Noble Blood - The Nun of Monza, Part 2

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

CW: murder, gore. Sister Virgina (born Marianna) had made a terrible choice in secret lovers. When a young secular boarder at the convent where she was a nun threatened to expose her illicit relationship with a neighboring nobleman, the man killed the young boarder. Together they tried to cover up the crime, but there would be no way for Marianna to run from her sins forever. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong,

dance and then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. Hey, this is Dana Schwartz host of the show. Thank you so much for listening. Just a tiny bit of housekeeping before we begin. There is Noble Blood merch. The link is available in the episode description. You can also follow the show on Patreon. Subscribe for access to a weekly bonus podcast series where we recap episodes of the television show Rain about Mary Queen of Scots. And I also put episode scripts there. And it's also just a great community. So that's great. And if you're in Los Angeles, this is very, very exciting.

The paperback copies of two of my books, Anatomy a Love Story and Immortality A Love Story, a Duology, are finally coming out. And the paperback release is going to be Thursday, May 23rd, 6 p.m. at the bookstore Chevaliers on Larchmont. So if you're in Los Angeles and you're a listener, absolutely come by. I would love to see you. Celebrate the books. It's going to be a really fun time. The convent of Santa Margarita was buzzing with excitement. It was July 29, 1606, and as the nuns woke up and began preparing for the day, not even the sweltering oppressive heat could dampen their enthusiasm for one of the most

important days in any convent's calendar, election day. Elections were incredibly significant moments for a convent. Eligible nuns had the opportunity to vote for or run for a variety of positions pertaining to the daily, spiritual, and even political and economic life of the convent, all the way up to the superior position, in this case a prioress, and the vicar, her second in command. As the historian Kate Lowe has pointed out, convent elections often held a particular significance for the many women who had been put into the convent against their will. Voting for new leadership was a concrete moment in which they were given even a small choice in the direction of their lives.

And then, of course, there were the feasts, which even for the most committed none could be a welcome break from the monotony and austerity of convent. life. The excitement of Santa Margarita's election day, however, would turn out to be short-lived. The preparations came to a screeching halt that morning when it was discovered that a young secular border had disappeared from the convent overnight. The girl, Katerina della Cassina had recently been imprisoned in the woodshed as punishment at the behest of the powerful sister Virginia Maria, birth name Mariana de Livia and Marino, following a string of Katerina's bad behavior. When the mother superior and the visiting prelate Monsignor Pietro Barca had gone to speak with Katerina before beginning the election proceedings, however,

the girl was nowhere to be found. A large hole in the wall of the shed facing the road suggested that Katerina had run away. Katerina had always been vocal about her disdain for convent life, and she had even threatened to run away in the past. Perhaps many of the nuns thought she had finally had enough, and staring down punishment for her recent actions, she finally decided to make an escape. There were more than a few sisters present in the convent who could sympathize,

though they knew better to admit it. Still, to run away from one's convent was a serious offense, not to mention a dangerous undertaking. The elections went on despite the confusion of the morning, but they did little to lift anyone's spirit. The election turned out to be heavily contested, following months of tension over Sister Virginia's almost unchecked power within the convent, and some whispered her suspicious pattern of immoral behavior.

She had been the vicar of the convent and was in the running for Prioress, but she and her supporters all ended up losing their elections. Many of the nuns noticed that Sister Virginia seemed almost panicked throughout the day. Some reasoned that she must have been worried about Katerina, given that she was the supervisor of the girls who were boarding at the convent. Other sneered that Sister Virginia was just upset at losing the right to boss everybody around while she did whatever she pleased. As the day finally drew to a close, the nuns settled into their beds with the general sense

that something wasn't quite right. They never could have guessed, though, that their missing sister, Katarina, had never actually made it off convent grounds. And they couldn't have known that at that night. very moment, Catarina's murderer was preparing to sneak back in to retrieve the poor girl's body. But when they eventually found out what had happened, the nuns of Santa Margarita knew one thing for sure that sister Virginia had given the murderer the key. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

Perhaps as Mariana de Levia I Marino threatened fellow nun's lives, She thought to herself that this was not the direction she had imagined her own life would take. In another universe, perhaps she would have turned out like her mother, the woman for whom she, Mariana, took her religious name, Virginia Maria. Although Virginia Maria's life had been tragically cut short by illness, probably plague, 30 years earlier, her life had perfectly fit the script of a young woman of noble, rank, and significant wealth. She grew up comfortably in her family home, married someone of an equally illustrious lineage, and had a child for whom she both had the means and the intention to provide a life much like her own.

