Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima by Frank Graziano

The Peruvian mystic St. Rose of Lima (Isabel Flores y Oliva, 1586-1617) used to be canonized in 1671 because the first saint of the recent global and is still the thing of frequent devotion this day. during this engrossing new examine, Frank Graziano makes use of the instance of St. Rose to discover the which means of woman mysticism and how during which saints are items in their cultures.
Virginity, austerity, eucharistic devotion, incessant mortification, and mystical marriage to Christ characterised the devotional routine that dependent St. Rose's whole existence. a lot of her mystical practices echo the indicators of such glossy mental problems as masochism, melancholy, hysteria, and anorexia nervosa. Graziano bargains a worldly argument not just for the origins and that means of those behaviors in Rose's case, but in addition for the explanation her tradition commemorated them as symptoms of sanctity. within the technique he explores a variety of issues, from the assumption of ache as an expression of affection to the assimilation of early life trauma via spiritual repetition.
Graziano additionally bargains a penetrating research of the politics of Rose's canonization. He unearths that her mystical union with God--bypassing the institutional channels of sacrament and priestly mediation--was inherently subversive to the bureaucratized Church. Canonization was once a cooptation wherein Rose's competing declare to Christ was once built-in into the Catholic canon.
The ebook concludes with a desirable exploration of mystical eroticism, with its excessive reviews of imaginative and prescient and ecstasy. The eroticized soreness of many mystics is proven to be very human in beginning: the mystic's wounded love is projected onto a God conceived to deal with it.
Wounds of Love is predicated on a decade of analysis in records, infrequent books, and a unprecedented variety of secondary resources. Introducing an leading edge procedure that integrates historical past, cultural experiences, psychoanalysis, and medical psychology, this compelling paintings bargains a daring new interpretation of girl mysticism.