Benedetta Carlini

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster.

And today we are whipping out our wimples and reciting our rosaries as we learn all about the scandalous 17th century nun, Benedetta Carlini.

And to help us, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's the Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor in English at the University of North Dakota.

She's a specialist in medieval studies, especially medieval religion, women's literature and queer theory.

And she's the author of several books.

It's Professor Michelle Sauer.

Welcome, Michelle.

Thanks so much, Greg.

It's wonderful to be speaking with you today and to meet Sophie.

Yes, you're very lucky Sophie's very special.

And in Comedy Corner, she is an award-winning comedian, writer, and actor, as well as her fabulous stand-up shows.

You will recognize her from TV's 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, Live of the Apollo, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, but of course, you'll remember her from our back catalogue, including episodes on Atlantis and Ramesses the Great.

It's Sophie Duca.

Welcome back, Sophie.

Hey, special feels like a neg, but I'll take it.

No, no, it was meant to be positive.

I'm very thrilled to be special and to be here and to be meeting Michelle Sauer.

What about Benedetta Carlini?

Is this a name that rings any bells?

Church bells.

So I don't know, I don't really know anything.

That's not quite true.

I think I've got the sense that she's some sort of queer icon, but I don't really know much about her.

And I've already heard from your intro that she's a sexy nun.

Wait, did you say that or did I?

I was projecting.

You didn't say that.

I didn't say that.

You didn't say that.

I projected.

You said wimple, and I was like, hot, that's what happened.

How embarrassing.

It's fine.

It's a fantastic insight into your mind there.

Yeah, I think sexy nun is probably about fair, but we'll see.

So, what do you know?

This is the so what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And you are probably well, you're probably familiar with nun life, you know, from totally true documentaries like Sister Act and the sound of music, but you might be less familiar with a small mountain girl called Benedetta Carlini, who rose to notoriety in 17th century Italy and then vanished from history until being rediscovered quite recently.

Although if you are a Paul Verhoeven fan, you might have seen a somewhat fictionised version of her story in his racy 2021 film Benedetta.

But who was the real woman who, in quotes, pretended to be a mystic but was found to be a woman of ill repute?

What does this have to do with silkworms?

And does the devil really loved cured meats?

Let's find out.

Professor Michelle, let's start with her family background.

Who was Benedetta?

Where was she born?

When was she born?

What was her family situation, please?

Benedetta was born on January 20th, 1590, on the night of St.

Sebastian in a small mountain village called Volano in Tuscany, in Italy.

She was the only child of Medea and Giuliana Carlini.

Her father was the third richest man in Volano, so it was a well-off family.

And the fact that she was born on the night of St.

Sebastian, it was sort of preescient, because Saint Sebastian was considered the greatest intercessor or one of the greatest intercessors of the Middle Ages.

I have a question.

What is an intercessor?

Someone who helps you get your prayers answered.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like a middleman.

Yeah, the middleman.

You're not good enough to approach the Holy One,

and so you need someone who is better than you to get the job done.

1590 is a bit later than I expected.

I think I was expecting a kind of medieval story, but we are in the Elizabethan era over in England at this time.

Sophie, I know you speak French.

I want to test your Italian now.

Do you know what Benedetta translates to in English?

Is it like a sexy egg?

Benedetta, is it like blessed one?

Oh, yeah.

Bang on.

Yeah.

Okay, she did Latin as well.

All right.

Benedetta.

Lovely.

Okay, so yes, blessed, Michelle.

Blessed.

Why blessed?

What was the naming reason for that?

Her mother had a very difficult labor, and at one point it seemed like both mother and child would die.

So her father, who was both rich and devout,

prayed to God desperately that they lived and asked the intercession of Saint Sebastian.

Now we come to why it's so important to have such a great intercessor.

And in gratitude, Benedetta was named blessed.

And her father dedicated her to God and promised that she would become a nun.

That's a lot of pressure, very young, isn't it, to come into the world and immediately know what you're going to do with your life.

Yeah.

I feel like

it's a big ask, a big ask of a young girl.

What age does she start to sort of become nun adjacent, Michelle?

I mean, I think she's pretty nun-adjacent right from the start.

By the time she was five years old, she was reciting the litany, saying the rosary on her own.

And her father had, unusually enough, undertaken her education himself.

Usually, young children, both boys and girls, would have been educated at home by their mothers at this age.

She also experienced miracles as a young girl.

She had a nightingale that followed her around, would sing on command, would occasionally sing the lauds with her.

That's a very Disney princess to have a bird on your shoulder singing along.