That was the life that Mariana should have had, comfortable, simple, and about as free a life as any young woman could have in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But instead, here Mariana was, a nun against her will, a secret lover hiding an affair, an unwed mother, and now accomplice to a murder. John Paolo Osio, her partner, both in affair and crime, had murdered Katarina della Cassini, the unruly secular at the convent who had threatened to expose their forbidden romance. Mariana and John Paolo weren't the only ones who had gotten their hands dirty, though. There were also the sisters Atavia, Benedetta, Candida, Colomba, and Sylvia, Mariana's fellow nuns, who had witnessed the murder and were now helping in covering up the crime.

As the group stood in the woodshed over Katerina's body, John Paolo and the nuns came up with a plan. First, they quickly moved the girl's body to the nearby chicken coop, at least until they had time to come up with a more permanent solution. They stood the body upright and hid it behind planks of wood, since there wasn't enough room to conceal the body lying down. Next, as the group would later tell it, John Paolo made the hole in the woodshed wall to stimulate an escape. Historians have pointed out, however, that the shed had, in fact, been made of stone, and that it would have been extraordinarily difficult to have quickly and quietly made such a hole without proper tools, a detail that raises the specter of premeditation, that maybe this wasn't a murder in a moment of confusion and anger.

The most important thing on the murder checklist, of course, was to make sure no one. Nobody blabbed. John Paolo and Mariana had a lot to lose, but the other nuns had only been accomplices. It would have been easy for them to claim they were manipulated or tricked or coerced into helping the illicit couple carry out their murderous plan. Mariana knew that, and she had it covered. All she had to do was point to poor Katerina's bloodied corpse and tell her fellow nuns, her friends who had aided her for years. She had years, that that was their future if they dared to speak a word. That threat, coupled with the very recent memory of John Paolo's brutal violence, was enough to shut them up. After the next morning's hectic convent elections and visit from the prelate, they had to move Katarina's body to a more permanent location. That night, Jean-Paolo and Sister Benedetta snuck back into the chicken coop and brought the body back to the former's estate. John Paolo dismembered the body before bringing the pieces to his family's estate in nearby Velate. Most of the pieces he hid in his

neviera, a cellar made to store ice and snow. Katerina's head, however, he threw in a nearby well, presumably so that if anyone found the rest of her body, it would be nearly impossible to identify. identify her. The body was safely hidden, but that didn't mean that nobody was going to be suspicious about Katerina's so-called escape. As much as Katarina had threatened to run away, none of the nuns quite believed that Katerina had actually done it. It was too sudden, too clean, and too coincidentally timed with increasing speculation about Mariana's illicit activities. Before long, just about everybody both inside and outside the convent walls were gossiping about what was going on at Santa Margarita. And though nobody quite connected the dots, it was clear that some sort of suspicion was falling on the well-known, quote, secret lovers, John Paolo and Mariana.

The latter did her best to keep her composure as the rumors swirled around her. John Paolo, on the other hand, began to feel trapped, and by the fall of 1606, decided that there was only one way out, to kill anyone he thought might talk. John Paolo attempted first to murder a man named Raniero Roncino, a local apothecary who had been telling everyone in town about the various unusual, perhaps compromising, ointments and medicine, that the convent had commissioned from him over the years, and he had been known to remark about the parentage of John Paolo's daughter, Alma Francesca Margarita, who would visit the monastery multiple times a week. Jean-Palo sought to stop the gossip, and so he shot at Raniero with a long gun called an arquebus.

He missed, and Ranchino got away. John Paolo also planned to murder Father Paolo Aragone, the very man whose letter ghostwriting, had helped Jean-Palo woo Mariana in the first place. But Mariana heard about Jean-Paolo's plan, and she begged him not to proceed with it, which spared Father Paulo's life. Cheseray Ferrari, the blacksmith who had been forging copies of the monastery keys for John Paulo and Mariana, was not so lucky. He was found dead outside his shop.

