Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima

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Wounds of Love

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Wounds of Love The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima

frank graziano

1 2004

1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜o Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright 2004 by Frank Graziano Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graziano, Frank, 1955– Wounds of love : the mystical marriage of Saint Rose of Lima / Frank Graziano. p. cm. ISBN 0-19-513640-3 1. Rose, of Lima, Saint, 1586–1617. 2. Christian saints—Peru—Lima. 3. Lima (Peru)—Church history. I. Title. BX4700.R6 G73 2003 282'.092—dc21 2002156304

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For the victims of love. My heart like a ﬂame upside down. —Guillaume Apollinaire

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Preface

The principal primary sources on St. Rose of Lima are the depositions taken during the ordinary and apostolic processes of beatiﬁcation and canonization, both conducted in Lima in the early seventeenth century. The most complete and least damaged copies of these documents are found in the Vatican Secret Archives, Sacred Congregation of Rites section, in the manuscript volumes numbered 1570 through 1580. (During my visit in 1994, volume 1579 could not be located.) The most important volumes for the purposes of the study reported in this volume are 1570 (which contains the testimonies of the ordinary process taken in 1617 and 1618) and 1573 and 1574 (which are virtually identical and each contain the testimonies of the apostolic process taken between 1630 and 1632. Volume 1573 also contains several unbound, unnumbered pages of letters that were written in 1631 and 1632 by civil and religious authorities of the Viceroyalty of Peru and were dispatched from Lima to Rome to manifest support for Rose’s canonization. Many of these letters are also available in print sources. Given the relative inaccessibility of these manuscripts and the confusion resulting from the unsynchronized pagination of the many original and microﬁlm copies (such as those in the Archivo Arzobispal in Lima, the Dominican College Library in Washington, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University, in addition to the mentioned Vatican volumes), I have cited witness testimony primarily from modern print sources. In these cases, the identity of the particular witness and the secondary source—usually the compilation published by Cayetano Bruno—are noted. In those cases for which no print source was available or known to me, I referenced the Vatican manuscripts. I have also cited the key hagiographies of Pedro de

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Loayza and Leonard Hansen in modern editions. All translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. It is frequently observed that hagiography can “tell us at least as much about the author and about those who used the text—their ideals and practices, their concerns and aspirations—as it does about the saints who are their subjects.”1 Much the same may be said of scholarship. Any study registers the beliefs, concerns, values, politics, prejudices, and interpretive strategies of its author and, more broadly, of the culture and subculture in which it was produced. Hagiography differs from scholarship, however, as constancy differs from restlessness. Scholarship clearly proceeds in movements and-isms that generate bodies of genre literature, some of which endures and most of which is displaced by new trends. Even a glance at book advertisements in professional journals across a period of ﬁfty years suggests that “the history of ideas is a history of a sequence of entrenched ideational fashions.”2 A developmental advance is suggested as each new movement presumes inherent superiority, but fashion’s only claim is to novelty. The odd styles worn along the way, so apparent in retrospect, are likely also dressing us now. Scholarly acumen is necessarily partial (in both senses of the term), transitory, and, perhaps, ridiculous, and I am therefore as reluctant to align my (partial, transitory, ridiculous) inquiry to any one school or discipline as I am to dismiss scholarship that, for whatever reason, has fallen out of fashion. I likewise ﬁnd it useful to consult with both sides of polemical arguments as I formulate my own interpretations, precisely because each illuminates—in the special angle of its light—different aspects of the material under study. These arguments’ tentative but celebrated incompatibility with one another does not preclude their coherent integration into a discussion outside of the polemic, particularly if any claim to exclusivity is dismissed. Without venturing to classify what I offer in the study that follows, I may describe this work as an informed reading of related texts in the perspective of a scholar who is intrigued by the complexities of Catholic cultures, studied in interpretive theories, and enticed by the simultaneity of contradictory meanings. My study explores mysticism in atheistic perspective and by means of my peculiar combination of scholarly assets, but I intend to offend no one on neither religious nor scholarly grounds, and I have made a sustained effort to avoid doing so. At the same time, however, I have been careful to avoid the haunting self-censorship that results from one’s anticipation of objections raised by disgruntled, dogmatic, or hostile readers whose opinions are guided by beliefs or methods that are incompatible with those operative in these pages and who are disinclined to extend the reciprocal courtesy of religious and intellectual tolerance. I offer my views in good will to whoever may be interested and in full awareness of the dismissals, assaults, and mocking stock qualiﬁers—puerile, anachronistic, titillating, reductionist—that will emerge in some quarters. One must ﬁrst be true to oneself if what one writes is to be worthy of its honest readers.

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notes 1. The quoted phrase is from Thomas Head, “Introduction,” Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), xiii. 2. The quoted phrase is from Richard A. Shweder, “Anthropology’s Romantic Rebellion against the Enlightenment, Or There’s More to Thinking Than Reason and Evidence,” in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 28.

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Acknowledgments

As this study slogged across the years toward its reluctant conclusion, I accumulated a huge debt of gratitude. At the top of the institutional list is the John Carter Brown Library, which in 1989 provided a fellowship and a stimulating environment for the initial research in early modern print sources. A National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (which supported work toward chapter 4) and a matching award from the Dean of Faculties at American University made months of uninterrupted work possible in 1992. The following year, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies helped to support a semester of full-time research and writing. A substantial part of that semester was spent working under ideal and idyllic conditions as a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. In 1994, a research award from American University funded a trip to the Vatican Secret Archives, where I was able to continue the manuscript research that I had begun earlier, using partial microﬁlm copies of the ordinary and apostolic processes. A year later, while directing American University’s World Capitals Program in Madrid, I had ready access to the Biblioteca Nacional and Archivo Histo´rico Nacional, where the primary research was continued. Also in 1995, American University funded travel to Lima, Peru, where an exhibit of colonial paintings, sculpture, and folk art on St. Rose of Lima provided an ideal opportunity for research in iconography. The project’s primary research also included work at the Archbishopric Archives in Quito, Ecuador; in the Mendel Collection at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, under a Helm Fellowship; at the Dominican House Library in Washington, D.C.; at the Hispanic Society of America in New York; and in the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas,

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Austin. Since 1999, my research has been generously supported by Connecticut College through the research stipend of the John D. MacArthur professorship. I express my sincere and enduring gratitude to all of these collections, institutions, and ﬁnancial supporters for the assistance that made this project possible. First on the list of individuals to who I am grateful is Peter Bakewell, in whose graduate seminar this project began and who over the years has been a steadfast and generous friend. I also gratefully acknowledge the help, comments, and guidance of Rudolph Bell, Rudolph Binion, Fermı´n del Pino, Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Bernard McGinn, Kathleen Myers, Luis Millones, Donald Weinstein, and, at Connecticut College, my colleagues Robert Baldwin, Dirk Held, and Fred Paxton. To my editor at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read, I reiterate my incalculable gratitude. The Instituto Riva-Agu¨ero in Lima twice provided a context in which my thoughts on Rose of Lima were reﬁned, and for these opportunities I am grateful particularly to Carlos Ga´lvez, Margarita Sua´rez, and Carmela Zanelli. For other forums during which my ideas evolved, I thank Noe¨l Valis and the faculty in Spanish at Yale University; Kenneth Mills and the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University; Jean-Jacques DeCoster and the scholars who responded to my work in Revista andina; and Norman Fiering, the John Carter Brown Library, and the participants in the conference “Rosa de Lima: Sanctity, Mysticism, and Creole Identity in Colonial Spanish America.” Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the publishers of my previous work on Rose of Lima: Boletı´n del Instituto Riva-Agu¨ero, Biblioteca Peruano de Psicoana´lisis and Seminario Interdisciplinario de Estudios Andinos, Encounters, Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, and Public.

Contents

1. Meanings in Motion, 3 Sanctity and Insanity 20 Inversions 27 2. Conditioned Perceptions, 33 Constructing Sanctity 33 Life by the Book 42 The Prototype as Palimpsest 49 Sanctity as Tautology 53 Of Truth and Falsity 58 3. Miracle of the Rose, 67 Deﬂowering 67 Paradise Regained 75 The Odor of Sanctity 80 The Name of the Rose 84 4. Why Rose of Lima?, 89 5. Mysticism as Dissent, 111 The Politics of Canonization 111 Sublime Subversions 119 “Obedezco pero no cumplo” 122 Virgin Warrior 126 6. Vicarious Atonement, 133 Sin and Expiation 133 The Poetics of Patronage 143

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7. Spiritualized Symptoms, 149 The Mother 149 Traumatic Reliving 157 Erotic Agony 164 Delusional Truths 173 Desolate unto Bliss 183 8. Psychosexual Faith, 187 Eroticized Scripture 187 Return of the Repressed 193 9. The Purgatory of Love, 205 The Wound as Breast 205 Flames of Passion and Wounds of Love 210 Mystical Marriage 215 Notes, 233 Index, 331

Wounds of Love

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1 Meanings in Motion

If God does not exist, or at least not as depicted by early modern Catholicism, then what are mystics doing? St. Rose of Lima vowed virginity, fasted to emaciation, scourged herself until blood ran to the ﬂoor, and, in short, dedicated her entire, agonized life to mortiﬁcation as preparation for mystical marriage with Christ the Bridegroom. Her “pious cruelty” and “holy hatred” toward herself were predicated on the belief that God loved his brides in proportion to their suffering.1 In one of the few extant documents in Rose of Lima’s hand she underscored “the great desire that I have to suffer for Jesus Christ, Bridegroom of my soul.”2 Rose’s religious culture in the broad sense—from the Limen ˜ os among whom she lived to the hagiographers and cult dedicated to her throughout the seventeenth century—shared her belief that the relation between suffering and sanctity was causal. They lauded Rose’s abuse of her body, applauded her virginity, marveled at her heroic tolerance of asceticism and pain, and endorsed her conviction that this torturous route led to mystical marriage and an eternity of heavenly bliss. They also believed, like Rose, that God willed the suffering. The testimony of one of Rose’s acquaintances, Luisa de Santa Marı´a, registered the typical conviction that Rose engaged in the “bad treatment of her body in conformance with the will of God.” “The more you bear,” this God explained centuries earlier to Catherine of Siena, “the more you show your love for me.”3 When Rose or others of Christ’s brides were lax in their penitence, or when an extra dose of atonement was required, Christ himself exacted an allotment in exchange for his love, often by sending unbearable physical torments. The self-inﬂicted pain was offered up in loving devotion, and the reciprocal God-sent sufferings were accepted almost as though

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they were caresses. As explained by Rose’s principal hagiographer, the German Dominican Leonard Hansen, “When the pain in her side caused her to vomit blood,” the moribund Rose “spoke to her Bridegroom in verses,” expressing sweetly her gratitude for the agony. Hansen dutifully itemized the particulars of Rose’s deathbed sufferings so that the reader would understand that “to die slowly is a more glorious martyrdom.”4 Protracted moribund agony was the ﬁnal purging “with which the Lord wanted to ﬁnish purifying that blessed soul,” precisely because he desired to “enjoy her as his Bride eternally.”5 Mystical marriage would unite Rose’s agony to Christ’s Passion with a love that was paradoxically carnal and disembodied, excruciating and blissful. As an eighteenth-century painting represented such love, Christ’s right arm pulls free from the cross to hug the mortiﬁed Rose as her lips approach the gash in his side.6 Two wounded loves fuse as Rose drinks deeply from the spilled blood that saved her life. The divinity of this God of love is called into question by his all-too-human emotions. In one episode, the Bridegroom was jealous of Rose’s garden because her love for it challenged his monopoly on her affection. Christ spitefully trampled and uprooted Rose’s plants in what resembled an outburst of juvenile insecurity and possessiveness, and he insisted that she devote herself exclusively to him. As Christ explained to Rose with echoes of the Song of Songs, “whoever has Me, because I am the ﬂower of the ﬁeld, does not need to grow ﬂowers here on earth, but rather to be dedicated to loving me.” In another episode, Rose had a sore throat, wagered the pain in a dice game with Christ, and won. The pain disappeared miraculously, but then Christ, “impatient and a sore loser,” demanded a rematch, won this second round, and restored Rose’s sore throat with a vengeance.7 At other times Christ chastised Rose for breaking her fast. On one occasion he rejected the prayers that she offered after eating (“I don’t have to listen while you’re like that”), and on another he objected to “cleaning the garbage” out of her stomach. In other episodes a miniature Christ ran naked between the lines of the book Rose was reading, pausing to give her “very sweet caresses.”8 He broke into sweat when Rose addressed to him her ﬁery pleas, and, when he proposed marriage to Rose, he was so overtaken with nervous emotion that “he stammered and, choked up with emotion, could barely express himself.”9 When speaking to Catherine of Siena, God similarly evidenced human debilities by losing his train of thought, repeating himself endlessly, making calculation errors, and quoting the Bible to support his arguments.10 Such human frailties were compounded by the cruelty, erotic desire, penchant for ﬁnery and feasting, and lack of charity attributed to Christ elsewhere in Rose’s hagiography. When these character traits are considered in contrast to the devotional purposes of the texts that present them, they reveal a God plagued by the vices, faults, passions, and weaknesses that Rose of Lima—paradoxically— dedicated her entire life to obliterating. The deity represented in such hagiographic episodes and in the wounded erotics of mysticism generally is more convincing as the construct of a particular strain of Catholicism than as the one true God of the universe. His hu-

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manity casts a shadow over his divinity. What sort of omniscient, omnipotent God would express himself in these basely human and often ludicrous ways that trivialize the power and awe of deity? What sort of all-loving God would demand as a condition of his love that a frail girl torture herself to mime the sufferings of his Passion, through which he was supposed to have settled the account once for all? Why is the human body debased and mortiﬁed, while the God—incarnate—is decidedly anthropomorphic, having fused his Word with our ﬂesh? Why is this God depicted as a Bridegroom who wounds his betrothed as he loves them erotically, who demands absolute deprecation of the brides who are admitted to his heavenly bedchamber? And if all of these matters—the cruel demands, the gratuitous miracles, the nuanced sexuality, the nuptial tropes—are of human rather than divine origin, if they are projected onto a God conceived to accommodate them, then what is happening during the intense experiences of vision and ecstasy, who is speaking when God speaks, why does mystical union assume sexual tropes, and why is the loved female body loathed? If God is not behind the incessant mortiﬁcation, the inhuman regimen of penitential asceticism, the virginity, the rendezvous in heaven, and, in general, the ungodly behavior, then what is Rose of Lima doing, why is it celebrated and saintly in her culture, and what could it reveal in the long view? Texts, lives, and texts written about lives are inherently polysemous. Their deﬁnitive meaning at any given historical moment is always a transitory, privileged meaning that eclipses and often excludes competing meanings, any one of which, at another historical moment or under a different paradigm, could itself have come to assume the privileged position as deﬁnitive, as true, as indisputable. Texts, lives, and texts written about lives are open works receptive to multiple readings, but they are often closed down and restricted to a single interpretation that exalts the values and defends the interests of a dominant political position that claims them. Meaning is contingent, malleable, and restricted by context. The more specious a truth, the more desperately it must be defended. Any challenge to the hegemony of an institutionalized opinion ossiﬁed into dogma will be met with inquisitorial wrath. Even within Catholic cultures, the identity of Rose of Lima was adaptable to sometimes contradictory purposes as varied interests competed for its ownership. Strategic selection of episodes could stress some aspects of Rose’s identity while deemphasizing others, and reading with purpose could steer the saint toward multiple and even mutually exclusive roles that fulﬁlled the needs of the diverse constituencies claiming her. Thus, in her own times and across the centuries, Rose of Lima was represented as a new Catherine of Siena, an Alumbrada, a protectress, a patron, a sacriﬁcial victim, an edenic ﬂower, a neurotic, a virgin warrior, a symbol of Creole nationalism, a pillar of Hapsburg monarchy, an antidote for native paganism, an instigator of indigenous insurrection, and a saint of little importance.11 For the popular classes, she represented miraculous intercession; for the Lima Dominicans, a trophy; for other beatas, a model; for the Inquisition, an enigma; for the papacy, a triumph; and for her mother, a problem. There is also an enduring tendency in iconography,

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popular imagery, and even scholarship to deemphasize the horror of Rose’s life—tortured from beginning to end—and to accentuate instead the mostly apocryphal sweet incidents, such as her singing, friendship with nature, strolling with Jesus, and caring for the poor. As represented in a contemporary Peruvian textbook for schoolchildren, Rose “was a woman of extraordinary humility. In her spacious garden she built a hermitage in order to pray and to converse with the mosquitoes.”12 If even within religious cultures Rose’s identities have been multiple, then outside of them, once the metaphysics relinquish their primacy, secular meanings redouble the complexity. The religious beliefs and practices of Rose of Lima were conditioned by European Catholic culture as it ﬂourished in Spain and adapted to the realities of the New World colonies. The ideal of sainthood was fostered in an ambience in which history was shaped by religion as Catholicism penetrated and regulated even the most mundane aspects of society. Many have observed that external aspects of the faith tended to overshadow sincere inner devotion, but far from indexing a false conviction this ceremonial faith expressed a deep religiosity that was both personal and social, that united the individual to the community as well as to God, and that had temporal as well as spiritual functions. An exaltation of penance counterbalanced the ostentation. The CounterReformation brought increased Catholic emphasis on the cruciﬁed Christ and the Passion, and penitential exercises, often public, followed suit. Particularly after the military and demographic disasters in Spain of the 1640s and 1650s, which were perceived as divine punishments, an empire in decline atoned to beseech redemption. Monarchy provided an enduring paradigm—from the regal asceticism of Charles V’s retiring to the monastery of Yuste to the notorious inﬁdelities of Philip IV that were counterbalanced by the austerities of his morosely nunlike widow, Mariana of Austria, and atoned for vicariously by his subjects. In Lima, the epicenter of viceregal South America, the Catholic faith was similarly ubiquitous. “Life was Christian,” as one scholar put it, and another characteristically described “an ambience saturated with religious fervor.”13 The socialization and politicization of Catholicism in the New World was facilitated by a series of papal decrees, epitomized by Julius II’s bull of July 28, 1508, which granted Spanish monarchy royal patronage over the Church in the colonies.14 Birth and death rituals, education, health care, political organization, city planning, civil status, ethics, customs, values, the arts, enmity, conquest, and aspects of labor were all signiﬁcantly determined by Catholicism. The churchish skyline was an always visible monument to Catholicism’s predominance; the passage of time was measured by church bells and ofﬁces; and the ritual calendar—with daily feast days, frequent religious holidays, and corresponding spectacular ceremonies—synchronized the temporal world with eternity. Sacraments, miracles, mystical ecstasies, visions, the procession of religious images to ward off dangers, daily visits to churches, the ubiquity and prominent social roles of clergy, and, in short, the presence of God in everyday life were the norm. The world was a theater in which God’s will, responding always to human behavior, made itself manifest for better or for worse.

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The natural and supernatural worlds intermingled in the social realties of ruling and underclasses alike. Political ﬁgures and the elite often prided themselves on a high-proﬁle religiosity. The viceroy Count of Lemos, who advocated on behalf of Rose of Lima’s canonization, confessed and took communion daily. When he was not enjoying the pomp of viceregal splendor, he expressed his Christian humility by sweeping the ﬂoor of a church that was founded with his assistance. He mandated that Lima residents fall to their knees when the cathedral bells rang and, in general, advocated harsh punishment for those who impeded his effort to “pietize” the city. Some felt, around 1657, that he “wanted to turn Lima into a religious monastery.”15 A scholar more recently and more generally observed that early colonial Lima adopted monastic life as its ideal, and that the city was like “a huge convent, with its sleepy tranquility, it monotony interrupted by ostentatious celebrations, its mystical ecstasies.” What is certain is that the ambience of colonial Lima was conducive to the emergence of saintly ﬁgures, Rose of Lima the ﬁrst among them to be canonized. Between 1580 and 1680 Lima produced some fourteen saints, venerables, and servants of God, as well as innumerable nuns, beatas (non-cloistered religious women, often tertiaries of a mendicant order), and others who were widely regarded as saintly but never gained the Church’s formal recognition.16 Some cultures—ours not among them—are “programmed” to perceive sanctity, and their saints, assessed later by cultures like ours, become “cultural indicators” that “reﬂect the values of the culture which sees them in a heroic light.”17 That light can dim when the cultural values change and interpretations of religious actions adjust accordingly. From the vantage point of contemporary secular culture there seems to be a mutual interdependence, a dialectical process of cocreation, and of cosalvation, between Rose of Lima and the culture that conferred canonical sanctity on her. The beliefs and practices of Rose of Lima were conditioned by the cultural context in which she lived and were then measured and assessed by the same paradigm that conditioned them. Her sanctity was as dependent on her culture as her culture was on her sanctity; each guaranteed the other. Her viability as a saint was a contingency—she would not have appeared saintly, for example, among Incas, Jews, Yorubas, or Protestants—and, reciprocally, the religious validation of a colonial Catholic polity was contingent on her viability as a saint. A tautological circularity blurred the distinctions between the actor, the act, and the audience, between the cultural demand, the saint who assumed it, and the social functions that were realized by her private worship made public. As discussed in this volume, Rose of Lima was constructed by conditioned actions that engaged dialectically with the very interpretations that conditioned them. This same process was then repeated in a higher register as canonization institutionalized the saintly image coproduced by Rose and the participantobservers of her culture. Here one sees more clearly how the consumer of the sanctity—now the Church—strategically tailored an identity to suit its criteria and then venerated its own creation. This unperceived circularity made every new instance of sanctity, every new instance of conformity to a saintly paradigm, a self-congratulatory tautology that reinforced the Church’s claim to

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hegemony as the one true faith. As the Church assumed ownership of the candidate to sainthood, it reconstructed in accord with its own criteria the identity that previously had been constructed locally, thereby further distancing the construct from the historical person on whom these mythopoetic operations were based. The actual person, Isabel Flores y Oliva, ultimately disappeared as she was displaced by the saintly construct known as Rose of Lima. Her history becomes nothing other than its representation, the saint stands in for the historical subject, and the name “Rose of Lima” refers less to a human life than to an identity built in texts and images. Events that never occurred as such are historicized as though they had occurred, and their protagonist is canonized, pursuant to these historicized non-events, as though she were a person rather than a construct. Rose of Lima can be an exemplar of heroic sanctity only within a context in which her practices—mutilating her ﬂesh, drinking putreﬁed blood, caressing God’s body—are perceived as holy and meaningful rather than as aberrations.18 Interpretations during Rose’s times tended to be religious and, consequently, in testimony and hagiography one ﬁnds not hallucinations but visions, not masochism but mortiﬁcation, not anorexia nervosa but miraculous inedia, and not sexual delusion but mystical marriage with God incarnate. It is often observed that the incidence of a mental disorder depends on the symptomatic criteria used to deﬁne it; the same may be said of sanctity. Sanctity happens when it is perceived to happen. The experience and the perception of sanctity and insanity are culturally relative, and whoever would presume to sort one from the other—then and now—is bound by that same relativity. The religious reading of Rose’s behavior within her culture, ﬁrst privileged and later—after formal church and state endorsements—required, foreclosed competing interpretations that suggested physical and psychological causes for her mystical experiences. Once Rose’s saintly identity had been consolidated, the mounting severity of her practices resulted not in renewed questioning of their propriety but, rather, in enhanced miraculousness and devotion. Before endorsement, ﬁrst by friars and then by canonization, her extranormal behavior accommodated various possible meanings; afterward, the earthbound interpretations were reassessed under a halo of sanctity, and Rose’s anomalous behavior—but carefully restricted anomalous behavior—acquired transcendental importance. The strange ways of God’s servant evidenced her divine election and indexed her miraculous capacities. If saints functioned effectively within their societies, as Rose did, “anything they did, however bizarre, was seen by their contemporaries as an added sign of sanctity.”19 When considered from outside her cultural milieu, however, Rose of Lima accommodates other interpretations. In analyzing seventeenth-century historical texts and hagiographies, one should avoid, by an early-twenty-ﬁrst-century scholarly standard, the retroactive imposition of alien prejudices that would distort the history one purports to elucidate.20 A prudent study is advised to respect and abide by the perceptions of the period and to avoid isolating its subject from the historical context. The meanings of Rose of Lima’s actions

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and the attending discourse, like the meanings of any other action and discourse, are best considered in the context in which they were produced. One simultaneously recognizes, however, that what we know as Rose of Lima was constructed and interpreted by diverse interests over broad historical periods, that her meaning cannot be ﬁxed at any given one of them, that hagiography repackaged her by violating the very principles by which contemporary historians abide, that censorship purged disfavorable evidence, and that canonization extracted her from her context, itself constructed, and then further distorted her identity by imposition of European models and values in order to catholicize her history. A contemporary interpreter would be foolish to err in these manners but also to assume that the identity known as “Rose of Lima” excluded these multiple levels of interested construction. Equally foolish, in my estimation, would be to handicap an inquiry by not availing it of the theoretical and scientiﬁc advances that have radically altered human knowledge and, consequently, given us the interpretive capacity to understand these texts in ways not previously possible. We otherwise capitulate to meanings restricted and instituted by the dogmatized presumptions of a church-state that “puriﬁes the truth.”21 The texts that represent Rose of Lima—testimony, hagiography, bulls— are historical by intent but often ﬁctional by default. Fiction inﬁltrates their history because they interpret and represent events in conformity with the demands of controlling paradigms—political, scientiﬁc, and religious—that subordinate objectivity to agendas of higher authority. Early modern Catholic scholarship, always subject to the censorial oversight of the Church, served to defend and strengthen the infrastructure of Catholicism and monarchy, steering evidence toward the orthodox conclusions that preceded it. Although inherent biases and objective unreliability limit the usefulness of such sources for some purposes, they are nevertheless immensely valuable, informative, and relevant for understanding the religious ideology of the culture that produced them. The paradigms that governed discourse production—which were largely invisible or taken for granted in the seventeenth century—come into relief with the passage of centuries. The meanings intended by those who produced these texts remain intact, but they engage now with interpretations that challenge their premises. Polyvalence happens when the texts turned in on themselves generate competing meanings. Rose of Lima—much like a classic, the Bible, or history written by victors —accepts different and sometimes contradictory readings across the ages. A judicious application of current knowledge endeavors not to displace the seventeenth-century reading with a contemporary one that presumes exclusivity: not to reduce but, rather, to expand by exploration, to probe by comparison, to bring repressed meanings to the surface, and to test the limits of disparate cultures as they come into contact and debate. Such interpretation seeks not a retroactive, revisionist transformation; rather, it adds another layer to the palimpsest, and all prior meanings remain intact. A conscientious scholar recognizes that at least two paradigms are operative, the one that governs the text

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under analysis and the one that governs the analysis itself, and that both are partial and provisional.22 The latter paradigm is necessarily privileged—with faith in it one writes one’s book—but at the same time the hagiographic position must be understood on its own terms, even as one challenges it. The Vatican did not reciprocate that courtesy of tolerance to those with opposing ideas. The Church presumed, as a scholar does, the correctness of its point of view, but beyond that it regarded its position as an indisputable matter of fact ratiﬁed by God, and it oppressed, violently and sometimes ruthlessly, any challenge to its sacrosanct opinion. My intent is less totalitarian and more humble: to offer an alternative reading—enticed by complexity and receptive to the simultaneity of meanings—without any pretension to exclusivity. The hagiographers, based in Christian faith and genre conventions, present Rose of Lima in terms of Catholic doctrine and canonized models, whereas I, with the theoretical presumptions of a more secular society, attempt to understand what Rose of Lima might mean, as a cultural expression, if the substructure of early modern Catholicism is false. This approach can shed new light on how Rose was understood in the cultures in which she lived and was canonized, but also on how Rose of Lima— as an evolving construct, not a person—can be understood in cultural contexts of the twenty-ﬁrst century as they encounter the historical precedents by which they were formed. In the end, all of the readings of Rose of Lima collapse back into the text that they together constitute, embedded there in their palimpsest, colonial and modern, religious and scientiﬁc, some dormant and others dominant, depending on who brings what to the surface, and with what purpose. Recent scholarship becomes particularly polemical when questions regarding sexuality and sanity are raised.23 In my mind there is no doubt that the female mystical tradition to which Rose belongs—one that emphasizes union with a very human Christ as Bridegroom—is erotic. To argue otherwise seems to me ludicrous. One would have to dismiss or view in a very particular light the insistent nuptial imagery of mystical marriage, including the seminaked Bridegroom who offers and receives caresses, the brides who forfeit their virginity in Christ’s heavenly bedchamber, and the burning love described by mystics who incorporate Christ’s body. One would also have to ignore, neutralize, or apologize for the innumerable beatas, nuns, and female saints who report having kissed Christ on his mouth and body, who strip naked before the cruciﬁx, who drink from Christ’s wound as though it were a breast, who have lascivious visions of otherworldly seducers, and who have copulation ecstasies and masturbation fantasies with Christ as their subject. Some outstanding scholars, notably Carolyn Walker Bynum, have nevertheless argued against the tendency to view late medieval spiritual mysticism as erotic. In reference to Catherine of Siena, who provided the saintly prototype for Rose of Lima and many other saints and beatas across the centuries, Bynum argued that “Catherine’s sense of ﬂesh is extremely unerotic.” Rather than eroticism, Bynum emphasized that Catherine “associated Christ’s physicality with the female body,” including Christ as “a nurturing mother more often than a bridegroom,” and that “Catherine understood union with Christ not as