And a nightingale as well.

You don't get those anymore.

It's crows and pigeons.

They're all over medieval literature, but you know, not in real life anymore.

I mean, they exist.

Okay.

So, Nightingale, good.

Any bad animal appearances?

Any demonic animals?

There was a mysterious black dog that showed up and, you know, growled and slobbered and tried to drag her off.

And, you know, eventually it just sort of disappeared when she prayed.

So that's obviously a demonic manifestation.

Okay, good.

I'm enjoying this.

This is

this is fun.

Okay, so Sophie, how old do you think the Benedetta was when she was first entering the convent?

Okay, so if she's like reciting litanies from five years old, I feel probably quite like a young entrant.

I'm going to go with lucky number 13.

That's a good guess.

It's a little bit generous.

It was nine.

Oh, nine.

Okay, classic age to take on a trade.

What kind of convent does Benedetta join?

And what are convents at this period?

In the Middle Ages, we thought of them as monasteries for women because they really are companion pieces to the male monastic houses.

So the different orders often developed a female companion sort of offshoot.

So there were Dominicans and then female Dominicans.

But there is like a real huge expansion of these orders throughout the centuries.

By 1552, which is a little bit before Benedetta, one in eight women in Florence, and Florence is the biggest city in the area here, lived in a religious community.

When they get sent off to these monasteries for women, it's kind of like a single-sex environment.

Do they have like socials with the matching men's monasteries?

Is there any like sort of no, but is there any sort of communication between the two, or is it just that there's like a male monastery and a female monastery in the same area and they don't chat or get together or compare notes?

They're not necessarily even in the same area.

Just because an area would have a Dominican house for men does not mean that there would be a Dominican house for women in the same city or the same area even.

But there were, since you brought it up, Sophie, a few orders that had what we call double monasteries.

And double monasteries are a male house and a female house joined in the middle by a church.

That would be the thing you would join them with.

The best part, Sophie, is that the women, the abbess, is always in charge of both houses.

This is great.

Yeah.

It feels a bit like a single-sex boarding school.

I didn't go to boarding school, but I did go to an all-girls school.

And we had a...

There was never like a church

joining us to a boys' school, but there were socials where the boys and girls did not look at each other or touch.

So it feels like home.

So what's the name of the community that Benedetta joined, Michelle?

Because you mentioned Dominican, but that's not the community she goes into.

So she was in Volano.

She was born in Volano, which is a small mountain village.

And when it came time for her to join a convent, her father basically just took her down the hill to the next biggest city, which is Pesha.

And in Pesha, there were three major convents.

These convents were filled to the brim.

They were overflowing.

There was something like 230 women in these three convents in a

reasonably small town.

In order to join one of them, you basically had to be a patrician or a noble or a property holder or an existing relative of a woman already in the convent.

And you had to pay a huge dowry.

It is like private school.

Yeah, it's a bonus, though.

It is.

I mean, and the dowry is to support the convent, but it's also ostensibly you're marrying Jesus, and just like every other man, he expects you to pay a dowry.

Oh, Jesus, how disappointing.

It is, isn't it?

The community, I should say, that Benedetta joined was less expensive.

It was only a dowry of 160 scooty.

Works out to be about 154 US dollars in

today's money.

And the community community that she joined is something called the Theatines.

The Theatines were not actually an official order as of yet.

When Benedetta joins, they are still an unofficial community, although they had been sanctioned by the church.

A woman named Piera Pagni founded this community in 1590, the year that Benedetta was born.

And

she had applied to the Pope for permission to make this a formal community.

It's like a start-up convent.

It's not quite recognized yet.

It's like a young cool.

They're disrupting the sector.

Yeah, they've gone to venture capitalists.

Theatines are disrupting the sector of female monasteries.

Okay.

One of the things that they do to bring money in the theatines is they work in the silk industry.

Sophie, do you know anything about the history of silk?

No.

For worms, worms make silk.

I know that.

Yeah.

There was a road of silk.

It wasn't made of silk, but yes.

Yeah.

And that is something that I knew.

There was a metaphorical road of silk.

Yeah, I'm trying to think of a third silk fact that I know.

No.

Two facts is good.

Thank you for your contribution.

It's a really important part of medieval history, but it's quite a fun way that silk arrives into Europe.

Normally things arrive in through trade, but silk arrives into Europe through a heist.

And it was a heist pulled off by some monks in the sixth century.

They were working for Justinian, the emperor of the Byzantine Empire, and they smuggled silkworms out of Asia, out of China, inside some sort of like, I think, bamboo rods.

