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Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (review)
- Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2004
- pp. 104-107
- 10.1353/scs.2004.0017
- Review
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Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 4.1 (2004) 104-107
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During the past few decades, the study of early modern mysticism and saint-making has flourished. In broad surveys of saints in medieval and early modern Europe, scholars have pointed out the changing demographics and characteristics of canonized saints. A renaissance in the study of St. Teresa of Avila has not only enhanced our understanding of this paradigmatic saint and Spanish mysticism, but also highlighted the importance of rhetoric, politics, and historical location in the making of a saint. Furthermore, recent studies of the Inquisition, women's marginalized role in Mediterranean societies, and hagiographical and autobiographical [End Page 104] conventions, have provided nuanced contexts for understanding women's religious experience.
In Between Exaltation and Infamy, Stephen Haliczer examines thirty biographies and autobiographies of "approved" female mystics and fifteen Inquisition trials of "sham" mystics (the terms in quotation marks are his) from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. Arguing that the time for broad surveys of sainthood has passed, he employs quantitative and qualitative approaches in order "to interpret the social construction of female sanctity in early modern Spain" (5, 6). He examines the historical context in which female mystics emerged in Spain, gives a general overview of their development from childhood to adulthood, and identifies the factors which supported or detracted from claims to holiness.
Haliczer stresses that in Spain the reforms mandated by the Catholic Reformation were implemented with zeal. Though vernacular versions of the Bible were prohibited, the publication of innumerable hagiographical and devotional works in Spanish helped to slake the thirst of devout readers. Haliczer characterizes Spaniards as being "uncritical" in their belief in the miraculous and reliance on divine favor-credulity that accounts, at least in part, for Spain's failure to take part in the scientific revolution (12-13). As seventeenth-century Spain faced increasingly severe economic, military, and social crises, interest in discerning the divine will through political prophecies and mystical revelations grew. Numerous female mystics who emerged to fill this need received royal, aristocratic, and middle-class patronage. Though some theologians viewed women as the weaker sex and unworthy of God's favor,
many theologians had come to reject or at least question the traditional idea that women were less trustworthy recipients. They argued that the lack of formal education, ability to read Latin, and access to scripture and sophisticated theological works made it highly likely that such communication came directly from God (66).
The canonization of Teresa of Avila in 1622 encouraged such beliefs.
Like all women in early modern Europe, future mystics in Spain had limited choices and opportunities. The decision about whether elite women would marry or enter a convent was generally made by their parents or relatives. Women from poor families had even fewer options. Since they often lacked the dowry required both for marrying and for entering a convent, some of these women opted to live in a beaterio, an informal religious community. Haliczer describes the childhood of most female mystics at all social levels as marred by some degree of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. In addition, at an early age many of them were forced by their families into rigorous devotional and penitential practices. "It is only natural," Haliczer argues, "that such imaginative and sensitive children should seek to separate themselves from a painful reality and take refuge in a world of helping, loving divine figures" (160). The adolescence of female mystics was characterized by a "struggle for self-assertion" (the title of his chapter on adolescence) in which they wrestled with their sexuality and limited vocational choices. In adulthood, they employed numerous "strategies" aimed at attaining authority by establishing moral ascendancy. Not only did they engage in devotional practices; they "perform[ed]" their interactions with the divine (181, 187).
The last three chapters focus on what determined a female...