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an erotic fusing with a male ﬁgure but as a taking in and taking on—a becoming—of Christ’s ﬂesh itself.”24 Elsewhere she added that “when Catherine of Siena spoke of the foreskin of Christ as a wedding ring, she associated that piece of bleeding ﬂesh with the eucharistic host and saw herself appropriating the pain of Christ. It is we who suspect sexual yearnings in a medieval virgin who found sex the least of the world’s temptations.”25 Our retroactive sexual suspicions are also more comprehensive: “Twentieth-century readers and viewers tend to eroticize the body and to deﬁne themselves by the nature of their sexuality. But did medieval viewers?”26 Bynum argued that medievals did not “understand as erotic or sexual” many body sensations that we interpret that way. “Medieval viewers saw bared breasts (at least in painting and sculpture) not primarily as sexual but as the food with which they were iconographically associated.” Similarly, “medieval people saw Christ’s penis not primarily as a sexual organ but as the object of circumcision,” wounded and bleeding. And therefore, “they probably did not associate either penis or breast primarily with sexual activity.”27 Whereas many other progressive historians “all treat body as a locus of sexuality,” Bynum wrote, “we must wipe away such assumptions before we come to medieval source material.”28 Bynum’s forceful opus, which stresses an androgynous Christ and the alimentary aspects of the body, has catalyzed a more general tendency in recent scholarship to devalue or deemphasize the eroticism of female mystics. Bynum redirects the evidence toward her theses (which happen to coincide with latetwentieth-century eating and gender concerns) as she argues for their primacy, but in my estimation the eroticism is integral to the texts and images under study and can complement and enhance the body-based themes—food practices, maternal and lactation tropes, the femininity of Jesus, union through suffering—if their prevalence in the source material is acknowledged and integrated rather than repudiated. The very tropes, images, and episodes that Bynum cites in support of her de-eroticizing theses could be cited as well, simultaneously and without contradiction, in support of mystical eroticism.29 Such a reading, which is implicit in Bynum’s work despite the disclaimers, pursues the complexity of mystical phenomena by exploring the compatibility of mystical eroticism with alimentary, androgynous, and diverse other themes rather than sorting them hierarchically or advocating their mutual exclusion. Essential to mysticism is the simultaneity of contradictory meanings, and the isolation of any given one of them (including eroticism) can only be a necessary, provisional expedient of exposition. In his reply to Bynum’s critique of his study on the sexuality of Christ, Leo Steinberg cited several iconographic examples to demonstrate a point that hardly needs proving: that the human body was perceived as erotically by medievals as it has been by humans across the ages.30 The examples cited by Steinberg could certainly be multiplied and complemented by textual sources, but the prevalence of religious eroticism is established simply enough by quoting Bynum’s own work. Bynum, for example, makes reference to “monks describing what appears to be a sexual union with a male God” and acknowledges that in writings concerning the feminization of Jesus religious males could

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express “certain sexual desires: play at the breast and entry into the female body.” Among women mystics, many had “erotic visions” and “female erotic experience” was a “major metaphor” for mystical union.31 “In the eucharist and in ecstasy, a male Christ was handled and loved,” and “the beautiful young Christ who appeared to Lutgard, Margaret of Ypres, and Margaret of Oingt, baring his breast, was both nursing mother and sensual male lover.”32 Elsewhere, “Christ is the bridegroom, and all kinds of passionate sexual language serves as metaphor for union with a male God.” The religiosity of late medieval women, she writes, often “had erotic or sensual overtones” including “erotic yearnings toward the beautiful young Christ.”33 Union with the cruciﬁed Christ “was achieved in two ways: through asceticism and through eroticism,” and this “physical union with Christ” was represented “in images of marriage and sexual consummation; it sometimes culminates in what appears to be orgasm.”34 Clear in these passages is Bynum’s ultimate recognition of the simultaneity and compatibility of her dominant argument with the eroticism that it calls into question. Her position is explicit when she acknowledges “sexual reasons” as causes for thirteenth-century nuns’ “stress on the physicality of Christ’s humanity” with “highly erotic imagery,” but then directs her inquiry toward what she regards as “far more important reasons than sublimated affectivity or sexuality.”35 Bynum’s understatement of mystical eroticism is a consequence of that preference and value judgment. The eroticism remains, however, not as a retroactive interpretive imposition but as an inherent aspect of the mystical texts and practices themselves. The many scholars who follow Bynum often proceed by similar means, quoting her work for support. One acknowledged “the often frankly erotic tones of Angela’s [of Foligno] relationship to Christ,” and then suggested the impropriety of its psychological study: “In spite of post-Freudian temptation, it would be very difﬁcult to see these descriptions of spiritual experiences as dictated exclusively by a nexus of unconscious sexual drives.”36 The “exclusively,” like Bynum’s use of “primarily” mentioned above, softens the assertion, but the arguments themselves, which tend to disparage the nonexclusive or nonprimary role of psychosexual eroticism, attest to a more comprehensive disavowal. Another scholar explained how we might perceive “a (barely) repressed or deﬂected erotic desire” in “the inexpressible pleasures, the intense warmth of prolonged embraces, the stimulating caresses, the gasped and rhythmic utterances” that occurred while Marguerite-Marie Alacoque pressed her lips to the wound in Christ’s side, and he then referred to Bynum’s work so that we not miss “the distinction between sexual intimacies and the caring, comforting intimacies of a loving (and divine) parent,” meaning “Jesus the loving mother.” The modus operandi in these instances is to represent (and thus acknowledge) the eroticism only in order to explain how it is unimportant or absent before our retrospective gloss superimposes contemporary concerns. Rhetorical maneuvers defuse the eroticism with compelling questions (“Why not admit the possibility of a spiritual ecstasy distinct from sexual ecstasy?”), but one might as well ask, for example, “Why not admit the possibility of a spiritual ecstasy

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that is expressed erotically?” or “Why is the spiritual ecstasy expressed erotically, if it is so distinct from sexual ecstasy?” or “Why is Jesus the loving mother conceived of as a Bridegroom and loved with ‘a (barely) repressed or deﬂected erotic desire’?”37 An excited polemic regarding “sublimation,” often aggravated by an incorrect or incomplete understanding of the term, has also troubled studies of mystical eroticism. “Sublimation” has been offered in explanation of an essential paradox: female mystics vowed to virginity lead a decidedly asexual, ascetic life, but their mortiﬁcations, visions, tropes, and, most graphically, union with Christ are often explicitly erotic, both in their own experience and in subsequent hagiography. In raising an objection that has now become common, Bynum argued that scholars have “suggested that such reactions were sublimated sexual desire, but it seems inappropriate to speak of ‘sublimation.’ ” She proposed, instead, that sexual feelings were “not so much translated into another medium as simply set free,” and elsewhere she described the female mystics’ release of “highly erotic energy toward God.”38 One of the mentioned scholars under Bynum’s inﬂuence explained that “to want Jesus with the intensity of a bride, to express spiritual needs not as sexual desire but using metaphors of sexual desire—these were innovations in the vocabulary of spiritual yearning.”39 For Bernard McGinn, “what is involved here is not so much the disguising of erotic language,” for it is indeed explicit, “as the full and direct use of certain forms of erotic expression for a different purpose—the transformation of all human desire in terms of what the mystic believes to be its true source [divine love].” In mysticism, all forms of love are consolidated “into a single transcendental act of loving,” which is regarded not as sublimation or idealization but, rather, as the mentioned “transformation.” The mystics were “adopting sexual imagery to facilitate the transformation of desire” for “a new kind of erotic encounter” between the soul and God.40 Others have argued variously that mystical love “is the expressive effectuation of human desire that becomes transferred and ampliﬁed with relation to God,” and that a mystic experiences love “not through her transcendence of earthly desire, but through her transference of physical desire to Christ.”41 A contemporary nun used “sublimation” (“in the sense of a real transposition, not a mere camouﬂage”) to explain that “virginity is neither a severance of human love nor indifference to it. It is a transformation of human love.”42 Sublimation seemed an inappropriate explanation to Simone de Beauvoir because it implied deﬂection of desire, when, in fact, “human and divine love commingle, not because the latter is a sublimation of the former, but because the ﬁrst is reaching out toward a transcendent, an absolute.” The mystic chooses God as her love object with “a desire directly oriented toward him,” and she “seeks to be united with God and lives out this union in her body.” Thus Teresa of Avila “is not the slave of her nerves and her hormones: one must admire, rather, the intensity of a faith that penetrates to the most intimate regions of her ﬂesh.”43 In their dictionary of psychoanalysis, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis deﬁned “sublimation” as “human activities which have no apparent connection

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with sexuality but which are assumed to be motivated by the force of sexual instinct.” They cited two examples offered by Freud: artistic creation and intellectual inquiry. “The instinct is said to be sublimated in so far as it is diverted towards a new, non-sexual aim and in so far as its objects are socially valued ones.”44 As Freud himself noted, this “desexualized libido” would continue to “retain the main purpose of Eros—that of uniting and binding,” and thus sublimation helps to establish “the unity, or tendency to unity, which is particularly characteristic of the ego.”45 Freud elsewhere summarized sublimation as follows: “Here both object and aim are changed, so that what was originally a sexual instinct ﬁnds satisfaction in some achievement which is no longer sexual but has a higher social or ethical valuation.”46 In Civilization and Its Discontents, sublimation was “an especially conspicuous feature of cultural development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientiﬁc, artistic, or ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life.”47 In view of these psychoanalytic deﬁnitions, the proper use of “sublimation” does not necessarily misrepresent the psychology of mystical eroticism. Although the term has often been misused to foreclose the discussion—with the one word and a wink purporting to reveal what mystics were really doing—a more judicious application of “sublimation” could reopen inquiries that have fallen into scholarly disfavor. The dynamics of sublimation seem particularly relevant in consideration of the primary purpose of both eroticism and mysticism: the quest for unity. If the essence of mysticism is union, then mysticism can be essentially erotic. This key unitive aspect was simply captured by Rudolph M. Bell, who explained that “the sexual drive, or more broadly the emotional need to unite in love, found its expression in mystical union with God.”48 If the term “sublimation” is problematic at all, ultimately, it is not because it refers inappropriately to a deﬂected expenditure of sexual energy but, rather, because “sublimation” refers to a process whose results are too desexualized to accommodate the sexual expressions of mysticism. Application of the term to the mystics’ erotic encounters with their Bridegroom is in this view awkward because sublimation entails, by deﬁnition, “human activities which have no apparent connection with sexuality.” To use the term correctly, one would have to regard the erotic expressions of mysticism as insufﬁciently or incompletely sublimated. The evasive circumlocutions and the surrogate terms offered to avoid “sublimation”—transformed, transposed, transferred, translated—often appear amid a more general distrust of psychological analyses. Bynum’s work, again a source of formative inﬂuence, well illustrates the troubled relationship that psychology, and particularly psychoanalysis, have had with the historical study of saints. Bynum described her earlier work, in Jesus as Mother, as “sometimes a kind of psycho-historical interpretation,” but more recently she has been critical of psychohistory.49 Noting that a few decades ago female mysticism was frequently interpreted as an expression of “psychological deprivation or outright pathology,” she asserted that she had “no interest in reducing the phenomena I have been describing to abnormal (or even normal) psychology.” Having said that, however, she proposed an exception for anorexia nervosa.50

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The preface was a caveat: “One should not say that medieval women suffered from anorexia nervosa” or apply any other diagnostic label, because “any such syndrome must be part of a particular culture and should not per se be transferred across cultures.” Bynum then described how “medieval women do show striking parallels to the modern syndrome,” suggesting “psychological and social reasons” for the eating habits of female mystics.51 In this case, as in her position on eroticism, she acknowledged what elsewhere she repudiated in order to assert its unimportance: “It is not particularly helpful to know that Catherine of Siena can be said to be, in the modern sense, anorectic or even bulimic (although the statement is clearly true).” The diagnosis is made and dismissed in the same sentence, and then followed by redirection toward her thesis: “The question is: why is food so central to women?”52 One would think, rather, that this is a question, and a question that, as interesting as some may ﬁnd it, does not invalidate the “clearly true” psychological factors that Bynum posited a sentence earlier. If the repertoire of the mystics’ practices were to some degree psychologically induced, then, certainly, there are other valid inquiries beyond the centrality of food to women. Bynum’s deﬁnite article (“the question is”) establishes her agenda as she dismisses themes and methods inappropriate to her task: “I will, then, leave aside the fact that some of the fasting behavior of late medieval women can be described by the modern psychological and medical term anorexia nervosa and address, rather, the question of why so much of the religious behavior and the religious language of these women revolved around food.”53 That sound agenda and the compelling book it produced are objectionable only insofar as the thematic and interpretive preferences of any school or scholar are generalized as a censorial mandate that limits the possibilities and stigmatizes the propriety of studies pursuing different interests by other methods. Bynum makes the most sense when her position is least reductionist: “In addition to the psychological and social explanations . . . there are theological and religious reasons for women’s spirituality.”54 Who could argue with that? The erotic and psychological aspects of mysticism were devalued by Bynum in part because she was responding to more than a century of predominantly male scholarship that tended to denigrate female mysticism with allegations of psychopathology and sexual perversion. Bynum and subsequent scholars revealed essential aspects of the medieval and early modern texts that had remained largely untreated, making possible our more comprehensive understanding both of the texts themselves and of the biases that constrained previous inquiries. My intent, particularly in the concluding three chapters of this book, is to integrate these new discoveries, insights, and cautions into a discussion that endeavors to avoid the now apparent errors while at once recuperating the erotic and psychological aspects of mysticism that have been devalued. Particularly contentious to historians are the psychological or psychoanalytic interpreters who fail to acknowledge that behaviors we now deem to be psychopathological may have been in their own cultures efﬁcacious, laudable, and indicative of divine election. “Contrary to the modern propensity to regard

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inner voices, self-castigation, and a feeling of unworthiness as pathological and dysfunctional,” Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell characteristically argued that “such manifestations were crucial to their [the saints’] personality development and ultimately proof to their communities of their saintliness. Any useful application of modern social or psychological theory should regard the saint’s development as a series of outcomes that were positive and effective” for their societies.55 Challenges to Rose of Lima’s sanity dissipate, ultimately, if “what we call ‘mental illness’ is more precisely described as ‘intolerable deviance,’ whether that deviance is intolerable to the suffering human being himself or to the social system of which he is a member.”56 Anomalous behavior that is integrative must be distinguished from anomalous behavior that disintegrates the psyche and society. In his subsequent study, Holy Anorexia, Bell summarized a common position by arguing that the evidence is hopelessly inadequate if the intent is to psychoanalyze a historical personage: “Our cast of characters is dead and beyond our help or harm.” Thus: “The result is that psychoanalytic theory, applied to a historical problem, easily becomes purely descriptive or reductionist; and even when it purports to be explanatory, proof is not possible.” Bell added, however, that “behavior once deemed to have been supernaturally inspired may well be seen in a different light as the product of human emotional development.” The behavior characterized by his hybrid qualiﬁer “holy anorexia” was separable, even during the age in which it occurred, into its component parts: “both holy and anorexic.”57 When a choice is forced, the sanctity or the insanity resides in the eye of the beholder. Richard Kieckhefer argued, like Weinstein and Bell, that the saints’ religious motives do not exclude psychological and even pathological factors: obsessive-compulsive neurosis, depressive disparagement of self, sadomasochism, and the like. But the veneration that the saints received by the people who had known them suggests that they functioned effectively in their societies, at least for many people. Their anomalous behavior was encouraged by the tradition in which they were raised and in most instances probably owed more to the cultural assumptions of this tradition than to personal psychological dispositions.58 These reasonable positions yield elsewhere to the antagonism and ridicule of scholars who take objection to analyses that “pathologize religiosity.” The author of an otherwise respectable study of Rose of Lima, for example, opened his discussion by arguing that psychological interpretations are an impediment to “seriously reconstructing the conceptual universe” of Rose, and that she has been subject to “the facile, generalized temptation to reduce all religious, intellectual or spiritual experience to subconscious imbalances.” He added that the “greatest obstacles that impede the full understanding of mystical phenomena are, paradoxically, the reductionist discourse prevailing in modern psy-

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chology.” Psychology is “a totalitarian philosophy” that “explains the highest spiritual and cultural values of humanity in the light of pathology.”59 Intolerance of psychology and psychohistory is in part the result of the “one-way interpretation of the symbol in traditional psychoanalysis,” by which “symbol hunters” purported to crack the unconscious codes of representations, deliver the “real meaning” hidden inside, and claim hermeneutic superiority for having done so. This “nonsocial and nondialectical view of the symbol”— with the ubiquitous phallus showing up as an explanation—is “a kind of automatic and essentially solipsistic interpretation based upon allegory or analogy, which tends to negate the particular social, historical, and personal conjunctures in which the producer of the symbol is involved.” Another common objection to the displacement from religion to psychology maintains that the facile application of a diagnostic label “merely replaces a hagiographic convention with a psychological one.”60 “Faced by an inexplicable and, in many respects, disturbing set of phenomena, it is simply not good enough to label them with a term [in this example, “hysteria”] which implies scorn and disbelief as if such labeling was the end rather than the beginning of any explanation.”61 The ill repute of psychohistory has been partially earned by such gratuitous “diagnosis,” but a balanced assessment must also recognize that hagiography makes its own, otherworldly “diagnosis” of the same “disturbing set of phenomena,” as though this, too, were “the end rather than the beginning of any explanation.” Value systems, inherent biases, and interpretive strategies condition both hagiography and psychology as they attempt in their respective manners to understand anomalous behavior. If one is found guilty of reductionist labeling (“hysteric”), then a fair assessment must regard the other as guilty of the same (“saint”). In the end, it seems that what is most objectionable to those who oppose psychological analyses is the mentioned “scorn and disbelief ” that depreciates sacrosanct symbols and “the highest spiritual and cultural values of humanity” by translating them into modern abnormality. Offense is taken by the “diagnostic rage” of psychologists who dismiss saints as “undeniable hysterics” and to their visions as “sensual, lascivious fantasies.” Such psychological assessment is objectionable, as one scholar explained, because it “empties the religious signiﬁer of its supernatural content, and replaces it with a neurotic one.”62 The wiser route pursues the parallel tracks of sanctity and insanity, allowing the cross ties to make their repeated contacts and connections while the rails themselves follow their respective, separate courses toward an illusory convergence on the horizon. Much of the intolerance toward psychological analysis also seems to be disciplinary—the result of what is viewed to be proper within a given academic ﬁeld—and historians of more positivist persuasions clearly ﬁnd psychology inappropriate to understanding the past. One also notes that receptivity to psychological perceptions depends not only on what the agenda is but also on what the options are. In response to the misinterpretation that sexualized Mary Magdalen’s “seven devils,” one scholar followed her sources to argue that the malaise was psychological: “Rather than being in a state of sinfulness, she

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probably suffered from ‘a violent and chronic nervous disorder.’ ” Here the psychological interpretation was gladly (and, it would seem, correctly) introduced to help dispel the medieval myths of Magdalen’s “extraordinary sexual appetite.”63 In other cases, diagnostic language appears to be used without apology or agenda, as a matter of fact or common sense, in the same way that we would name a physical disease.64 Indeed, a certain prejudice against psychological diagnosis comes into relief when it is compared to its complement in physical pathology. If the symptoms of a historical subject were physical rather than psychological, and if the textual sources provided sufﬁcient information for diagnosis, then few contemporary scholars would object to attaching a label— malaria, for example—to name a disorder recognized today but unknown in the science of the times under study. By identifying the disease, one would clarify the condition of an individual under study, even though that individual and his or her culture did not understand the condition in this manner and had other explanations for its etiology and meaning. Thus a contemporary scholar could observe without offending most sensibilities that a given queen died of malaria. A modern, scientiﬁc label is attached to the disorder, facilitating contemporary understanding of it, without undermining our simultaneous understanding that in the queen’s times her suffering was quite differently attributed to befoulment of her humors due to bewitchment by a dwarf. Indeed, failing to apply the modern diagnostic label would impede our understanding of the queen’s condition and—in a kind of reverse reductionism—would restrict the text to signify only within the limitations imposed by scholarly conventions slavishly subordinate to the times under study. One is not necessarily demeaning or displacing the studied culture when one names its diseases; rather, one is adding another interpretive layer on what anomalous manifestations—corporal or psychological—can mean when disparate cultures come into contact. The most recent edition of the diagnostic manual published by the American Psychiatric Association as much complicates as resolves the issue of crosscultural diagnosis by exempting certain individuals from symptoms that are considered pathological for others: “In some cultures, visual or auditory hallucinations with a religious content may be a normal part of religious experience (e.g., seeing the Virgin Mary or hearing God’s voice).” The experience is excepted from pathology without conferring on it the status of a vision: it remains a kind of pardoned hallucination. Thus, for example, “an individual’s cultural and religious background must be taken into account in evaluating the possible presence of Delusional Disorder. Some cultures have widely held and culturally sanctioned beliefs that might be considered delusional in other cultures. The content of delusions also varies in different cultures and subcultures.”65 Similarly, “Conversion Disorder is not diagnosed if a symptom is fully explained as a culturally sanctioned behavior or experience,” such as “ ‘visions’ or ‘spells’ that occur as part of religious rituals in which such behaviors are encouraged and expected.” Manifestations resembling conversion and dissociative symptoms “are common aspects of certain culturally sanctioned re-

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ligious and healing rituals.”66 What appears to be a symptom is exempt from pathology because of its subcultural context, even when it occurs within a dominant culture in which the same symptoms in other individuals is considered pathological. If one defers a divine source of mystical phenomena and stresses their psychological origin instead, this does not necessitate that mystics are insane. Antoine Vergote argued accordingly that visions, stigmata, and related religious experiences “are always of a psychological nature (but not necessarily pathological). I do not accord them any supernatural honor, but neither should they necessarily be taken as pathological symptoms.”67 In this perspective one could argue that Rose’s mystical experiences were culturally conditioned and psychologically induced (with the assistance of fasting, sleep deprivation, and mortiﬁcation), without raising the issue of insanity. In many cultures, even today, these same somatic stresses are quite intentionally used to induce otherwordly experiences that are regarded as sane and genuine.68 A sensitive psychoanalyst, in any case, “never looks upon symptoms and fantasies as aberrations but instead sees them as truths of the speaking subject, even if to cool judgment they seem to be delusions.”69 The truths of Rose’s times (that wooden statues smile when they are happy, that a young woman’s self-ﬂagellation wards off earthquakes) and of Rose’s place (in Lima today one can buy airmail envelopes preaddressed to Rose) must be allowed to speak as truths, even as they dialogue with what we regard as illusions. In view of all this, I am sympathetic with what is sometimes referred to as “cultural psychology,” meaning “the study of the ways subject and object, self and other, psyche and culture, person and context, ﬁgure and ground, practitioner and practice live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up.” The smiling statue or the otherworldly airmail correspondence “is real, factual, and forceful, but only as long as there exists a community of persons whose beliefs, desires, emotions, purposes, and other mental representations are directed at it, and are thereby inﬂuenced by it.” Things, events, practices, social stations, and concepts—sin, weeds, divorce, insurance, saints—all exist, but “would not exist independent of our involvements with them and reactions to them; and they exercise their inﬂuence in our lives because of our conceptions of them.”70 Thus “our representations of reality (including social and psychological reality) become part of the realities they represent.”71 There also remains the possibility, in Rose’s culture and in ours, that behavior can be both pathological and functional: that anormal or abnormal behavior, because it has some social usefulness, is tolerated or even exalted. This possibility provides that the admiration of certain forms of anomalous behavior in Rose’s culture might have offered some individuals a means to socialize psychological impulses that in another context may have found only pathological outlets or interpretations. After it was questioned and assessed, Rose’s deviance was accepted by her culture and endowed with the highest regard. Rose herself and her community interpreted her physical illnesses, her emotional torments, and her self-abuse in religious perspective (as imitation of

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Christ, as penance, as a test of her faith, as God-sent puriﬁcation), and the intent therefore was not to cure a malady but to applaud her tolerance of suffering, to witness the divine plan in awe, and to reap the beneﬁts of her vicarious atonement. What today might be regarded as pathology was therefore culturally reinforced. 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. Incessant mortiﬁcation guaranteed Rose’s mystical experiences and distinguished her from seemingly lesser beatas, as though the incontestability of her suffering were translatable and transferable to the incontestability of her mystical union with God.72 Her mortiﬁcation, illness, fasting, and sleep deprivation were all encouraged by her culture— which to this degree was pathogenic by a contemporary standard—because they authenticated religious claims and bestowed important gains on the community that made these judgments. My personal inclination is to explore mysticism comparatively as a transcultural phenomenon that in some cultures tends to be regarded as transcendental and in others, such as ours, as pathological. The exceptions to each case guarantee the vitality of both and free them from the respective historical periods to which they otherwise might be limited. Rose of Lima as a mystic and a saint was the result of complex interrelations of her individual constitution (psychological and corporal, and their psychosomatic interaction); the formative cultural context in which she was raised, in which she acted, and in which her actions were interpreted; and the representation of her life in folklore, testimony, hagiography, and iconography that purposefully packaged and enhanced a nuptial, penitential ideal of female sanctity. When a cultural and psychological discussion occurs in the context of these interacting factors, its intent is not to diagnose Rose of Lima or to judge the propriety of her faith in terms of modern science but rather to explore the competing functions and interpretations of similar phenomena as they occur in cultures that understand and value them differently. In these pursuits I hope to make a contribution— however displaced and monological—to what Bernard McGinn referred to as the “unrealized conversation” between historians, theorists, and scholars who study the psychology of mysticism.73 Our fullest understanding of Rose of Lima’s mysticism, sainthood, religious culture, and textual representation is afforded when history, cultural theory, and psychological analysis can negotiate a methodological compromise.

Sanctity and Insanity Mysticism and psychopathology are obviously related phenomena and, as such, are necessarily not one and the same. Their overwhelming likeness is disputed precisely because it is indisputable, which is to say because it is recognized even by those who repudiate it. One common argument accounting for the likeness of mysticism and psychopathology maintains that the mystics’ extranormal experiences, such as visions, are genuinely supernatural, while the

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seemingly similar experiences of insane people are religious delusions. This position has an initial appeal and is reminiscent of the many treatises, institutions (Inquisition, Congregation of Rites), and scholars purporting to sort true mystics from deluded or fraudulent imposters. But if one presumes that any extranormal experience owes nothing to divine intervention—that there is no objective God as such for mystics to see or marry—then this argument can only beg the question. It is also troublesome because it requires a jury to bring back the verdict that sorts mysticism from madness. All such judgments (particularly in the realm of null reference) have claims not to any durable truth but only to defending the presumptions and politics of a given interpreter or culture.74 A second argument thus suggests that the mystic and the insane person are not essentially or intrinsically different but are readily interchangeable according to who is sitting in the jury box. The mystic and the neurotic or psychotic are essentially the same, according to this view, but they are regarded differently when assessed under different paradigms, either within their own cultures or across the ages. A third argument, the one with which I am most sympathetic, pursues these last ideas into the formative factors of mysticism and insanity. Religious cultures, such as the Lima in which Rose lived, provided a context in which certain anomalous behaviors were fostered, socialized, made meaningful, and integrated. If the observing community recognized the religious validity of such practices as self-starvation or self-injury, then the beata who practiced them inspired praise and awe rather than the pathological diagnosis that she might have evoked if her own culture (or some other culture considering her) rejected the propriety and efﬁcacy of such practices. A late medieval or early modern mystic who pierced her breasts with nails or carved the name of her Bridegroom across them could arouse the awe of her community, from the folk who converged in search of miracles to the popes and monarchs who advocated her canonization. “Culturally sanctioned self-mutilative practices are traditional and reﬂect the history, symbolism, and beliefs of a society,” thereby generating compatible meanings for the individual who self-mutilates and the collective that interprets these acts.75 This consonance of the beata’s truth with that of her culture served as a “cultural inducement” that authorized and stimulated her anomalous behavior. The internalization of collective perceptions and cultural precepts engage dynamically with an individual’s psychological (but not necessarily psychopathological) disposition as the anomalous behavior—mad, mystical, or hybrid— pursues the course of its evolution. Thus both sanctity and insanity are generated by an individual’s psychological constitution as it engages in complex relations with the environmental factors—family, religion, social norms, culture—that provide obstacles and opportunities. The penitential mystic and the self-mutilating psychotic are received quite differently, but their self-injury has in common an “attempt to correct or prevent a pathological, destabilizing condition that threatens the community, the individual, or both.”76 A twenty-ﬁrst-century woman who slashes her breasts under Christ’s or-

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ders faces an audience less receptive than that enjoyed by beatas, because in her society and on its psychiatric ward the subjective truth of her experience is undermined by the dominant regard of its falsity. Unlike “truly ‘sacred’ mutilations,” these religious acts regarded as pathological “have no transcendency” because “their ﬂow of blood opens no signiﬁcant channels between God and Man.”77 They are distinguished from sacred, culturally sanctioned mortiﬁcations because the “innovative, impulsive, and idiosyncratic” mutilation rituals that are highly signiﬁcant to insane self-mutilators “have little meaning for the universe or the world or the community at large.” Such use of religious symbolism “is based on private rather than public delusions” and thus lacks the cultural integration necessary for perceptions of sanctity.78 Mortiﬁcation remains pathological when the delusions of the self-injurious subject are dissonant with public delusions. For Antoine Vergote, “pathology is the mutilation the psyche carries out upon itself for defensive purposes,” and “religious psychopathology is a religious self-mutilation supported by a psychological self-mutilation that becomes, in turn, motivated by the ﬁrst.”79 Thus the circle closes in a cycle of mutual reinforcement. In 1956 a Polish immigrant to the United States, Mrs. H., was denied admission to a religious order. She retired in despair from Sunday-school teaching and made her home in a small, chapel-like room appointed with cruciﬁxes and holy images that she repositioned in accord with the liturgical calendar. The Virgin Mary appeared to her shortly after, mandating that Mrs. H. suffer for the sins of others. Each Friday she entered an ecstatic state during which she wept blood, suffered otherworldly agonies, and had visions of the Virgin and St. Francis. Local Polish Catholics began to congregate for the Friday sessions, bringing Mrs. H. ﬂowers and taking home the treasured relics of handkerchiefs stained with her bloody tears. Less favorable was Mrs. H.’s reception by the Church. When she cried aloud in ecstasy during mass, the ofﬁciating priest asked the congregation to ignore her, explaining that her mental condition caused the ravings. Mrs. H. was admitted to psychiatric care in 1958 and again the next year after being found in a semicomatose state, clutching a rosary that could not be removed from her grasp.80 There is much in Mrs. H.’s story that resembles the lives of medieval and early modern female saints, but the dominant culture in which Mrs. H. lived regarded her as insane rather than saintly. Twentieth- and twenty-ﬁrst-century interpretations of visionary and penitential experiences tend to gravitate toward psychopathology (although the religious reading is possible), whereas in colonial Lima religious interpretations predominated (although the insanity reading was possible). One culture’s ideal is another’s deviance, and Mrs. H. was born too late. Her ecstasies, mortiﬁcations, vicarious atonement, and miracles, rejected as symptoms of her pathology, hindered rather than facilitated her aspirations to become a nun. The parish priest saw her ecstasies as occasion for public dismissal rather than as evidence of a special calling. And the cult of immigrants that accumulated around Mrs. H. was powerless to defend its belief in her sanctity from the oppressive ofﬁcial version that alleged insanity. The New Catholic Encyclopedia explains that the Church is prudent about

