Although many historical trials involved male defendants, as we can see in the cases of female enclosures in eighteenth-century Italy, women were also reflecting on sex and original sin. Their emergence was likely influenced by the circulation of forbidden books, some of which can be ascribed to the cultural milieus examined elsewhere. One such case concerns a Venetian nun, Maria Teresa Garzi, whose deposition seems to allude to a passage of Beverland’s On Original Sin. Her case, among others, gives insight into how we might explore women’s reading strategies in early modern Italy. The defendants read texts brimming with misogynist stereotypes but interpreted them according to their needs. These women elaborated their own views about bodies and sexual pleasure, which they jealously protected from the interference of their male tutors, thus claiming a degree of independence from Church hierarchies shaped by patriarchal authority.
At the same time, these cases suggest that while the belief that sex constituted the first infraction of God’s command was gaining momentum in the eighteenth century, the more radical view that it was specifically sodomitic sex that Adam and Eve enjoyed in the Garden of Eden was fading from this broader cultural construct. The archival holdings of the Roman Holy Office of the Inquisition, where these cases are preserved, testify to the progressive decline of the belief that sodomy constituted Adam and Eve’s original act of disobedience. What gradually took its place was the belief that sex more generally caused the Fall, a view that the Inquisition duly condemned formally in 1701. This was probably due to the rising notoriety of Beverland’s treatise. While we do not know much about the circulation of On Original Sin in Italy, we know that it came to the attention of the Congregation of the Index thanks to Leonard van Rijssen’s On the Just Abhorrence of Hadriaan Beverland’s Most Wicked Book. The cardinals gathered to discuss this merciless review of Beverland’s work on February 7, 1693, and this indirect testimony allowed them to reconstruct it enough that they decided to put Beverland’s work on the index. Yet they never actually implemented the decision, perhaps because they could not get hold of Beverland’s infamous treatise. Eight years later, the Holy Office gathered an ad hoc commission that categorized this opinion as a “heretical statement.” Their decision was filed in the same archival fonds that held the cases regarding sodomy as the forbidden fruit, and the fact that they were preserved together in the same folders suggests that the Inquisition considered these two unorthodox opinions to be closely related.
When did this conflation occur? The Holy Office’s archives were sorted in a systematic manner after an Apostolic Visitation of 1701 that triggered a complete inventory of the archive that was finished in 1710 and updated in 1745. Another Apostolic Visitation of 1735 led to the appointment of an archivist to reorganize the doctrinal and jurisdictional material. Giuseppe Maria Lugani held this position from 1762 to 1798, having indexed the archival files up to 1775 by the time he died. Lugani organized the doctrinal and criminal matters of the archives in the form that they still have today. The emphasis on sodomy as the original sin that we have analyzed thus far then progressively faded in the sources of the Roman Holy Office, until it apparently disappeared completely during the first half of the eighteenth century. By that point, inquisitors were concerned with the widespread idea that original sin was more simply the discovery of sex.
The first case to demonstrate this is the trial of a priest called Domenico De Marchis, which took place in 1700. He was the rector of a church in Alba, in the territory of the Langhe. The inquisitorial tribunal of Casale Monferrato sent several witnesses and denunciations to the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome to report that De Marchis had given this provocative opinion in several public spaces and also from the altar during Mass. A forty-year-old peasant called Sorisio di Pietro said that De Marchis told people that Adam sinned “pro concionationem,” an obscure definition that was explained soon after as a Latinization of a vernacular term meaning “carnal copulation.” The Casale inquisitors expressed concern about De Marchis’s mental stability. They may have been saying this to protect him from a harsh conviction, but they certainly thought he was capable of “getting out of mind, and doing weird things,” including committing suicide. De Marchis confessed that he had held this belief for about ten years, during which time he had become convinced that it was a truth of Catholic doctrine, even though many warned him of the contrary. He denied that he had ever professed this opinion from the altar. The inquisitors opted for a mediating approach, adopting the abbreviated procedure for those who spontaneously confessed (though De Marchis had not) and sentencing him to a formal abjuration followed by a “healthy penitence.”
The same series of documents does include cases that emphasize sodomy: Giovanni Leonarducci, a twenty-seven-year-old first-tonsure cleric from Aquileia, accused himself before the inquisitors on June 10, 1727, stating that he first learned about what he called “this dogma” when he was about sixteen years old. Two older clerics introduced him to the mystery, using gestures—a “sign with the hands”—to allude to sodomy. The young ecclesiastic believed that the Catholic Church had purposely covered this truth beneath metaphoric language for the sake of decency, implying that he believed that the opinion was orthodox. Nevertheless, he was condemned to a “vehement abjuration” (de vehementi). Later cases in the fonds center on the broader opinion that original sin was sexual intercourse. Two of them involved female defendants exclusively, as we will see below.
