Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (review)

In this study, Stephen Haliczer relies on two major sources: thirty biographies and autobiographies of women mystics and fifteen Inquisition cases brought against women accused of feigned sanctity. The most that the overwhelming majority of the women mystics investigated in this work could claim was popular sainthood. Only five of the thirty mystics studied were ever canonized, and most had cults that tended to die after a generation or two. The high level of documentation used in the biographies in this study, including autobiographical materials, detailed records kept by confessors, notarized accounts of miracles, and the spiritual writings of the women, demonstrates clearly that facts about these women's lives were not lost.

But nowhere else in Europe did mysticism come to play such a dominant role as in Spain, where it was not limited to a comparatively small number of devout individuals but took on the character of almost a mass movement, at least among the urban middle and upper classes. Haliczer asks the question, how did an entire society, or at least a significant part of it, see itself in terms of its capacity for sainthood.

As part of the Church's campaign to bring popular religious expression under greater control, the Inquisition moved to suppress the vernacular Bible. This left a gap that the authors of the Flos Sanctorum hastened to fill by including a variety of biblical stories in their works. They incorporated into these works the life and passion of Jesus and the life of Mary and descriptions of the Trinity and elaborate discussion and defense of the sacrament of the Eucharist, including various miracles that had occurred to demonstrate its veracity. The growing interest in the lives of the saints among the laity was also stoked by an extraordinary surge of individual lives. The publication of growing numbers of spiritual biographies and autobiographies by and about highly spiritual nuns and beatas induced other women whose spirituality was much less certain to try to publish their own material.

Most observers agreed that aristocratic lineage predisposed the individual to scale the heights of spirituality, regardless of any loss of personal comfort or convenience. The noble in this mentality was more likely than the plebeian to be virtuous. A whole seventy percent of the approved women mystics came of aristocratic families. None of the pretended mystics could boast of social status. But as the fervor for mysticism spread from an elite group of adepts to the popular masses, the church hierarchy and especially the Inquisition became more and more concerned about the problem of fraud.

Mysticism provided Spanish women with a way to transcend but not disrupt the control of the male-dominated church. Probably the most remarkable life of a woman mystic actually having some impact on national politics is contained in the correspondence exchanged between María de Jesús de Ágreda, a cloistered Franciscan nun, and King Philip IV. Over a period of twenty-two years, from 1643 to 1665, the nun acted as a kind of informal advisor and confidante to the troubled ruler, who consulted her about everything from his health to foreign policy.

The reception of female mystical experiences depended absolutely on the approval of the male-dominated church and monarchy. Paradoxically, alongside this cautious, even hostile, approach to female mysticism, the Holy Office was eager to believe and accept the validity of such supernatural phenomena as visions, revelations, and stigmata. These were signs that God still favored the devout Catholic with divine communication. If these favors were bestowed upon women in spite of their generally accepted emotional weakness, intellectual inferiority, and vulnerability to demonic manipulation, so much the better as a manifestation of God's wonderful generosity to his faithful. These, then, are some of the important themes dealt with in detail in this well-researched and documented study.