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canonization because “a psychopathological counterfeit of heroic virtue is possible,” resulting in frauds who “act the part of a ‘saint’ ” and are venerated by “misguided souls who seek miracles.”81 That concern, once the Inquisition’s, has endured across the centuries, but the criteria for sorting sanctity from insanity have changed. The contemporary standard for sanctity favors (in addition to martyrdom) heroic charity and good deeds—such as those of Mother Teresa—instead of the mortiﬁed, nuptial mysticism that made Rose of Lima such an appealing candidate.82 Most sensibilities in the twenty-ﬁrst century, even those of Catholic nuns and priests, ﬁnd severe mortiﬁcation an unlikely expression of sanctity, whereas in the seventeenth century good deeds alone, particularly by a female, would have been insufﬁcient.83 Either God has changed his mind—he once liked female saints mortiﬁed but no longer does— or else God and the ideal means of worshiping him are evolving constructs that adapt to the values of their age. I presume that the criteria for sanctity are bound to cultural relativity rather than to the changing preferences of deity. When saints are sorted from “psychopathological counterfeits,” a cultural bias is always registered. Comparison of Rose of Lima’s behavior with psychopathology as it is understood today reveals signiﬁcant symptomatic relations to aspects of masochism, selfinjurious behavior, hysteria (somatoform disorder; dissociation and conversion reactions), depression (melancholy), delusional disorder, schizophrenia, and anorexia nervosa. These similarities have no bearing on Rose’s genuineness as a saint, but they underscore the disparities in evaluation of sanctity and anomalous behavior as they gain expression across the ages. Contemporary Catholics often recognize psychosomatic or psychopathological causes for the extranormal behavior of their saints. In his study of protracted abstinence from food (inedia) among mystics, many of them beatiﬁed or canonized, Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit, remarked, “I am by no means saying that these manifestations are in any degree supernatural or divine. Similar symptoms are common in many hysterical disorders.” He then explained that “in these states of mystical union, the normal functions of the sentient and nutritive processes of the body often seem to be profoundly altered, or at any rate partially inhibited. The psychical element, in fact, appears in some strange way to dominate the physical.”84 Thurston thus recognized the possibility of psychopathology and provided a hybrid psychosomatic argument that entertained a nonmiraculous cause for inedia. The experience is still in some way “mystically” extranormal, just as Mrs. H.’s ecstasies were recognized even by the clergy who dismissed them as fraudulent, but the “psychical element” is the dominant cause. In the 1960s a Dominican hagiographer summarized the illnesses of Rose of Lima and other mystics to offer the hypothesis of a psychosomatic “mystical pathology.” Phenomena such as stigmata and ecstatic states, he postulated, “perhaps come from some somatic disorder.” These “psychophysical disturbances” are predisposed by a corporal incapacity, inﬁrmity, or imperfection that makes the mystic incapable of assimilating a “divine emanation” or the “sanctifying action of God.” The author clariﬁed that his theory by no means un-

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dermined the authenticity of mysticism; rather, “it means only that human nature, ‘touched’ by original sin, cannot completely ‘assimilate’ that ‘invasion’ in a normal way.” One appears to be mad because one is overwhelmed by grace. When the theorizing yields to the hagiographic narrative, however, Rose is exempted from abnormality by an indisputable proof that begs the question. Rose’s anomalous behavior “can seem somewhat pathological,” but “to prove that judgment to be false it sufﬁces to recall that Rose was elevated to the altars by the Church.”85 In a 1962 work released by a Catholic publisher—“making the world’s ﬁnest Catholic literature available to all”—another author more explicitly found Rose’s behavior to be psychopathological and argued for a religious channeling of “abnormal impulses” toward positive ends. In reference to Rose of Lima she observed: “That a young and beautiful girl should so afﬂict her body seems to us not only less admirable than it seemed to her contemporaries but positively repulsive.” We “ﬁnd ourselves confronted here with the abnormal. Let us face it. It has never been claimed that all saints were normal people, in fact some of them were distinctly otherwise. The point we must keep in mind is that even the abnormal can be sanctiﬁed.” Rose of Lima cannot be considered “psychologically normal,” but she “shows throughout her life the spiritualizing of abnormal impulses, which without religion might have become unhealthy and repulsive.”86 The tendency in contemporary scholarship is to regard the psychological assessment of saints as a post-Freudian novelty, but, in fact, Rose of Lima’s behavior was initially regarded as pathological by many signiﬁcant observers within her own community. Pedro de Loayza, a Dominican who was one of Rose’s confessors and her ﬁrst hagiographer, noted in 1619 that Rose’s confessors often attributed her mystical experiences to “melancholy” and to “faintness” or “weakness” resulting from her fasting, sleep deprivation, and mortiﬁcation.87 Over the course of ﬁfteen years Rose suffered for about an hour each day a range of torturous emotions and corresponding somatic reactions resulting from her fear that God had abandoned her. Rose interpreted these torments in mystical terms, but her confessors—friars and theologians entrenched in the same Catholic culture in which she was formed—tended, rather, toward physical and psychological explanations derived from the medical knowledge of their day. They believed that “the visions that she related were her fantasies or faintness in her head caused by the imbalance of her humors; and that those [visions] that seemed to her illustrations from heaven were nothing more than frivolous illusions of the devil or disturbance of her brain.” The experiences that Rose regarded as the dark night of her soul were only “delirium and dreams,” “ravings,” and “unfounded fears” resulting from “continual fasts and frequent [sleepless] vigils,” and therefore “they had no reality other than that given them by a sick imagination.”88 As Loayza summarized the confessors’ arguments, the ostensible mysticism was the result of “melancholic vapors that rose to her head.”89 Another Dominican, Juan Mele´ndez, later summarized these same positions at greater length: “Some told her that they were dreams or delirium;

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others, that they were fantastic illusions of ghosts; others, demonic illusions; others, with more good sense, with more basis, said that they could be effects of melancholy, or vapors that hypochondria sent to her head, and that the brain, with so much fasting and sleeplessness, was debilitated, and weak, and as such ready to admit any fantastic representation of illusions, and give it substance, and through this communicate with her senses.”90 The diagnosis of “melancholic humors, of which they tried to cure her” required medical rather than religious remedies, and on at least one occasion Rose’s confessors prescribed four hours of sleep (instead of the usual two) because “her head dried out” from excessive crying.91 The efforts of these priests were later dismissed by hagiographers as misguided attempts to cure matters of the soul with remedies for the body. Rose’s true mysticism, the hagiographers argued, was debased through the stubborn “ignorance of some confessors” who were incapable of understanding the “undecipherable enigmas of mysticism.”92 In contemporary perspective, however, these recorded opinions of Dominicans who viewed Rose as ill are invaluable for two reasons. First, they register considerable support within Rose’s religious community for the idea that her mystical experiences were of psychological, physical, or psychosomatic origin. And second, they evidence a textual strategy in the construction of sanctity by which signiﬁcant early dissenting opinions were neutralized and reintroduced as corroborating evidence of Rose’s triumph against all odds. The pairing of the confessors’ judgments with the later hagiographic disclaimers reveals a process by which nonreligious interpretations of Rose’s experiences were gradually devalued (here via ad hominum arguments alleging misperception) as the saintly interpretations gained momentum, came to dominate, and invalidated dissenting opinions by retroactive revision. As the religious reading takes precedence, the medical reading becomes progressively erroneous. Rose’s mother, too, at least as represented textually, was not convinced of the supernatural causes of her daughter’s experiences or of the value of selfinﬂicted suffering. She referred to Rose as a “torturer of herself ” and explained to Rose, as did the confessors, that the ostensible mysticism “was delirium” resulting from the severe fasts and mortiﬁcations. The mother’s solution, when it was not punitive, was medical: on one occasion she called a doctor, believing that a heart problem caused the special effects that Rose presumed to be mystical. The hagiographers duly retaliated by defaming the mother and dismissing her views with the customary revisionist editorial—Rose’s “malady was not in her body, but rather in her soul”—but the mother’s perplexed and thisworldly interpretations nevertheless corroborated those of the confessors.93 Her perceptions and reactions were common among parents of aspiring saints who engaged in rigorous mortiﬁcation: “Even in the so-called age of faith and miracle, parents who discovered their seven-year-old children whipping themselves until the blood ran or praying all night on their knees took alarm. Often, believing the children were sick, they sought medical advice.”94 Hagiography intervened to vilify such mothers—Lapa, the mother of Catherine of Siena, is the paradigm—for obstruction of their daughters’ saintly pursuits. Like the

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dissenting confessors, these mothers fulﬁlled an essential narrative function as antagonists, but their insistence of pathology nevertheless entered the record. There is also trace evidence in testimony and hagiography that Rose’s behavior may have been perceived as deviant by onlookers, or at least that such perceptions were a concern. Rose’s brother Hernando would become exasperated when he accompanied her to church, for example, because Rose stopped compulsively to separate pieces of straw that happened to overlap in the form of a cross. The thought of pedestrians unthinkingly stepping on the symbol of her cruciﬁed Bridegroom was unbearable to Rose, but Hernando discouraged her from continuing this “very ridiculous” and unladylike behavior for fear that it would inspire the “derision and ridicule” of whoever might witness it.95 What seemed to Rose a saintly necessity was for Hernando at least, and perhaps for others, merely a risible compulsion. The psychological and psychosomatic judgments made by Rose’s confessors, mother, and any others who may have viewed her beata behavior nonreligiously were not contaminated by the retroactive imposition of modern science, of course, but rather they were made by appeal to the knowledge of Rose’s own times. There was ample precedent for such interpretations even in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom recognized that the condition of the body had a direct effect on the experiences of the soul. The inﬂuential Teresa of Avila later offered psycho-physiological explanations for the epidemic of false (by her reckoning) mysticism that was occurring in the convents she had founded. Teresa explained, as had Rose of Lima’s confessors, that what appeared to be mystical ecstasies were actually the result of debilitation resulting from excessive fasting and mortiﬁcation, and she accordingly advised moderation or elimination of these practices. Also reminiscent of Rose’s confessors (and of Aristotle) was Teresa’s belief that many nuns claiming mystical experiences were suffering from melancholy, a corporal malady that affected the mind. The symptoms of melancholy, like those of many mystical experiences, included weeping, exaggerated remorse, visions, locutions, and rapture. Believing that melancholy was precipitated by excessive asceticism, Teresa again prescribed the strengthening of body and mind, here through diet, rest, and the use of oral rather than mental prayer.96 The source and meaning of seemingly mystical experiences are often unclear even to the very individuals who experience them. Teresa of Avila characteristically observed that during mystical union she was so beside herself “that I did not know if the glory that I had experienced was a dream or if it happened in reality.”97 Something of this same uncertainty occurs today when anomalous religious experiences are challenged by science. When a psychiatrist asked a patient if her stigmata might be the result of self-inﬂicted wounds, she responded, “I’ve asked myself one hundred times whether I rubbed or stabbed myself. I had at the time trouble being able to distinguish the truth and know it was the truth.”98 The meaning of extranormal religious experiences—indeed, their very occurrence—hovers in uncertainty, and any claim to mystical experience, like any claim to psychopathology, is therefore itself

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interpretive. A medieval text described how nuns “hack at themselves cruelly, hostilely lacerating their bodies until the blood ﬂows,” but when the gruesome ceremony had concluded, the nuns regarded the wounds on their bodies as stigmata.99 Under these circumstances clouded by doubt and bound to the dynamics of mind, body, and soul, any judgment is a contingency. Rose is mad or she is saintly; or she is saintly because she is mad; or she is mad because she is saintly, “mad for God.”100 Mystical sainthood, as it occurs and as it is interpreted, is generated through the simultaneous viability and interaction of these options.

Inversions Hagiography is a world beyond the looking glass. Meanings have been inverted and norms reformed so radically that the ideal to which saints aspire is the horror from which most others ﬂee. The grizzly tortures described in hagiography were gleefully welcomed by the martyrs and early saints. In the agony of her slow execution St. Agatha could not contain her happy exclamations: “These pains are my delight! As if I were hearing some good news, or seeing someone I had long wished to see, or had found a great treasure.” When St. Julitta witnessed her martyred, three-year-old son’s “tender brains spilling down the steps,” she “joyfully gave thanks to God.” Another Christian woman was devastated to hear of her husband’s arrest, but when she learned that his crime was faith in Christ “she was ﬁlled with joy, ran to the prison, and began to kiss her husband’s bonds.” “I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints for the sake of Christ,” Paul explained, “for when I am weak, then I am strong.”101 These ideals were championed by penitential mystics who heeded Christ’s mandate to “take the cross as your refreshment as I did” and to “choose pains and afﬂictions and embrace them indeed as consolations.” Catherine of Siena accordingly explained to her confessor that “nothing in this life brought her as much comfort as tribulation and suffering.”102 While others were striving for wealth, accomplishment, happiness, and social status, one of Catherine’s imitators, Rose of Lima, sought suffering “with great joy” because “it was a beautiful thing to suffer pains for her Divine Majesty.” Rose’s “great ambition” in society was to be “insulted and put at the feet of everyone,” because “one of the things that she most desired was that people demean her.”103 Her mortiﬁcation thus steered clear of vainglory as she charted a course by anomalous directives toward goals that invert common norms. Pleasures are torturous, food is nauseating, pain is comforting, praise is injurious, and the best life is a yearning for death. “I am dying because I am not dying” became a refrain of Spanish mystics, and New World beatas echoed such sentiments with their own slogans—“I am learning how to die”—as they surrounded themselves with morbid reminders of mortality.104 Life in the body was saintly insofar as it was denied, conquered, denigrated, wounded, and poised on the divide between the taboo of suicide and the exaltation of self-

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sacriﬁce. Beatas led deathly lives—deprived, starved, mortiﬁed, gloomy—and had an insatiable “desire to suffer and die for God,” in part because death was inverted into life’s highest achievement: salvation and birth into eternity.105 Life was a rehearsal during which bodies were punished “as reservoirs of sin and mortal enemies of the spirit,” but these same bodies were paradoxically the locus of a “macabre eroticism” and, after death, of miraculous power and radiant beautiful.106 Such paradoxes—“power is made perfect in weakness,” “always a spouse, always unwed”—reconciled the juxtaposed ideals of worldly and saintly lives. One of the mystics in the Cistercian convent of Helfta reported erotic encounters with Christ, only to clarify that “when I love him, I am chaste; when I touch him, I am pure; when I possess him, I am a virgin.”107 John Donne excelled in such erotics by inversion when he addressed God in verse: Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.108 Heaven is the ultimate inversion, the transcendentalized world-upsidedown that rights the wrongs of one’s troubled tour of duty on earth. In heaven the negative attributes of dichotomies are neutralized: “There will be health without illness, freedom without servitude, beauty without ugliness, immortality without corruption, abundance without need, peacefulness without disruption, safety without fear, knowledge without error, satiety without excess, joy without sadness, and honor without contradiction.”109 Asceticism is abruptly reversed in heaven as lifelong fasting ends in glorious banquets, virginity is ceded in the Bridegroom’s bedchamber, modesty is covered over in bejeweled accoutrements, and the crown of thorns is traded in for a crown of roses. Thus another paradox emerges: mystics like Rose of Lima “have overcome the ﬂesh and have led a heavenly life on earth,” but afterward they lead an earthly life in heaven, indulging in pleasures of the ﬂesh.110 Representations of spiritualized materialism in heaven may provide an attractive incentive to the unsaintly majority, for whom the next world can be “an intensiﬁed continuation of sensual pleasure on earth,” but they are dissonant with the ideals of mysticism.111 The heaven that is described in hagiography would seem rather the hell of penitential mystics, for whom any comfort, not to mention luxury, was unbearable. Rose’s escalating mortiﬁcation and rejection of carnal pleasures culminated in absolute, protracted agony as she neared death, only to be reversed an instant later by lavish, harem-like and hedonistic delight in everything that she had disdained and rejected. Why would a virgin who evaded social contact and was repulsed by food ﬁnd it appealing to “celebrate eternal ﬁestas in heaven,” beginning with the postmortem, wedding night “very splendid heavenly banquet” and bedchamber that awaited as she agonized on her deathbed?112 One answer may be found in inversion as an expression of alleviation, of desire not for luxury but for escape from agony. Otherwise, the values of ma-

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terialism and eroticism are measured by a double standard, being sinful on earth but acceptable in the heavenly court of the Bridegroom. The thirteenthcentury Margaret of Cortona, debilitated by mortiﬁcations, fasting, and weeping, was puzzled by a vision of Mary Magdalen dressed in a robe of silver and wearing a crown of jewels. Christ explained: “You wonder at the brilliant robe that Magdalen is wearing; know that she earned it in the desert cave. There also did she acquire the crown of precious stones by her victories over temptation, and by the penance which she imposed upon herself.”113 Christ here offered to Margaret (or Margaret to herself ) the usual explanation of heaven as a reward of good behavior through lavish inversion of earthly deprivations, but this conception of heaven reduces penitential mysticism and its spiritual goals to a formula of compensation: self-deprivation today yields the delayed gratiﬁcation of luxurious abundance after death. Asceticism and mortiﬁcation are emptied of intrinsic worth as they become avenues to material compensation. The simple inversion—sackcloth on earth and bejeweled gowns in heaven—may facilitate perseverance through anticipation of heavenly reversals, but by doing so it reveals an apotheosis of materialism and carnality that is incongruent with the ascetic tenets by which beatas were obliged to live. The reversible world of dying mystics—“from the greatest humiliation and dejection to the most sublime elevation and glory”—should, rather, have offered a heavenly payoff in currency congruent with the Catholicism by which it was earned.114 In lieu of the gaudy compensation for deprivations, one would expect a heaven more spiritual or monastic in demeanor, more in accord with the ascetic values propagated by the Church, as were images of the New Jerusalem, millennial kingdom, or Joachite third age. This inconsonance between how heaven is represented and how it is won reveals a fundamental contradiction in the Catholic valuation of asceticism. Heavenly materialism, eroticism, and luxurious abundance (or even lechery and gluttony) were evils puriﬁed by deferral, exalted by transcendentalization, divested of their worldly and sinful connotations, and held in trust for those whose steadfast suffering made them worthy of the prize.

When considering the heroic accomplishments of saints, the Church distinguishes between imitanda (what should be imitated) and admiranda (what inspires admiration, wonder, and awe but is not expected of ordinary lay Catholics). Rose of Lima’s life falls sometimes into one and sometimes the other of these categories, depending on the historical moment, the culture (with early modern Hispanic Catholicism more receptive to imitation), and the religious disposition of the observer. Contemporary accounts, particularly those from outside of Latin America, tend to discourage imitation of Rose’s severe asceticism. The editors of Butler’s Lives of the Saints felt obliged to conclude the Rose of Lima entry with a “don’t try this at home” admonition: “The mode of life and ascetical practices of St Rose of Lima are suitable only for those few whom God calls to them; the ordinary Christian may not seek to copy them.” The author of a 1937 hagiography of Rose published in the United States went

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further to qualify mortiﬁcation as counterproductive: “To assail the ﬂesh with these ingenious tortures of hers could only make a servant of God less useful to Him in life.” In a 1962 work, also from the United States, “St. Rose is most emphatically not for imitation.”115 The same note is clearly sounded among Europeans outside of Hispanic Catholicism. A nineteenth-century French account referred to Rose’s “astonishing mortiﬁcations” that “we have to admire,” but “not as examples that we should follow.” In his preface and afterword to an 1860 translation into English of a hagiography, F. W. Faber warned that readers “unaccustomed to the literature of Catholic countries” “may be a little startled” by the life of Rose, but now that she is canonized “no sneer of man can wither the marvelous blooming of her leaves,” and “he will ﬁnd a thorn who shall dare to handle roughly this sweet mysterious Rose.” The introduction to a 1913 British hagiography of Rose defended asceticism but observed cautiously that “everything in her life calls for admiration, many things for imitation, some, maybe, for explanation.” In the last analysis, Rose was “an object-lesson” to escape our “earthly, sensual, diabolical” times, but imitation of her must be tempered in accord with contemporary sensibilities. The text that followed these introductory remarks was in agreement, noting that ﬁfty years earlier, when hagiographies began to be widely disseminated in England, “the idea seems to have been that, whatever Italians or Spaniards might think of such matters, to English people a saint whose holiness took the form of cruel maceration of her body as one of the chief practices of her life must be an object of repulsion rather than attraction.” But Catholics “now as always, looks upon suffering of all kinds not as a cruel misfortune to be shunned by all means, but as a valuable possession to be put to a noble, and at the same time most practical, use.” Suffering has value as expiation but also as intercession, as a kind of prayer, because in the cruciﬁxion “Christ did not only bear the punishment of man’s sin, but won the ear of His Father to listen to His petitions.” Those who suffer in Christ’s name do the same. This author, herself a Dominican tertiary, ultimately regarded Rose’s “marvelously generous self-sacriﬁce” as “encouraging, even though inimitable.”116 Many Latin American interpreters grappling to understand mortiﬁcation similarly found compromise solutions. The author of an anonymous 1768 Mexican novena to Rose exalted the virtue of imitation while at once excusing himself: “My cowardice . . . does not let me imitate your rigorous penitence.” A late-nineteenth-century opinion postponed the imitation—“give us the strength necessary to imitate her, after we have admired her”—and a 1914 Peruvian text found a rhetorical escape by shifting ﬁnally from imitation of Rose’s “admirable example of mortiﬁcation and penitence” to imitation of her virtues.117 Similar in this respect was a 1917 pastoral letter from the archbishop of Lima on the occasion of the third centenary of Rose’s death. If one admired Rose’s sanctity, then one must follow her penitential example—“Oh, my children, let us try to imitate her!”—but the call seemed little more than rhetorical and the penance unworthy of the name in which it was evoked. The asceticism went little further than abstaining from “not very Christian pastimes,” and

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although these Limen ˜ os were encouraged to observe “the holy law of fasting,” the great majority of those depicted in the photographs, particularly the clerical hierarchy doing the preaching, were stylishly plump.118 A rhetorical maneuver again facilitated a compromise in a 1987 booklet on Rose that was published in Lima to edify Catholic families. A summary of Rose’s mortiﬁcations was followed by the observation that such practices “are undoubtedly shocking to a modern mentality.” However, the author argued, “only the excess of Christ’s love for humanity explains the scandal and the madness of the cross. Only the excess of Rose’s love for Christ explains the ‘scandal’ and ‘madness’ of her mortiﬁcation.” The text was explicit on the issue of imitation: “Saint Rose does not ask us to imitate her mortiﬁcation.” Instead, one should serve one’s family and other Christians who, in their difﬁcult lives, “share now the suffering and anguish of the Redeemer.” This shift from Rose’s self-inﬂicted mortiﬁcation to reinterpretation of one’s existing “suffering and anguish” was then explained: meditation on the cruciﬁxion brings a “spirit of austerity” and “inspires us to offer our suffering, our sicknesses, and our sadness for the salvation of our brothers.”119 Imitation of Rose required no new suffering, only the revaluation of the suffering that these families already endured. Rose mortiﬁed herself in vicarious atonement, but these Catholics participate in ongoing redemption by offering the mortiﬁcation of their everyday lives. Earlier texts, particularly from Lima, tended conversely to encourage imitation of Rose’s asceticism. Such was decidedly advocated at the opening of the 1617 ordinary process, in which Rose’s candidacy for sainthood was linked explicitly to her value as a model for imitation.120 In a 1632 letter from the Cabildo of Lima to the pope, similarly, beatiﬁcation was urged “so that everyone will be inspired to imitate her.” The same was echoed in a 1669 sermon when Rose’s beatiﬁcation was announced in Lima: “Who would not be shamed by not trying to imitate her?”121 Fray Andre´s Ferrer de Valdecebro urged the readers of his hagiography of Rose, published in the same year, to “not remain in admiration of such an unusual life, but rather try to imitate it sincerely.” Another sermon given in Lima a century later, in 1782, described Rose as an “exemplar” to be imitated and used as a model, and, now with rhetorical softening, an 1812 sermon given in Lima’s cathedral urged imitation of “this spirit of compunction and penitence.”122 The call for imitation within the Catholic culture that produced Rose of Lima thus yielded in other regions and periods to diverse perspectives and debate. In some cultures mortiﬁcation was exalted as an ideal toward which all should aspire, and in others it was kept at a wondrous distance or regarded as aberrant or inappropriate. The majority positions on imitation and wonder, like those on sanctity and insanity, shift with the ﬂux of broader cultural trends. Imitation yields to wonder and, eventually, to repulsion as mortiﬁcation is gradually devalued as efﬁcacious; and sanctity yields to insanity as belief in penitential mysticism declines. The meanings of mysticism hang in the balance of such ﬂuctuations and inversions.

