Benedetta Carlini
The investigations into a visionary Tuscan abbess also preserved testimony about sexual contact between women.
Benedetta Carlini was born in Vellano, Tuscany, in 1590. She entered a religious community in nearby Pescia as a child. In her twenties she reported visions of Jesus and angels and later claimed to bear the stigmata. She became abbess in 1619.
Church authorities investigated her claims. During a later inquiry, another nun, Bartolomea Crivelli, testified that Carlini had engaged her in sexual acts over several years. According to the testimony, Carlini claimed that an angel named Splenditello was acting through her. The records do not allow this relationship to be treated simply as a freely chosen love affair.
The investigators rejected Carlini’s supernatural claims. She spent roughly the last 35 years of her life confined within the convent and died in 1661.
Historian Judith C. Brown reconstructed the case from archival records in “Immodest Acts” (1986), bringing unusual evidence about sexuality between women in early modern Europe to a wider readership. The book later inspired Paul Verhoeven’s film “Benedetta” (2021). Both Carlini’s identity and Crivelli’s experience must be approached through testimony shaped by religious authority and an investigation, rather than assumed to fit modern categories.