people had never really believed in the officials' efforts to discredit her miracles. A crowd gathered near the convent's gate. People wanted to see and touch Benedetta's body or even take some of it with them like the relics of a saint. But the nuns barred the doors of the church to avoid any uproar and tumult until the burial. They brought dead Carlini into the church as they do with the other nuns and dressed her with the black veil and habit worn by the others. Very little information about the later life of Bartolomea Crivelli has come down to us. An unknown nun on 18 September 1660 wrote in the diary: "Sister Bartolomea [blank] died [today?]; when Sister Benedetta Carlini was engaged in those deceits note in this book on page [blank], she was her companion and was always with her. And because of this she experienced many difficulties. . . . In temporal affairs she worked as hard as she could and in spiritual affairs she was very devoted and totally given over to holy prayer." Possibly, Bartolomea had been recognized as an innocent victim of deception and coercion and had not been punished by ecclesiastical or secular authorities. She may have been stigmatized for a time by the other nuns and may have had to endure occasional reminders of her misdeeds, but she appears to have spent her time as an ordinary nun. Alternative interpretations of Carlini E. Ann Matter, a feminist religious scholar, has an alternative perspective on the case of Benedetta Carlini, and wrote about it in the Journal of Homosexuality in 1990. She compared and contrasted two autobiographical accounts from Benedetta Carlini and another 17th-century Italian Catholic mystic, Maria Domitilla Galluzzi of Pavia. Carlini and Galluzi were both self-designated visionaries and highly regarded by their religious and secular communities, but each was subject to suspicion and close scrutiny by church hierarchy. Benedetta Carlini's trial records related the aforementioned series of sexual contacts with Bartolomea, while Maria Domitilla Galluzzi seems to have had no sexual experiences within her own mystical framework. Matter's article questioned whether scholars might have succumbed to the temptation to simply transpose the sexual self-understanding of figures in their own historical context to past historical environments. "Lesbian nun" might be viewed as too simplistic a description, and alongside Maria Galluzzi, Benedetta Carlini's sexuality "might be viewed as organised around an elaborate