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2 Conditioned Perceptions

Constructing Sanctity Everything known about Rose of Lima is derived from the ordinary (1617–1618) and apostolic (1630–1632) canonization processes and a few miscellaneous documents (Inquisition records, correspondence, bulls, and briefs); the remainder is devotional embellishment. Even these primary sources are conspicuously nonobjective, however, as evidenced by the nature of their inquiry, the formulaic unanimity of the testimony, the absence of dissenting witnesses, and the political and religious paradigm that conditioned the hearings and their outcome. For the study of Rose of Lima (like the study, I would imagine, of most saints) there are, in effect, no primary historical sources, if such implies a more or less reliable, objective record of events. In hagiographic discourse the archive itself is an interpretation, and the distinction between primary and secondary sources breaks down. Prejudices, elaborations, and fabrications already embedded in primary sources are, of course, confronted by anyone who studies the past, but the testimony in canonization processes is exceptionally disposed to the forfeiture of objectivity. Particularly in the ordinary processes, the unacknowledged purpose of the hearings is not investigatory, not to judge the worthiness of a candidate for sainthood, but, rather, to gather data that represent that candidate in the manner most conducive to canonization. Objectivity yields to advocacy. The ordinary and apostolic processes are reliable primary sources only insofar as they are read to understand the workings of a religious culture and the means by which that culture constructs its saints. They enter into the record a “collective representation,” a

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packaged identity that stands in for, and ultimately displaces, the historical person on whom it was based.1 The documents generated by the processes for canonization were of course regarded as accurate and historical by those who produced them in solemn severity with the oversight of church and state. They register the perspective of Catholic culture that deﬁned empiricism broadly to include a range of discourses (the Bible, theological tracts, sermons, hagiography) and phenomena (miracles, visions, levitations, stigmata, incorruptible ﬂesh) that are valid as positive knowledge only within a context permeated by faith. Science was subordinate to religion but nevertheless was science. The quasi-inquisitorial commission that examined Rose of Lima permitted the questioning to be directed by Juan del Castillo, a secular medical doctor, in part because his scientiﬁc knowledge could better determine the possible physical or psychological causes of Rose’s mystical experiences. Science was recruited so that its perspective would enhance the knowledge and interpretation afforded by theology, but Castillo’s science, as was typical of his times, differed from modern science in that it endowed mysticism with the same reality and validity as any other empirical phenomena. Indeed, mysticism was privileged as a higher reality because it was transcendental, and Castillo himself brought to science a decided mystical inclination. Three days after her death, Castillo saw Rose radiating in glory and surrounded by roses, and in his subsequent contemplative prayer Rose appeared to him “continually for six months.”2 Castillo ended his career by taking the Dominican habit in 1636, shortly before his death. His science and his religion were untroubled by the mutual exclusion—insanity or mysticism—that tends to dominate interpretations today, but, by contemporary standards, religion was privileged in a hierarchical arrangement that handicapped his scientiﬁc objectivity. Much the same might be said of the “learned Doctors and intelligent and experienced Surgeons” who reported the miraculous state of Rose’s corpse ﬁfteen years after her death. They were called in as physicians to make a scientiﬁc determination that could not be made by priests, but their conclusions tended to support a priori conclusions—the incorruptible ﬂesh, the odor of sanctity—worthy of hagiography. This comfortable intermingling of religion and medicine is also evident in the various means by which illness was treated. Medical doctors cured, but so did religious healers, including Rose of Lima, and after Rose’s death any relic associated with her was accorded curative properties. The two realms fused when seventeenth-century physicians in Lima prescribed as a medical cure that their patients ingest miraculous dirt taken from Rose of Lima’s tomb.3 Theologians, too, lived in an empirical world that was more ﬂexible than that of the twenty-ﬁrst century, and the oligarchy, schooled by them, followed their lead. The erudite Juan de Lorenzana, for example, testiﬁed that when an attack on Lima was threatened by pirates, the face of the Virgin of the Rosary— a wooden statue—became stricken with grief, because the statue “understood that the wrath of God was coming down on the city.” Pedro de Loayza, Gonzalo de la Maza, and Juan Mele´ndez, all highly educated members of Lima’s reli-

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gious and civil elite, subscribed to the miracle of Rose “teaching” the plants in her garden to bow down humbly and praise the Lord. Each of these men alluded to the nonmiraculous possibility that the wind blew the plants (“they make a harmonious and very gentle sound,” “like when they are moved by a gentle wind”) and that the praying was only Rose’s perception (“it seemed to her that they did it”), but in the end they all endorsed the event as miraculous.4 Leonard Hansen later exploited the scene’s full potential for the educated elite at the Vatican. Rose entered the garden each morning on her way to her cell and called the plants to prayer; immediately “the leaves of the trees clapping softly against one another applauded the Lord,” and a grove of trees “bent its magniﬁcent crest toward the earth, making the humble gesture of bowing down to kiss the ground in reverence of its Maker.”5 The miracle was further enhanced in a sermon given during the celebration of Rose’s beatiﬁcation in Lima, in which all the trees “bowed down their heads” and then, after “humbly kissing the earth,” rose again toward the sky, “repeating the rising and bowing many times.”6 These storybook accounts are reminiscent of the many similar scenes in medieval hagiography: an ox and an ass recognized the Lord and “went to their knees and worshipped him,” for example, or a certain tree “bent down to the ground and devoutly adored the Christ.” The marvelous, elaborated incidents in Rose’s garden, along with innumerable other hagiographic episodes, become historicized as miraculous truths and leave behind their specious origins. In a March 9, 1668, letter to the viceroy Conde de Lemos, Queen Mariana of Austria mandated protection of Rose’s house, “where there is the garden in which the trees bowed down to praise God.”7 The identity of a saint is constructed through the interaction of several factors, including the following: • The way an aspirant to sanctity conducted his or her life, usually in imitation of canonized models of sainthood • The elaboration of that life in rumor and folklore (including reports of miracles) during the person’s lifetime • A signiﬁcant increase in oral narratives, miracles, and devotion following death, often at all class levels • The circulation of precocious texts and images that introduce an initial, tentative identity • The textualization of a rudimentary life story through transcription of ordinary-process testimony, which provides the basis for the gradual coherence of an ofﬁcial version • The narrativization and elaboration of this testimony in early hagiography, often written by a confessor, and in documents produced by religious and civil authorities to advocate canonization • The intervention of the Vatican, the introduction of new interrogatories that steer the inquiry (and thus the identity) in particular directions of canonical interest, and the gathering of new testimony transcribed during the apostolic process

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wounds of love • The polished narration of the life, now with greater poetic license, in new hagiographies written to advocate canonization • The formalization of the saint’s identity and the life story through beatiﬁcation, canonization, and the texts and images that these generate • The postcanonization iconography that formalizes the dominant motifs and stresses select hagiographic episodes

The saint’s identity continues to evolve across the centuries as the ofﬁcial version—ﬁxed, but never ﬁnal—engages with varied peoples who adapt it to their needs, values, and ideologies. Scholarship intervenes to transform oral tradition into written history, and the Church endows this narrative with canonical deﬁnitiveness and sacrosanct closure, but the resulting ofﬁcial version, derived from folklore to begin with, is nevertheless perpetually reelaborated as popular devotion revisits it, misreads it, updates it, rewrites it, and transforms it. Oral tradition anticipates and provides a basis for the narrative that hagiographers produce in (predominantly male) high culture, and it then returns to this ofﬁcial version to readapt it to new devotions. Saints, to this degree, are authored from the bottom up. They are what popular devotion makes of them, and the erudition of the Church intervenes—in collaboration or in objection— to formalize, sanitize, historicize, and canonize life stories that the faithful (the last word is theirs) continue to revise. The construction of sanctity by quotas is well illustrated by the narrative of one of Rose’s celebrated visions. Christ appeared to Rose in a rainbow, holding a scale on which grace and mortiﬁcation were counterbalanced. The vision communicated to Rose a message that corresponded with a belief by which she lived: love and grace are acquired only in proportion to one’s suffering. The vision occurred in the last months of Rose’s life, shortly before she entered her ﬁnal illness, and she related it to Castillo ﬁve days before her death. One therefore notes a suggestive consonance between the message of the vision and one of Rose’s guiding beliefs, a context of illness and moribundity (not to mention the customary sleep and food deprivation) under which the vision was related and perhaps occurred, and a time lapse between the vision itself and its oral narration. What was represented as a vision may also have been a dream. As Rose’s principal confessor testiﬁed in 1617, Rose reported only dreams—never visions—to her confessors, but believing that this was an expression of her humility the confessors regarded the dreams to be “visions and revelations,” and as such they entered the record.8 An experience with subjective reality—vision or dream—was necessarily given narrative form and perhaps elaborated by secondary revision as Rose related it to Castillo. The narration was not related freely but, rather, in response to the probing questions that Castillo posed to Rose as he analyzed what he was hearing. An external structure was thereby imposed on Rose’s narrative, aligning it with Castillo’s theological inquiry. The text was to some degree coauthored by the interlocutor who guided its narration. The narrative then became exclusively Castillo’s after Rose died, and it was renarrated and elaborated when Castillo reported it orally in his ordinary-process deposition.

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During that testimony Castillo explicitly integrated his theological analysis into his narration of Rose’s vision. The vision and its meaning, the text and its interpretation, thus became one and the same as they entered the record to represent Rose’s experience. Castillo’s oral testimony was transcribed into that record certainly not verbatim, sometimes by summary, and again in response to an external inquiry. New interpretive layers, those of the interlocutor and the transcriber, were thus added as the oral history assumed its ﬁrst written version.9 This text, subsequently subject to translation and retranslation between Spanish and Latin, provided the prototype for the ofﬁcial version in formation. The notary’s summary transcription of Castillo’s analytical retelling of Rose’s guided narration of a vision that perhaps was a dream then received its most patent elaboration in hagiography. Here it was reﬁned with literary embellishments, adapted to genre conventions, purged of unorthodox suggestions, and attractively repackaged for the Vatican.10 Iconography provided a visual complement to these hagiographic elaborations. Papal bulls and briefs dogmatized this multiply elaborated text, providing a canonized, ofﬁcial version that was severed from the history of its construction. This ﬁxed narrative was then released to the free market of new interpretations layered on by sermons, folklore, formal and popular iconography, hagiographies, scholarship, and the new visionary experiences that it inspired. The depositions taken in the ordinary and apostolic processes are more generally characterized by a pro forma quality that renders suspect the objectivity of testimony. This is not to suggest that the witnesses were dishonest or purposely deceptive but that their testimonies were affected by context and procedures, by a tacit complicity in common purpose, and by the general presumption of the sainthood that was ostensibly under consideration. A sanctifying paradigm conditioned the inquiry and the depositions advocated where they could have informed. There were also relatively few witnesses (a total of some 210), considering that “all of Lima” came out for Rose’s funeral and an open call for witnesses was made.11 Among these few, dissenting witnesses were conspicuously absent. The formal questions that structured testimony often stated as fact what they purported to inquire, thereby leading the witnesses toward desired responses. Rather than asking, for example, “Was Rose devoted to the Virgin Mary and, if so, how?,” question twelve in the ordinary process of 1617 asked if Rose was “most devoted to the Mother of God of the Rosary” and continued, “in whose chapel she frequently prayed, where she received from that Virgin and from the Child in her arms very special favors.”12 In effect, the second part of the question provided evidence in support of the ﬁrst, and one would have to refute this evidence in order to testify against an assertion for which Church authorities were indirectly soliciting corroboration. In her 1618 testimony, Marı´a de Mesta made speciﬁc reference to the instructions that a question offered to the witnesses, agreeing that after death Rose had a “smiling face, as stated in the question.”13 The questions for the 1630–1632 apostolic-process inquiry, which came to Lima from the Vatican, likewise steered the witnesses

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toward reafﬁrmation of marvelous occurrences, heroic virtue, and presumed sanctity. The unanimity of witness testimony is also suggestive. “You ask for a portrait,” as one scholar put it, “and you receive a programme.”14 After reading the testimony given in support of canonization, Hansen proudly reported that Rose’s eleven confessors testiﬁed “as though they spoke with one mouth.” By this he meant that the confessors were in unanimous agreement on Rose’s sanctity, but the phrase also captured the stereotyped nature of the testimony. The same words reappeared later in Hansen’s narrative to describe the testimony of the several witnesses present when Rose’s tomb was opened for inspection on May 17, 1632, as part of the apostolic-process investigation.15 Their unanimous testimony that Rose’s corpse emitted a beautiful ﬂoral fragrance was in itself pro forma, conforming to the hagiographic commonplace of the odor of sanctity, but more telling was the manner in which this conventional discourse was articulated (or transcribed). Rather than each witness describing the incident in his own words, the record presented a series of verbatim repetitions of a formal statement. The testimony of Juan de Texeda, a medical doctor, repeated a phrase from previous testimony that underscored the fragrance of Rose’s corpse: “an odor similar to that of dried Roses, very different from that which corpses in a similar state usually have.” Texada innovated by adding that this semblance of dried roses “had a particular sweetness and fragrance that comforted and inspired devotion in everyone,” and this supplement then became integral to the repertoire of what was repeated subsequently. In the testimony of a surgeon named Luis de Molina, for example, the driedroses passage was repeated verbatim and followed by Texada’s added observation, again verbatim, “as though they spoke with one mouth.”16 Signiﬁcant observations made by other witnesses were sometimes discounted, ignored, or reinterpreted because they were detrimental to the advocacy of canonization. The unﬂattering opinions of Rose offered by her mother and some of her confessors, as discussed in chapter 1, are cases in point. Such dissenting perceptions enter hagiography because they serve as antagonistic counterpoints that accentuate Rose’s heroic virtue. Similar use is made of those who did not believe in Rose’s sanctity; they appear in hagiography only to narrate their miraculous punishment or conversion.17 The text registers their dissent in order to undo it, but the dissent nevertheless goes on the record. Also suggestive are the brief, explicit, ignored passages of testimony that index versions of Rose’s history unlike the one constructed hagiographically. Gonzalo de la Maza, his wife Marı´a de Uza´tegui, and their children were among the few people who knew Rose intimately. Rose lived with this family during the last years of her life, which were critical in the formation of her identity as a saint, and many stories circulated concerning Rose’s otherworldly feats in the de la Maza household. Uza´tegui, who was Rose’s surrogate mother and strong supporter, nevertheless testiﬁed candidly that Rose “had no notable mystical ecstasies” and that she had never seen Rose “in trance or ecstasy, as is often said.” Uza´tegui further testiﬁed that she had not witnessed “any miracle that the blessed Rose had performed while alive.”18 These reports from a

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source quite close to Rose provide a basis for measuring the saintly person against the hyperbolic construct that displaces her in hagiography. Uza´tegui’s phrase “as is often said” further implies the circulation of mythopoetic rumor and, when combined with her disclaimer, an attempt to correct the record, but such dissonant nuances became insigniﬁcant amid the more concerted counterdiscourse of advocacy. Other discrepancies likewise emerge through internal contradictions in testimony and hagiography. Many of these result from the miraculous enhancement of some commonplace phenomenon or from the revision of an episode to assure its conformity with hagiographic precedents. Rose of Lima was taught to read by her mother, who was a teacher by profession and “went to great pains to give her daughter the most careful cultivation and most conscientious education.” Two pages later in Hansen’s hagiography, however, Rose’s literacy became miraculous: “She learned to read and write perfectly,” without “the guidance of any teacher” or “bothersome and continuous study.”19 The miraculous acquisition of reading skills made Rose more worthy of canonization because it indicated divine intervention, but also because, as Hansen was quick to observe, it was another of many occurrences that linked Rose’s life to that of her hagiographic model, Catherine of Siena, who likewise learned without instruction. As Raymond of Capua explained it, Catherine learned the saints’ lives “without the aid of teachers or books,” learned theology directly from Christ, and learned to read Latin “without being taught by human beings.”20 Miraculous enhancement is also evidenced in the hagiographic representations of Rose’s accomplishments as a musician. In the prototype established by Hansen, Rose was “seen and heard playing the harp, the lute, and the vihuela without having been taught by anyone.” Members of the Gonzalo de la Maza household, however, remembered it differently. Uza´tegui testiﬁed that at night Rose would praise the Lord in song, “strumming the strings of a guitar, without knowing how to play, with her right hand, without moving her left hand.” Uza´tegui’s daughters similarly testiﬁed that Rose picked up a guitar (that sometimes had strings and sometimes did not) to mime the gestures of a musician, but “she did not know how to play.”21 If the world was “like a book written by the ﬁnger of God” in twelfthcentury Europe, it was no less so in the seventeenth century when the hagiographer’s task was to “to discover in everything the inﬁnitely wise hand of God our Lord.”22 Rose’s hagiographers contemplated the mysteries and deciphered God’s cryptic message in the painless childbirth experienced by her mother, in her birth on a street named after St. Dominic, in the black and white butterﬂy that revealed she would take the Dominican habit, and in her name (Rosa) embedded within that of the king (Carlos).23 Whenever there was an option between the probable and the prodigious, the prodigious was the hagiographer’s preference.24 There was always a place in the ambiguous sign to accommodate miracle, revelation, and hagiographic convention. On Palm Sunday, 1617, a sacristan inadvertently (it would seem) neglected to give Rose a palm frond as they were distributed prior to a procession. Hansen entertained

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two possible explanations, one rational and the other providential: either it was “an error or negligence of the sacristan, who was in a hurry,” or else it was the “singular disposition of heaven.” He opted for the latter—“it is more credible”—because the ensuing events were believed to have resulted in Rose’s betrothal to Christ.25 Hansen thus followed the customary procedure of reinterpreting Rose’s life through the ﬁlter of her presumed sanctity and then positing his interpretations as empirical evidence. He read backward through the mystical marriage, itself largely constructed, to endow the mundane palm incident with prophetic, otherworldly meaning. Juan Mele´ndez discovered God’s secret designs in an inkblot that made Rose’s original name, “Isabel,” illegible in her baptismal record. Because the error blotted out precisely the name, it revealed, Mele´ndez explained, that God “did not want that name (although sacred) for his Rose.” The truth of the text was precisely in its error. As in the case of the palm frond, ordinary events revealed extraordinary meanings when they were examined through the ﬁlter of the later miracles with which they were associated. The signs that Mele´ndez interpreted were offered as proof of Rose’s sanctity, but that same sanctity, already presumed, itself imbued these signs with their transcendental meanings. Mele´ndez viewed the notary’s slip of the pen retrospectively through the later transformation of Rose’s face into a rose (which resulted in her name change), and the error in the baptismal record thus became a prophetic sign awaiting revelation. In secular perspective the notary’s error seems less an act of God than a kind of Rorschach blot that accepts the projections of those who interpret it, but for Mele´ndez this slip (along with another that he discovered in the baptismal record) revealed “not what the hand intended but what God wanted.”26 On occasion, the empty signs were ﬁlled by Rose herself, at least as she is represented in hagiography. When Rose heard a singing bird, for example, she interpreted the melodious chirps as a charge to augment the severity of her fasts. This meaning was inherent in the reader but not in the text; it exploited ambiguity to make the sign responsible for a message projected onto it. Guilt provided the bridge: how could she waste time preparing and eating food, however meager, while God’s simplest creatures dedicated their lives to praising him in song? In a separate episode, a moribund Dominican friar promised to pay postmortem visits to his friend—also a Dominican—and to Rose, in order to inform them that he had been admitted into heaven. The Dominican left behind on earth became concerned for the fate of his friend’s soul when the promised visit failed to occur. Rose put the issue to rest by dismissing the initial promise of a visit and positing instead an alternative explanation. The dead friar was “enjoying eternal happiness in glory,” Rose explained, and therefore had no reason to return to this world.27 Originally a visit from the hereafter would be indication of the friar’s entrance into heaven, but the malleability of the sign and the gullibility of the interlocutor allowed that the opposite—failure to return—could signify precisely the same. Many of the marvels that ostensibly occurred during Rose’s life remained untold until long after her death, and memory took shape in the interim. One

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Dominican, Bernardo Ma´rquez, remembered ﬁfteen years after Rose’s death that he feared his hand would burn in the ﬂames bursting from her face as he served her the eucharist. One presumes that this priest, a very young novice at the time of this startling occurrence, would have marveled over the experience with other friars or have reported it in 1617, when testimony was solicited—particularly from his order—for the ordinary process, but not a word of this incident was spoken before his tardy testimony. Nearby communicants who had witnessed the ﬂames would also have been likely to disseminate the story, if not formally then in folklore. By the time Ma´rquez testiﬁed in the early 1630s, Rose had already been associated with the conventions of ﬂaming eucharistic devotion—“ﬂames sometimes burst out of her mouth” wrote Loayza in 1619—and Rose’s “volcanic” attributes were likewise developed in later hagiography.28 It would seem that what the priest narrated as memory expressed less what he saw with his eyes than what he saw through a culture learned in hagiography. Many of the miracles that became central to Rose’s saintly identity were witnessed only by children, and often uneducated children in subordinate positions. The popular image of Rose walking hand-in-hand with Christ was reported orally by a young domestic servant, Juana, the daughter of a mulatta in the service of Isabel Mejı´a. As a child, Rose frequented Mejı´a’s home and was sometimes in residence there for months at a time. Nothing was said— again—of Rose’s stroll with Christ at the time it occurred, but after Rose died, Juana reported to Mejı´a that once she had seen Rose walking across the patio with “a small boy, dressed in blue and red, with a luminescence that was pleasing.” It was Mejı´a, not the girl herself, who testiﬁed on this apparition, and in her secondhand account during the ordinary process Mejı´a conjectured that the boy must have been Rose’s “Guardian Angel or the Christ Child.”29 Some ﬁfteen years later Juana’s mother appeared to testify during the apostolic process (Juana herself had died), but the mother’s testimony—now thirdhand—was based not on a report from her daughter but, rather, on what she had heard from Mejı´a. With the passage of time the description became more miraculous: the mother testiﬁed that Juana “had seen the said Rose holding hands with a boy as they strolled through some portals of the said house, and that the said boy was surrounded by light, and likewise the ground on which he passed.” By the time Hansen was ﬁnished with the episode some thirty-ﬁve years later, the event was witnessed by Mejı´a’s own daughter, the boy holding hands with Rose was deﬁnitely “the Child Jesus,” and the couple’s appearance was that “of two elegant lovers.”30 When Rose’s beatiﬁcation was celebrated in Rome, one of the images that adorned the basilica depicted these lovers—Rose and Christ—strolling hand-in-hand in the garden.31 Folklore was thereby again canonized as history, and later iconographic contributions visually enhanced the scene’s romantic aspects to further suggest the courtship that culminated in mystical marriage.

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Life by the Book Hagiography is a hybrid of representation and construction; it subordinates historicity to exemplarity and advocacy. “We encounter here a poetics of meaning that cannot be reduced to an exactitude of facts or of doctrine without destroying the very genre that conveys it.”32 Hagiography is the biography of a legend that it creates. In the early colonial New World, where literary ﬁctions were largely prohibited, hagiography provided entry into novelesque realms that were inhabited by extraordinary characters. Hagiography blurred the boundaries between real and marvelous, natural and supernatural, thus creating wondrous, ﬁctive, real-world opportunities beyond the norm, perhaps beyond the possible, but within parameters acceptable to both church and state. The constructive properties of hagiography lend it performative speech-act functions that are not unlike those of canonization bulls, which, indeed, bring new saints into being by ceremoniously introducing texts into a ritual context that makes them efﬁcacious. Before the Congregation of Rites and the pope speak, there is no canonical saint; afterward formal recognition is ritually celebrated, a cult is formalized, an icon is manufactured, and the legends of a sanctiﬁed life are historicized. Hagiography, itself reinforced by the folklore and testimony preceding it, provides an archive, a historical paper trail, that substantiate canonization’s claims and makes its speech act veriﬁable. Hagiography anticipates the saint that it represents, and canonization fulﬁlls this prophesy. Saints are constructed by appeal to canonized precedents, and these precedents are limited and limiting. The Counter-Reformation’s defense of orthodoxy restricted the options to endless variations on few acceptable prototypes, and saints, in life and in text, tended to conform to this “powerful incentive for uniformity.”33 Hagiographers were responsible for making the ﬁnal ﬁt viable, for tailoring a life along the contours of a canonized model. The principal implied reader of precanonization hagiography—a genre as political as it was religious—was always the Vatican. Hagiographers were inclined to reduplication of canonized prototypes in order to facilitate the positive reception of mystics, including Rose of Lima, who were potentially subversive to orthodoxy, but their saintly protagonists provided variations and innovations as the story superimposed on their lives mutated through contact with new times, places, personalities, and cultural contexts. The prototype adapted to the saints as they were adapted to the prototype. The story was perpetually revised as it was retold in the name of its serial protagonists because the imitative methods of both the candidate and hagiographer, far from being rotely repetitive, were dialectical, interpretive, and innovative. Conformance with the prototype enhanced a candidate’s chances for success by resounding the familiar, while the variations attested to the prototype’s ongoing validity and vitality. When the Vatican looked at Rose of Lima it saw a “portrait of itself,” but painted now with a New World palette. Rose’s face “is the face of the Church, whose cheeks are Rose colored.”34 Andre´ Vauchez, Weinstein and Bell, and other scholars surveying the lives

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of saints have observed that, in Peter Burke’s summation, “a key factor in the imputation of sanctity to an individual is the ‘ﬁt’ between his or her career and the best-known stereotypes of sanctity.”35 New World beatas like Rose of Lima fell into the mystic or ecstatic category of Burke’s typology, and, as Weinstein and Bell explained, they “recalled the supernatural elements of the Mediterranean wonder-workers, visionaries, and penitents as these had been elaborated in the hagiography and cultic activity of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.” Many American saints “patterned themselves explicitly after their European models”—to such a degree that one scholar described “induced sanctity”—and hagiography generously compensated for any deﬁciencies in an aspirant’s emulation of the prototype.36 The traditions contributing to the saintly model that was pursued by Rose of Lima and her hagiographers emphasized penitential asceticism, nuptial mysticism, and eucharistic devotion. The interaction of these beliefs and practices was pioneered beginning in the thirteenth century by Dominican and Franciscan tertiaries in southern Europe, including the Italian Franciscan Angela of Foligno; by the Beguines in northern Europe; and by the German Cistercian nuns of Helfta. In the fourteenth century many German Dominican nuns and, particularly, the Italian Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena made signiﬁcant contributions, and decisive advances were made in the sixteenth century by the Spanish mystical tradition epitomized by Teresa of Avila. Rose of Lima’s written life conforms in signiﬁcant detail to the motifs of these medieval traditions. The protagonist of the typical composite story as it pertains to Rose is a beautiful girl, delivered in painless childbirth, whose ascetic calling is signaled in infancy when she refuses the breast or tolerates a dry breast with saintly complacency.37 In her youth she avoids childish play, withdrawing from her peers for prayer and mortiﬁcation.38 She vows virginity precociously (usually before the age of seven), chooses Christ as her Bridegroom, rejects earthly suitors, and frustrates her parents’ desire that she marry.39 An escalating battle of wills results, often dominated by a mother who misunderstands her daughter’s special calling and seeks a remedy through abusive punishment.40 The aspiring saint ultimately prevails, takes a habit, and dedicates her chaste, ascetic life to penance, charity, handiwork, and religious exercises. She tends to be sickly and is often gravely ill, and she bears these torments stoically, even gratefully, as gifts from God. She can survive without eating, taking only the eucharist, and despite her prolonged fasts, corporal abuse, and illnesses, she remains healthy looking, rosy-cheeked, and beautiful.41 The indefatigable devil tries to derail her sanctity by beating her; by attacking her physically in diverse forms, including as a huge dog or other beast; by performing “immodest acts” in front of her; and by trying to seduce her in the guise of a handsome boy or man.42 The summit of this aspiring saint’s life is mystical marriage with Christ the Bridegroom, and in ecstatic rapture she has intimate, often erotic experiences with her incarnate deity-husband. Burning love, piercing, union, wounds, and a range of courtly and corporal images are the tropes of her mystical experiences. She predicts her own death, makes a saintly exit, demonstrating fortitude and forbearance until the end, and leaves

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behind a corpse that is incorruptible, that exudes a sweet fragrance, or that bears in its ﬂesh the insignias of Christ’s Passion.43 The most critical inﬂuence on Rose of Lima was Catherine of Siena (1347– 1380), who was canonized in 1461. For Rose, as for many beatas in Peru and throughout western Christianity, Catherine was the “greatest exemplar” of female mysticism and provided a paradigm for imitation that was consciously pursued and openly acknowledged. Raymond of Capua’s hagiography of Catherine established a prototype that for centuries was a “model according to which biographers wrote and women lived.”44 Many of the principal witnesses in Rose of Lima’s processes of canonization—including her mother, Uza´tegui, de la Maza, and Castillo—testiﬁed that from an early age Rose was “very devoted” to Catherine, after “having heard and read the book of her life.”45 Rose’s close imitation of Catherine was decisive in her formation and selfexpression as a beata, and this modeled behavior was socially reinforced by a community that fostered and accepted her as a new Catherine of Siena. When an onlooker in church inquired as to Rose’s identity, for example, she was described as “the saint to whom God grants great favors and who lives a very harsh life, and she is regarded as another Saint Catherine of Siena.” Before Lorenzana accepted Rose as his confessant in 1614, he was likewise familiar with her reputation as “another Saint Catherine of Siena.” Such recognition transformed Rose’s personal aspiration into a social reality. She could look at Catherine “as though in a mirror” insofar as that mirror also reﬂected social approval of what was reﬂected. The more her culture endorsed imitation of Catherine, the more Rose was at liberty to do so with promise of success. Immediately after Rose’s death in 1617, the Dominicans and others in Lima were already formally stating—here in a letter to Pope Urban VIII—that “in the opinion of everyone she was a new Saint Catherine of Siena.”46 Hagiography enhanced and invented connections to assure that the Vatican, too, would regard Rose as a new Catherine of Siena. Hansen began his narrative by comparing Rose’s infancy to Catherine’s and then throughout his text selected and presented evidence carefully to align the two saints’ lives. He arrived soon at the common conclusion—“Limen ˜ os call her the second Catherine of Siena”—and subsequent hagiographies offered such variations on the theme as a “new Catherine of Siena of the New World” and even “Catherine of Lima.” Some, including Hansen, gave the otherwise passive model an active role as Rose’s “teacher” by having Catherine descend from heaven for tutorials with her protegee.47 A comparison of the two hagiographies—Catherine’s written by Raymond of Capua between 1384 and 1395 (ﬁrst published in 1553) and Rose’s published by Leonard Hansen in 1664—reveals astonishing similarities, among them the following. The more one studies female mysticism, the less its extremities seem anomalous.48 (1) The Vow of Virginity. Catherine made a vow of virginity at the age of seven, cutting off her hair (described as her most beautiful feature) as she withdrew from the vain world of beauty and courtship. Her mother, Lapa, “had

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dreams of rejoicing in some distinguished son-in-law,” without realizing that Catherine had already “obtained a greater son-in-law,” Christ the Bridegroom, than anyone could have possibly imagined. Lapa encouraged the young Catherine to beautify herself and, with the help of Catherine’s sister, Bonaventura, she was temporarily successful. But Catherine soon regarded such vanity as a great sin, and in order to make herself undesirable to suitors and to end the insistence on courtship, she “seized a pair of scissors and joyfully cut her hair off to the roots.” The mother retaliated, and the struggle intensiﬁed until Catherine’s father, with some help from God, ﬁnally ruled that Catherine would be allowed to “serve her Husband freely”: “We have no reason to lament if instead of a mortal man we are to have God and an Immortal Man in our family.”49 When Rose was ﬁve years old, her brother dirtied her beautiful blond hair with mud, she protested in anger, and her brother responded with friarly wisdom: women’s curls and braids are the “snares of hell” and “God detests” the adornment of hair. The words struck home. Hansen then narrated how Rose chopped off her hair without maternal consent, underscoring that she did so in imitation of Catherine. The gesture was doubly efﬁcacious because Rose, again echoing Catherine’s story, at once cut her hair and “cut off her mother’s hopes and the snares and ties” that might have entangled her in marriage.50 In the aftermath, at the age of ﬁve, Rose resolved to follow Catherine by making a vow of virginity. To her mother’s dismay, Rose subsequently rejected all suitors, arguing with husbandly tropes, as had Catherine (or Raymond), that she could not forfeit her heavenly Bridegroom in exchange for any mere mortal. (2) The Mother as Antagonist. As Rose was fashioned into a new Catherine of Siena, her mother Marı´a de Oliva shaped up as a new Lapa. Both mothers enter the story with insufﬁcient lactation, try to marry off their daughters, respond cruelly to their daughters’ preferences for a religious vocation, engage in protracted struggles as they attempt to impede asceticism, and, ﬁnally, exhausted by formidable resistance and subterfuge, free the daughters to their destinies. The link between the two mothers was already established in the ﬁrst hagiography of Rose of Lima, in which Loayza explained that Rose suffered the abuse of her mother “in imitation of the torments that Saint Catherine of Siena suffered from her mother, Lapa” and—he added in his testimony—“for the same causes and reasons.” Hansen strengthened the relation by arguing that the maternal torments Rose suffered could only be understood by “carefully reading the story of Catherine of Siena.”51 Rose herself, with the guidance of confessors who (like Catherine’s) were sometimes drawn into the struggle between mother and daughter, may have come to understand her own mother through this hagiographic ﬁlter, thereby endowing with otherworldly purpose and meaning the obstacles she confronted and the punishments she suffered. Hansen fused Lapa and Marı´a de Oliva to such a degree that the latter verbally abused Rose “with the same words with which in another time Lapa, mother of Saint Catherine of Siena, mortiﬁed her.” The endings were happy, however, as both Lapa and Marı´a de Oliva ultimately saw the light. Rose’s mother became a nun after the death of her