Is it Michelle?

I can't quite remember, but it's like a proper ocean to Levin heist.

Yeah, two Nestorian monks went to China, and indeed they smuggled eggs of silkworms out in bamboo rods.

It took two years to pull off this heist completely.

Oh my God.

Yeah, and silk became a huge industry afterwards in medieval Europe.

Italy and France were the biggest centers of it.

But in Italy, convents really took over as the locations of the silk industry.

Why convents?

Why not monasteries?

Well,

this is great news for women.

Silkworms required really delicate handling.

And in the industry, the worms were treated just like children.

And the woman in charge of the silkworm hatchery was called mother.

And adult men were not allowed anywhere near silkworms, lest they disturb their work.

Wow.

That is very queer-coded.

That is very...

That's like,

that seems mad that they've just like, no man can touch this worm with his big, brutish hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Incredible.

I'd love to be the mother of a silkworm house.

I've got very small, very gentle hands.

Delicate hands.

I've got delicate hands.

I could handle a silkworm.

Why am I being...

I want to handle silkworms.

Why am I being discriminated against, Sophie?

That's what I want to know.

Why isn't there a men handling silkworms, Dave?

Yeah, exactly.

Hashtag not all men.

Not all men.

Not all men crush the worms between finger and thumb.

But yeah, so silk's really important to the Italian nunnery scene.

But what else is going on in the convent, do you think, Sophie?

You know, if we're imagining Benedetta as a, I don't know, let's imagine her as a modern influencer living her hashtag none life.

What kind of content are you expecting on the gram?

Okay, when you started talking about Benedetta, I really thought that she was like, have been a great TikTok baby because it's all like her dad's making her read these litanies.

She's got this little bird and stuff.

Like, I feel like she would have been creating content from early.

Doing unboxing videos.

Yeah, just being like, it's another rosary.

And then just sitting there, it's like 90 minutes long.

I feel if she was a modern influencer, obviously obviously she's like a prodigy.

I feel like maybe she would be like, she'd have, like, she'd have written, she'd have learnt loads of like hymns, like maybe she'd be singing,

maybe like

reciting stuff.

I'm trying to think of what like the nun version of a get ready with me

is.

I saw a reel recently where someone was like, I've been a holy girl.

Okay.

There's a TikTok sound that's like, I've been a nasty girl.

and there are Christians who are sort of making it terrible and unwatchable by making it like I've been a holy girl

yeah Benedetta I think like being like a pretty clearly a pretty smart kid I think she'd just be like reciting chunks of the Bible singing stuff maybe getting the bird involved

oh yes the nightingale yeah yeah might now have died of old age or tried to peck out you know the eyes of the abbess.

Michelle, Sophie's painted quite a charming image there.

Nun life was quite hard.

Is that fair?

It could be pretty hard, especially if you're one of a lot of orders had something called lay sisters.

They're the uneducated ones who

did all the hard work, the cooking and the cleaning and the repairing and the sewing.

Choir sisters were the ones who were educated and spent their time making silk and sewing and praying and singing.

And is there a disciplinary culture here?

I'm a medievalist by training, so when I think of monks and nuns, I tend to think of a bit of whipping, sometimes a bit of

self-flagellation.

Is that going on?

Well, that wouldn't have been required.

That would have been

a personal sort of thing.

The biggest things that were required were fasting.

Lots and lots of fasting.

We have a young nun, Benedetta.

Her life is sort of on tracks to be fairly conventional.

And then at 23, it changes.

Michelle, why 23?

Well, you know, we don't really know a lot about her between the ages of nine and 23.

Presumably, she's doing this conventional thing, except that we have one sort of indication that she is still special.

Right away, when she first got to the convent at age nine, she had...

gone into the convent chapel and was praying in front of the Theatines Madonna statue when the Blessed Virgin Mary sort of manifested within this statue and leaned forward to kiss Benedetta.

But she sort of panicked, freaked out,

and then the statue fell as she ran off.

But she didn't tell anybody about the almost kiss.

None of my Virgin Mary statuettes have ever tried to pash on me, so that is

feeling a bit slighted.

another vision michelle involves quite a sort of eden-esque vibe one was was definitely eden-esque um she was walking in a beautiful garden full of fruits and flowers many of which wouldn't be growing um at the time or place in which she lived there was a fountain full of scented water these visions were both beautiful and reassuring because angels would also join her in them.

And she's also mountain climbing.

So it is the sound of music.

She's climbing every mountain.

She's fording every stream.

She's following her rainbow.

And she's going to find her dream.