Of course, despite having murdered his blacksmith, John Paolo still needed keys made to be able to come and go from the monastery as he pleased. He sent a servant on his behalf to engage the services of a man named Alessandro Moko. All was well for a few months, until one fateful day when someone from the monastery of Santa Margarita

came to Alessandro's workshop to have some locks cleaned, some locks with very familiar-looking keys. The blacksmith realized with a start that for months he had been duplicating keys to the monastery, and he knew exactly who he was doing it for. Alessandro Moko, the blacksmith, was apparently the only honorable man in the city of Manta, so when he realized what he had been complicit in, he immediately told his father, who told the confessor of the monastery of Santa Margarita,

who told, of course, the governor of Milan. Pedro Enrico de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes and governor of Milan, had heard nothing of the debauchery taking place at the monastery of Santa Margarita when the nun's confessor wrote to him in early 1607 describing what he had heard from the blacksmith's father. It is unclear from the record whether at this point the blacksmith had connected the dots about John Paolo's illicit dealings at the monastery with his killing slash attempted killing spree, or whether the blacksmith had just discovered the affair he was having with Mariana. In any case, Governor Fuentes had John Paolo arrested during the celebrations for Carnival in 1607

and imprisoned him in Pavia, a town about three. 30 miles south of Milan. News of John Paolo's imprisonment quickly reached the convent, where soon everyone was talking about how it must have been related to his affair with Mariana. As the reality of the situation they were in became apparent to the now separated lovers, they each made a choice that would very quickly come to haunt them. Mariana wrote in a panic to Governor Fuentes, alleging that John Paolo's relationship with the monastery was completely spiritual, even going so far as to strongarm as many of her fellow nuns as she could into signing the letter, a move that only served to fuel the governor's suspicions.

John Paolo, on the other hand, fabricated a medical declaration, stating that imprisonment posed a severe threat to his health, and he sent that letter to the archer. Bishop of Milan, Cardinal Frederico Borromeo, who had previously known nothing about the situation, but who, upon reading this letter, now became very, very interested. In the summer of 1607, Cardinal Borromeo traveled to Manza under the guise of a normal pastoral visit to the monastery of Santa Margarita. In reality, however, he had been informed of the rumors swirling around the city with increasing intensity. A series of murderous attacks,

a potential affair involving a nun, a young child of dubious parentage, all-merited investigation. When he arrived at the convent, he took on a curious, firm but calm demeanor, especially when he finally spoke to Mariana. He was sure, he told her, that she had only been acting

with the most innocent of intentions. He reminded her, gently, of her vows, of her noble heritage, and asked her to reassure him that nothing untoward had been going on. In the same breath that she denied any wrongdoing, Mariana also decided to appeal passionately to Borromeo on her lover's behalf, saying that his continued imprisonment was a threat to his honor. Her appeal was a brazen, move that shocked the cardinal. As the writer Giuseppe Rupa-Monte would later tell it, quote, the outcome of that conversation was the following, that on the one hand, the woman became more suspicious than she had previously been. On the other hand, the cardinal left more restless and worried than he had been before arriving there. Cardinal Borromeo returned to Milan with the

same sense of unease that many in Monsa had been feeling for some time, as the effects of John Paolo and Mariana's relationship continued to ripple out. The Cardinal's unease would have surely turned to fury, however, when in late September 1607, John Paolo escaped from his confinement in Pavia. John Paulo went into hiding, desperate to avoid punishment for his crimes. He frantically came up with a plan he thought would kill two birds with one stone, or rather kill two potential witnesses with one murderer. First, he dispatched one of his various henchmen to kill Raniero Rancini, the apothecary who had narrowly evaded John Paolo's bullet almost a year earlier. Then he planted the murder weapon in the house of his friend, Father Paulo Aragone, and remember

Father Paulo was the very man who had ghostwritten the letters that had initially wooed Mariana to John Paolo in the first place. At first, it seemed like Jean-Palo's hasty, violent scheme had actually worked out in his favor. But of course, that wouldn't last long. Father Paulo was arrested and transferred to the custody of the Archbishopric of Milan, while Cardinal Borromeo prepared the investigation. Within days, the trial began, and by the time it concluded, all of Marianas and John Paolo's most sordid secrets would finally be brought to light. But the bloodshed was far from over. The murder trial of Father Paolo Aragona began in October 1607, but it quickly became obvious that the priest, although guilty of plenty of sins, was not, in fact guilty of murder.

He was exonerated within weeks by the porter of the monastery, who testified that Jean-Paolo had commissioned the murder, and that one of his cronies had executed it. Upon hearing that he had finally been formally accused of some of the crimes he had definitely committed, John Paulo made another of his bone-headed choices, and he went into hiding in the convent of Santa Margarita, taking refuge first in the quarters of Sister Atavia, then Sister Benedetta. We can applaud, I suppose, the good sense he had in avoiding hiding in Mariana's room.

