It seems that history is littered with accounts of naughty nuns and deviant monks all striving for pleasure when they should have been in prayer (the reformation, French revolutionary anti-clericalism etc.). Yet these accounts often come from enemies of the monasteries and are thus untrustworthy as source material. Would someone on ask Historians be able to separate fact from fiction a little bit for me? Were monks and nuns "getting it on" for want of a better phrase all over the place (with the opposite gender or the same for that matter) or were they for the most part a virtuous bunch whose occasional sins were blown completely out of proportion by their enemies and detractors. Any time period is fine, I just wanted to get a broad feeling for the topic.
The answer is that a lot of the the salaciousness implied to be going on in monasteries and cloisters is sensationalism that built itself around some genuine examples. There's a very famous example of Benedetta Carlini, a 16th century mystic and lesbian who was one of the rare examples historians have of lesbians in the early modern period (it's not to say they didn't exist, but rather they left little direct evidence). The social historian Judith Brown covered Carlini's life in her Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy and it's well worth checking out because Brown uses Carlini's story to examine the wider issues of homosexuality within the convent and cloister.