That's beautiful.

She's just a nun walking through the mountains, tripping her nut off.

Yes, it does sound like a high, doesn't it?

It's all very PG-friendly so far, but then Benedetta's vision's got quite heavy metal, Sophie.

We've got quite a quick mini-quiz for you, actually.

Which of these visions did Benedetta not claim to have experienced?

So, five options.

Here we go.

Okay.

One, she was pursued by handsome young men in iron chains with weapons.

Two, Jesus ripped out her heart and she lived without a heart for three days.

Three, an angel in a white robe, gold chain, long curly hair, named Splenditello, brought her a double-edged wand made of flowers and thorns.

Four, she married Jesus.

Five, an angel told her to go vegan.

Which of those?

Not true.

Oh my god.

Okay.

I mean, it feels like she's very horny for God in all these visions.

It feels like a real insight into her psyche.

I think she was told to go vegan.

Jesus taking her heart.

It's very poetic.

Like walking around without a heart for three days.

It's relatable content.

She's basically Charlie XEX.

I think that Splendotello sounds a bit much.

Okay.

You're rejecting Splendatello and his lovely curly hair.

I think he's modelled on you, Greg.

I would love to be Splendatello.

I don't have the looks to pull it off.

I've got the curly hair and nothing else.

It's actually a trick question, Sophie.

All five are true.

Oh, my God.

Sorry.

Sorry.

That's us being very mean there, but we thought maybe it would be fun to see if you could tell them apart.

But no, yeah, she claims all five.

So she claims her heart's ripped out for three days.

She claims to be going vegan, marrying Jesus.

Splendatello comes to her, offers her a double wand of flowers and thorns, and pursued by young men who attack her with weapons and chains.

So

quite an array of visions here.

Yeah.

Michelle, Benedetta also started to have the physical signs of holy interactions, what we might call stigmata.

From about 16, 15 forward, she started experiencing intense pain over her entire body.

The stigmata are representative wounds on an individual's body that are the same.

They correspond with the wounds on Jesus Christ's body.

So it would be the hands, the feet,

the side wound,

and in some extreme cases of stigmata,

manifestation of the crown of thorns.

These are huge claims to be making.

I suppose the obvious question is, were there others in the convent reporting similar things, Michelle?

Is she alone in this?

There are no other people in the convent who are reporting this.

This is not

a typical thing.

The stigmata itself is considered an extreme extreme gift that very few saints had ever received.

The most famous of these would be St.

Francis of Assisi.

And there were a few others that were accepted.

St.

Catherine of Siena received the stigmata in her heart, and that was internal and not external.

But other than that, it's not common at all.

Catherine of Siena is the one.

She has a marriage to Jesus with a very unusual ring.

Sophie, do you know what the ring is made from?

Is it a natural substance?

Yeah, yeah.

Or is

lard?

No, lard is bad.

Lard is a bad ring material.

Like, thorns is what you'd think.

Thorns is what the jewelry

is.

Thorns, reeds, reeds?

These are good guesses.

Michelle, do you want to tell us what it was?

I'm afraid not, Sophie.

It is made out of the foreskin of Christ.

Wow.

Wow.

A literal cock ring.

Yes.

Wow.

Yes.

So Benedetta's having these pretty powerful physical and visual visitations and visions.

How do you think her fellow nuns were handling that at the dinner table?

I mean, I think they probably treated her like an annoying little shit.

I think

at 23?

At 23, you're trying to make out like you're like St.

Catherine of Siena.

At 23,

your frontal lobe isn't even fully developed.

Yeah, that's probably why you're having pain.

But, you know, I don't know.

I think it feels like a, especially if there's not other people doing it, if it's not part of the, you know, company culture to be having visions, then if you kind of state yourself out as having very disruptive and evocative visions, I feel like it'd probably get on a few of the nuns' tits.

The thing that's intriguing to me, Michelle, is they the community sort of give Benedetta a kind of friend to play with almost.

It's a bit like, all right, look, you need someone to keep you company.

And they give you a young woman called Bartolomea Crivelli.

Is that right?

That's right.

So this is sort of cheeky, if you think about it, of Benedetta.

She's having visions.

I mean, Saint Catherine shows up with Jesus in one of these

visions to, you know, help.

Yeah, to help the whole heart exchange that she had.

So I think that sort of helps the community think, yeah, this is great.

And she's accepted.

