Your Life as a Lesbian Nun in Every Religious Order

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]So, your family just dropped you off at a convent, and they are not coming back.

[00:00:03]You are maybe 14, maybe younger, and the heavy wooden door has just thudded shut behind you for the rest of your natural life. Here is the part nobody at the family dinner table wanted to talk about. You are not exactly devastated to be leaving all those eligible bachelors behind. The other girls getting locked in here with you, though? Yeah, about that. Welcome to your life as a nun in Renaissance Europe, sworn to chastity, sealed inside a building full of women, and wired in a way the entire Catholic Church has decided it would rather not think about too hard. Let me walk you through how this goes. Nobody actually asked if you wanted this. First, a reality check on how you even got here.

[00:00:37]You probably think nuns were holy women who heard a calling and ran toward God with open arms. Some were. You, statistically, were not. You were sent.

[00:00:45]In 16th and 17th century Italy, convents had quietly turned into the place wealthy families stashed the daughters they could not afford to marry off. The reason was brutally simple. Money.

[00:00:56]Marriage dowries had inflated to insane levels, and a noble family could realistically only buy husbands for one or two daughters. The rest got the budget option. A convent dowry was a fraction of the cost of a wedding. So, the math did the parenting. One daughter gets the big white wedding. The other three get a veil and a cell. This was not some rare tragedy. In Venice, by 1581, roughly 3/5 of all patrician women, the daughters of the city's ruling families, were living in convents. 60%. That is not a religious revival. That is a real estate decision wearing a habit. And the women noticed.

[00:01:28]Boy, did they notice. The nun who wrote the diss track on her own father. Enter Arcangela Tarabotti, who is about to become your favorite person in this whole story. Born in Venice in 1604, she had a limp from birth, which in the marriage market of the time made her, in her family's cold accounting, unsellable. So, off to the Benedictine convent of Sant'Anna she went, around the age of 11 or 12, with no say in the matter whatsoever. Most women in her position seethed quietly. Tarabotti picked up a pen and went to war. She wrote a book with the polite title Paternal Tyranny in which she argued that fathers who dumped unwilling daughters into convents were committing a crime against God and nature, trading their own children's freedom to protect the family bank account. Then she wrote an even angrier one called Convent Hell because subtlety was clearly not the goal. Here is how spicy her writing was.

[00:02:16]Paternal Tyranny got published after she died and then landed on the church's index of prohibited books in 1661. And Convent Hell, her real scorched earth manuscript, that one was considered so hot that it was not actually published until 1990. Her words sat in a drawer for 338 years before the world was ready. She basically threw a punch in 1652 and it did not connect until the fall of the Berlin Wall. So, that is your context. You are in here because of accounting. You may be furious about it and you are surrounded for life by other women in exactly the same boat. This is the most watched building in the whole town. Now, you might be thinking this sounds like an opportunity. Lots of women, no men, plenty of privacy. Let me stop you right there because the church thought of that, too, and it built the architecture specifically to ruin your plans. In 1563, the Council of Trent wrapped up its final session and dropped the rule that would define the rest of your life, clausura, strict enclosure. Once you took your vows, you did not leave, ever.

[00:03:14]Not for a parent's funeral, not for fresh air, not for anything. The convent walls were not a metaphor. They were the entire point. Trent also handed the local bishop the keys, naming him guardian of the cloister with the power to punish anyone who breached it. The reception rooms where you could speak to outside visitors, called parlors, had to be physically cut off from the interior of the convent with iron grills between you and the world. You talked to your own mother through a metal grate. The architecture itself was designed to assume that any woman, given a private moment, would get up to something. They were watching everyone. They were definitely watching you and your days were not your own, either. Your entire schedule was bolted to the divine office, the cycle of prayers that ran from before dawn until after dark. You were hauled out of bed in the dead of night to chant the first round, then again at sunrise, then at intervals all through the day, every day, for the rest of your life. There were no weekends.

[00:04:03]There was no sleeping in. The bells told you when to pray, when to eat, when to work, and when to be silent. And the answer to when should I be silent was usually now. Whole stretches of the day were spent in enforced quiet, which sounds peaceful until you realize it was also a tool.

[00:04:18]A community that cannot chat freely is a community that cannot conspire, gossip, or fall in love out loud. And convent life had a class system baked right in, because of course it did. If your family paid the big dowry, you became a choir nun. You sang the divine office, the cycle of prayers that structured every single day, and you did not do manual labor. If your family was poorer, you became a lay sister, also called a converse sister, and you did the cooking, the cleaning, and the scrubbing while the choir nuns prayed. Same vows, same God, completely different daily grind. Even in a building dedicated to humility before heaven, they found a way to make it about who paid more. The rule had a specific word for your situation.

