Judith C. Brown's Immodet Acts

The critique of Judith C. Brown’s Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy is meant to discuss the writing style and format, the use of evidence used to support Brown’s interpretation of events leading to Benedetta’s imprisonment, and whether or now Brown made her point. I found Brown’s writing style to be easy enough to understand. In Immodest Acts she tells the story of a nun named Benedetta Carlini who moved from her mountain home to the Convent of the Mother of God at age nine in 1599. At twenty-three she began having visions of Jesus and an angel called Splenditello, and continued until 1699 after clerics released their final report on Benedetta and her mysticism. Her story is well reinforced by a set of documents …show more content…
The facts are laid out for the reader but between them you find Brown expressing her opinion on the whys of Benedetta’s actions. In regards to Bartolomea Crivelli and her accusations against Benedetta’s for forcing her into a lesbian relationship, Brown sheds light on more than one reason why Bartolomea remained quiet about it until the second investigation. Bartolomea could have been afraid of a variety of things: Benedetta, Splenditello, Jesus’ disappointment, the Devil, of being burned at the stake for participating in lesbian acts. She could have also withheld this information because she participated willingly. Brown wrote that statements in 1619 to the provost “made it amply clear that she often approached Benedetta’s bed voluntarily” and that “she sometimes put her hand on her breast or embraced her.” (Brown, p. 125) For Benedetta, Brown says that her reasoning for seeking out a relationship with Bartolomea could be to satisfy a need to love and be loved, a need she was denied by her parents as a …show more content…
According to Brown, her sources “consisted primarily of abbreviated transcripts, letters, and summaries of documents that no longer extant.” (Brown, p. 139) Who put the Miscellanea Medicea 386, insert 28 together is unknown. There were also diary logs from an anonymous nun used in the epilogue that record the death dates for both Benedetta and Bartolomea. Brown did put a sort of disclaimer in the appendix that it was difficult to determine what was fact or fiction within the documents due to the fact they were second-hand witness testimonies and/or unverifiable. What pulls the reader into Immodest Acts is both the sexual tones as well as Benedetta’s claim to being a visionary. We live in a time, four-hundred years later, were sex is more liberal, women have more freedoms, and visionaries like Benedetta would fit in easier on Coast to Coast AM than in a modern day convent, so to read about a situation in Pescia, Italy like this one, where the other nuns and Father Ricordati even let it go on for as long as they did is very interesting. I did not have any issues in the story telling or formatting of the