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husband (as Rose had prophesied), and Lapa followed Catherine to the letter by becoming a Dominican tertiary. At the age of eighty-nine, the once viliﬁed Lapa “went to enjoy in heaven the affectionate embrace of her holy daughter.”52 (3) Asceticism and Mortiﬁcation. The regimen of fasting, austerity, and mortiﬁcation is almost identical in the hagiographies of Catherine and Rose. Catherine avoided “all childish games and devoted her time to prayer and meditation instead,” withdrawing from view “to scourge her young body in secret.” Rose’s precocious mortiﬁcations were characterized by precisely the same avoidance, withdrawal, and secrecy. Catherine increased her penitential regimen “to the almost total exclusion of sleep,” and Rose followed suit, ﬁnally reduced sleep to two hours nightly.53 They both withdrew to cells, wore crowns of thorns, slept on mortifying beds, and used stones for pillows. Catherine “girded herself with an iron chain so tightly that it sank into her ﬂesh and almost chafed the skin away,” and Rose did exactly the same.54 Raymond of Capua also reported that Catherine whipped herself with an iron chain in imitation of St. Dominic, and Hansen followed with qualiﬁcation of Rose’s identical scourging as “imitation of her Father St. Dominic.” The similarities in fasting likewise coincided until ﬁnally the eucharist replaced all sources of nutrition for both Catherine and Rose. Hansen found in this inedia sufﬁcient evidence for his conviction that “the same spirit reigned in both of them.”55 (4) Humility and the Wound. Catherine was nauseated when she removed the bandages from an old woman’s oozing wound, and to chastise herself for this outrageous lack of charity before one of God’s creatures, she drank the blood and pus that it secreted. Christ rewarded this exemplary act of humility in kind, drawing Catherine to the wound in his side and allowing her to drink there deeply. Rose of Lima, tending to a sick girl, similarly felt nauseous revulsion before a bowl of putreﬁed blood. The girl had been bled so that her humors could be read, but two days had passed and the doctor had not returned. Rose reprimanded herself for her uncharitable disgust—she was “more vile and rotten than all of that rottenness”—and for failing to heed Catherine’s good example. To reverse, conquer, and atone for the sin, she picked up the bowl and “with holy wrath she drank down all of that blood without leaving a single drop.” After having performed this “heroic action,” Hansen concluded, “no one can doubt that our Rose was the legitimate disciple of Saint Catherine of Siena.” Rose, like Catherine, also drank from the wound in Christ’s side. She and Catherine were thus sisters, Hansen explained, for having nursed at the same breast.56 (5) Transformative Identiﬁcation. The similarities in behavior also provided a basis for proposing Rose’s physical resemblance to Catherine. Loayza reported that a confessor saw Rose’s face transformed into that of Catherine and ﬂed the room praising God. Hansen made the transformation permanent. Certain emanations of light were transferred from Catherine’s face to Rose’s, and as a result Rose became a “copy and portrait” of her model. A hagiography published by the Church shortly after canonization followed Hansen to observe that “lights came out of the face of the Blessed Catherine to that of Rose” and

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made their physiognomy identical. This went largely undetected during Rose’s lifetime, but at the funeral her devotees could observe her face more carefully and thereby discovered that it was identical to Catherine’s.57 (6) Coinciding Birthdate. Rose’s birthdate is debated, some contending April 20 and others April 30, the feast day of Catherine of Siena. The ﬁrst hagiography of Rose (by Loayza), Hansen’s hagiography, and ofﬁcial Catholic Church documents, including the bull of canonization, all use the April 20 birthdate.58 Some of those who favor the April 30 date argue that April 20 was erroneously recorded when Rose’s cause was reopened, thereby providing the incorrect precedent that subsequent church documents simply duplicated. Others who likewise believe April 30 to be correct argue that this date corresponds exactly to the number of days in Rose’s life—31 years, 3 months, and 24 days.59 This calculation only begs the question, however, because it presumes the April 30 birthdate, does its math backward to count the days, and then provides the tally as evidence for a premise that precedes it. If the April 20 birthdate were used when this calculation were made, then the number of days in Rose’s life would obviously add up differently. The count of days proves only that whoever did the calculation used the April 30 date as a basis. The same scholars also rely on the testimony of one of Rose’s brothers, Hernando. In the ordinary-process inquiry, during which Hernando testiﬁed, the birthdate was built into the question and also into the prefatory narrative: Rose was born “on the last day of the month of April.” Hernando testiﬁed that the date stated in the question—April 30—was correct, because he had seen this date written in a diary in which his father recorded the birthdates of his children. The ambiguity is reopened by the testimony of Rose’s mother. In one manuscript copy of her ordinary-process testimony the birthdate is recorded as April 20 and in another as April 30. Her apostolic-process testimony indicates April 20 as the birthdate. The mother is therefore selectively cited as evidence by those who argue in favor of either date.60 The coinciding of Rose’s birthdate with Catherine’s feast day is another of many embellishments that forged a strong, prodigious, providential bond between Rose and Catherine. The peers who viewed Rose as a “new Catherine” were well disposed to making the modest adjustment in date, even if unwittingly, and the hagiographers who subscribed to the change—though not the important ones—had in that adjustment a piece of data useful to their purposes. Indeed, were Rose’s birthdate actually April 30, no one advocating this “new Catherine of Siena”—least of all Hansen—would have missed the opportunity. Why, at the time of her death, would the April 20 date even have emerged if indeed she were born on April 30, particularly with the pertinent question steering depositions toward the date associated with Catherine? The fact that April 20 is in evidence at the latest by 1619 and that the April 30 date is contested within the culture that advocated canonization is highly suggestive that the coincidence with Catherine was contrived. There are also indications of purposeful textual “correction” of the April 20 date so that it would coincide with Catherine’s feast day. The ﬁrst hagiography of Rose, Loayza’s, indicated an April 20 birthdate in the manuscript

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version sent to Rome as part of the apostolic process, but in the printed version distributed today by the Sanctuary of Rose of Lima the date has been changed to April 30. Another devotional booklet fabricated evidence for the April 30 birthdate by inventing wording for the non-extant diary of Rose’s father. This urge to link Rose to Catherine’s feast day was also pursued by other means, notably when notiﬁcation of Rose’s beatiﬁcation arrived in Lima. The news came on January 18, 1669, but its public announcement was postponed until Catherine’s feast day, April 30.61 The supposed coincidence of Rose’s birthdate and Catherine’s feast day hovers somewhere between the moot, the arbitrary, and the irresolvable when one considers that a February 16, 1630, brief of Pope Urban VIII changed the date of Catherine’s feast day from the date established in her bull of canonization—“the ﬁrst Sunday of May”—to April 30. When Rose was born in 1586, Catherine’s feast day was not on April 30 but, rather, on “the ﬁrst Sunday of May.”62 Those who aligned the birthdate with Catherine’s feast day—if, indeed, that is what happened—thus projected the changed date backward to a day that was not yet formally associated with Catherine.

In addition to Catherine of Siena, Rose was inﬂuenced by various other saints “whose lives she had read.” These included the Mexican Gregorio Lo´pez, whose life so moved Rose that she “at once took him as an example, in order to imitate him.”63 Rose was particularly impressed by Lo´pez’s relentless asceticism, a quality that led her also (like Catherine before her) to an imitative interest in the Desert Fathers, about whom she had read repeatedly in books borrowed from Gonzalo de la Maza. A more distant inﬂuence with local connections was St. Bartholomew, the apostle of Christ who was credited (along with St. Thomas) with the evangelization of the Indies. Rose had a particular devotion to Bartholomew, whom she referred to as “my Father and apostle,” and she died— as she had prophesied—on his feast day.64 A more important but less direct inﬂuence was Teresa of Avila, the paradigm of female mysticism in Spain. Although Teresa was not canonized until 1622—ﬁve years after Rose’s death—Teresa’s life and writings (ﬁrst published in 1583, with a major edition in Salamanca under the direction of Fray Luis de Leo´n in 1588) had a profound inﬂuence on spirituality in Lima during Rose’s lifetime. The Jesuits in Lima evaluated Luisa Melgarejo’s writings by comparing them with those of Teresa, and they marketed Melgarejo as a “new Teresa of Avila.” There is no evidence of Rose having read Teresa, but Juan del Castillo was working on a commentary of Teresa’s works when he began his mystical and theological discussions with Rose in 1614, and it is likely that he related Teresa’s ideas directly or indirectly. Another likely channel between Rose and Teresa’s writings was Juan de Lorenzana, who prior to his migration to Lima had studied at the University of Salamanca with Teresa’s confessor, Domingo Ban ˜ ez. “If Ba´n ˜ ez was the principle spiritual teacher of Saint Teresa, Lorenzana was the same for another, equally great saint.” Thus, following the common pattern, “Lorenzana was the Ba´n ˜ ez of Lima.” And because Lorenzana was spir-

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itually nourishing Rose—“nursing her at his breast with his example and his doctrine”—it is again likely that something of Teresa ﬁltered through.65 The mystical collages created by Rose certainly bear an extraordinary similarity to themes and imagery characteristic of Teresa’s writings. The written lives of Rose and Teresa also have much in common. To cite one simple example, Teresa related in her autobiography how in her youth she was inspired by the lives of saints who through martyrdom “bought very cheaply” their tickets to heaven. Teresa “longed to die this way” for the love of God and attempted ﬂight to Moorish territories with the hope of being decapitated. The plan failed, and Teresa settled instead for a compensatory, withdrawn asceticism in a hermitage that she built in her garden. Rose of Lima, similarly, longed to “ﬂee to the barbarous provinces” with the hope that the idolaters would “cruelly take her life for the love of Christ.” That failing, she too repaired to a garden hermitage and contented herself with imagining and improvising “various kind of torments that she longed to suffer for her heavenly Bridegroom.”66 Such similarities led one panegyrist to fuse these saints’ individual identities into a single composite, now a threesome, including Rose, Teresa, and Catherine: “Whoever looks at one sees the other,” because they are made “by the same mold.” His tropes ﬁnd literal meaning well beyond his intentions in hagiographies that revise the lives to conform with a prototype. Catherine, Teresa, and Rose are like “three Books produced by the same Author, of the same material, on the same press, and with the same letters.”67

The Prototype as Palimpsest Rose of Lima, once the imitator, herself became a model for subsequent generations of beatas. She was an inspiration to peers even during her lifetime, and already in 1617 mention was made of a beata who was “trying to imitate the life of the blessed Rose.”68 A growing number of others followed. Rose’s beatiﬁcation in 1668 catalyzed efforts to purchase her family residence in order to establish there a home for thirty-three Dominican tertiaries inspired by her sanctity. The purchase was unsuccessful, but in 1669 the Dominican order constructed nearby the Beaterio de las Rosas, and there the mentioned tertiaries, known as the “Beatas Rosas,” institutionalized the pursuit of Rose’s good example. Another signiﬁcant advance was made in 1708, when the house of Gonzalo de la Maza, where Rose had died, became a Dominican convent known as the Monasterio de las Rosas or Santa Rosa de las Monjas.69 Informal imitation also continued in Lima outside of institutional settings. Catalina de Yturgoyen Amasa, known as the Condesa de la Vega del Ren (1685–1732), imitated Rose sometimes so literally that speciﬁc hagiographic episodes—the rubbing of ajı´ (chili) into the eyes to avoid social contact, for example—were faithfully repeated.70 Rose’s hagiography also inspired imitators outside of the New World. The Italian saint Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727) explained that in her youth, after “hearing the lives of certain martyr saints being read,” she developed “a desire

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to suffer.” Veronica imitated acts of mortiﬁcation not out of divine inspiration but, rather, she wrote, “I did these things because I heard that the martyr saints did them.” After learning that the young Rose of Lima was mortiﬁed by a heavy trunk lid that slammed down on her ﬁngers, the likewise youthful Veronica, unequal to the task, painlessly ﬂirted with mortiﬁcation by placing her ﬁngers between the doorjamb and the front door of her house. God’s will was done when Veronica’s sister slammed the door to prevent a large dog from entering. Like Rose before her, Veronica suffered the wound and cure with saintly fortitude.71 Later in life, as she prepared for her espousals with the Bridegroom, Veronica was visited by the Virgin, Rose, and Catherine of Siena: “It seemed to me that Our Lady told me that I must imitate them in the most heroic virtues.” This duo of co-models and co-mentors guided Veronica jointly until an implied hierarchy was clariﬁed during mystical betrothal. Rose assumed a secondary role as Catherine alone “intimated to Veronica what she was to do in that most august solemnity.”72 Perhaps the most outstanding and instructive appeal to Rose of Lima’s model was made in the hagiography of St. Mariana of Jesus (1618–1645 ), also known as the “Lily of Quito.” In the seminal hagiography of Mariana, written by the Ecuadorian Jesuit Jacinto Mora´n de Butro´n in 1697, there is a concerted effort to liken Mariana’s life to that of Rose. God enriched America with Rose but then “transplanted” her to heaven for higher purposes. America bemoaned this absence, God heard the plea, and Mariana was born, “so that she would be Rose’s substitute, and the very portrait of her virtues.” Mora´n de Butro´n strengthened the link between the death of Rose and the birth of Mariana by adjusting the dates to erroneously represent these events as occurring within two months of one another. He then related that as he read Mariana’s process of canonization, “having Rose’s virtues in view,” he discovered that the two saints were identical. His conviction was reinforced when he read a letter in which the archbishop, addressing the queen, similarly observed that Mariana’s life “was very similar” to that of Rose. Other members of his order also concurred that Mariana was “very similar to the fragrant ﬂower of the Kingdoms of Peru, Rose of Saint Mary.” Mora´n de Butro´n concluded that “the lives of these two most loved virgins were so similar that the only disparity was that Rose came ﬁrst as teacher and Mariana followed her as disciple.”73 This insistent interrelation of the two saints is particularly suggestive because Rose was not among the saints acknowledged by Mariana herself as a role model. As another Ecuadorian Jesuit, Aurelio Espinosa Polit, more recently observed, “Much is said by the biographers and panegyrists of Saint Mariana of Jesus regarding her points of similarity with Saint Rose of Lima,” but “this aspect is not treated neither in the funereal Prayer of Father Alonso de Rojas nor in the ﬁrst Process that was done between 1670 and 1678.” Only one testimony makes passing reference to Rose of Lima, with no mention of her as a role model for Mariana. It establishes with relative certainty that Mariana was aware of Rose and believed in the miraculous power of her relics, but nothing more.74 If Mariana and Rose were similar, it is not because Mariana imitated Rose

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but rather because both lives were modeled on earlier precedents, notably Catherine of Siena. Mariana, like Rose, “was very devoted” to Catherine, “knew her whole life by heart,” and “tried to imitate her completely.” As Mariana herself reported, Catherine appeared to her and would return again at the hour of death to guide her to heaven and coronate her. Others cited Teresa of Avila, in addition to Catherine, as the two decisive models of Mariana’s formation, and Mora´n de Butro´n noted that Mariana’s “special devotion” to Teresa included the regular reading of “the books of this great Doctor of the Church.”75 Mariana died in 1645, and Rose was not beatiﬁed until 1668. Those dates suggest that Mariana’s access to knowledge of Rose was limited orally to folklore or the informal discourse of priests and textually to unofﬁcial images and ephemera. Loayza’s hagiography was the only one written before Mariana’s death, and there is no reason to suspect that Mariana had access to it. For Mariana, Rose was a noteworthy antecedent in common enterprise, an outstanding peer, rather than a gloriﬁed ﬁgure worthy of a Catherine or Teresa. Mariana was dedicated to the same imitative agenda as Rose, and it is possible that she internalized aspects of Rose’s story without intent, but any symmetry between the actual (as opposed to hagiographic) lives of Rose and Mariana owes little or nothing to decided imitation. By the time Mariana’s ordinary process took place between 1670 and 1678, however, Rose had already been beatiﬁed and—after 1671—canonized. Both events were duly celebrated throughout the Spanish empire and more so in the viceroyalty of Peru, making new information available in print, images, and sermons. Those who testiﬁed on Mariana’s behalf, unlike Mariana herself, had an exalted conception of Rose as a “new Catherine of Siena,” the ﬁrst saint of the New World, and patron of all the Americas. It is therefore possible, perhaps probable, that the witnesses’ memories of Mariana—some twenty-ﬁve years had already passed—were to some degree inﬂuenced by the association of Rose and Mariana. Recollections of Mariana may have been enhanced, embellished, or modiﬁed as they intermingled with the fanfare for Rose of Lima. As those who testiﬁed looked back at Mariana, and past her to Catherine and Teresa, they could not have avoided in that retrospective lineup the new presence of the Americas’ own Rose of Lima. What is certain is that formal hagiographies and other documents advocating canonization intentionally stressed the similarity of Rose and Mariana. Mora´n de Butro´n’s hagiography was a composite of conventions culminating in tireless, strategic representation of Mariana as the “new” Rose of Lima. “The path that Saint Rose took to arrive at the heights of perfection to which she ascended,” meaning imitation of Catherine of Siena, “was also taken by Mariana,” and they were therefore “co-disciples” of Catherine, “not in the same time but in the same spirit.”76 The line of succession, from Catherine through Rose to Mariana, made the last of these the heir apparent. The prototype becomes a palimpsest when the life story of a new saint is an intertextual amalgam comprising both acknowledged models (in Mariana’s case, the written lives of Catherine and, to a lesser degree, Teresa) and after-the-fact models (Rose’s written life) that provide reinforcement for hagiographers.

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Prodigious similarities became the rule as Mariana was reexamined through the superimposition of these precedents. At birth Mariana, like Rose and Catherine, was “so pretty and beautiful that it caused admiration” and, because she was born “mature for sanctity,” she began fasting when she was an infant at the breast. Both Rose and Mariana tolerated the hunger of this precocious asceticism with startling “tranquility and meekness.”77 Mariana— still in strict conformance with the prototype—avoided play with other children and at a tender age commenced mortiﬁcation: at three years wounding herself with thorns, at ﬁve whipping herself, and at six developing a regular regimen of penitence. Like Rose, she recruited a household servant, in this case Catalina de Alcocer, to assist in her youthful mortiﬁcations. Alcocer testiﬁed that Mariana (like Rose, Catherine, and Teresa) suffered since childhood a “a variety of sicknesses and ailments,” and to compound the suffering of these chronic inﬁrmities she “cruelly hurt her fragile body.”78 Mariana’s adoptive parents, like the parents of Rose and Catherine, were distressed by her precocious mortiﬁcations and believed that a convent was the proper venue for her religious devotion. Efforts to have Mariana admitted to a convent were frustrated, however, and, in consonance with the hagiographies of Rose and Catherine, she repaired to separate quarters at home where she could tend to her penitential mysticism. In almost verbatim repetition of words attributed to Rose, Mariana described this small, sparsely furnished room as “big enough for her and her Bridegroom.”79 The daily schedule—quite similar to Rose’s—was divided between prayer and spiritual exercises, manual labor, mortiﬁcation, and minimal sleep. The fasts were as severe as those of Catherine and Rose, including six years of sustenance on nothing but the eucharist. Mariana beat herself until the blood ran across the ﬂoor; kept her scourges secret by cleaning walls “splattered with blood” with the help of a maid; wrapped herself in a chain “as though it were a stole, and ﬁnished it off with four turns around her waist”; slept on boards, and used a stone or piece of wood for her pillow; wore a crown of thorns, but was careful to keep it concealed; and on Fridays drank bile and vinegar, all of these like Rose and with clear reminders of Catherine. When her penance began to affect her appearance, she asked God, as Rose had, to hide the signs, and her pale, drawn face was miraculously transformed into “a rosy and healthy-looking color” that lasted, as in Rose’s case, until death.80 Mariana also shared with Rose the desire for martyrdom, and in a youthful escapade (also reminiscent of Teresa’s ﬂight toward the Moors) she attempted an escape to missions among hostile natives. She made a vow of virginity at the age of six or seven, conceived of Christ as her Bridegroom, and suffered the temptations of “devils in lascivious and dishonest forms” and of a handsome man attempting to seduce her, all again like Rose, Catherine, and innumerable saints and beatas conforming to this prototype.81 A miscellany of hagiographic details also all conform to Rose’s story. Mariana left her home rarely and avoided visits, nursed “the most disgusting people,” predicted the foundation of a convent, played with the infant Jesus, composed amorous verses and “played the vihuela; she said she was giving music to her Bride-

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groom,” and believed herself to be “the most evil and perverse” person in the world. At her death, on May 26, 1645, there was an incident concerning thirst (as in the stories of Rose and Christ, with allusions to Teresa), and when Mariana gave up the ghost “her holy cadaver was smiling and seemed alive, giving off a fragrance.”82 An outpouring of popular devotion followed, and, as in Rose’s funeral, the corpse had to be defended after relic seekers tore and cut off one and then another of the habits in which she was dressed, “and they reached such an extreme that one had grabbed a ﬁnger in order to cut it off.”83 Thus the prototype of Catherine of Siena, the inﬂuence of Spanish mysticism through Teresa of Avila, the hagiographic appeal to conventions, the inﬂuences that Rose’s life may have had on Mariana or on ordinary-process witnesses, and the use of Rose’s hagiography as a model for representing Mariana all contributed to a constructed identity that was ﬁrmly grounded in canonized precedents. As Pope Pius XII put it on the occasion of Mariana’s tardy canonization in 1950, Mariana is like “the ﬁnal phrase of a symphony that brings together all of the themes, taking from each something of its characteristics to compose the marvelous harmony of her spirit.”84

Sanctity as Tautology In the last analysis, one saint does not model her life on another saint’s life per se but, rather, on the factitious representation of that life in hagiography and iconography. Rose of Lima did not model her life on that of Catherine of Siena but on texts and images that idealized Catherine’s life within an emerging prototype of female mysticism. The hagiographic Catherine was a hybrid of biography and invention that was regarded as historical by those, including Rose, who internalized an unrealized precedent. Candidates for sainthood could rarely duplicate the feats of predecessors who were largely constructed (the paradigm of impossibility was Mary, both virgin and mother), but, when a community’s inclination was to view them favorably, they met or exceeded the hyperbolic ideal in compensatory folklore and hagiography. The rising saint’s life was thereby elevated to legendary heroism in turn, making new contributions to a composite model that was always both formative and in formation. Rose imitated a hagiographic prototype as though its protagonist were real, and this mimesis replayed in perpetually higher registers as the elaboration of her own life (in text, image, and oral tradition) reinforced the composite prototype for subsequent beatas who, in turn, took Rose (or Rose and Catherine) as their model. Like those who today ﬁnd role models in novels or movies (particularly in characters portrayed by idolized stars), beatas lived in a world where heroes migrated between the real and the imaginary. During exemplary crossovers between social reality and textual fantasies, the young Mariana of Quito “became” the protagonists of hagiographies through intensive identiﬁcation with the texts that were read to her. Teresa of Avila also developed in a bookish world of fantasy where, in this case, hagiography intermingled with

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novels of chivalry to together condition her aspirations. When Teresa was later deprived the spiritual tracts upon which she thrived, God intervened with a solution: “I will give you a living book.”85 Mystics who bring hagiography to life by transformative identiﬁcation have this “living book” as their trope. A book is enacted, a life is lived by the book. “Let me so read thy life, that I / Unto all life of mine may die,” as Richard Crashaw put it.86 The aspiring saint disappears into the hagiography that she brings to life, and, in turn, her textualized life becomes a “living book” viviﬁed by others. She forfeits her subjectivity in one direction to the text that she imitates and in the other to the text that she becomes. She is an active author in this gradual dissipation of subjectivity, writing herself out of the script of her life in order to live it as it was and will be written. When her life and hagiography are checked against the texts that structured them, the faithful see a prophesy fulﬁlled. On November 30, 1573, the viceroy of Peru complained to the king about the circulation of books that were “profane and of bad example,” asking instead for books by Fray Luis de Granada, which were in demand among lay and church people alike. Granada’s books subsequently penetrated the viceroyalty “even to the furthest reaches of the Andean world,” and passages were translated into Quechua for use in the missions.87 For Rose and innumerable beatas in Lima, Granada’s Book of Prayer and Meditation provided useful guidance for the contemplative prayer that was central to their devotion. Granada encouraged imaginative visualization of Christian themes—the last judgment, heaven and hell, episodes from the life of Christ—as well as meditation on “things that belong more to understanding than to imagination,” meaning nonvisualizable abstractions such as divine graces and mercy. He also prescribed an ascetic, penitential, contemptus mundi (contempt for the world) lifestyle to facilitate success in these endeavors. The spirit united with Christ through meditation and the body through mimetic suffering. Guilt played a prominent role. Christ’s cruciﬁxion is ongoing, but “he is not whipped now by his torturers, he is not crowned by soldiers, it is not the nails nor the thorns that now make him bleed.” Rather, it is sin that perpetuates the Savior’s agony on the cross, and the penitential beatas must assume responsibility: “I am your torturer, I am the cause of your suffering.”88 Rose of Lima’s religious ideology was formed by what she read in Granada, hagiography, and related sources; what she heard in sermons; what she learned during her spiritual direction by friars and Juan del Castillo; and what her religious culture—the paintings on the walls, the peer beatas, the ambience of miracle and mysticism—taught her to expect. This knowledge, processed by cognition in accord with her particular mental capacity and psychological disposition, was internalized and personalized to form a discourse that she and others regarded as her own. The cultural propositions that she assimilated were collective and traditional (“they are developed in the historical experience of social groups”) but “once a cultural proposition is acquired as a personal belief by social actors, its acquisition is a psychological event.”89 Individuals form the collective, the collective returns to re-form the individual, and the collective is

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re-formed as each individual represents it internally and rearticulates versions of its discourse. Through imitation of hagiographic models, guidance by spiritual handbooks, and assimilation of the religious world around her, Rose engaged the gear of her culture with that of her cognition to produce meanings that were at once social and intensely individual. When Rose related her ideas and experiences to her confessors or to Castillo, what she said corresponded precisely with aspects of the Catholic culture that she shared with—and largely acquired through—these same interlocutors and their libraries. The same factors that preceded and conditioned Rose’s mysticism returned afterward as the criteria for evaluation of its authenticity. Christ appeared to Rose as he was represented in her culture, Rose described the vision to Castillo accordingly, and Castillo evaluated Rose’s account and ruled authenticity because “the said ﬁgures [visions of Christ] conform to Holy Scripture.”90 The vision and its source correspond as exactly as a print and the plate from which it was pressed. This unperceived conﬂation of cause and effect made every new tautology an epiphany. Rose assimilated tradition, processed it in the crucible of penitential mysticism, ﬁltered it through her individual constitution, and reexpressed it in new words and experiences that were at once all her own and all her culture’s. When during formal interrogation Castillo asked Rose if she had read any spiritual books that guided her quest toward mystical union, Rose, despite having read works by Granada and others, responded that “no book had taught her anything that she knew.” In the text that accompanied her mystical graphics she similarly stated (without being asked) that “I have neither seen nor read them in any book.”91 Rose’s graphics, their text, and their structure in escalating ascent toward mystical union are nevertheless typical of Spanish mysticism and, more generally, of nuptial mysticism throughout medieval Europe. One of the images is captioned with a direct quote from Granada, others have captions from the Song of Songs or allusions to Spanish mysticism, and some— the bride’s heart with a Christ child inside it, for example—are remarkably similar to antecedents in medieval German mysticism.92 Either Rose was intentionally dishonest in her disclaimers, which seems unlikely, or else she articulated a discourse that was so essentially intertextual, so permeated with internalized and assimilated inﬂuences, that it was experienced and expressed as her own. In the end, the graphics and their text were created by what Rose called “the powerful hand of the Lord,” which is to say the greater force of an introjected religious culture that expressed Rose as she expressed herself. The one writing hand that appears in her graphics is not God’s but Rose’s own, however, and it dips a pen into her heart as though into an inkwell: “Heart full of divine love writes outside of itself.”93 Rose, “outside of herself ” but always within her tradition, rewrote in blood and divine love the alien story that became her own. A similar intertextual conﬂation is evident in the songs of divine love (coplas) that are attributed to Rose. The most celebrated, which plays metaphorically with her paternal and maternal last names (Flores and Oliva), reads: Ay, Jesu´s de mi alma, / Que bien pareces / Entre ﬂores y rosas / Y olivas verdes (Oh,

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Jesus of my soul / How good you look / Between ﬂowers and roses / And green olives). This text bears a remarkable similarity to a passage from Lope de Vega: “¡Rio de Sevilla, cuan bien pareces, con galeras blancas y ramos verdes! (River of Seville / how good you look, with white ships and green branches).94 Another of Rose’s quatrains—Las doce son dadas / mi Jesu´s no viene / ¿Quien sera´ la dichosa / que lo detiene? (The clock has struck twelve / my Jesus doesn’t come / Who is the lucky one / who detains Him?)—seems to be derived from profanelove verses in Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499): La media noche es pasada, y no viene, sabedme si hay otra amada, que lo detiene (Midnight has passed, and he doesn’t come, I wonder if there is another lover, who detains him).95 The contemplative prayer advocated by Granada and others privileged a kind of imaginative visualization that made the barriers between inner and outer experience more permeable. One held a religious image in one’s mind until, in effect, it came to life as an autonomous reduplication of its referent in the world. The visualization of Christian imagery was also advocated by Ignacio Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises stressed the tactics of interior representation: “to see with the eyes of the imagination”; “to call to mind”; “to see and consider”; “to behold, observe and contemplate”; and, more comprehensively, to use “the ﬁve senses of the imagination.” Teresa of Avila similarly advised meditation on religious imagery as a basis for contemplative prayer. During her own spiritual exercises Teresa tried to make Christ “present inside me,” as she put it, and she used textual and artistic images, such as statues, to shape this living mental image.96 At times during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Inquisition discouraged or prohibited the unsupervised use of how-to manuals for do-ityourself spiritual pursuits. The simple instructions made mysticism seem too easy, and in the hands of impressionable enthusiasts, particularly those who had not taken vows, experiences of questionable authenticity proliferated. Ine´s de Velasco, a beata in Lima, “went into mystical trance reading a book in the said manner.” Ine´s de Ubitarte, a nun who also came before the Lima Inquisition, likewise used handbooks with signiﬁcant but contested success. The Inquisition felt that her mystical experiences were “fantasies that came into her mind from things that she had read in Fray Luis de Granada and in other books,” and they were “composed partly from her head and partly from what she read in spiritual books of Saint Teresa, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Lutgard, and others,” along with parts of what she heard in “sermons and discussions” and “what she was told by those who examined her spirit.”97 Ubitarte’s anthology of sources well illustrates the latitude for personalization of a collective discourse, ﬁrst through selection of the contributing inﬂuences and then through the editing of these contributions into an integrated, customized experience. The dialectic between the objective religious culture and its subjective visualization—“partly from her head and partly from what she read in spiritual books”—makes the vision an interpretation that adapts its sources to individual uses and sensibilities. When Rose of Lima paused on the name “Jesus” during her spiritual readings, the Word became ﬂesh and the book came to life: “The Child lover, in