With these violent visions, they were worried about her.

so she gets her her buddy her buddy bottle and and benedetta now sort of steps it up she starts preaching from the pulpit which is a big no-no isn't it that's that's a man's job right huge no-no okay

and then in 1619 the other nuns elect her the abbess of the nunnery michelle so that she's not unpopular wow she's not unpopular at all the following year the community received its official papal permission to become a closed community sophies benedetta starts living her best life with her bff's Spotlameer, and, of course, Splendatello, the angel.

Splendatello, can't forget her.

Well, so does a closed community mean that they don't really have to answer to anyone else, or that they're not bringing in it.

What does closing

the Abbey mean?

It means that

they have more control over who they accept, and that they have the church seal of approval to actually be a formal community for women, a formal convent.

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home.

Suffs.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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But that official stamp of authority then means presumably the church is then looking more closely at what's happening because suddenly the church authorities show up and go, hang on a second, what?

There's a woman preaching, claiming mystic visions.

We'd better check this out because we now get an official process of interrogation, Michelle.

Yeah, and it's not just the nuns.

She had been making inroads into the local nobility.

So when she married Jesus, for an example, she invited the local duke and the local nobles over for a party.

Imagine those wedding invitations.

That'd be amazing.

So she just, she was starting to make the church nervous, right?

Women with too much authority and too much pull,

for one thing, made ecclesiastical powers nervous.

But just in general, visions were looked at with suspicion more and more.

They could be coming from the devil, especially when they involve such bodily sorts of visions.

Oh.

So the fear here is that she is being visited by Satan, not by an angel.

Yes.

Gotcha.

Okay.

So we get the provost of Peschia, Stefano Cecchi, sort of showing up to physically examine the stigmata, the wounds, starts asking questions, Sophie.

It's becoming a bit official.

What do you think Bartolomeo does, Sophie, the sort of best friend who's been appointed?

So like they're like besties at this point.

Is she like a waiting maid or are they just like companions?

Yeah, a bit of both, is it, Michelle?

Yeah, she is there to, I guess, help out Benedetta, make sure that she's brought back to Earth after her visions,

that her

body is cared for.

If, you know, if her heart's removed for three days, that somebody has to take care of what's left behind.

And Bartolomeo says that she had to put put the heart back in.

Wow.

Yes.

Yeah.

That

she is a devoted companion.

Not only does she confirm to this inquiry board, to the provost of Pesha, that Benedetta did indeed, you know, exist three days without a heart while this exchange with Jesus was going on, but that she herself pushed it back into Benedetta's body.

Sophie, have you ever done that for a friend?

Have you ever?

Have I ever pushed a heart back in?

No, I've held the hair back while they've been sick, but I've never pushed pushed the heart back into the body.

I've never reverse Temple of Doom to friend.

But I'd like to think any one of my friends would do that for me.

Yeah, I think that's the test of modern friendship.

So yeah, if it's spoken out a bit, it's just like, yeah, it's your heart slipped.

Just nudge it.

Yeah, exactly.

The heart skipped a beat, pop it back in.

That's amazing.

Okay, so Benedetta has a very loyal friend here, and Bartolomeir is going on the record saying, yes, the heart came out.

I saw it.

I put it back in.

So that means Benedetta passes the first interrogation, the first investigation, but there will be another, because obviously we said that woman of ill repute is a phrase that gets used.

Why does she pass the first test, but a second one is launched, Michelle?

What does she do, Benedetta, that's more provocative

or claimed to do?

Benedetta dies,

but then she comes back to life.

Whoa,

whoa.

So 1621,

she,

you know, she's dead.

And then Father Paolo Ricordate

um commanded her in a loud voice to arise and she did that's all it needs right that's all you need you just need someone that's all you need you just need a man to say get up come on sort it out

not dead anymore not dead

let's talk about the second investigation because the this time around sophie it's not the local authorities who are sort of showing up to have an interrogation the pope has sent someone the pope mr pope himself he sent a nuncio uh which is an official figure a sort sort of a bunch of officials showing up in 1622.

They're there for several months.

They're outsiders, right?

They're not used to the community.

They're not used to her.

So they're a bit more interrogative.

It doesn't go so well this time, Sophie.

They're suspicious.

Yeah, I'd be suspicious.

I feel like Bartolomeo sounds like a liability.

I feel like she's adding like little embellishments like, yeah, I saw the heart.

I pushed it back in.

Like, it feels like Benedetta's got quite a lot of charisma.

But I'm not sure Bartolomea commands quite the same amount of reverence, no questions asked, as her friend does.

So I feel like she's possibly not going to be the weak link in questioning.

That's interesting.

I quite like that.

I mean, the line of questioning, Michelle, that you've already alluded to is the nuncio are sort of going down the satanic route.