It wasn't long, however, before the nuns began to notice the sisters nervously sneaking extra food back to their rooms, and they reported their suspicions to the Cardinal. On November 25, 1607, Mariana, was finally arrested. Cardinal Borromeo sent guards to the monastery to capture her by force. According to Ripamonte, she resisted with a boldness rather unbecoming of a nun, breaking her bonds and attempting to escape, stealing a sword and threatening to slash her way out of custody, even hitting her head against a wall before they could restrain her again. John Paolo somehow managed to avoid arrest again, and he would return to the convent once the coast was clear a few days later.

As Mariana's trial began, and as John Paolo's trial began in absentia, the authorities began interrogating the nuns one by one. Sisters Atavia and Benedetta began to panic. They had been complicit in so many of Mariana and John Paolo, transgressions, they were practically guilty themselves. What was going to happen to them when the inquisitors learned of their involvement? Visions of torture and imprisonment, and worse, danced in their heads, and they turned to Jean-Paulo, begging him to help them escape the convent. He agreed. John-Palo helped the nuns escape from the convent through a hole in the wall, a familiar move

that perhaps should have given the nun's pause. They set off together toward his estate in Velaide on November 29th. Once safely in the countryside, they followed the river Lambrough for a while, but eventually had to head east toward their destination. As they made their way across a bridge, however, John Paolo made his true intentions clear. He pushed Sister Atavia into the river, and as she tried to climb back to shore, he hit her repeatedly on the head with the butt of his trusty gun. Sister Atavia finally fell back into the river, and John Paolo left her for dead. She was, however, still alive, though just barely, and would be found downstream by a farmer, not long after the attack. She was brought back to Manza, to the monastery of Santa Orsola,

and she would linger for a few more weeks, finally dying in late December after giving a full confession in her final days. Sister Benedetta got luckier, but not by much. For some reason, perhaps a belief that John Paola would spare her, perhaps knowing she had no other options, Benedetta continued on after his murder of Sister Atavia toward Velate. The following night, however, as they reached Velatee, he decided that she too could not be trusted not to talk,

and he threw her into a nearby well and attempted to obscure her body with stones and dirt before running off on his own. The fall broke two ribs and a femur, but Benedetta survived. For two days, Benedetta screamed for help from the bottom of the well, hurt and bleeding and cold in the dark. Finally, she was rescued and brought to a monastery where, shaken by her ordeal, she immediately confessed. When the authorities investigated the well, Jean-Paolo had thrown her into, they were shocked.

Well, maybe not that shocked, to find the long-since-severed head of the missing secular, Catarina della Casina. Finally, the last of Mariana and John Paolo's secrets had been uncovered. All that was left was to punish them for their crimes. Cardinal Federico Borromeo must have laughed his holy ass off when he received a letter just before Christmas, 1607, from none other than John Paolo Osio himself. It was hilarious for its content, sure. The man on the run with a trail of bodies behind him was shamelessly proclaiming his innocence, but the letter was also funny for its timing.

The letter was dated December 20th. But by the time the cardinal received it a few days later, Mariana de Lavia I Marino had already confessed to everything that she and John Paolo had done. Mariana pointed the finger firmly at John. her confession. Whether out of genuine belief or an attempt to minimize her guilt, Mariana claimed she had been struck by love sickness. She couldn't help, but carry on an affair with John Paolo because she was cursed. To support her claim, she listed off examples of the times she had tried and failed to break off the relationship, even going so far as to resort to magical

cures, including the one we mentioned in part one, where she consumed her lover's feces. Mariana argued that the alleged curse had been placed on her years ago when John Paolo had first started giving her gifts thrown over the garden wall. One of those gifts, she told the Inquisitors, was a black magnet fastened in a gold setting. John Paolo had told her it was a relic blessed by none other than Father Paolo himself. The man, Jean-Paolo, would later try to frame for murder. Jean-Palo had kissed the magnet, touching it with his tongue, and gave it to Mariana so she could do the same. She hesitated, she told the court, but he pressured her until she kissed the magnet too,

and that, she believed, caused her lovesick condition. Magnets had long been associated with themes of divinity, but also. also the occult and, you know, attraction. In other words, Mariana's accusation was one that would have been taken at least somewhat seriously by the court. In fact, a special jurist from the Holy Office was brought in, likely to investigate whether Father Paolo had committed heresy. But ultimately, the love-magic accusation did not exonerate Mariana in the court's eyes.