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very tiny form, appeared to his virgin love on top of the book she was reading.”98 This miniature Jesus ran around the page and then dissolved back into the text from which he had emerged, but not before caressing his bride. Catherine of Siena also came to life during Rose’s readings, as did statues and paintings touched by Rose or her gaze. Rose hugged, kissed, and cried in passion before a statue of Catherine, “as though her very teacher were present there.” Often a painted or sculpted image responded in kind, manifesting by reﬂection the vitality that was projected onto it. One image of the Christ child seemed to “reach its arms outside of the painting,” as though trying to jump out and hug Rose as she prayed before it.99 In other cases the animism of icons was theatrically assisted. Veronica Giuliani undressed herself, removed a painting of the Virgin and Child from the wall, and offered her breast, saying, “My Jesus, leave those breasts. Come take milk here from me.” Christ obligingly attached himself to her breast, and, as Veronica reported, “at that moment the Babe seemed not painted, but in ﬂesh.”100 The objective view reveals Veronica in the lamentable posture of holding a painting to her dry, naked breast, but her vision recruits the collusion of the external world—precisely the artistic images that conditioned her visions— in the enactment of an internal reality. The contemplative visualization that was encouraged by Granada, Loyola, Teresa, and many others in the Spanish mystical tradition fostered a sequential process of internalization and reduplication that contributed to the intermingling of real and imaginary worlds. Visualization became vision, and vision projected the interior representations back onto the world from which they were derived. The standardization of religious imagery, particularly after the Council of Trent, thus had a normalizing effect not only on prints, paintings, and sculptures but also on their second-generation reproduction in visionary experience. Saints appeared in visions as they were represented artistically. An Italian Renaissance nun, Benedetta Carlini, observed that the Catherine of Siena who appeared to her in visions “was dressed just as one sees her in the paintings,” assorted otherworldly personages appeared to Catarina de San Juan “as they are usually represented in paintings,” and Rose appeared to a beata in Lima “in the form and dress that she was represented in the many paintings that there were in that city.”101 The tautological circularity went unrecognized when such consonance was the measure of a vision’s authenticity. The content of visions tended to be similar within a given religious community because the catalysts—textual or iconographic—were standardized and limited. The comparison of visions among peers and the narration of visions to confessors likewise had normalizing effects.102 Iconography structured visions in the same way that hagiography structured lives. The very private mystical experience became social when the mystic internalized cultural expectations and, like an artist conﬁned by orthodoxy, reproduced an authorized motif that satisﬁed the conditions of its creation. The mystic animated the static artistic image, revived the subject it represented, and gave that life back to the Church. Life followed art, and the art itself was “mystical realism.”103

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A curious variation on the theme was provided when Catalina de Jesu´s Herrera (1717–1795), a Dominican nun in Ecuador, was puzzled by the Rose of Lima who appeared to her in a vision. After the experience, Catalina wrote, “I went around looking at her Images in the Convent, and found some resemblance to her mouth only in one.” The Rose who appeared to Catalina was dissimilar to the images in the convent from which she was derived, but rather than doubting the authenticity of her vision (which she considered to be as real as anything else “in life”), Catalina questioned the accuracy of the paintings. She therefore reconsidered the paintings against Rose’s “true” appearance in the vision, discovered that only one painting was more or less accurate, and wished that she were a painter in order to get the job done right. “If I were a painter,” she wrote, “I would paint the Saint just as her Face was in life,” meaning in the vision.104 In this case it is not orthodox outsiders who judge the mystic’s vision to be false because it does not conform to standardized precedents in hagiography and iconography. Rather, the mystic herself returns to the unacknowledged source of her vision—the paintings—and judges them to be inaccurate because they cannot measure up to the indisputable truth of her vision. The replica returns to challenge the accuracy of the original on which it is based. The paintings as source of the vision are thus modiﬁed, “corrected,” by the very vision that cannot exist without them; the tautology contests its own truth. Religious culture is kept alive in these dynamic circulations between texts, images, beliefs, imitation, and mental representations attributed to otherworldly sources. The visions are dependent on the culture, but the culture, too, is dependent on the visions that authenticate it, revitalize it, and, as in this case, reﬁne it.

Of Truth and Falsity The formidable task of evaluating mystical experience, which was the ultimate responsibility of the Inquisition in Lima, had been formally addressed much earlier, in 1415, when the theologian Jean Gerson developed investigative criteria for distinguishing authenticity from fraudulence. Gerson’s work circulated widely and inﬂuenced Jakob Sprenger, the German Inquisitor responsible for the notorious Malleus maleﬁcarum, which was ﬁrst published in 1493. In Spain, Gerson’s inﬂuence is discernible in such texts as Sa´nchez de Vercial’s Book of Examples, written circa 1420, which counseled “not to believe in visions,” particularly those of women. Gerson’s criteria for sorting truth and falsity more decisively inﬂuenced the seventeenth-century Spanish “Interrogatory for the Examination of Revelations, Visions, and Dreams,” which the Inquisition distributed to its judges.105 The supernatural feats of mysticism evidenced “either a lot of God or a lot of the Devil,” and such investigative and interpretive reinforcements guided theologians as they scrutinized beatas and reached their verdicts.106 Hands-on examinations by medical consultants were sometimes made, and detective work sought to reveal heretical nuances, sur-

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reptitious eating, nail holes masquerading as stigmata, deceptive evasion of conjugal and domestic responsibilities, and the intent to proﬁt from otherworldly spectacles. Judgments were subjective insofar as they were made on the basis of the knowledge at hand (scientiﬁc, theological, evidentiary), the particular inclinations and dispositions of those who judged, and the political circumstances under which one was tried. Joan of Arc, to cite a highly politicized case, was condemned and executed as a heretic in 1431 and canonized ﬁve centuries later, in 1920. In sixteenth-century Spain, while Teresa of Avila was reviving the primitive Carmelite rule to the displeasure of many conservative clergymen, some “false visionaries” were condemned by the Inquisition and their autosda-fe´ had national repercussions. At the height of the ensuing controversy Teresa herself was detained in the convent of Toledo and came dangerously close to being charged by the Inquisition. The Dominican Alonso de la Fuente felt that Teresa’s writings had much in common with “the ecstatic heretics, alumbrados and dejados.” In Teresa’s writings, he maintained, “there is nothing more than lies or inventions or error or heresy or sect or demonic fantasy,” and through them “the heretics spread their sect without anyone realizing it.”107 Another of his observations is reminiscent of the complicated relations that also existed between Rose of Lima and her Dominican confessors: “When she says that in twenty years she found no one to understand her, it makes me strongly suspect that her spirit was strange and different from the spirit of God.”108 Interpretations later ﬂopped in Teresa’s favor, however, and she was canonized, in 1622, only thirty-ﬁve years after she had been examined by the Inquisition and only seventeen years after theologians recommended that all of her writings be burned. In 1970 Pope Paul VI designated Teresa a Doctor of the Church in formal recognition of her theological contributions.109 The interpretive criteria were equally volatile in Lima. Beatas generally fell into four categories: (1) the beata was authentic and in genuine union with God; (2) the beata thought she was authentic but was deluded by her imagination or madness (often melancholy), the latter perhaps a consequence of severe asceticism; (3) the beata was under the inﬂuence of the devil, either unwittingly or because she had made a pact with him; and (4) the beata was a deceiver, exploiting a contrived saintliness for notoriety or proﬁt. These possibilities often intermingled—the deceiver could be diabolically inﬂuenced, for example—to produce such hybrid judgments as “sickness of devils” and “feigned madness.”110 A beata could also be guilty in more than one category and, because the evaluative criteria were volatile and sometimes arbitrary, could be genuine today but fraudulent tomorrow, and thus lauded and loathed accordingly. Two beatas who behaved similarly could confront quite different destinies as the evidence was processed with wide interpretive leeway. “Because their conduct was so remarkably similar, the historian can only speculate as to what would have happened to the reputations of certain of the women mystics who received ofﬁcial biographies if they had been subjected to the kinds of interrogation that those accused of false sanctity had to undergo.”111 The methods

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and the intent of these contrasting inquiries—those by the Inquisition and those for canonization—were quite different, and in both cases the anticipated verdict often shaped the evidence. Rose of Lima’s rosy, healthy-looking face was explained in testimony and hagiography as miraculous, as defying and hiding the consequences of severe mortiﬁcation and fasting, even though onlookers had publicly ridiculed Rose by suggesting that her face betrayed surreptitious eating. When Rose’s friend, the beata Luisa Melgarejo, was tried by the Inquisition, however, the same sign—a healthy face with “good color”— was used as incriminating evidence to prove the laxity of Melgarejo’s fasts and asceticism.112 Regardless of the ultimate truth or falsity of these respective claims, the same ambiguous sign served as evidence to support contrary claims and verdicts. An argument popular among Latin American historians today maintains that Rose of Lima was the genuine article, inherently superior to her peers, and that the contemporaneous and subsequent Lima beatas were “the false imitation of the model.” The scholar most vehement on this point reiterated that the lesser beatas “were deceivers” who “in a crude and fraudulent manner tried to imitate St. Rose,” while Rose herself “did not fake her sanctity.”113 Rather than considering a level ﬁeld, in which—as Fernando Iwasaki Cauti rightly observed—Rose and many other Lima beatas were engaged in more or less the same practices, this argument begs the question by projecting Rose of Lima’s canonized identity into events that preceded it. It replaces Rose as a beata with a hagiographic construct built a posteriori, measures the other beatas against that idealized image, and then discovers genuineness surrounded by fraudulence. This argument also fails to recognize that the categorical truth and falsity that it upholds were deeply affected, if not determined, by the different standards applied by Inquisition and canonization-process hearings as they collected and evaluated evidence in anticipation of their foreseeable verdicts. It rests on the conviction that the Congregation of Rites and the Inquisition made their respective correct choices, even with their demonstrably defective and politically conditioned methods for distinguishing truth from falsity, and that canonization, or the lack of it, is the ultimate and indisputable criterion for validation or invalidation of authenticity. As the precarious career of Teresa of Avila well illustrates, the Church’s position was in constant, politically conditioned ﬂux in which mysticism was a contingency. Many other nuns and beatas who were ultimately canonized were likewise ﬁrst suspected of or charged with false sanctity, Rose of Lima among them. The “truth” of sanctity is simultaneously sabotaged from within by the many saints—such as the inﬂuential Catherine of Alexandria—who never actually existed, and the many more, perhaps most, who never existed as represented in hagiography. The Virgin Mary is the most compelling example. There is no evidence of Mary’s virginity in the four gospels—“the evangelists, far from asserting it, raise a number of doubts”—nor is there any biblical basis for the bull that established Mary’s Immaculate Conception.114 Thus the inversion of the relation between true model and false imitators is equally as viable: the “false” models provided by hagiography—false because these saints

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never existed at all or as represented—can result in the “true” saints who imitate these factitious identities. The accompanying chronological argument—that Rose, the real thing, came ﬁrst, and that inauthentic imitators followed—also seems untenable. Tight temporal and regional framing posits Rose as the origin and the imitating beatas as the aftermath, but before Rose of Lima served as a model for subsequent generations there were and continued to be, as these scholars are well aware, many other models for beata piety. The outstanding example, Catherine of Siena, herself imitated her saintly predecessors, and some of Catherine’s imitators—such as Rose, Veronica Giuliani, and Mariana of Quito—were regarded as true beatas and, in turn, were canonized.115 Teresa of Avila, a “true” saint if ever there was one, was inﬂuenced by the religious ﬁgures around and preceding her, including the noteworthy Gertrude of Helfta. Getrude’s writings were available to Spanish religious intellectuals, among them Domingo Ba´n ˜ ez and others of Teresa’s confessors, in 1558, and broader diffusion was accelerated with Spanish translation of Gertrude’s works by 1598. “The evidence suggests that Teresa was certainly aware of at least some of Gertrude’s visions,” and Teresa’s transverberation “is remarkably similar to Gertrude’s account of Christ piercing her heart with a triple-pointed arrow.” Gertrude’s precedence was then subsequently enhanced by Teresa’s hagiographers, precisely because they recognized the value of congruence with a saintly model in establishing the “truth” of their candidates. Teresa’s ﬁrst hagiographer, Francisco de Ribera, “was at pains to compare Teresa’s visions and revelations” to those of Gertrude, among other saints, in order to establish precedents for Teresa’s piety and thereby “make her appear less like a dangerous innovator.”116 Imitation was the norm of nun and beata religiosity, was encouraged by confessors, was accentuated in hagiography, and was by no means an index of fraudulence. The models were multiple, and many of those who imitated previous saints and beatas were later regarded as “true” saints by the Church and became, in turn, models for subsequent generations. “Be imitators of me as I am of Christ,” said Paul to the Corinthians.117 The negative perception that history recorded for the beatas who imitated Rose owes less to a decline in genuineness than to a change in the policy toward and tolerance of beatas. The Rose who lived in Lima between 1586 and 1617 probably more resembled her peers of those times, many of them brought before the Inquisition, than she did the canonized construct produced in her name by hagiography and iconography. During her lifetime Rose was accused of all the possible negative interpretations—fake, madwoman, and diabolically deceived—even by those with whom she was most intimate. In the company of family and friends her mother referred to her, in Hansen’s account, as “a great hypocrite, deceiver, and false saint, alien to and empty of any true and solid virtue.” There were six autos-da-fe´ in Lima during Rose’s lifetime, and this ominous oversight of heresy and fringe Catholicism made a beata’s notoriety a cause for concern. Rose’s family began to fear her arrest “as a suspect of false hypocrisy and as liar and deceiver of the world, and because she faked sanctity sacrilegiously.” Mele´ndez likewise underscored the fear that “she

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would be arrested by the Inquisition as an Alumbrada” and would “disgrace her Parents and relatives” during the public punishment of an auto-da-fe´.118 An Inquisition caliﬁcador who testiﬁed in the apostolic process gave the feared arrest a more diabolical spin, testifying that “they suspected it might be some evil spirit” behind the experiences Rose believed to be divine.119 A similar concern on the part of Rose’s confessors, of other Dominicans in Lima, and of Rose’s patron, Gonzalo de la Maza, resulted in the formation of a commission to investigate the authenticity, propriety, and orthodoxy of Rose’s mysticism. In 1614, three years before her death, Rose was wisely advised to request a hearing before it was demanded of her, and she agreed “because she felt obliged in order to live more safely.” Leading the examination were Rose’s principal confessor at the time, Juan de Lorenzana, who was a university professor of theology, Prior and Vicar General of the Dominicans and, most importantly in the present context, ﬁrst caliﬁcador of the Inquisition; and the mentioned Juan del Castillo, an inﬂuential medical doctor who was studied in theology and mystically inclined. Also present were some of Rose’s Dominican and Jesuit confessors, as well as Marı´a de Uza´tegui and Rose’s mother (although the mother absented herself when Rose discussed her mortiﬁcations).120 During the course of the examination Castillo, who led the questioning, drew on his medical and theological knowledge to determine whether Rose’s mystical experiences might be diabolical or delusional, the latter perhaps a consequence of her debilitation through fasting, sleep deprivation, and mortiﬁcation. The inquiry would also determine whether Rose, like many of the beatas with whom she was associated, was guilty of errors pertaining to the Alumbrado heresy. Rose was reluctant to answer questions on two occasions during the inquiry, but her response was demanded with the reminder that the examination was “for her beneﬁt and safety” and that “it was not the time nor occasion to hide anything.”121 With that prompting, Rose “responded with much embarrassment, and humility, and with her face as red as a beet,” by relating, after asking permission, an experience that prior “she never dared to say.” After the purifying “hell” or “purgatory” of her dark night of the soul, Rose conﬁded, she felt “impeccable,” as though she had been cleansed of sin and could never sin again.122 Rose’s reluctance was prudent because impeccability was precisely one of the heretical propositions that the Inquisition punished when it moved against the Alumbrados in Spain beginning in 1525.123 Claims to impeccability were regarded severely because they evaded and—ultimately—rendered obsolete the sacrament of confession and the sacerdotal power of absolution.124 Rose, again reminiscent of the Alumbrados, trespassed in this area on a separate occasion by confessing her sins daily to St. Dominic. When one of her this-worldly confessors asked how she did this, Rose responded, “In the same way that I confess with you, Father, saying my sins and asking that they be forgiven.” Similarly suggestive of Alumbrado heresy was Rose’s reclusive withdrawal, during which she was spiritually nourished by contemplative prayer without need or mediation of the sacramental Church. At ﬁrst, “she came to have such

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love for this solitude, that if it were not for the necessary obligation of hearing Mass, she would never leave her retreat.”125 Later, once her hermitage was constructed in the garden of her parents’ home, Rose stopped frequenting mass and “rarely went to church on weekdays.” Her explanation—that “being absent from the church in body, she was present in spirit”—missed the point, for it was precisely this private, priestless spirituality that was egregious.126 Were all Catholics to opt for similarly unmediated worship, the sacraments would be useless, the dogma ignored, the priests obsolete, and the churches empty. Other events in Rose’s life also tested the limits of orthodoxy, notably the staging of her “marriage” to Christ on Easter Sunday, 1617, in the Dominican church. Lorenzana, her primary confessor, originally agreed to stand in for the absent Bridegroom, but at the last hour Lorenzana pardoned himself from the risque´ affair. In his place Rose recruited the reluctant participation of another of her confessors, Alonso Vela´squez, who in a surreptitious ceremony put the wedding ring on her ﬁnger “with such caution, disguise, and secrecy” that even those sitting nearby were unaware of what had occurred. Had Lorenzana chosen to object rather than to dismiss himself, or had other friars made vocal objections, this incident could well have combined with others to repercuss negatively on Rose’s relations with the Inquisition. Indeed, in the broad view, any tribunal looking for cause to justify proceedings against Rose of Lima could have found substantial evidence at a glance in her visionary experiences and her daily practices as a beata. An anti-Alumbrado edict that was sent to Lima in 1575 cast the net wide, requiring the faithful to denounce anyone—Rose certainly among them—who claimed to “see divine essence in this life” after “they reach a certain point of perfection.” The second question that Rose evaded during the examination concerned precisely her visions of Christ.127 There were, of course, vast differences between Rose and the Alumbrados, notably her tacit subordination to clerical authority, but in many other cases before the Inquisition in Lima sacerdotal direction was an insufﬁcient defense.128 Rose’s examination by the commission underscored how her destiny was contingent on the interpretive biases of those who judged her. A different tribunal, examining the same evidence, could readily have returned the opposite verdict. While under the protection of the powerful Gonzalo de la Maza and his close friends—Castillo and Lorenzana among them—Rose was most favorably perceived. The intent of the 1614 examination, unlike the interrogations imposed by the Inquisition on other beatas, was to clear Rose’s name rather than to establish her guilt. This encounter with a quasi-inquisitorial tribunal thus had fortuitous results for Rose, because Castillo and Lorenzana were not only satisﬁed with her orthodoxy but also enthused by her mysticism and impressed by her theological knowledge. Like the teachers in the temple astonished by the youthful Christ’s wisdom, Castillo and Lorenzana left the inquiry in awe and with no doubt of their mystic’s authenticity.129 Their decidedly positive endorsement solidiﬁed Rose’s position among Lima’s civil and ecclesiastical elite—the prevailing opinion was “that Rose acted governed by the spirit of God”—and their subsequent promotion of her saintly image was

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the turning point in her journey toward the altars.130 Cleared now of suspicion, supported by powerful admirers, protected by de la Maza, and fueled in her mysticism by Castillo and Jesuit confessors, Rose was poised for grandeur, rising above her peers, eligible for canonization. The same excessive practices that once were suspect were now evidence of her special calling. The miracles proliferated. And the political agenda of sifting sanctity from heresy shifted now to facilitating her mystical growth and tailoring her image along the contours of approved models of sanctity. Rose’s fate may have been quite different had she lived into the early 1620s—some ﬁve years longer—when the Inquisition’s oppression of beatas in Lima became intense. In 1622 the Inquisition conﬁscated the dead Rose’s papers, presumed to include her spiritual writings, when it opened a case against her friend Luisa Melgarejo. Some scholars maintain that religious authorities in Lima subsequently refused to release Rose’s manuscripts to Rome in order to avoid jeopardizing her cause for beatiﬁcation. That refusal, if it is certain, itself indexes competing interpretations of orthodoxy. The very suggestion that Rose’s writings might damage rather than strengthen her cause for canonization indicates the possibly unorthodox content of the manuscripts, the defense of Rose’s perceived sanctity by local religious authorities, and the discrepancy between what is acceptable to confessors actively engaged with a mystic as opposed to what is acceptable when disinterested orthodoxy is imposed from afar by ecclesiastic bureaucracy.131 In November 1623, ﬁfty-nine notebooks in which Melgarejo recorded her own visions and ecstasies were conﬁscated by Inquisition ofﬁcials, who discovered that the notebooks had been revised by Melgarejo’s Jesuit confessors. The Inquisition censured the two responsible priests because “with their additions and corrections they make Catholic doctrine” of Melgarejo’s writings, but “without considering that by revising, deleting, and adding” to the supposed revelations they offered only their own inventions, if not “a fraud involving them all.” Here the protective sanitizing of a beata’s texts is explicit, with improprieties hidden from higher authorities by complicit lower authorities. The evaluation of orthodoxy becomes more rigorous as the texts ascend through the hierarchy toward—in this case—hostile readers, and the beata’s defenders anticipate the objections and intervene. Melgarejo’s Jesuit confessors were consequently investigated, along with de la Maza and his wife, Marı´a de Uza´tegui, in a related scandal concerning the burning of some of Melgarejo’s notebooks.132 Melgarejo was of Lima’s noble class and was married in 1615 to Juan de Soto, rector of the University of San Marcos.133 She was spiritually directed by Jesuits who were sufﬁciently convinced of her authenticity to compare her to Teresa of Avila and to ask her to peer into heaven to see which of their recently deceased priests enjoyed eternal glory.134 Melgarejo’s scholarly husband likewise took her mystical experiences seriously and transcribed phrases that she exclaimed during ecstasies. At Rose of Lima’s deathbed Melgarejo raved in ecstasy for hours to narrate her vision of Rose’s entry into heaven, and the transcriptions of this discourse—again regarded as authentic—were incorpo-

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rated into de la Maza’s 1617 testimony and were subsequently referenced in the ﬁrst and later hagiographies of Rose of Lima. Pedro de Loayza, author of that ﬁrst hagiography in 1619, regarded Melgarejo as a “person of great sanctity” and as a “Servant of God” whose “sanctity is very notorious.”135 Melgarejo’s high regard and good fortune suffered a radical change in the repressive environment of the early 1620s. A priest named Juan Mun ˜ oz reproached his fellow Jesuits Diego Martı´nez (who was also one of Rose’s confessors), Francisco de Contreras, and Diego de Torres for encouraging the otherworldly fantasies of beatas, and he denounced Melgarejo to the Inquisition. Melgarejo was tried in 1623. Her social status and the political pressure exerted by prominent Limen ˜ os—some of the same people who protected Rose of Lima—resulted in a suspended sentence. Melgarejo lowered her proﬁle but maintained contact with Jesuits who continued to regard her sanctity as authentic. Her funeral in 1651 was attended by the highest civil and religious authorities, and from heaven she appeared to the prominent Jesuit Antonio Ruiz de Montoya “as a beautiful crystal, very diaphanous and transparent.” Melgarejo thus traveled the distance from high saintly regard to a precipitous fall followed by a partial recovery. She lived beyond the moment when her saintly image may have been ﬁxed for posterity, and the authenticity of her mysticism—contingent always upon who was assessing it—slid with her along this continuum.136 The fate of even the most exemplary beatas was always precarious. Their actions were inherently suspect because they were female and occurring outside of approved socioreligious institutions (convent, marriage), and their destinies were determined as much by conditioned perceptions and chance as by their speciﬁc deeds. Catherine of Siena’s confessor and hagiographer, Raymond of Capua, initially had grave doubts about Catherine’s authenticity. He knew that many women experienced “vain fantasies, and are more easily deceived by the devil,” and he racked his brains to determine if her experiences “were of God, or of the enemy, if they were true, or false.” Catherine’s fate hung in the balance of these deliberations. Once Raymond had been convinced that Catherine’s mysticism was authentic, however, his position shifted so radically that the hierarchical roles were reversed and he begged her for her own and for God’s forgiveness. Raymond and the other friars, who were “fathers” as priests, began referring to Catherine as “Mother” or “our mother and teacher,” despite Catherine’s request to be called “daughter.”137 Universal regard of Catherine’s authenticity solidiﬁed after her death, and a retroactive gloss neutralized any lingering doubt or dissent: “I and the others who lived with her understand what she said and did better today than when she was amongst us.”138 Not all beatas had this good fortune. Angela Carranza attracted a huge devotion in Lima, “and not only of the poor, but also of nobility and of people with authority and in high positions, such as viceroys, vicereines, the archbishop of Lima and many bishops of this kingdom,” all of whom “respected her like one of the greatest saints venerated by the Church.” History may have received Carranza (like Melgarejo) more favorably had she died in a timely

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manner, but, instead, the Inquisition found Carranza guilty of false sanctity in 1694 and public perception of her authenticity ﬂopped accordingly. After the reading of Carranza’s sentence a mob showered her with stones and would have lynched her had a military guard not intervened.139 Juan del Castillo, the theologian and medical doctor who examined Rose of Lima during her quasi-inquisitorial review, was also a victim of the ﬂuctuating criteria that came with reasserted orthodoxy in Lima. When he questioned Rose in 1614, Castillo was well connected and universally held in high esteem, and during the ensuing years he was regarded as the individual who most profoundly understood Rose’s mysticism. Though not a priest, Castillo was permitted to serve informally as Rose’s spiritual conﬁdant and adviser until her death in 1617. The Inquisition’s disinterest in pursuing Rose of Lima owed an inestimable debt to Castillo’s judgment after the 1614 examination, but Castillo himself, ten years later, was called before the Holy Ofﬁce and totally discredited as a theologian. The judgment against him was based in part on condemnation of tracts that Castillo had written in 1610, before his evaluation of Rose, and at a time when his opinion was highly esteemed. Thus the same mystical theology for which he was once celebrated, and by which he judged the authenticity of Rose’s sanctity, resulted in his demise when it was reconsidered by interpreters who were intolerant of mysticism. Castillo was also censured for the content of his visions (which included frequent visions of Rose of Lima) and for his involvement with some of the beatas, such as Marı´a de Santo Domingo and Ine´s de Velasco, who were found guilty by the Inquisition. The earlier tolerance of his outsider status also returned to haunt him, because, as the Inquisition saw it, “he is merely a layman and not a theologian” and his involvement in sacrosanct matters of clerical domain established a precedent that could be abused by other “idiotic laymen” like him. In his sentence on April 24, 1624, the Inquisitors cited “very great stupidities in theological and mystical rigor” and “many ridiculous revelations,” but in consideration of his age, his physical and psychological state (“the qualities and circumstances of a melancholic person”), and his misreading of theological and mystical works, Castillo was pardoned: “It seems to us that he has greater need of medicinal remedies to cure his nature and weakness of mind.”140 The religious medical doctor thus received a medical pardon from his religious judges. Three days after his death the Inquisition conﬁscated his manuscripts.

