister "shall in no case, even though she repent and implore mercy and pardon, be received back into the community, save if some reasonable cause supervene and on the recommendation and advice of the visitor".

Carlini and Galluzi were both self-designated visionaries and highly regarded by their religious and secular communities, but each was subject to suspicion and close scrutiny by church hierarchy.

"[82] Judith C. Brown chronicled Carlini's life in Immodest Acts (1986), which discussed the events that led to her significance for historians of women's spirituality and lesbianism.

More recently, Brian Levack has analysed the Carlini case and others in the context of his work on demonic possession and exorcism in the Baroque era of 17th and 18th century Europe.

Levack departs from the above authors in placing the event in philosophical and historical context, noting the rise of nominalism within 17th and 18th century Catholic thought, which attributed greater scope for agency and supernatural activity from demonic entities than had previously been the case.

In popular culture, Canadian playwright and director Rosemary Rowe has written a play about her affair with Sister Bartolomea, Benedetta Carlini: Lesbian Nun of Renaissance Italy.