I kept the subject line boring on purpose to keep out all the guys who’d just post that Catholic lesbian sex is hot.
Anyway, how often does it happen that nuns transgress their vows of chastity with each other? Any official numbers? Any good guesses? Any (dare I say) personal experiences? Anything at all?
Their lips are sealed.
While moriah’s answer is correct and funny in more ways than one, it wasn’t quite the hard data I was looking for. Doesn’t anyone in Doperland know about this? We hear about other transgression in monasteries and convents, surely some sapphic pleasure must occur and news of which trickle out?
But you did not ask whether it occurred; you asked for a quantification of its occurrence. Given that it would be a violation of Church law and seen as a grave sin, to say nothing of giving scandal, if it were known, where do you expect the figures to have been collected and recorded? I don’t believe that you are going to find any evidence that will supply numbers or dates.
If you are seriously interested, you could probably spend a few decades rifling through the Vatican archives tracking any references to convents being shut down and their members being removed, although such events might have other causes, as well. (You might want to find a cover story for your study, as the Vatican Librarian might not be keen to have you spend years and years in the archives looking for that information.) I really doubt that anyone before you has thought that the matter was worth pursuing, so I doubt that there are numbers to discover.
There is a fair bit of work around female religous and sexuality, particularly in the area of religion and gender studies, but I don’t think there is an answer to your question if all you’re looking for are figures. Even if you did the relevant research in archives, you wouldn’t necessarily know whether what you uncovered were real examples of hot, nun on nun action, or something else altogether.
Accusations of “unnatural” behaviour directed at female communities, religious and otherwise, were not uncommon. In some instances these accusations may have been a way of disparaging or forcing the closure of communities which had transgressed in other ways, for example by becoming too rich or too powerful.
Other instances may simply have been an expression of uneasiness at the very idea of women’s communities. There’s an entire tradition of male suspicion of women living together without men, a suspicion which not infrequently found expression in speculation about the sexual practices of those women.
I can’t speak about later periods, but I’d be surprised if some of the same ideas about women’s communities didn’t continue through later centuries.
There is a substantial body of scholarly work on homosexuality and Catholicism, and about women religious in the medieval period which won’t necessarily answer your question, but which might illuminate a context for it.
The Medieval Sourcebook has a lot of good stuff on women’s roles, including women religious (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook1v.html) and a decent bibliography on homosexuality and Catholicism (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/lgbcathbib3.html), although I think if you did a search on one of the medieval periodical indexes you’d find a lot more up-to-date material.
I do believe there’s been a few ‘kiss and tell’ books by former, disgruntled women religious. The problem is that such books are anecdotal. One doesn’t know the veracity of the author or what kind of axe she’s grinding which would distort the ‘facts’ of the story. Also, even if everything in such a tell-all book is true, there’s no way of knowing if the situation is endemic to all/most other religious houses and orders; or whether her particular situation is an isolated problem.
So, sorry, I have no leads for you.
Peace.