3 Miracle of the Rose

You are born among ﬂowers; you live with ﬂowers; you are nourished by ﬂowers; you are crowned in ﬂowers; ﬂowers celebrate you; you are transformed into ﬂowers; you triumph under arches of ﬂowers; and amidst such a multitude of ﬂowers you stand out as the one Rose. —From a sermon by Bartolome´ Garcı´a, Madrid, 1668

Deﬂowering The rose had multiple origins in Greek and Roman mythology, but it was always associated with the corresponding goddesses of love, Aphrodite (Greek) and Venus (Roman). Many versions relate that the rose was white until stained by the blood of Aphrodite or Venus when a thorn pierced her foot. The Greek bucolic poet Bion and others offered the variant account that the originally all-white rose was stained by the blood of Adonis (the incestuous child of Myrrha by her father, the king of Cyprus) when he was killed by a wild boar. When Aphrodite is included in the narrative, she hurries to the assistance of Adonis, steps on the mentioned thorn, and drips the blood that colored the rose. Another version offered imagery that is reminiscent of Rose of Lima’s rosy cheeks and the miracle that resulted in her name change. When Venus realized that Jupiter was watching her bathe, her cheeks were reddened in embarrassment and from them the newborn ﬂower “sprung with blushing tinctures dressed, / And wantoned o’er its parent’s breast.”1 Its origins among these goddesses of love made the rose a sym-

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bol of romance and sexual encounter. Roses adorned Greek celebrations of love, newlyweds slept on beds strewn with roses, pillows were ﬁlled with roses, bridal wreaths were made of roses, and courters hung rose wreaths on the doors of their beloved. Aphrodite herself, as Euripides has it, “ever on her hair wears a garland of sweet-smelling roses.” Aphrodite’s rose also became an attribute of her son, Eros, and of her companions, the sexy three Graces.2 The rose’s later association with the Roman cult of Venus was emphatic, and the bower of Venus became “the archetype of the paradisiacal love garden.”3 Lovers wore and exchanged garlands of roses, for a time the rose was the compulsory badge worn by prostitutes, and roses were placed on graves and on the foreheads of the dead—“reddening with the rose, their paradise”—as signs of enduring love.4 In the succinct summation of an anonymous Latin poet: “The rose is the ﬂower of Venus.” Titian’s The Venus of Urbino (1538) depicts the naked Venus with one hand suggestively resting on, almost penetrating, her genitals, while the other hand holds red ﬂowers, one of which has fallen.5 The association of the rose and the beloved was sometimes so strong that the two fused into one and the same object. In the medieval Romance of the Rose, the metaphorical distance collapsed between the loved woman and the rose representing her. The Lover in the Romance fell in love with a rose after Cupid pierced his heart with arrows, and Venus helped him gain access to the ﬂower that had maddened him with passion. The sexuality was barely veiled when the Lover ﬁnally made contact: “I scattered a little seed on the bud when I shook it, when I touched it within in order to pore over the petals.” And again: “I plucked, with great delight, the ﬂower from the leaves of the rosebush, and thus I have my red rose.”6 A digression in the text retold the Pygmalion tale to set the stage for this personiﬁed animation of the ﬂower as love object, and the graphics that illustrated some medieval editions of the Romance returned the trope to its literal origins by depicting the loved Rose not as a ﬂower but as a woman. In one image this rose-woman is in bed with the Lover on top of her; another print offers a dual image that “shows both the literal and symbolic action of plucking the rose,” one in the garden and the other in the bed.7 Early Christianity disparaged and devalued the rose because of its associations with pagan sensuality, but the inability to suppress rose symbolism resulted in the Church’s gradual adaptation of the rose to new tropes that were congruent with the emerging faith. Dante later provided the paradigm of this transformation of human to divine love, maximizing Christianity’s sacred recuperation of the ﬂower by giving heaven itself the form of a rose. When at the conclusion of the Divine Comedy the Pilgrim ﬁrst gazed at the heaven beyond, he realized that what appeared to be ﬂowers were the souls of the blessed, seated in “ranks of petals” that formed the huge Celestial Rose: So now, appearing to me in the form of a white rose was Heaven’s sacred host, those whom with His own blood Christ made His bride.8 Angels ﬂy back and forth, like bees, transporting God’s love to these saintly souls who are ﬂowers. Back on earth, “rose windows” ﬁgured prominently

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above the front entrances of Gothic cathedrals so that the light of God would illuminate the congregations.9 Once the sign of Venus and earthly love, the rose eventually came to represent virginity, spiritual love, and, above all, the Virgin Mary, who was a “rose without thorns” because she was free of sin. In the earliest Greek litanies Mary was given the enduring title “mystical rose,” and ﬂoral references abound in the medieval Latin hymns and sequences that celebrate Mary as a “noble rose,” “fragrant rose,” “chaste rose,” “rose of heaven,” “rose of love,” and “neverwilting rose.”10 Mary is the virginal ﬂower and, in the broadened view, the rose garden that bore Christ. Dante referred to her as the “Rose in which the Word of God took on the ﬂesh.” In a medieval English carol to the Virgin, “There is no rose of swych vertu / As is the rose that bare Jhesu.”11 The Virgin and roses were also associated through the innumerable legends and hagiographic episodes that linked them, notably the miraculous transformation of roses into the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the tilma of Juan Diego in colonial Mexico. Elsewhere, the late-fourteenth-century Virgin of the Rose Garden by Stefano da Verona and, in Lima, Bernardo Bitti’s mannerist Virgin of the Rose exemplify the allegorical charge given to roses and their petals. The Golden Legend explained that during the Assumption the Virgin “was surrounded by red roses,” El Greco’s Assumption features roses and lilies falling into the grave as the Virgin ascends, and a seventeenth-century painting from Quito includes roses and other ﬂowers scattered on the ﬂoor as the Virgin receives the annunciation.12 According to Bernabe´ Cobo, the ﬁrst rose that was grown in Peru was ceremoniously delivered to a statue of the Virgin by the archbishop.13 The rose garland that was once the emblem of lovers was also adapted by Christianity to become the crown of virginity. The brides and grooms of early Christian marriage ceremonies were crowned with ﬂowers “as a symbol of victory” for having made it to the marriage bed “unconquered by pleasure.” Many saints, such as St. Cecilia, Rose of Viterbo, and Rose of Lima herself, have this crown of roses among their virginal attributes. Women less victorious in chastity were denied the honor. Tertullian described Eve as “being more conveniently encircled with leaves about the middle than with ﬂowers about the temple.”14 The ﬁgurative equation of virginity and the crown of roses was sometimes extended to represent individual virgins as roses and their collective as a garland that crowned Christ or the Church. In a dream or, as Hansen described it, a vision, roses once appeared scattered on the ﬂoor around Rose of Lima. Christ directed her to gather them for him but then accepted only one, his “chosen rose,” saying “this rose is you.” Rose wove the others into a garland with which she crowned her infant lover. On another occasion, Rose was collecting roses and suddenly, moved by “divine impulses,” began throwing them upward toward heaven. The ﬂowers miraculously remained suspended in midair, taking the form of crosses or, in Hansen’s clarifying elaboration, a single cross surrounded by a circle.15 Interpretations of these episodes explained that the roses on the ground or in the air represented the many disperse beatas in Lima—“very beautiful roses in the eyes of God”—who should be congregated

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in a Convent of St. Catherine of Siena.16 The scattered roses, once bound to one another and to the Church by vows, would be the crowning glory of their Bridegroom. Christ was crowned with thorns, not ﬂowers, and the rose thereby acquired other meanings through its capacity to wound. Genesis 3:18, which related sin to thorns, provided an Old Testament precedent for Christ’s crown of thorns as a symbol of atonement. Penitential mystics followed suit. Juan Mele´ndez observed that many beatas “try with saintly ambition” to crown themselves with thorns, but for Rose of Lima “it was very natural”: “Has there ever been a rose that is not crowned with thorns?” Rose wore a crown of thorns for most of her life in imitation of Catherine of Siena, who, according to one admirer, was in turn a ﬂower “crowned in thorns in imitation of her Bridegroom Jesus.” The thorns were an instrument of mortiﬁcation and at once a kind of inverted adornment—“the thorns enhance the beauty of Rose”—that made mystics more attractive to their cruciﬁed Bridegroom.17 When Rose died, “there was no crown of ﬂowers with which to adorn her head, as was the custom in the burial of maidens.” The attending Dominicans improvised by removing the garland from their statue of Catherine of Siena and adorning Rose with this and with another symbol of virginity, the palm frond. Once the deceased Rose had been “transplanted to Paradise,” visions revealed that she was surrounded by red and white roses and had been coronated with roses by the Virgin.18 In one of the earliest images of Rose, printed in Rome in 1668, she wears both a crown of roses and a crown of thorns, and in Melchor Caffa´’s celebrated sculpture she is crowned with thorns and a rose is growing beside her. A popular motif in later iconography captures the moment in which Rose is being coronated with a garland by the Christ child himself.19 The beauty of the rose coupled with the pain-inducing thorns provided an apt symbol for mystical love expressed through suffering. The whiteness of purity was stained with the blood of martyrdom in a passion for Christ that was bound to Christ’s Passion. Thorns both protect and wound the roses that they crown. For John Chrysostom, “the root, and the ﬂower, too, of virginity, is a cruciﬁed life.” A 1711 emblem book depicted the nuptials of Rose of Lima and her Bridegroom as two ﬂowers intertwined, “so that Rose might blossom,” and the following image represented the relation of pain and virginal beauty with a rose entangled in thorns.20 In the late Middle Ages, actual crowns of ﬂowers provided a model for ﬁgurative “crowns” of prayers—ten “Hail Marys” alternating with one “Our Father”—which evolved into the rosary devotion. The incantatory prayers of the rosary intermingled with medieval rose symbolism “until the beads themselves were seen to be chaplets to crown the Queen of Heaven.” Reciting the prayers of the rosary was “making for the Virgin chaplets of symbolic roses grown in ‘the garden of the heart.’”21 A medieval German altar panel depicts a Dominican praying as “Mary plucks each Ave Maria from his mouth in the form of a rose and weaves it into the chaplet that she holds in her hand.” The string of beads used in this devotion, which were once made of dried, ground

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rose petals, are by extension also called the “rosary,” and that same word was further used in reference to rosebushes, rose beds, and rose gardens.22 According to tradition, the Virgin Mary gave the rosary to St. Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, to assist his struggle against heresy in the early thirteenth century. The ﬁrst papal mention of the rosary was made by Alexander VI in 1495, and the devotion spread rapidly thereafter. Pope Pius V, a Dominican, later endorsed rosary devotion formally by papal bull. Rose of Lima always carried a rosary and prayed it frequently, even while in conversation with others, and her life was decisively inﬂuenced by the same Virgin of the Rosary who instructed Dominic to disseminate rosary devotion.23 The rose’s association with virginity also encompassed paradise-garden imagery from the Song of Songs, where “a garden locked is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.” The Song’s stress on the woman’s lush, well-irrigated garden as locked, enclosed, and sealed was readily adaptable to Christian concerns with chastity. The unbroken hymen preserved the inviolate perfection of virgins “sealed” to Christ.24 Ambrose borrowed tropes from the Song to counsel women on preservation of their hidden garden’s integrity: “Let no one disturb, no one mark, and keep intact the seal you have received by nature.”25 The enclosed garden with its sealed fountain also came to represent the Virgin Mary, whose hymen remained unbroken even by childbirth. When ﬂower imagery was stressed, the Virgin was the rose without thorns protected within the walls of an enclosed garden. Variations on the theme intermixed Genesis and Song of Songs motifs to describe the Virgin as “an earth virgin of thorns and thistles.” In a devotional poem with similar prelapsarian suggestions, Rose of Lima “was a garden closed / to the pain of sin,” and in a brief prepared by Congregation of Rites in 1663, “she conserved intact, like a lily among thorns, the virginity that she offered to God.”26 For many secular poets the rose was a symbol of mortality and the transience of earthly beauty—“And this same ﬂower that smells today / Tomorrow will be dying”—but as the trope of virginity and divine love the protected rose was everlasting.27 Centuries of inexhaustible exegeses linked the ﬂower tropes in the Song of Songs to various Catholic identities. Albertus Magnus summarized (forgetting only virginal saints in his tally): “And note that Christ is a rose, Mary is a rose, the Church is a rose, the faithful soul is a rose.”28 There was also notable migration between the rose and the lily as the type of ﬂower preferred in these attributions. In Songs of Songs 2:1–2, the rose of Sharon competes with the lily of the valley, and the man praises his beloved “as a lily among thorns” in comparison to other women. In 6:2 the male lover “has gone down to his garden” in order to gather lilies, in 7:2 the lower abdomen of his beloved is “encircled by lilies,” in 4:5 her breasts are fawns that feed among lilies, and in 5:13 the man’s “lips are lilies” dripping myrrh. Elsewhere Christ is “the Lover of lilies” when he takes his brides, but he himself was likewise the lily of the valley whose “white neck shone as a white lily gleams from the most radiant love.”29 The lily as “a symbol of purity, innocence, and immortality” was also closely associated with the Virgin Mary. When Gabriel announces the Virgin’s

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impregnation he often carries lilies representing purity, and during the feast of the Puriﬁcation some girls still lay lilies at the feet of a statue of the Virgin, saying, “Mary, I give you the lily of my heart.” In these instances the lily is the outstanding attribute of the Virgin, but in others, particularly in exegeses and translations of the Song of Songs, the lily was displaced by the rose “as the blossom most closely linked to both divine and human love in the popular imagination.”30 Rose of Lima iconography sometimes struck a compromise by representing Rose holding lilies but wearing a crown of roses.31 The rose’s associations with blood and death (including Adonis’s gory death and dripping blood) were also readily adaptable to a cruciﬁed God and the Christian martyrs who followed him. If the white rose, along with the lily, symbolized virginal purity, then the red rose gravitated toward wounds, blood, suffering, and martyrdom. In his hagiography of Rose of Lima, Jacinto de Parra argued that the pagan story of Venus was untrue because the red rose was stained with the blood of Christ. Albertus Magnus also wrote of “the rose made red by the blood of Christ in his passion” and described Christ as the rose of Jerico blossoming in the resurrection.32 A popular guide to rosary devotion similarly alluded to the rosary as crimson “because the Precious Blood of Our Lord has fallen upon it.” In medieval texts, “Christ is the rosebush,” “each drop of his precious blood is like one of its blossoms,” his blood is “rose colored,” and his wounds correspond to the rose’s petals.33 The rose represents Christ’s wounded sacred heart, the cup that collects his spilled blood, and the resurrection as a blood-red blossoming out of death.34 Pseudoetymology also helped to link Christ and the rose by erroneously translating “Nazareth,” the name of the town where Christ was born. “Nazareth means ‘ﬂower,’ ” Jacobus of Voragine explained in The Golden Legend; “hence Bernard says that the Flower willed to be born of a ﬂower, in ‘Flower,’ in the season of ﬂowers.” In a medieval description of the Holy Land, similarly, Nazareth means “a ‘ﬂower’ or a ‘shrub’ and is justly so-named, because therein grew the ﬂower with whose fragrance the whole world is ﬁlled.”35 Floral tropes provided inexhaustible imagery for the celebration of martyrdom. The wound in Christ’s side was a “rose of ineffable beauty,” and on the tree of the cross the dying Christ bowed his head “to show that he died like a ﬂower that bends toward the earth as it withers.” In Go´ngora’s poem “The Rose,” “many Herods lie in wait each hour / To murder thee as soon as thou art born”; Christine of Christ “saw her rosaries materialize as roses surrounding the baby Jesus as he grew into the suffering man”; and Renaissance paintings depicted the Virgin handing a goldﬁnch to the Christ child because this bird “was known to love the cover of thorn bushes, and thus preﬁgures the future sufferings of Christ.”36 Floral symbolism also extended into the sacramented, sacriﬁcial body of Christ, partially through association of the whiteness of the eucharist with that of the rose and the lily. The rose, stained with blood during the cruciﬁxion, was restored through resurrection to the whiteness of its purity, but the redness of wounds is nevertheless stressed. A Spanish beata saw a statue of the cruciﬁed Christ pull

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a rose from the wound in its side for each person receiving the eucharist. When Rose of Lima took communion, “this Eucharistic Blood reddened that ﬂower,” fusing her sacriﬁce with his.37 The association of rose imagery with Christ’s Passion extended more generally to Christian martyrs and, subsequently, to saints who suffered the symbolic martyrdom of mortiﬁcation. Catherine of Alexandria (like Rose) had cheeks that “used to blossom red and white,” and when she suffered martyrdom “many a ﬂowering rose appeared among the skin and ﬂesh, which the hooks had ripped from the bones.” The Dominican St. Peter Martyr was “a red rose among thorns,” St. Dominic was a “rose of patience,” Catarina de San Juan was referred to as a rose and compared to Rose of Lima and Rose of Viterbo, and Rose of Lima herself was “a pure and delicate ﬂower who surrounded herself with thorns to be more like the Cruciﬁed Christ.”38 When she felt that Christ had abandoned her, Rose suffered so greatly that she was “not only encircled by thorns, but transformed into them.” Roses blooming from blood drops are associated with St. Francis of Assisi, and in the hagiography of Mariana de Jesus, also known as the “Lily of Quito,” red became white as lilies blossomed from a hole in the ground where Mariana buried her blood that was spilled during mortiﬁcations.39 As evidenced in texts epitomized by the Romance of the Rose, the Christian readaptation of rose tropes added new meanings but never purged the rose of its enduring sexual connotations. Even within Christianity the sexual content was insistent, in part because the Greco-Roman rose as a symbol of carnal love and the Christian adaptation of rose symbolism to spiritual love was negotiated through appeal to erotic imagery from the Song of Songs. The genre of love garden illustrations popular in the ﬁfteenth century “frequently picture lovers in a rose-trellised enclosure” at the same time that devotional songs were depicting the Virgin Mary “reposing in a beautiful garden while the Divine Lover weaves a rose garland for his beloved.”40 The Song’s “enclosed garden” intermingled with the medieval Garden of Love, itself derived “from a classical prototype of the Paradise Garden as the abode of Venus.” The Virgin and, in turn, virgins generally, were brides of Christ who were given, represented by, and surrounded by roses as they encountered their Bridegroom.41 These rendezvous often occurred within the conﬁnes of an enclosed garden, lush in ﬂoral symbolism, that appealed simultaneously to courtly romance and the martyrdom of suffered love. In one of her wounded-love collages, Rose of Lima adapted words from the Song of Songs by replacing “sustain me with rains” with “sustain me with ﬂowers.”42 Floral and erotic imagery also consolidated on the body of Christ when it was represented as “a bed that he shares with the bride.” According to the twelfth-century Alan of Lille, “the bed of Christ means the ﬂesh he assumed. . . . Tastefully does the text say our bed is all ﬂowers, because Christ’s ﬂesh, which ﬁrst ﬂourished during his life, bloomed at his death and bloomed yet again at his resurrection.”43 Spanish mysticism was similarly indebted to the Song of Songs as it pursued erotic tropes toward a Bridegroom whose very body was

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a ﬂowering bed and “sweet garden of desire.” Catherine of Siena, for whom the cross was “the ﬂowery couch of her love,” likewise learned “to enjoy the embraces of her Heavenly Bridegroom in a ﬂowery bed” where she became with him one ﬂesh.44 Erotic aspects of ﬂowers were also activated in iconography when Christ’s genitals were juxtaposed with a rose or covered by roselike folds of cloth.45 The rose represents completion, perfection, purity, beauty, virginity, messianic hope, and other abstractions with religious connotations, but, particularly in the context of mystical marriage, it at once carries a counterdiscourse derived from the erotic origins of its symbolism. A ﬂower is the reproductive organ of a plant; reproduction depends on the ﬂower’s ability to attract birds and bees with its color, odor, sweetness, and form; and therefore “sexuality lies at the core of the ﬂower’s existence” and extends into its ﬁgurative uses. By appeal to its color and form the rose is associated with the female genitalia, and “deﬂowering,” which has as its ﬁrst meaning “to deprive of virginity,” further alludes to the ﬁgurative exchanges between ﬂoral imagery and human sexuality.46 Deﬂowering as sexual intercourse evokes the rose plucked from its enclosed garden, as well as the bloodstained rose that blossoms when the “fountain sealed” is penetrated. Imminent deﬂowering is symbolically foreshadowed at weddings when the bride, departing for the wedding night, throws her bouquet to the unmarried women (who still have their “ﬂower”), or, in some Catholic weddings, places it as a representation of her virginity, now ending, before a statue of the Virgin Mary. In one of Guaman Poma’s drawings a “deﬂowering” takes the form of a symbolic exchange between a man “who makes a vulgar gesture alluding to coitus” and a woman who responds by offering a (or her) rose.47 The same motif was represented with greater sophistication and less explicit eroticism in the many medieval Italian paintings in which the Christ child reaches for the rose or lily held by the Virgin, who is represented as both his mother and his bride. In Rose of Lima iconography, the bride of Christ is more accommodating and readily offers her rose to her Bridegroom. These paintings often freeze the moment of transfer as the hands of Rose and Christ make contact through the ﬂower.48 The imagery is particularly suggestive in Nicola´s de Correa’s 1695 Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima, in which the surrender of the rose is an explicit gesture of nuptial exchange. In Bartolome´ Esteban Murillo’s Santa Rosa de Lima, Rose offers a pink rose in response to words of betrothal from the naked Christ who sits on the cushion of her sewing basket.49 Rose was admired throughout her life for “the intact ﬂower of her virginal purity,” but metaphorically, as Hansen explained, she forfeited her rose and also her palm (a symbol of virginity) after her “wedding” to Christ in the chapel of the Virgin of the Rosary.50 Rose, the New World’s “ﬁrst ﬂower,” was harvested shortly after, deﬂowered from God’s garden on earth to consummate her nuptials on high.

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Paradise Regained By their fruits you shall know them. —Matthew 7:20 Anyone who has tended a garden knows that weeds aggressively take over unless one conquers them. The perimeters of the garden must be defended with a pitiless assault, an extirpation in the strict sense of term, a yanking out by the roots. But weeds are persistent, requiring a constant retaliatory counteroffensive to eliminate them without damaging the fragile ﬂowers that are nurtured, on the same turf, toward maximal proliferation and beauty. The great irony comes with the harvest. The garden’s carefully cultivated blossoms—half what they are and half what appreciative perception makes of them—face a demise like that of the weeds that were extirpated to protect them. There is an important distinction between pulling weeds and cutting ﬂowers, however, because a ﬂower is cut but not destroyed: a ﬂower is cut to be adored, to adorn, to be displayed like a mirror that reﬂects the greater beauty and perfection that was created of an uncultivated land overrun by weeds. The beauty with which the cut ﬂower dramatizes death neutralizes the horror of decomposition. The ﬂower falls to pieces gracefully, petal by petal, in a fragrant, insolent death, as though in triumph over mortality and putrefaction. Something of these poetics took root as hagiographers meditated on Rose of Lima’s name, place, and mission. The devil had the Americas enshrouded in “continuous darkness,” the natives behaved like “irrational animals,” the land produced only thorns, and God abhorred these “ugly and horrible abominations.” But then the Spaniards arrived, “virtue battled against vices,” and ﬁnally the New World as a “theater of horriﬁc thorns” was transformed into “a divine garden” cultivated with the grace of God. After a “sacred conquest” had subjected the Indians to the “sweet yoke of the cruciﬁed Christ,” the Dominicans began cultivating the New World and Rose of Lima, “the ﬁrst Flower of heroic Sanctity,” blossomed as the fruit of their toil.51 The savage indigenous Americas, once “covered with the brambles and thorns of idolatry,” were decidedly transformed when Rose blossomed “among the weeds of Paganism.” As the trope—rehashed in innumerable variations—was summarized in a 1632 letter from the Cabildo of Lima to Pope Urban VIII, “in other times the devil sowed the thorns of so many idolatries,” but now, at last, the New World produced this “Rose of such fragrance and aroma of rare virtues and exceptional examples.”52 The friars regarded themselves as laborers, like Christ, working in the garden of the Church, cultivating the good plants (virtues) and culling the weeds (vices). With proper cultivation, the weeds themselves could be metamorphosed into ﬂowers. Converted Indians martyred for their faith in colonial Mexico were “a harvest of roses” among “thorns and chaff,” meaning the nonconverted natives who killed them.53 In Bernardino de Sahagu´n’s 1583 Psalmodia christiana, a song in Nahuatl for the festival of Mary Magdalen offered

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a model for understanding the transformation from weed to ﬂower. The soul of the sinful Magdalen was likened to the wilds, and in this “very woody place, a grassy place, a very dangerous place, among the ﬁerce beasts, our lord hoed; thus he made a ﬂower garden there.” The repentant Magdalen, like the converted Indian, consequently enjoyed a change of her vegetal status: “In a sacred way she is an enclosed ﬂower garden, the manifestation of Penitence. There the roses lie growing—they are the symbol of love. There the various ﬂowers lie colored red, lie fragrant.” The results of such metamorphoses were mixed, however, and in the early seventeenth century a friar in Mexico characteristically lamented that “this weed of idolatry is so seeded in the hearts of the Indians that it began to sprout again.”54 Hagiography nevertheless made the edenic transformation of the New World seem absolute. After “the ﬂower of Religion” had been planted by Pizarro in Peru and had been irrigated with “an abundant river” of blood (“greater than the four rivers of Paradise”), Rose, the “ﬁrst fruit” of the transplanted Church, blossomed to redeem the Americas “from the shame of sterility.” Endless baroque variations celebrated the theme. Hansen opened his narrative with Lima, “the pleasant garden of the New World,” barely half a century old when “the most beautiful ﬂower of virtue sprouted there.”55 Juan Mele´ndez described Rose’s birth as a sprouting of fragrances in the ﬂoral garden of Lima, followed by her transplantation to the “the delicious Garden of the Church,” meaning the Dominican order, where she “ﬂowered” in the third order.56 Usually the garden is more broadly conceived—“if Peru is the Garden, this ﬂower [Rose] is its greatest adornment”—and the transplantation, when not from the Old World to the New, is postmortem. “After this fragrant Rose withered in the sterile ﬁelds of the earth, she was transplanted to Paradise.” For Rose, to die is “to be transplanted from earth to the Paradise of her Bridegroom.”57 When transplantation emphasized instead the extension of Christendom from Europe to the New World, it often registered an implication of American superiority. A 1668 sermon on Rose of Lima used a gardening tip to make the point: “Pliny advises that transplanting improves the Rose.” Like the ﬂower, and like the Church, “Rose was born in America, but of Spanish parents.”58 The transplantation of Old World sanctity into New World fertility yielded as its ﬁrst fruit the peerless Rose of Lima, demonstrating that the virginal earth of the Americas could outproduce the tired soil of Europe. The absence of saints that had given the impression of American “sterility” was, in fact, the extended gestation necessary to produce a saint of Rose of Lima’s grandeur: “The City of Kings does not content itself with less than the queen of ﬂowers.”59 Rose of Lima was not merely “the most fragrant Rose that the pleasant Gardens of the New World have produced,” but also “the Queen of all” and “the most fragrant rose of the Universe.”60 Those assertions were inﬂuenced in part by conceptions of the New World as a terrestrial paradise or New Jerusalem where the corrupted Church of the Old World would be superseded by a return to pure, primitive Christianity.61 Alluding to the common idea that the Garden of Eden was located in the New World, one panegyrist felt that it was no coincidence that “this Rose was born

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in the land where the ﬁrst sin was sowed.”62 The Fall occurred in the New World and would now be remedied there by Rose as a New Eve. The perfect ﬂower of sanctity reigned where once there were only thorns of sinfulness. The primordial curse on the earth, the one that brought the sterility of weeds and thorns, was lifted and God’s garden was restored to its edenic abundance. Rose “transformed that thorny and sterile wasteland into Paradise.” A 1668 sermon celebrating Rose’s beatiﬁcation quoted God on the point: “Attracted by the pleasures that the beauty of this Rose inspires in me, I will make the earth that produced such a ﬂower into a pleasant garden of virtues, a Paradise of perfections.”63 The idea of this perfect Rose in paradise was indebted to the long Christian tradition that associated roses with Eden. A ﬁfth-century poet described Adam and Eve rejoicing among roses, and, according to Ambrose, the rose did not have thorns until it sprouted them after the Fall in commemoration of Adam and Eve’s sin. The Golden Legend likewise reported that in Eden there “were no thorns or brambles, and lilies and roses did not wither.”64 These natural graces will be restored when the New Jerusalem descends at the end of time, and the millennial kingdom “will be like Paradise in its entirety and, because of having been irrigated with the blood of the saints, it will be decorated eternally with sweet-smelling ﬂowers, lilies, roses, and violets that will never fade.” Lima, like Eden and the New Jerusalem, produced its perfect, eternal Rose, free of the thorns of sin and irrigated with the blood of martyrdom. As worded in an eighteenth-century Mexican novena, Rose was “the Glory of the new Jerusalem.”65 Some panegyrists were at pains to represent Rose as the New Eve who restored Paradise. Christ is the New Adam, the “divine Farmer who has already irrigated the land in order to make a Paradise in the Church.” But because Christ needed a wife, “the dead woman [Eve] is revived by ﬂowering as Rose, as the Bride of the second, celestial Adam.” The sermon continued to explain that “just as God took a rib from the sleeping Adam in order to create Eve,” so Christ, during the “sweet sleep of death” on the cross, allowed his side to be pierced and “with the blood blossomed His Bride, blossomed Rose.” Rose is born from the wound, but she is also the wound itself: “Contemplate that bloody wound and there you will see Rose.” In related seventeenth-century iconography, Rose of Lima is the “bloody ﬂower born from the side of Christ cruciﬁed on the tree of life.”66 Christ was frequently represented as a gardener or “Divine Farmer” who cultivated roses, including Rose of Lima, and the paradise in which they ﬂourished. After the cruciﬁxion Christ was buried in a garden, and when Mary Magdalen encountered the risen Christ she mistook him for the gardener.67 “Indeed I am the gardener,” God told Catherine of Siena, “for all that exists comes from me.” He then turned the trope of his gardening skills and instruments toward mortiﬁcation: “When my servants remain united to me I prune them with great suffering so that they will bear more and better fruit.”68 Bernard of Clairvaux described Christ as a kind of gardener of the soul, doing within each Christian what Rose’s Church attempted in the New World: “He