They're saying, you don't get these visions from God.

You get these visions from Satan.

We think Benedetta, but actually Benedetta's family are in league with Satan.

Is that right?

Where she really started losing people was continuing to preach from the pulpit.

It was understandable, maybe, the first few times because she was reporting what Jesus had said in these visions, but continuing to do that

wanders into dangerous territory.

And who would inspire someone to continually act in such a manner contrary to God, but the devil.

So

the local community starts turning against her and suggests that her parents have been possessed by devils.

And then all of this sort of comes to a head when the nuncio comes to town.

He is very suspicious of things like the heart exchange and the mystical marriage and especially stigmata.

And they find satanic signs and around the kind of the sort of the general locale of the nunnery.

Oh, okay.

I don't know what a satanic sign.

I was gonna, I was thinking it might be like physical markings, like a love bite or something like that, but that's not something that you generally strew across the floor.

Maybe just

like stuff that's written down.

Yeah, that's a good guess.

Michelle, what is the evidence gathered against Benedetta?

The biggest sign of all of demonic, if not possession, association

is that she

didn't go vegan anymore.

She started secretly eating meat.

And

in particular, she had a love of salami

and mortadella.

And I mean, I can't blame her.

Mortadella is delicious.

Wow, the nun who loves salami

is not how I thought she would be described.

So, Michelle, is this...

I'm slightly worried where we're going next, but are we going next into sort of, you know, demonic territory of

naughty things?

Not quite, unfortunately.

I know that in witchcraft trials, there's lots of explicit discussions of how they have sex with the devil in various ways.

That's not where we end up with

Benedetta.

Instead, we end up with Benedetta having sex not with the devil, but with her best friend, Bartolomeo.

No!

What?

Sophie's back on board.

What?

Those two good friends?

Yeah.

They were just roommates.

The roommates?

What?

Yeah.

This is the most surprising development in the entire case.

Yeah, tell us more, Michelle.

What is their...

I was going to say, what is their routine?

Is it a routine?

Is it kind of like a weekly session?

It is a routine, in fact.

So

under intense questioning, Bartolomea breaks down and admits that

for two years, three times a week, they engage in sexual activities, predominantly frobbage.

Benedetta would disrobe, she would force Bartolomea to lie back on the bed.

Benedetta would crawl on top of her, kiss her, and then start moving.

And the word that's used in the trial trail scripts is stir.

In the Middle Ages, stir

means arousal, it means

a repetitive movement, but it also

implies some form of penetration.

She would stir or move on top of Bartolomeus so much that, and this is also in the transcript, both of them corrupted themselves.

So the implication is that they orgasmed from this experience.

More than that, Sophie, Benedetta is claiming that the angel Slendatello is making them do it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no, yeah.

I've had that one as well.

It's like,

it's that.

Like, there's someone watching, he's got like curly hair.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow.

I mean, it's, I think it's a solid fantasy.

It's a good, I mean, it's very, it's sort of heartbreaking that Bartolomeo has to share these intimate details of their, you know,

routine.

But three times a week.

Yeah, I mean, that's, that's pretty solid.

It's solid.

Yeah.

But yes, there is one detail in the church's eyes that's made the actions even more scandalous, Sophie.

Do you know what that might have been?

Besides not just the stirring and the angel?

Not just the stirring or the angel.

Okay,

Benedessa's giving me like femme top energy.

I feel like, did she ask Bartolomeo to like call her anything?

Oh, right.

Some role play.

Some sort of role play, some light, you know,

call me mother, call me daddy, call me mother, call me mother of God.

No, it's not that, it's because they're doing it on

holy days, on feast days.

On feast days, which is when you're meant to absolutely not be doing this stuff.

So,

doing it on a Saints' Day is absolutely in the book.

It's like no, no stirring and frottage ones please, please, if you could not on those days.

So, Michelle, I think the question we have to ask at this point now is, you know, we can all have a laugh about these sort of things, but actually, what's quite interesting is there is a sort of moment in that testimony where Bartholomew sort of says she was sort of made to lie on her back.

And that brings up ideas perhaps of coercion, perhaps of one person having more power than the other.

So is this a standard, you know, typical lesbian relationship between two consenting women?

Or do we have something more problematic here?

I think that there it is more problematic,

but there's multiple levels of coercion, I think, going on here also.

It's not just that Splendatello made them do it for his own benefit, but

Benedetta claims that Splendatello really inhabits her body or takes over her body in certain ways, so that she herself is actually

subject to coercion in a way to then

make Bartolomea also go through with this.

