Even when he departs from her account of Benedetta Carlini, whose story she unearthed by accident in the late 1970s in Florence’s Medici archives as an aspiring academic at Berkeley and later Stanford “looking for a footnote”, Brown insists that Verhoeven, who also co-wrote the script, usually does so cleverly. 

“He takes things that were in my [1985] book but which did not necessarily take place in Benedetta’s convent. He does that in order to make certain points and I thought that those were great.” 

In her introduction, she recounts, she had mentioned in passing that there was a nun in another convent in Pescia who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism. “That’s all I said. It was all I knew.”

However, Verhoeven includes in the film a Jewish nun called Sister Jacopa (Guilaine Londez) “in a very moving set of scenes”. He did so, Brown suggests, “because anti-Semitism was very important to Paul growing up as he did in Holland in the Second World War.” 

Even on the delicate subject of that unorthodox dildo, she adds, Verhoeven didn’t entirely make it up to shock or titillate. “It didn’t happen in this convent but I did write in the introduction about another convent in Pescia in which they discovered a dildo hidden in a shoe when it was taken to be mended. It wasn’t a statue of Mary, just a piece of wood, but Paul took that detail and used it in a particular way to make certain points.”

Her willingness to give the controversial director license with her much admired and still read 36-year-old book is not boundless. though. One loss that she particularly regrets is the film’s eclipse of the figure of Splenditello who, in the written accounts of how Benedetta justified her lack of chastity when put on trial, was a male angel who took over her body.

“I missed Splenditello in the film,” says Brown. “In Immodest Acts I made the point that Benedetta had no way to conceive of a same-sex relationship. This was a society in which you can’t even give a name to it. So she explained it to herself by saying she became Splenditello and was male when she was having sex with Bartolomea.”  

Fans of her book, she says, have made the same point to her about his absence (even if angels in Catholic theology are usually androgynous and never have sex). It matters because it goes to the heart of Benedetta’s story.