[00:04:57]Here is where it gets personal. The people who wrote the monastic rules were not naive. They knew exactly what could happen when you locked devoted women together for life, and they had a clinical, slightly chilling phrase for it: particular friendships. In Italian, amicizie particolari. A particular friendship was any bond between two nuns that got too close, too intense, too exclusive, and it was forbidden. Not because the church was necessarily picturing romance every time, but because the whole spiritual machine depended on you loving God and the community as a whole, not loving one specific person in the cell down the hall. The Benedictine rule enforced this with a toolkit of loneliness, enforced silence for large parts of the day, seclusion, and an explicit ban on close friendships, with the expectation that you would stay emotionally distant from your sisters, even though you ate, prayed, and slept a few feet from them for decades. Imagine being told to spend 50 years living with the same 40 women, and also that getting attached to any of them is a sin. It was emotional solitary confinement with a chapel attached. The rules got specific, too. In plenty of houses, you were not supposed to be alone with another sister behind a closed door, ever. Two nuns wanting a private conversation could be a problem worth reporting. Dormitory arrangements were watched, comings and goings were noted, and the older nuns were essentially encouraged to keep tabs on the younger ones. The whole social design was built to make sure no two people could quietly become a world of their own. You were meant to be a cell in a single body, never half of a pair.

[00:06:20]So, if you, specifically, found yourself drawn to one particular sister, you were not just breaking a vow of chastity, you were violating the basic operating system of the entire institution. Two strikes before you have even done anything. And the institution had spent centuries designing itself so you would get caught on both. Good news, the law barely knew you existed. Now, for the genuinely strange part, and this is where being a woman who loved women actually came with a bizarre, grim, little advantage. The medieval and early modern legal system mostly could not figure out what you were even doing. The whole framework for understanding sex back then was built around one act, penetration, done by one person to another. That was the definition. And in the minds of theologians, two women together did not obviously fit that definition, because there was, in their very technical phrasing, no phallus involved. So, a lot of authorities concluded that whatever women did together, it could not be the real, serious version of the sin. You can see this in the penance books, which itemized and priced out every category of sin in cold, bureaucratic detail. The medieval equivalent of a corporate expense policy for the human soul.

[00:07:24]Theodore's Penitential gave a woman who slept with another woman three years of penance. A man who slept with a man got 10. Bede's version, three years for two women, but seven years if a nun used an instrument with another nun. Pope Gregory III, in the 8th century, set female unnatural acts at 160 days of penance, against roughly a year for male sodomy. Across the board, what you might do was treated as the lesser offense.

[00:07:47]One 12th-century cleric named Etienne de Fougeres summed up the official attitude with breathtaking dismissiveness. He called sex between women more ridiculous than sinful, again because of the missing phallus. Read that back. The medieval church looked at lesbian desire, and its main reaction was not horror. It was a shrug and a chuckle.

[00:08:05]You were not a monster to them. You were a punchline. Think about what that actually meant for daily life inside your convent. The men who held power over you, the bishops, the confessors, the inquisitors, were not lying awake worried about what the nuns were doing with each other. Their entire mental model of sin pointed somewhere else.

[00:08:22]They policed your friendships obsessively, yes, but mostly out of a fear that you would form factions and break the community's discipline, not because they pictured what you might do after lights out. The thing you might actually be doing was, to them, almost invisible. You could hide in plain sight inside the very blind spot of the institution that owned you. The number back this up in the bleakest way possible. Historians digging through the entire medieval record, centuries of European history, have found only around 12 documented cases of sexual relationships between women. 12.

[00:08:51]Meanwhile, there were thousands of accusations against men. That is not because women were not doing anything.

[00:08:56]It is because the authorities mostly were not looking, were not naming it, and did not have the vocabulary to prosecute it even when they tripped over it. Bad news. There was always a catch.

[00:09:06]Before you get too comfortable, do not mistake barely understood for safe.

[00:09:11]The leniency had a switch, and the switch was the instrument. Remember how the whole legal definition revolved around penetration and a phallus? The flip side was that if a woman was found to have used a dildo, an object that simulated the missing piece of their definition, the shrug vanished instantly. Suddenly, you were not a punchline. You were imitating a man, usurping the male role, and that was treated as deadly serious. This is the hinge that every execution turned on. In 1477, in the German city of Speyer, a woman named Catharina Hetzeldorfer was put to death by drowning. Her crime involved using an instrument and taking on what the court saw as a masculine role. The unsettling part is that the authorities barely had the legal language to charge her with anything because the offense had no settled name.