When Bartolomeo refused, that she would go to her anyway and would force her, would physically grasp her hand and place it on her breasts or on her genitals and force it and force the issue.

So there's coercion, I think, on multiple levels.

I think it's really psychologically interesting, though, because of all the like visions of Benedetta originally had of being pursued by this kind of like rapacious masculine energy and all these different individuals.

And then the way this sort of

stirring plays out is by her sort of like inhabiting that power and like enacting it on someone else.

I mean, I think she should see a therapist, but I know that's not possible at this stage.

At sixteen twenty, that's that's harder to do, but uh yeah, I it's it's definitely a problematic relationship, but it's also problematic for us'cause it comes to us through the official testimony of nuncio papal legates and it's it's all it's it's slightly refracted through.

So the the phrasing that is used in the official uh interrogation is called the immodest act, these sexual acts between the two ladies and the angel uh is known as the immodest act, Sophie.

But uh there's definitely yes, there's some there's some power issues there, I think, perhaps in the relationship.

So, what is the outcome of this investigation, Michelle?

The second investigation from the Pope's man?

So, the final investigative visit was in November of 1623.

There's no more evidence of stigmata

or of a mystical wedding ring.

Benedetta is no longer seeing visions.

Splendatello has left her.

And unlike his promise to Bartolomea, he has never manifested, Benedetta agrees that she had been deceived by the devil and lived very obediently under a new abbess.

It's giving breakup.

Yeah,

I mean, that's a sort of full recantation.

It's a full like, sorry, I was, I was.

Yeah.

My bad.

Yeah.

I'm slightly surprised at that, but that's interesting.

So we get towards towards the end of her life a full recanting, Bartolomeo recants, and then what?

What happens to Benedetta?

Well, she actually sort of drops out of history.

We don't really hear from her again,

although the convent records basically indicate that she died when she was 71 years old, that she had been ill for 18 days.

But this diary also reveals one interesting fact.

She had been imprisoned in solitary confinement for 35 years.

So it appears that her recantation and her reformation to live the good life under a new abbess was for naught.

Oh, Sophie.

That's a bit of a vibe shift on the episode there, isn't it?

Yeah.

It's so sad.

Sorry.

35 years.

Yeah.

So she was held against her will despite saying, my bad, I fell in with Satan.

I'm going to be good.

Like, she was sort of made to stay away from people or stay away from the rest of the community.

I mean, the implication is that she was put into solitary for 35 years.

I mean, I don't know if it's held against her will she was going to be in the convent anyway.

There was never any chance of her leaving.

The nuance window!

Time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Sophie and I set down our needles and sit in silent contemplation for two minutes while Professor Michelle takes to the pulpit to preach something that we need to know about Benedetta Carlini.

So my stopwatch is ready.

You have two minutes.

Take it away, Professor Michelle.

I really wanted to talk a little bit about medieval lesbians.

In the introduction to her book, Immodest Acts, about Benedetta Carlini, Judith C.

Brown says, Had the material belonged to a later epoch, the sexual allegations against Benedetta would not have been all that rare.

And as Protestantism became more firmly entrenched, smirking stories about nuns, loving nuns, became a common sidebar, apparently.

By the 18th century, homosexual relations, though scandalous, were at least acknowledged in intellectual circles.

But what about medieval lesbians?

Looking for medieval lesbians, one of the things about studying them is that it allows for participation in the creation of social and sexual histories and forefronts the female experience in a field that continues to be dominated by white straight men.

And even the term homosexual has been co-opted and used only to describe male same-sex encounters.

So it's good on the one hand that we have Benedetta Carlini.

Bad, of course, because of the situation, but good because the scant handful of documented lesbians are generally documented for being caught.

Benedetta Carlini was on trial, Oddly enough, mostly for preaching, and the immodest act came out.

We can find medieval lesbians and joy in medieval lesbian activities in such places as mystic texts, where female saints call Jesus their mother, then suckle from his side as breastfeeding before crawling into the open vaginal-shaped wound.

One such woman was Catherine of Siena.

She describes climbing Christ's body that has been clearly transformed into a feminized creation as he possesses her and presses her to his breast and the opening there, encouraging her to drink and be enraptured.

Margarita Ebner slept with an image of Christ's wounds pressed to her bosom and dreamed of tonguing his bleeding heart.

And Gertrude the Great slept on the opening itself.

We know that the church and theologians were concerned about the possibilities of women being being with other women in a sexual manner.