With Mariana's confession, dodgy as it was, both her and John Paolo's fates were all but sealed. In February 1608, the Inquisitors began the process of having all of the witnesses and defendants, including Mariana, repeat their statements under torture, a practice that was ironically believed to ensure that what they were saying was really the truth. Father Paolo Aragone was subjected to the strappado, where his hands were tied behind his back before he was suspended with a rope by his wrists, resulting in a painful dislocation of his shoulders. The porter of the convent who had testified on Father Paulo's behalf, along with his wife, were actually spared of the torture but were interrogated while, quote, exposed to torture. which meant with the instruments of torture in sight.

Seems better to me. Mariana and her fellow nuns were subjected to the torture of the Sibbles, where their fingers were fastened into a series of metal rings that could be tightened and loosened by the Inquisitors, which caused great pain and potentially significant damage to the hands. While Mariana submitted torture and the court, convened to decide their case, John Paolo continued to evade arrest, bouncing between estates and hiding in the homes of any remaining friends who were willing to shelter him.

It turns out he was bad at murder, but great at hiding. He was never found by the authorities who sentenced him in absentia. The sentence, which he would never hear, read, John Paolo Osio is condemned to the gallows and to the confiscation of his assets and is banished forever from the territory of Milan. So in such a way that if the said Osio were to fall into the hands of justice, he shall be driven on a cart in front of the monastery of Santa Margarita in the city of Monza, and there his right hand is to be cut off. He is to be taken on the same cart to the place of execution of the sentence and, in the city of In the meantime, he is to be tortured with red-hot pincers. Finally, let him hang on the gallows so that he dies, and his corpse is to be cut into pieces,

and these are to be hung in the places where his crimes were committed, however, outside the said city. Woof! John Paolo would never suffer those rather harrowing consequences, but that's not to say he never got his comeuppance. In 1609, he was murdered by a friend, or rather a former friend, in the cellar of said frenemies palace. This small morsel of poetic justice was perhaps what he deserved, but it paled in comparison to Marianna's horrific fate. After months of deliberation, Marianna's sentence was finally handed down on October 18. 1608, Mariana was sentenced to immurement for, quote, the most grievous and irregular and most atrocious offenses. Often colloquially referred to as, quote, being walled in,

immurement is pretty much what it sounds like. Mariana was to be taken to the nearby monastery of Santa Valeria, a shelter for converts and wayward women, and was to be enclosed into a single small cell with no doors and no windows, except for one just large enough to pass food and water through, and through which she could still make regular confession. The nuns who were complicit in Mariana and Gianpaolo's crimes, the ones he hadn't murdered anyway, would share her fate, though they were sentenced later and amured in Santa Margarita, meant to be a kind of living death. Immurement was a cruel punishment, often meted out to nuns and monks, who had broken their vows of chastity.

It has a long, gruesome history dating back at least to the ancient Roman priestesses called Vestal Virgins, who would be entombed alive if they were found to have violated their vows of chastity. Immurement was generally a life sentence, although people who were immured didn't tend to survive for very long unless they were given sufficient food and water, which could simultaneously be a mercy or an elongation of the punishment or both. Mariana spent 14 years in near total darkness and solitude, walled into a cell, roughly five, by seven feet in size. The small hole in the wall allowed room enough to receive minimal rations and enough light to recite the breviary. In the winters, her cell was damp and cold. In the summer's sweltering, she received no spare clothes and no blankets or comforts other than a

mattress stuffed with straw that rotted every two months, but was only changed every six. No one healed her illnesses or comforted the inevitable attacks of claustrophobic terror. Memoirs from other prisoners of the time answer that question that you might be wondering. She was given a bucket for her waist, but it was only changed every four or five days, leaving the stagnant air almost unbreathable. These were the conditions of extreme penance, meant to encourage the inner spiritual transformation of the prisoner. But from where we stand in the modern era,

it's hard to imagine it as anything other than torture. The court had intended to keep all of the convicted nuns amured for the remainder of their lives, but after continual meetings with Cardinal Borromeo throughout her imprisonment, Mariana finally convinced him of her penitence, and he ordered her to be forced. on September 25th, 1622. We do not know for sure, but it's likely that the other nuns were also freed alongside her,

although Mariana remained in Santa Valeria away from her former convent. Marianna's writings and other records that survive from this period after she had her sentence commuted show just how much those 14 years broke her spirit, and most likely also her mind. If she had gone into her sentence with any remaining feelings of yearning for freedom, for a different kind of life, they were thoroughly squashed by the time she was released, replaced with religious fervor, fear, and emptiness.