[00:09:53]They executed her for a crime they could hardly describe. Then there is Catharina Link, and I have to be up front, she was not a nun, so she is context here rather than a sister of yours, but her case shows you exactly where the line was. In 1721, in Prussia, Link had lived as a man under the name Anastasius, married a woman, and used a stuffed leather device. When it came out, the officials were genuinely tangled up about how to punish her. They wrote, with what reads like real frustration, that the Bible was silent on sex between women, and that her act did not even technically count as sodomy because it was done, in their words, with a lifeless leather device. So, they argued about it, and then King Frederick William the First settled the argument by having her beheaded. She is often cited as the last person executed in Europe for lesbian sexual activity. So, no, you were not actually safe. You were ignored right up until you were not, and the consequences could be lethal. And do not buy the comforting myth that women always got off easy. Thomas Aquinas, the heavyweight theologian of them all, lumped female same-sex acts into the same sinful category as male sodomy. And in parts of France, Spain, Italy, and the German lands, it was capital in principle. Enforcement was rare, not impossible. The historian Helmut Puff has spent a career arguing that this whole picture of breezy lesbian impunity is overstated. The church was not tolerant, it was distracted. There is a difference, and the difference could cost you your head.

[00:11:14]Now meet the nun who broke every record.

[00:11:17]Which brings us to the woman whose story is the reason this whole topic survives at all. Her name was Benedetta Carlini, and she is, as far as the surviving paperwork goes, one of the earliest documented cases of a same-sex relationship in modern Western history.

[00:11:30]Not because she was the first, because she got caught, investigated, and written down. Benedetta was born in 1590 in a tiny mountain village called Vellano, northwest of Florence. At the age of nine, in 1599, her family placed her with a small community of devout women in the town of Pescia. This group was nicknamed the Theatines, and it eventually got official papal recognition in 1620 as a proper convent, with Benedetta rising to become its abbess. So far, model resume. Then Benedetta started seeing things. Her visions began around 1614. By 1618, she claimed she had received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, appearing on her hands, her feet, her head, and her side.

[00:12:08]In May of 1619, she announced that Jesus himself had ordered her to undergo a mystical marriage, a spiritual wedding to Christ, and she staged the ceremony in front of the whole community. This was not a quiet, private vision. She turned it into theater. She spoke in voices. She described heaven in vivid detail. She claimed Christ had swapped her heart for his own. For a small-town convent in the Tuscan hills, this was the most extraordinary thing anyone had ever witnessed. The other nuns were stunned. Some were convinced they were living under the same roof as a genuine living saint, and words started to spread beyond the walls. Remember, this is a culture where a verified holy woman was a huge deal. A convent with a real mystic became a destination, a source of prestige, donations, and pilgrims. So, Benedetta's claims were not just personal. They were potentially very good business, which meant a lot of powerful people had reasons to want them to be true.

[00:12:59]The church sent an investigator, and the first investigation, around 1619 and 1620, actually went well for her. The provost in charge concluded her visions were the real deal. She was reinstated, and the convent was granted full enclosure. Benedetta had, against all odds, passed the audit. Saint status looked locked in. The angel did it.

[00:13:19]That was the defense. Here is where it falls apart, and where you, our hypothetical sister, should pay close attention to how thin the line was between mystic and prisoner. A second investigation opened around 1622, this time under a far more skeptical church official. And this one went digging into Benedetta's private life. The key witness was a younger nun named Bartolomea Crivelli, who had been assigned to share Benedetta's cell, partly to care for her during her violent visions. What Bartolomea described turned the whole case inside out. She testified that during certain episodes, Benedetta would say she was no longer herself. She claimed to be possessed by or transformed into a male angel named Splenditello. And while she was Splenditello, by Bartolomea's account, she would draw Bartolomea onto the bed and initiate sexual acts with the angel insisting it was not a sin because Benedetta was unaware of what was happening. Benedetta, for her part, denied all of it. I have to be really careful and really honest with you here because this is exactly the kind of story that gets flattened into a tidy headline. The official 1623 report did not actually conclude the abbess had a love affair. It framed the acts as something done in its own language, without her consent and against her will, while she was out of her senses by the work of the devil. In other words, the record we have is closer to a tangle of possession, coercion, and one nun's testimony than it is to a clear romance between two equals. Whether there was genuine affection, whether Bartolomea was a willing partner or a frightened subordinate, whether Benedetta even understood what she was doing, all of that is genuinely unrecoverable. Anyone who tells you they know exactly what happened in that cell is selling you something. The investigators also tore apart her miracles while they were at it. Nuns testified that she had faked the stigmata by jabbing herself with a needle, that she had faked her holy wedding ring using gold foil and red wax, that she had smeared blood around to fake the marks of self-flagellation.