Sister Maria Teresa Garzi
On February 24, 1714, the Venetian Inquisition took a statement spontaneously offered by Sister Maria Teresa Garzi, who was a professed nun at the Franciscan monastery of Saint Mary Major in the district of Santa Croce in Venice. During Lent of 1710, Sister Maria Teresa declared that “while discussing the original sin with Sister Maria Eugenia Borelli, Sister Maria Soave Borelli, and Sister Maria Perpetua Manfrotti”—who were also nuns in the same monastery—“the abovementioned Maria Eugenia told her that, as far as the original sin was concerned, Adam transgressed the divine precept not by eating the fruit that God had forbidden him, but sinning in his senses . . . that is, that Adam and Eve had sinned in the terrestrial paradise by knowing each other carnally against God’s command, who since then prohibited that act.”
Assailed by doubt, Sister Maria Teresa Garzi asked her confessor for clarification. She admitted to the judges that she had found his response totally unsatisfactory and lacking “frankness,” and it thus confirmed her “in this error.” Sister Maria Eugenia Borelli, who was allegedly the first to spread this belief in the monastery, went to the sisters who were present that day to recant her previous statement, under the pressure of her confessor. Indeed, he had “instructed and undeceived her,” clarifying the orthodox opinion that the original sin was simply eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This only increased Sister Maria Teresa Garzi’s doubts. She was skeptical of the reliability of Sister Eugenia and of her male tutors and came to believe that the confessors “wanted to conceal the truth to [the nuns], because [they were] consecrated, women, and uncultivated.” Eager to know more, she was unwilling to comply with her guides’ injunctions to drop the matter. As her curiosity grew, she turned again to the confessor, who argued that her interpretation of the Scriptures was incorrect. “More stubborn than ever,” she said, describing herself in the statement, “I believed what I had believed before, thinking that the abovementioned confessor did not want to tell the truth” and that “not even he knew it.” Her inner convictions were more certain than the theological knowledge flaunted by her male guide, but as she shared her views with her fellow sisters, their response became less indulgent. Maria Eletta Lamberti told her that she had already heard this interpretation of original sin from “morbid people,” while Sister Maria Cecilia Vernizzi preferred not to respond at all. A third, Sister Francesca Zerbina, noted that she had even heard someone saying that Christ paid for this sin by suffering circumcision, but she soon added that none of these things were true because the Sacred Scriptures said otherwise.
The allusion to the circumcision of Christ as a remedy for Adam and Eve’s sexual sin probably refers to a learned source. Beverland’s On Original Sin explains circumcision as an effort by the Jews to restrain the grip of concupiscence that originated from Adam and Eve’s surrender to lust; it “was therefore a type of rejection of carnal desires.” Agrippa’s Declamation had already dealt with this subject, noting that when “the merciful God concluded a covenant with his people,” to make sure that “the covenanters would remember their depraved nature,” he commanded them to be circumcised “so that the part which had sinned and through which the original sin is transfused would serve as a sign of the covenant. He extended this into metaphor, noting that removing the foreskins of their hearts would remove that depraved concupiscence.” Beverland distanced himself from Agrippa’s antecedent and claimed that in his sacrifice for the salvation of humankind, Christ voluntarily let his body be wounded by the mark of sexual debauchery: “The immaculate virgin bore him with her virginity intact and without toil and she freed this burden of her chaste womb in a pure delivery as a generous mother. The wounded enemy favoured the offspring of the first semen, which Christ as the semen of the blessed little virgin, the Messiah or Michael destroyed, crushed, and subdued.” Despite his virginal conception, however, Christ had to suffer the same fate as every Jewish child: “He suffered circumcision for us and He commanded us to purify ourselves through baptism, because, innocent, He suffered an affliction in the flesh for us, to make himself indebted to always observe the laws.”
Sister Maria Teresa Garzi was willing to pursue an inner conviction that she described as coming exclusively from an independent inspiration. She declared that, soon after her discussion with Sister Francesca Zerbina, she decided to go back to her confessor with the explicit intent of “making him believe what [she] believed, because [she] thought he did not know the truth about this issue.” Along with this proud claim for independence, Sister Maria Teresa insisted that she had never thought that “the Catholic Roman Church maintained or believed the contrary of what [she] believed.” It was probably less risky for her to convince the judges that she had deceived herself into believing something to be orthodox and true when it was not than to admit that she was familiar with something that had been formally declared to be heretical. She claimed that her belief that Christ was circumcised to clean the stain of Adam and Eve’s sexual infraction was something that she had “invented in her own head.” The confessor was not as easily manipulable as she hoped, and he warned her that “this was a rotten heresy” and that she was obliged to denounce herself to the inquisitor.
Even when she described to her judges the conversion that ultimately led her to repent, she diminished the contribution of her male confessor in this process. She took her time to think about the matter, and, “rather dubious about what was the truth,” she turned inward, “thinking about her business, and eventually enlightened by God,” she declared, “I realized my error, which I detest, and I firmly believe in all the things, that are reported in the Holy Scripture, how it is thought and considered by the Holy Roman Church.” Sister Maria Teresa Garzi thus depicted her return to orthodoxy as depending on direct divine inspiration, as if to diminish her dependence on her confessor’s authority until the end of the judicial proceedings. She was vehemently condemned to abjure on March 20, 1714, and given an unspecified spiritual penance.
From What God Kept for Himself: Atheism, Sodomy, and Radical Dissent in Renaissance Italy. Used with permission of Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Umberto Grassi.