She spoke of visions of angels and demons and seeking celestial favor. She wept at the feet of Cardinal Borromeo, convulsed in religious ecstasy and insisted on sleeping in a dirty and dark corner of the monastery until the cardinal ordered that she moved to a new cell, quote, suited to comforting the spirit through cheerfulness of attitude and air. Until his death in 1631, Borromeo utilized Mariana as an example of the transformative powers of repentance and had her right to nuns throughout the region who were struggling or otherwise facing consequences

for troublesome behavior, something of a nun-scared straight program. Although there are few exact records about Mariana's life after Borromeo's death, it's believed that she remained at Santa Valeria and devoted the remainder of her life to the spiritual support of her fellow nuns, continuing to offer herself as an example of dangers in straying from the righteous path.

In November 1646, she wrote a letter to the Archdeacon of Santa Maria de la Scala in Siena, including a brief family tree of the Delavia family, evidence that through her ordeal, she still remained somewhat invested in her family's continued legacy. Mariana's own legacy has been one of scandal and retellings of her story, which have tended to place a great deal of blame on her. According to most of the historical sources we have of Mariana's life and story, she was a woman who should have honored her vows, and who instead broke all of them and then some, and who paid a horrifying price for failing to resist temptation. But there's also another version we might consider of a woman whose life could have been defined by freedom, but who was trapped again and again, first by her father, then by a convent, then by a violent man who manipulated her,

and finally by a brick wall, and whose choices to reclaim what little freedom she could were unfortunate, even disastrous, but maybe worthy of a little empathy. The reality for Mariana, as it is for most of us, must be somewhere in the gray area. Mariana died on January 7, 1650 at 74 years old. Although she had somewhat faded into obscurity by the time of her death, we know the date because of a single note in the ledger of the monastery of Santa Margarita, which read, on November 7, 1650, sister Virginia's family owes the convent the sum of 3,801 lira and 39 soldi for alimony, because today she has passed away to a better life. She never did, it seems, receive the dowry that she should have inherited.

That's the end of the second part of the salacious and tragic story of the nun of Monza. But stick around after a brief sponsor break to hear about another nun gone bad who was causing trouble in her own convent at around the same time. You can have opinions, you can have like a strong stance, and then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our

relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The case of Mariana de Lévié Marino and her disastrous love affair is certainly unique in many ways, but it was far from the only example of how the early modern practice of forcing children into monasteries could have unfortunate, even scandalous consequences. Around the time that Mariana was released from her sentence of immurement, another convent drama

was playing out less than 150 miles away in the small town of Pesha. In 1622 or 23, paper authorities were called to the congregation of the mother of God who investigate a nun, in fact a former abbess for her suspicious claims of mysticism. The nun, Benedetta Carlini, had been placed in the convent by her parents as a child, and even then had quickly garnered a reputation for her apparent divine favor. She had been making claims for years that she had been experiencing powerful mystic visions. She even had the stigmata and wounds on her forehead that mimicked the wounds of Christ, though many nuns reported having seen her take a needle to her own hands and feet. These rumors, along with other suspicious incidents like a faked resurrection,

drew the attention of an inquisition, which had long been anxious about the fervent followings mystics had been able to amass, and which sought to stamp them out whenever possible. The inquisitors never could have expected, though, this scandal they were about to uncover when they arrived to investigate the so-called mystic in Pesha. Upon interrogation, Benedetta's companion, a younger nun named Bartolomea Cravelli, admitted that for years she and Benedetta had had a sexual relationship, although she claimed that the elder nun had fooled her into participating by pretending to be possessed by an angel named Splenditello during their relations.

The accusation shocked the Inquisitors and shook the convent and town to its core. For her litany of crimes, including sexual, impropriety, Benedetta was imprisoned in the convent, although not immured, and remained so until her death in 1661 at age 71. Unlike Mariana's story, which was revived in the 19th century, Benedetta and Bartolomea's almost unbelievable tale remained largely unknown until the 1980s, when historian Judith Brown published her book, Immodest Acts. the life of a lesbian nun in Renaissance Italy, after discovering records from Benedetta's case in an archive. But lest we lament the lost opportunity for a nunsploitation adaptation of that book,

not to worry. A movie called Benedetta, directed by Paul Verhoven, of Robocop fame, came out in 2021. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and host of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.