[00:15:07]The living saint, it turned out, had been doing arts and crafts. The final report came down in November of 1623.

[00:15:14]Benedetta lost everything. She was stripped of her authority and imprisoned within the convent, confined for the rest of her life. According to a fellow nun's diary, she spent 35 years in that confinement before dying in 1661 at the age of 71. Three and a half decades sealed away for the woman the town had nearly worshipped. You are genuinely not the only one. If all of this makes you feel terribly alone in your cell, take some cold comfort. The historical record is sprinkled with women in religious life whose hearts very clearly lean toward other women. The catch is that the evidence is almost always fragmentary, filtered through hostile sources, and fiercely debated by historians. So, let me give you the honest version with the question marks left in. Go back to the 12th century and you find Hildegard of Bingen, the famous German abbess, composer, and mystic. She had an intense bond with a younger nun named Richardis von Stade, and when church authorities tried to transfer Richardis to a distant abbey, Hildegard fought it ferociously, writing letters of longing that reached for the language of the Song of Songs. Some scholars, notably Susan Schibanoff, read those letters as eroticized desire.

[00:16:16]Most historians read them as a profound spiritual and emotional attachment and nothing more. The truth is, we only have the letters, and letters of longing are not proof of anything in a bed. File it under deeply felt and forever uncertain.

[00:16:29]Cross the ocean to 17th century Mexico and you meet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Hieronymite nun and one of the most brilliant writers of her entire century.

[00:16:37]She wrote gorgeous, aching poems to the vicereine, the wife of the Spanish viceroy, a noble woman she nicknamed Lysis.

[00:16:45]In one poem, she wrote that for the soul, distance and sex simply do not count. Was it romantic love or elevated platonic devotion? The Nobel laureate Octavio Paz spent serious effort arguing it was purely chaste, soul to soul, no bodies involved. Plenty of other readers think the jealousy and yearning in those poems speak for themselves. Both camps are still arguing, and the fact that one of Mexico's greatest poets felt the need to write that the soul has no sex tells you something about how badly people wanted to file her under safe. What unites all these women across centuries and oceans and wildly different orders is the shape of the problem. They were brilliant, devoted, and stuck. They poured enormous feeling into the only relationships available to them, which were with other women, and then history handed their private lives over to be argued about by strangers. You do not get a vote on how you are remembered.

[00:17:34]Neither did they. And a quick word of caution about another group you will hear lumped in here, the Beguines. These were communities of religious women starting in the late 12th century around Liège, who lived in walled neighborhoods called beguinages, supported themselves by nursing and textile work, and crucially refused to slot into any approved order. The church hunted them.

[00:17:53]The Council of Vienne condemned them in 1312, and the beguine writer Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to retract her book. But, and this matters, they were persecuted for being independent religious women operating outside church control, not for sex. Do not let anyone fold them into a sexuality story. Their crime was autonomy. So, naturally, Hollywood made a movie. You would think a story this knotted and this human would be safe from being turned into something glossy. You would be wrong. In 2021, the director Paul Verhoeven, the man behind some of cinema's least subtle films, released Benedetta, loosely based on the historian Judith Brown's book about Carlini. Emphasis on loosely. The film invents huge chunks and, remarkably, leaves out Splenditello entirely, which is a baffling choice given that the angel is the single strangest and most central detail of the real case. And that brings us back to the single biggest catch in this whole story, the one I have been circling the entire time. Brown titled her groundbreaking book Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy, and that word, lesbian, was a deliberate provocation. Because here is the uncomfortable truth for anyone wanting a clean narrative. Benedetta and the women in this story did not think of themselves as lesbian. The whole modern idea of a fixed sexual orientation, of being a certain kind of person, simply did not exist in their world. Scholars like E. and Matter have pushed back hard on slapping the label on, suggesting what Benedetta experienced was something far stranger, a tangled knot of the spiritual and the sensual that does not map onto any of our tidy modern boxes.

[00:19:24]So, what was your life as a lesbian nun in every religious order? It was being sent somewhere you never chose, surrounded by women you were forbidden to love, watched by an institution that could not decide whether your desire was a death sentence or a joke not worth telling. And then, if anyone ever wrote it down, being remembered through the suspicious words of the very people who locked you up. The records survive. The women, mostly, do not get to speak for themselves. Terra Body at least got the last laugh, even if it took three centuries to land. Benedetta got 35 years in a cell and a Paul Verhoeven movie 400 years later. And the dozen or so women the medieval clerks bothered to write down got reduced to a number in a penance book. Their desire priced out and filed next to stealing and lying on some grim little ledger. Not exactly the sainthood any of them were promised.

[00:20:08]Somewhere, the angel Splenditello is taking notes.