Elred of Reveaux, who wrote a letter to his sister, an anchorus, cautioned her against teaching young women because she would clearly be enraptured by them and want to kiss them.

St.

Augustine wrote a similar letter to his sister.

So there are deep concerns.

about these women.

Therefore, we know that they exist, that they're out there, and we really need to keep looking more completely into this history so that we don't foreclose the possibilities of a long history of women who loved other women.

I mean, it's a lot.

It's a lot.

I feel like there's so, um, there's so little, like there are so little examples.

There's such a scant amount of evidence and testimony, but when it does pop up, it's really visceral.

And like, those images of like licking Jesus's heart.

It's very intense and very lesbian.

I think that, you know,

I am going to go to a lesbian bar tonight and I am going to ask

the gathered congregation if anyone's ever asked to lick their heart, which I think is probably quite likely, given East London.

So what do you know now?

This is the, so what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Sophie to see how much she has learned.

Sophie, you do very well on our quizzes.

How are you feeling on this one?

I'm feeling nervous.

I feel like that maybe the sauciness and unsettling nature of

some of the visions might have thrown me off my fat remembering game.

Yeah.

But I'm going to channel Bartolomeo.

Don't channel Splendatello, though.

Anyway.

Okay.

Question one.

What does the name Benedetta mean?

It means blessed.

It does.

Question two.

How old was Benedetta when she first entered the nunnery?

She was nine.

She was only nine years old.

Only nine, she was.

Question three.

Name one of the ways that convents could make money to support themselves.

They could make money to support themselves by

making silk.

Yeah, very good.

Question four.

What is the stigmata that Benedetta claimed to have received?

Oh, it was in like her hands.

A classic place, the hands and feet and side.

Yeah, and these are are the wounds of Jesus Christ on the cross.

Absolutely.

Question five.

What was the name of Benedetta's surprisingly horny guardian angel?

Splendatella.

It was.

Nay, Greg Jenner.

Hey, come on now.

Question six.

What was unusual about the wedding ring allegedly given to St.

Catherine of Siena by Jesus in a vision?

It was made of foreskin.

Of course it was.

Question seven.

Can you describe two of Benedetta's visions?

Yes.

One was a very like deliciously Ella-type vision where it was just like, babe, you've got to stop eating meat, you've got to go plant-based.

And one of them, she was chased by specifically handsome men,

so probably gay men.

I don't know.

It doesn't state in the vision whether they were like Twinks or bears, but she's being chased by men on horseback who are assaulting her with weapons.

Yeah, very good.

Question eight, which non-vegan food was used as evidence of Benedetta's demonic possession?

Ah, salami, the lady loves salami, and mortadella.

Yeah, very good.

Question nine, What phrase was used to describe what Benedetta and Bartolomeo got up to in bed?

Stirring.

And another one.

Oh, frottage.

Yes, and another one that the church used was the most...

It was the most...

Oh, it...

Frottage and stirring and immodest acts.

Hey, very good, well done.

And this for 10 out of 10.

For how long was Benedetta imprisoned in the convent?

35 years.

10 out of 10, never in doubt.

Sophie Duca, well done.

Non-fun.

Love it.

I mean, and some non, and some non-trauma,

some sad, non-trauma.

Some non-trauma and some non-fun.

It's so interesting.

Her life is, yeah, her life is bonkers.

Yeah, and I think we probably threw you under the bus a little bit by going, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun.

And now some seriously sad stuff.

But it's really interesting, right?

This is a fascinating story.

And Michelle's nuance window, I think, is really beautiful in placing this into a wider context.

But there we go.

Thank you, Sophie.

Thank you, Professor Michelle.

Listener, if after today's episode you want more duca in your ears, check out our episodes on Atlantis, Ramesses the Great, Ashanti Ghana and the Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

What about catalogue?

And if you've enjoyed hearing about the naughty nun, why not listen to our episode on the profane popes of the early medieval papacy?

Those guys were, they were extra.

Let's just put it that way.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review.

Share the show with your friends.

Subscribe to your dead to me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode.

But all that's left for me to do is say a huge thank you to our guests in history corner we have the magnificent professor michelle sauer from the university of north dakota thank you michelle thank you it was awesome

and in comedy corner we have the sublime sophie duker thank you sophie bless you greg bless you michelle

thank you very much

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we investigate more historical friendships in Inverted Commas.

But for now, I'm off to go and offer Satan some of my salami.

Bye!

This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by Hannah Campbell Hewson.

It was written by Hannah Campbell Hewson, Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoos, and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey, and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me, and senior producer Emma Nagoos, and our executive editor was James Cook.

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

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