telophase | (no subject)

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One of the best parts of working in an academic library is browsing the catalog, clicking trhough to see where things lead, and discovering subject headings like this:

Subject Lesbian nuns -- Italy -- Biography.

We only have one book about lesbian nuns in Italy, but we also have one about lesbian nuns in the US.

And because I know some of you are perking up right now, here's the answer to the question you were about to ask: Brown, Judith C. Immodest acts : the life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy. New York : Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Still in print, too -- $20 for a paperback from Amazon, $40 for the hardcover.

The main reason I haven't checked it out yet is that it's one of the books stored offsite and I don't like to request offsite books unless they're directly relevant to what I'm working on, but one day...

I was going to say, "is that Immodest Acts"

(I took a class on Renaissance Florence that basically turned out to be about everything other than cishet men of property. Magic, lesbian nuns, sex, murder, alchemy, etc. etc.

That sounds like a fabulous class! The only class I took on Renaissance Italy ended up being all about the humanistic ideas that developed from cishet men of property so we spent a lot of time debating free will and whatnot while what I wanted to know is WHAT HAPPENED THEN? Not what ideas we have now developed then, WHAT DID PEOPLE DO?

I don't think I was the only person who was disgruntled with the direction the class took because the prof sat down at one point and carefully explained that that was what the class was--which was not the description in the course catalog--on the day AFTER we could drop for no penalty.

I mostly checked out at that point, doing just enough work to scrape either a C+ or a B-.

It was a really great class. (I did my final paper on accusations about doing magic against other people, and there's this whole fascinating thing where love spells, per se, were not a problem, but love spells to, say, separate your lover from his wife and family (basically anything that destroyed the family unit) was a problem.

And ugh, yes, on that kind of class problem. (The conducting class that broke my ability to listen to classical music for more than a decade was like that: our professor kept wanting it to be an orchestral repertoire class.)

I saw just the subject you quoted and wondered, "Is that Immodest Acts they're talking about? And it's pretty interesting - I haven't read it in many years but I remember it being a worthwhile book.

I ended up putting it on my wishlist so if I don't get around to checking it out at work (it's in remote storage, so slightly more of a hassle than usual), my mom might end up getting it for me for Christmas or another gift-giving occasion.

See also the story of Julie d’Aubigny (1670-1707):

"If Julie d’Aubigny had one overriding flaw, it was an allergy to boredom. In fact, she soon dumped the wandering swordsman, pronounced herself tired of men in general, and seduced a local merchant’s daughter. The merchant, desperate to separate the two, sent his daughter to a convent — but again, our heroine found a loophole. La Maupin joined the convent herself, and started hooking up with her intended in the house of God. Shortly into their convent stay, an elderly nun died (from unrelated causes, it would seem), and La Maupin reacted the same way anyone might: by disinterring the body, putting it in her lover’s room, and setting the whole convent on fire. You know, same old story.

The two ran off in the confusion, and enjoyed a long elopement. After three months, La Maupin got bored, dumped her back at her parents’ house, and ran off into the night.

For this bout of shenaniganery, La Maupin was sentenced to death. In response, she approached her first paramour (her dad’s boss), and through his influence, convinced Louis XIV to revoke her sentence. The king did so, and she took advantage of her new lease on life by running off to Paris and joining the opera.

And this was all before she was 20! Makes you feel like an underachiever."

https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/princesses/julie-daubigny

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