The discovery of the fascinating and richly documented story of Sister Benedetta Carlini, Abbess of the Convent of the Mother of God, by Judith C. Brown was an event of major historical importance. Not only is the story revealed in Immodest Acts that of the rise and fall of a powerful woman in a church community and a record of the life of a religious visionary, it is also the earliest documentation of lesbianism in modern Western history.
Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious...

Offering an in-depth synthesis of recent scholarship in the field, this book presents a reconstruction of the Renaissance in Italy as both a social and a gendered experience. Successive chapters explore this theme in the context of work, law, politics, and notion of the state; and as expressed in Renaissance concepts of honour, representational art, medicine and magic, sexual practices, religious organization and spirituality. Introductory and concluding chapters on the historiography of Italian social and gender history draw these specific studies together.

This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.