Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima (review)

Frank Graziano's ambitious and provocative book re-examines the first New World saint, Peruvian Saint Rose of Lima, canonized in 1671. Graziano applies a "cultural psychology" approach, drawing on psychoanalytic and literary analysis to look deeply into the multiple and at times competing representations of Rose of Lima during the process of her emergence as a mystic in seventeenth-century colonial Peru, through to her canonization and beyond. What Graziano is after here is not a history or historical biography of Rosa of Lima, but instead an analysis of the representation of her life in the hagiographic works that document her saintliness, and in the reception of her pious works in Peruvian society specifically, and of seventeenth-century Catholic society in general. Catholicism in this historical moment was a gendered religious culture that valued not only virginity, but also visions, often dramatic physical mortifications, and prolonged fasts and illnesses to signal female saintliness, as long as these action took place within certain Church-determined boundaries.

Graziano is particularly interested in the relationship between Rose's suffering and her sanctity, and he posits that her religious behavior could be both pathological and functional within seventeenth-century Catholic religious cultures, arguing that "Rose played to an audience that interrelated her illness and her saintliness and assessed the authenticity of her mysticism by measuring the severity of her suffering" (p. 20). Of course, analyzing a religious figure such as Saint Rose of Lima outside of traditional hagiographic frameworks as Graziano does can be controversial, as in the case of Stafford Poole's research on the Virgin of Guadalupe in his book Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (1995). At same time, however, this type of research works to historicize and contextualize the lives of saints and their roles in cultures on the ground in the New World, as well as to analyze hagiographic constructs and how they change over time. Graziano also locates his arguments about the representations of Rose of Lima's self-mortification into the broader literature on medieval and early modern female piety.

This work, however, has no conventional conclusion. One would have liked Graziano to say something about the larger implications of his interpretations for our understandings of Rose of Lima's religious life, and for medieval and early modern cultures of female saints, mystics, and beatas in Latin America and Europe. This would have been especially helpful given the book's final, intense chapters. These were key to his psychoanalytic analysis of Rosa's corporeal mortification, her mystical marriage to Christ, and the larger cultural beliefs in the connection between the mortification of the female body and societal atonement. Nevertheless, this is a carefully written, closely argued work that adds important new dimensions to Saint Rose of Lima and her representations in New World and European Catholic cultures.