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has begun to root up and pull down, to build and to plant, to water the dry places and illuminate the dark ones.” A book of emblems paired a languishing ﬂower of love revived by the rain with the fasting Rose of Lima as a ﬂower of Christ revived by “eucharistic food.” Rose was nurtured and nourished by the Divine Farmer who “fertilized her with the sacred rain of the blood from his chest.”69 Similar tropes were developed by Teresa of Avila, who saw the soul as a garden that each Catholic tended through a cooperative effort with God. The trope turned in on itself when friars conceived of the cloister garden as “a metaphor for the human soul.” The soul is a garden and the garden a soul, and when properly tended both provided in miniature the model for a New World paradise that produced Rose as its symbol of perfection.70 Rose’s own garden was the ﬁrst installment in a gradual transformation of the New World into paradise. In this edenic conﬁne, plants bowed down in prayer and mosquitoes sang to praise the Lord, starting and stopping at Rose’s command like a choir. The mosquitoes never bit Rose because in her garden she enjoyed “the privileges of paradise.” Rose reciprocally defended the mosquitoes from the swatting hands of visitors who failed to recognize the edenic harmony among all of God’s creatures. The vegetable and animal kingdoms joyfully obeyed Rose because she was a “perfect copy” of Adam and enclosed herself in a realm “reserved for the state of innocence, and resided in that solitude as though in Paradise.”71 In the garden that surrounded her hermitage, Rose, again a New Eve, restored her deﬁled realm to its prelapsarian harmony, giving the world God’s order not by force but by integrative unity with nature, by the grace of God, and, like Adam naming the animals, by assuming gently, humbly, her intrinsic superiority as a creature in the image of her maker. Rose’s corner of the New World was a “Garden reserved for the delights of God.”72 Providential collaboration in Rose’s recuperation of Eden was indexed by the mysteries of her name. In Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 24:14, the rosebush and the olive tree are linked, as they were in Rose’s ﬁrst name and maternal surname (Oliva) and in the verses that Rose created from them. A sermon on the occasion of Rose’s beatiﬁcation made a connection between the olive branch that the dove brought to Noah and the “Oliva” of Rose’s surname: “And what Olive branch is this, if not Rose of Saint Mary?” Rose’s mother was the fertile “trunk” that produced this branch “in the new olive grove of the American Church.”73 As expressed in verses from Lima in 1670: Illustrious City, contemplate This mysterious Olive Tree That produces a rose. A panegyric sermon elaborated: “Who cannot admire that without waiting for the fruit, which is preceded by a ﬂower, the ﬂower itself is a fruit, a ﬂorid fruit, or fruited ﬂower?” After having exhausted himself with these and subsequent musings, this baroque priest concluded that Rose was a “Beatiﬁed Fruit.”74 A book of emblems also linked Rose of Lima’s maternal surname to the dove that delivered an olive branch to Noah, but now to more speciﬁcally suggest,

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as the olive branch did to Noah, that God’s scourge had been lifted. Thanks to Rose as a new olive branch, peace would be restored to the fallen Indies.75 The Fall and the Redemption were also reconciled in horticultural imagery by depicting Christ’s cross as a tree of life that, in some instances, ﬂowers and gives fruit. For the always hungry Catherine of Siena, in “the garden of the Holy Church” “there is planted the tree on which hangs the fruit, Christ.”76 A late-thirteenth-century missal more typically sacramented the harvest by wrapping Christ’s legs around the cross as though they were a vine, while beneath the cross Adam rose from his grave to receive Christ’s blood in a chalice. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Christ said, and “those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.”77 Many of the common themes—Christ as the New Adam, sacriﬁcial blood and eucharistic wine, the resurrection of the dead, the restoration of paradise—are as intertwined as the metaphoric vine in the missal image. A ﬁfteenth-century painting with similar eucharistic echoes featured a stalk of wheat and a grapevine (bread and wine as body and blood) growing from the wounds in Christ’s feet and upward through the holes in his hands.78 Easter is celebrated on the ﬁrst Sunday following the full moon after the spring equinox in order to coincide the resurrection of Christ with the “rebirth” of nature at the end of winter. “He whose ﬂesh was sown in death, bursts into blossom again in the new resurrection,” like a plant or tree. “The seed is the oldest Christian metaphor for the resurrection of the body,” and agricultural and fertility tropes also extended from ancient Mediterranean mother-goddess devotions to the Virgin Mary, whose womb, like the virginal earth of Paradise and the enclosed garden never broken by the plowshare, took the divine seed and produced the everlasting, resurrecting life of Christ as “the ﬂower of the world.”79 Horticultural imagery was also used frequently to illustrate genealogical and social relations. In an eighteenth-century Cuzco-school painting, the monstrance is depicted as a genealogical tree in which the apostles, Christ, and the Virgin are represented. A genealogy is also suggested by the frontispiece of a Flos Sanctorum published in 1625, which connects Christ, cruciﬁed on a tree, with the saints sprouting among leaves from its many limbs, as though they grew from his living death. In another volume from the same series, a tree grows out of the side of God the Father (reminiscent of Adam’s rib and Christ’s wound), the Virgin and Christ child emerge from a nestlike structure at the top of its trunk, and saints sprout from the horizontal branches.80 The tree of Jesse in Isaiah 11:1 and the genealogy in Matthew 1:1–16 often combined in a genealogical tree to represent Mary as the new branch from Jesse’s tree stump and Christ as its ﬂower and fruit. In corresponding iconography, this tree grows from Jesse’s sleeping body, and its branches support Old Testament ﬁgures in the lineage from Jesse through the Virgin to Christ. Similar imagery was associated with Joseph’s staff, which in some versions bursts into ﬂower, and with Aaron’s rod, sometimes equated with “the body of the Lord,” which “placed in the aridness of death bursts forth into the ﬂower of resurrection.”81

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The genealogy ends where successive births culminate in Christ’s rebirth: the desert blossoms. In a mysterious ﬁfteenth-century painting, the Virgin and Christ child are inside a dry tree that resembles a crown of thorns. The tree and the background are dark and gloomy, but the Virgin and Christ are painted in vibrant reds and greens, as though their vitality were triumphantly born or reborn, like the New World, from the death and desolation that surrounds them.82

The Odor of Sanctity The phrase “odor of sanctity” hovers between its literal and ﬁgurative meanings. What appears originally to have been metaphoric—the “odor” being one’s air or reputation of saintliness—increasingly assumed quite literal usage to denote the sweet fragrance exuded by the corpses of holy people in lieu of the stench of putrefaction to which the rest of us are destined. This odor of sanctity was regarded as a sign that one’s holiness had been recognized on high, and as the ﬁrst postmortem miracle it catalyzed a quest for relics cut from the perfumed cadaver. The origins of both the phrase and the phenomena of the odor of sanctity are uncertain, but some scholars suggest that the fragrance of saintly corpses may have been partially derived from the incense, odoriferous herbs, and spices with and in which some socially important people were once buried.83 For the Greeks and Romans, a pleasant smell was regarded as an attribute of divinity, and these ideas obtained in early Christianity. “We are the aroma of Christ,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and the holy spirit’s presence was a “mystical fragrance.” Origen explained how properly prepared souls could “inhale the grace of the divine odour,” and mystics regarded Christ as the “sweetest to smell” and were “inebriated with the sweetness of his odor.”84 Ambrose similarly believed that the soul “savors inwardly the odor of His Divinity” and that divine presence is discernible when “the soul’s sense of smell” perceives God’s “sweet breath.”85 For Fray Luis de Granada, in a text read by Rose of Lima, God is a source of “inﬁnite aroma,” and when people pray, as when they touch fragrant plants, they come away from the experience “smelling like what they have touched.” According to Hansen, in pursuit of mystical marriage Rose herself was “carried by the aroma and fragrance of the Bridegroom.”86 Perhaps the earliest extant example of the “odor of sanctity” per se is found in a letter in which the Christians of Smyrna described the martyrdom of their bishop, St. Polycarp, in the year 155. When Polycarp was burned, they wrote, “we perceived such a fragrant smell, as if it were the wafted odour of frankincense or some other precious spice.” In an alternate version, a fragrance lifted from Polycarp’s body, “not as burning ﬂesh, but rather like bread being baked.”87 During the Middle Ages a sweet smell came to be expected of holy corpses, “and if the corpse of a servant of God did not emit ‘the odour of sanctity,’ the veneration might stop as quickly as it had begun.” That expecta-

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tion was registered and at once reinforced by the endless elaboration of the odor of sanctity in hagiography, where the trope tended to be literalized. In the twelfth century, the corpse of St. Isidore showed no signs of decay and emitted a “ravishing odour” when disinterred forty years after his death, and again four hundred and ﬁfty years later when the remains were exhumed for relocation.88 When what were believed to be Mary Magdalen’s remains were discovered in 1279, there was “a strong fragrance, as if a storehouse of sweet spices had been opened.” As The Golden Legend explained, “so powerful an odor of sweetness pervaded the church that for seven days all those who entered noticed it.”89 The corpse of a fourteenth-century Italian nun, “despite its being plentifully covered in ﬂesh and fat, and though it had not been embalmed,” similarly “exhaled a gentle odour, a heavenly fragrance.” The grave of another saintly woman exuded “a supernatural fragrance so sweetly aromatic and unlike any earthly odours,” and this fragrance grew stronger “at times when Holy Mass was celebrated, almost in token of her pleasure at the entreaties addressed to her.”90 From the tomb of St. Dominic, too, “an odor of such sweetness came forth that it might have come from a storeroom of perfumes rather than from a tomb,” and following her death in 1607 the corpse of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi evidenced a popular variation on the theme when it leaked fragrant miraculous oils.91 Teresa of Avila’s corpse was examined nine times (the last in 1760, 178 years after her death) and evidenced always an exception state of preservation, even though the clothing was completely decomposed. Immediately after her death, the ﬂoral “aroma that her holy corpse gave off was so strong” that “it spread through the whole house.”92 In the Carmelite convent of Alba de Tormes, where her transverberated heart is enshrined, the reliquary glass occasionally breaks and the sweet odor of sanctity is still released.93 The odor of sanctity also extended into fragrance tropes that represented virtues, including “the good odor of humility,” “the sweet odor of penitence,” and “the odor of virginity.” In fourth-century Italy, consecrated virgins were compared to “gardens heavy with the scent of ﬂowers,” and Bernard of Clairvaux later noted that the humility of Christ’s brides “gives forth a sweet odor.”94 As the paradigm of virginity, virtue, and sinlessness, the Virgin Mary “smells ambrosial,” and “she is the ﬂower, the violet, the full-blown rose, who gives out such a scent that she satisﬁes us all. The mother of the lord most high is scented beyond any ﬂower.”95 Through such heavenly perfumes the Virgin, Christ, and the saints could imbue others with their exuding virtues. A scholar suffering from “temptations of the ﬂesh,” for example, kissed St. Dominic’s hand and “sensed a perfume coming from the hand, an odor sweeter than any he had experienced in his life.” Thanks to this conveyance of purity by olfactory osmosis, the scholar’s sinfulness waned and “the heat of carnal passion was marvelously cooled in him.” Miraculous intervention was less accommodating if one sought to exploit the odor of sanctity for this-worldly ends. An Italian saint’s chamber pot gave off a fragrant odor after his death, and a woman applied some of its contents to her disﬁgured face. She was hoping for a beautifying miracle, but instead

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she experienced a dissipation of the perfume and restoration of the excrement’s stench. The holy relic in the chamber pot, the hagiographer explained, would not lend itself to the designs of vanity.96 As suggested in this last example, the odor of sanctity was often posited in contradistinction to the foul stench of evil. Those who are lost to Christ have “an odor of death that leads to death,” while those who are saved have “an odor of life that leads to life.” Sin stinks, but in the cruciﬁed Christ “sin itself is made fragrant.”97 Rose of Lima came into the sinful New World “spreading delights and perfumes that pushed away, with the aroma of Jesus Christ, the stench of so many centuries of idolatry and the odor of blood spilled by the Conquest.” Such ﬁgurative allusions to a diabolical stench yielded readily to literal manifestations that made a sensory appeal to the repugnance of evil while providing a counterpoint to the odor of sanctity also literalized. Thus a woman who had been possessed by the devil smelled “like a dead body” and emitted “a most intolerable stench” reminiscent of that which “comes out of a grave when it is open eight days after the body has been buried.”98 The devil who taunted Rose of Lima similarly reeked intolerably, in this case as in many others “of burned sulfur” as he “emitted foul-smelling ﬁre from his eyes, nostrils, and ears.” A devilish man who had “impure desires” toward Rose also “gave off a foul odor and intolerable stench.”99 The odor of sanctity was closely associated with another miraculous hagiographic leitmotif, the incorruptible ﬂesh. Deﬁance of putrefaction was in the long view the denouement of a drama that began on the saint’s deathbed. Hagiographers sought to demonstrate the saints’ virtuous perseverance until the end. “The emphasis was put, therefore, on the joy they manifested at the approach of death,” because union with God was imminent. No sooner had their lives expired than “the physical signs of election”—serene beauty, pleasant smell, supple limbs—were made manifest on their cadavers. The death of a saint was a birth into life everlasting, so “the body itself changed and seemed to come to life; the features of the dead person lit up and assumed a joyful expression.”100 Thereafter the sweet smell of the corpse, the absence of cadaveric rigor, and the immunity to decay were related phenomena that demonstrated the divine election of a person who had died in the odor of sanctity. “Sin is the cause of the body’s decay,” with sexual sins privileged, and those without sin were accordingly exempt from putrefaction.101 “As a symptom of sin, putrefaction is concupiscence’s twin; and a woman who conquered one penalty of the Fall could overcome the other.” These ideas were fundamental to the dogma of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption, which was the logical culmination of her Immaculate Conception. Because Mary, the New Eve, was free of original sin, she was freed from putrefaction in the grave.102 Mary’s virginity was also factored into the equation as a causal relation was established between sexual purity and incorruptible ﬂesh. “As you never knew the stain of sin through carnal intercourse,” Christ says to Mary during her Assumption into heaven, “so you shall never suffer dissolution of the ﬂesh in the tomb.” “Putrescence and the worm are the shame of the human condition,” but because Mary

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abstained from the shame of sexual intercourse, she was spared the shame of decomposition.103 This relation of virginity and incorruptibility was extended to virgins throughout Christian history. A seventh-century text describing a nun who died in the odor of sanctity explained that “the miraculous preservation of her body from corruption in the tomb is evidence that she had remained untainted by bodily intercourse.” Corporal integrity and purity are preserved beyond death. In its exemption from decay the virginal body is in one direction a restoration of the prelapsarian body and in the other an anticipation of the resurrection of the dead.104 It is an emulation of the Virgin Mary’s pure body risen intact and at once a participation—like eucharistic devotion—in the resurrected body of Christ. The virgin’s victory over the ﬂesh in life is recapitulated in the grave. By the time these ideas had evolved into the early modern period, the cadaver’s full or partial incorruptibility became a virtual requirement for female sanctity.105 The complex of themes pertinent to the odor of sanctity was particularly prominent in the lives of saints whose names alluded to ﬂowers, Rose of Lima among them. Immediately after Rose’s death, her cadaver, as Hansen described it, displayed “more signs of life” than had the moribund body. Rose’s dead face became ﬂush with color, and her eyes “shined like two bright stars.” Cadaveric rigor was absent, and when the archbishop took Rose’s hand to kiss it he discovered a miraculous ﬂexibility, “as though she were still alive.”106 In his sermon during Rose’s funeral mass, Fray Luis de Bilbao, who had been one of her confessors, reported that Rose’s corpse was “without a bad odor or decay.” A 1617 letter advocating canonization observed that “thirty-six hours after the soul had left this holy body it gave off, according to everyone, a fragrance and aroma.”107 Other early testimonies likewise cited the lack of malodorous putrefaction but without mention of a pleasant fragrance. “Her dead body did not smell,” Gonzalo de la Maza testiﬁed, and another witness similarly stated that there was no “no sign of decay and bad odor.”108 In the more elaborated hagiographic accounts, such as Hansen’s, the literalized odor of sanctity perfumed the texts with wafts of otherwordly fragrance. During the days before its burial Rose’s incorruptible cadaver exuded a “miraculous fragrance,” Hansen wrote, and in support he cataloged opinions regarding “the admirable and celestial fragrance that the corpse emitted”: “Some said that it was like the rose water of angels,” while for others Rose’s corpse had the odor of a garden of ﬂowers, with the intermingling fragrances of lilies, balsam, and roses.109 When Rose’s tomb was opened for the ﬁrst time in March 1619, her corpse continued to emit these pleasant fragrances. Hansen reconnected the odor of sanctity to the poetics of the resurrected body by describing the incorruptible Rose as “a living image of the resurrection of Christ.”110 When Rose’s corpse was again inspected on May 27, 1632, as part of the apostolic process for canonization, representatives from the Church and the medical profession discovered separated skeletal remains and dried skin that gave off a sweet “odor like that of dried Roses, very different from the one that dead bodies in similar condition usually have.” This fragrance had a religious value beyond its olfac-

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tory pleasantness because it inspired “consolation and devotion” in those who smelled it.111 Building on these testimonies, Hansen reiterated that the fragrance of Rose’s remains suddenly ﬁlled everyone with an “inner feeling of tenderness and devotion.” This inspirational odor of sanctity thus became a metonymy of the saint’s life as a whole, a life canonized and propagated among the faithful to edify their faith through imitation and admiration. Even the fragments of dried skin stuck to the chain with which Rose had scourged herself “gave off a soothing and unusual fragrance,” and the aroma of this relic was her “mute witness to the odor of virtues.”112 As Juan Mele´ndez explained, “all of the fragrance of this Rose was for everyone else, only the thorns were for herself.” Rose’s sanctity emerged from her penitential suffering, an “aromatic pain” that left behind a fragrance beneﬁcial to her community. A hagiography published by the Catholic Church in 1673 counseled the reader devoted to Rose accordingly: “Apply your spirit’s sense of smell to her most sweet odor.”113 In these otherworldly fragrances the soul is puriﬁed.

The Name of the Rose Rose of Lima was baptized in the Church of San Sebastian on May 25, 1586, and, in accordance with custom, was named “Isabel” after her maternal grandmother. Two months later, however, a prodigious miracle resulted in a change of name from “Isabel” to “Rose.” The grandmother after whom Rose originally had been named found the change to be disrespectful and offensive, and the mother’s refusal to capitulate resulted in a battle of wills that was sometimes triangular but most often left Rose helplessly abandoned in the crossﬁre between the mother and grandmother. The matter was settled ﬁnally when Toribio de Mogrovejo, archbishop of Lima and himself later canonized, used the name “Rose” when he conﬁrmed Rose of Lima in 1597.114 Later, at about the time she took the Dominican habit, Rose herself became uncomfortable with the name change. She believed that her mother had insisted on the name “Rose” only in order to accentuate her beauty for the vain, this-worldly purposes of courtship and marriage.115 Rose explained her discontent to one of her confessors, Alonso Vela´squez, who calmed her by stressing the rose’s ﬁgurative association with virginity. Vela´squez told Rose “that her soul was a rose of Our Lady, who had deposited and put it in her body as in a vase or ﬂower pot,” so that Rose would conserve and protect it. That message was subsequently endorsed by the Virgin of the Rosary herself, and Rose decided thereafter to compound her name with the Virgin’s and call herself “Rose of St. Mary.” In some accounts, including Hansen’s, the acquisition of this new name was made miraculous by assigning active roles to the otherworldly participants. In these versions the Virgin of the Rosary approves of the name “Rose” because it is pleasing to the infant Bridegroom in her arms, and then, to redouble her graces, compounds Rose’s name by adding to it her own.116

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Thus Rose of St. Mary “not only received her name from heaven, but her last name too.” When asking that her mother refer to her only as “Rose of St. Mary,” Rose explained that “my soul is a rose of the Mother of God,” or, as Hansen had it, “my soul has been transformed into a Rose consecrated to the lovable Nazarene Jesus.”117 The transformation of Rose’s soul into a rose was the appropriate conclusion to an episode that began some twenty years earlier with the identical metamorphosis of her face. The versions of this face-change miracle are multiple and again evidence the quotas by which sainthood is constructed or dismantled in accord with the reigning paradigms of a given culture or historical period. During the ordinary process of 1617, Marı´a de Oliva, Rose’s mother, testiﬁed as an eyewitness that at the age of approximately three months Rose was in a cradle, her face covered with a cloth, when a household servant (generally regarded to be indigenous) came to check on her. This girl made demonstrations of awe that attracted other nearby girls whose exclamations in turn attracted the mother. The mother approached the cradle to investigate the commotion and saw Rose “so pretty and beautiful that it seemed to her that the whole face was made into a very pretty rose and in the middle of it she saw the features of her eyes, mouth, nose, and ears.”118 In her testimony for the apostolic process on March 21, 1631, the mother similarly related that Rose was around three months old when the miracle occurred. Here she testiﬁed that a servant girl who was caring for Rose lifted the face cloth and exclaimed, along with two other girls, “how pretty, how pretty this girl is.” The mother approached and “it seemed to her that the Face and head were inside a large rose of very bright color.”119 This transformation or vision lasted only an instant, “and then that rose disappeared, leaving the face very beautiful and prettier that she had seen it before.”120 Other witnesses who had not seen the event testiﬁed to its truth on the basis of common knowledge disseminated by rumor and folklore: “Her face had something like a rose and in the middle of it appeared the face’s features” and “her face was made into a rose that only revealed the eyes, nose, and mouth.” Mariana de Oliva, an indigenous servant to Rose’s household who is often erroneously equated with the girl who witnessed the miracle, similarly remarked in 1631: “While the said Rose was in the cradle they saw that her Face resembled a Rose.”121 Hagiographers across the centuries followed suit. A 1667, prebeatiﬁcation life of Rose of Lima explained that her name “had the origin of having seen her in the cradle with her face turned into a Rose at the age of three months.” As described by the Catholic Church in a hagiography published after Rose’s canonization, the name change resulted from “a celestial miracle of a Rose that suddenly appeared on her face.” Some later hagiographies also followed the mother’s testimony, as do many devotional booklets today: “The face turned into a beautiful, brilliant, inconceivable rose,” and “the face of the girl in the form of a blazing rose” out of which “her beautiful eyes shined.”122 In Angelino Medoro’s seventeenth-century painting of the miracle, the infant’s head is wrapped with a bandagelike rose that circles the face’s

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features. The imagery is similar in a contemporary picturebook that depicts the face surrounded by rose petals and leaves, as though they were a bonnet, while the caption explains, “a rose surrounded the girl’s face.”123 These versions that more or less conform to the mother’s report are complemented by others derived from a more visually accommodating variant. Marı´a de Uza´tegui testiﬁed in the ordinary process that the name change was due to “the Mother having seen a Rose on each one of her cheeks.” The testimony of Uza´tegui’s husband, Gonzalo de la Maza, cited Marı´a de Oliva as his source but offered the same two-cheeked variant: “This witness has also heard the said mother say that while rocking her in the cradle when she was a few months old an Indian servant taking off a cloth with which the face was covered in order to see if she was sleeping saw that the said girl had on the cheeks of her face two marvelous roses.” The biographical summary opening the 1617 process similarly reported that Rose “had on the cheeks of her Face two painted Roses.”124 A third version seems to have been initiated by Pedro de Loayza’s 1619 hagiography, in which those witnessing the miracle “saw her face covered with a beautiful rose.” Juan Mele´ndez concurred in 1681: the face was “covered with a beautiful, big, fragrant Rose.” In contemporary versions the face-covering rose sometimes hovered: “Over the cradle a full-blown rose was suspended. It hung in mid-air.” In another text, similarly, “there suddenly appeared in the air a beautiful rose, which after hovering for a time around the infant gradually descended until it touched her face.” The covering of the face and the hovering above it were reconciled by a hagiographer who explained in 1968 that in the perspective of the young and thus short servant girl standing beside the cradle the rose would have appeared to be hovering, while to the mother bending over directly above cradle, “the apparition hid the tiny face altogether.”125 More interestingly synthetic was the thorough account of Jose´ Antonio Cata´ de Calella (published posthumously in 1896), which drew from a range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources to offer this version of the miraculous episode: the mother “saw that the face of her daughter was as though hidden by a rose through whose petals the lineaments of the face could be discerned, as though heaven were saying that the three-month-old girl was Rose. The rose soon disappeared, and the face of the girl was, one might say [si cabe decirlo ası´], much more beautiful than before, because having disappeared, the rose left two imprinted on her cheeks.”126 This account is exceptional in its attempt to resolve the differences between the versions given by Rose’s mother on the one hand and by Uza´tegui and de la Maza on the other. The fusion of the rose and the face was brief, but it stamped a permanent, beautifying impression of roses on Rose’s cheeks as emblems of her special calling. Rhetorical softeners such as Cata´’s “as though” and “one might say” became increasingly prominent as the miracle was renarrated in more recent hagiography. Even when the possibility of the miracle was admitted, there is a reluctance to commit beyond allusions: “The maid was enraptured by what she saw. It far transcended the pink and white prettiness of any well-fed, well-

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tended infant; there was a freshness to it, a delicacy, a clarity that had a ﬂowerlike, rather than a human, quality.” Most recent accounts tend further to deemphasize the incident’s miraculous nature by stressing, instead, the possible natural causes and the subjectivity of perception carried by the verb parecer (to seem or to look like), which appears even in the two testimonies given by the mother who witnessed the miracle. In a 1914 hagiography from Lima, the girl’s face “seemed [or looked] like a most beautiful rose, not because it had lost its own features but because of a certain similarity and resemblance.”127 Rube´n Vargas Ugarte explained that the infant Rose’s face was “either more rosy than other times or more beautiful,” so the girls exclaimed, “Oh, this girl is so pretty. She seems to be [or looks like] a rose.” In the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the indigenous servant “exclaimed that she looked like a Rose.”128 Natural beauty was stressed in lieu of miracle by the author of a 1920s hagiography that is sold at Rose’s sanctuary in Lima. In this version the servant girl was awestruck by “the singular beauty of that infant face with all of the splendor of a rose,” and the mother responded as though “admiring the most beautiful of the roses in a garden.”129 In this and similar accounts the miraculous transformation yields to a less sensational, providential sign that indicated a new name for Rose consonant with her beautiful, virginal, and bloody dedication to Christ. More secular, scholarly accounts sometimes confront the miracle directly and dismiss it: “The so-called miracle was such an undramatic and normal occurrence that in a different time and place, only a loving mother or a doting grandmother would have thought it extraordinary.” A 1934 Peruvian dictionary entry noted simply, but signiﬁcantly, that the girl was named Rose “in view of her beauty.”130 The veracity of the miracle is also implicitly challenged by the very documents that advocate it. An unacknowledged dismissal of the miracle is apparent, for example, in the attitude of the grandmother, who saw in the resultant name change not an act of God but an act of disrespect. The miracle was more generally distanced from supernatural causes as it aligned with natural phenomena through the rhetoric of blushing and of rosy cheeks. Alonso Vela´squez made reference to the adult Rose’s face as always “red as a rose,” and Loayza observed that throughout her life Rose’s face was “as beautiful as a rose.” Mariana, the mentioned indigenous servant, testiﬁed that whenever Rose was embarrassed she “got so red” that “she was like a rose.”131 The miraculous also linked to the commonplace in a 1659 hagiography that reported the miracle— “they saw a Rose superimposed on her cheeks”—but later demoted it to a ﬁgure of speech in reference to the “rosy color of her cheeks” that Rose had generally: “She had (as we commonly say) a face made into a Rose.”132 Rose’s naturally rosy cheeks, the ﬂush of the face perhaps enhanced by the cloth that covered it, and the perceptions of roselike fair skin exclaimed by indigenous girls of darker complexion undoubtedly contributed to this miracle, but it nevertheless inaugurated the poetics by which Rose herself, her community, and her hagiographers represented her sanctity. The name change from “Isabel” to “Rose” and then the addition of “St. Mary” as a “surname” distanced Rose from her natural family and allied her more closely with the

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Virgin Mary, “the mystical rose,” who Rose herself referred to as a surrogate mother. The rose that appeared on the infant’s face was a “symbol of the virginal ﬂush in which she always burned” and a “Rose from the crown of Venus, not of that lascivious one of Paganism, but rather of the pure one,” of the Virgin as Mystical Rose. The coincidence of the Virgin’s name with that of Rose’s mother (both Marı´a, Mary) was another fortuitous, or providential, coincidence that facilitated the displacement from the natural mother impeding sanctity to a transcendental idealization of maternity, a perfected mother, who endorsed and facilitated Rose’s aspirations. In addition to their many other meanings, the rose face and the name change were thereby redirected against the mother’s sinful purposes of vanity as Rose and her interpreters found in them a means of liberation for mystical pursuits, including the mortiﬁcation by which this Rose would earn its bloodied color. The foundation miracle in the cradle provided the basis for a new identity, the name change and Rose’s rosy cheeks imprinted this seal of election on her identity forever, and the compound surname added by the Virgin made the mission and the meanings indisputable. Rose wrote to her brother in Chile that his ﬁrst child would be a daughter “who will be born with a rose on her face and who will be a servant of God.”133 The meaning of the sign, once ﬁxed, facilitates duplication of the prototype.

4 Why Rose of Lima?

Following centuries of apathy, fatigue, worldliness, corruption, and fragmentation, Roman Catholicism was shocked to its senses when the Protestant Reformation began in 1517. Reconsolidation and reform were addressed for nearly twenty years, and when the Council of Trent (1545–1563) concluded its deliberations, the CounterReformation emerged in tandem with the baroque culture that came to characterize it. Defense of orthodoxy was the paradigm of the tridentine reforms. The faith and the faithful were more rigorously controlled under new and revived procedural norms, with surveillance, oppression, and punishment awaiting the wayward who strayed into errors and heresy. The Council of Trent reafﬁrmed the cults of the Virgin and the saints, endorsed veneration of images and relics as representations, and defended the universal vicariate of the Catholic Church as the exclusive intermediary between Christians and deity. The distinctions between clergy and laity were reinforced, sacraments were strengthened, indices of forbidden books were issued, female religiosity was regulated, and lay spirituality— be it in the form of confraternities or tertiaries—was normalized and supervised.1 The rule in the politics of Counter-Reformation Spain was war. From the accession of King Philip II (1556) to the death of Philip IV (1665), Spain was constantly on the battleﬁeld as champion of the Catholic faith and defender of imperial theocracy. The reign of Philip II (1556–1598), which overlapped with the Council of Trent and the Siglo de Oro (approximately 1543–1681), brought imperial Spain to the height of its power. Militant Catholicism, impressive successes at war, thriving evangelization, and a windfall of New World treasures together generated a euphoric mood that led many

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to regard Philip as the Last World Emperor who would globalize Catholicism as prelude to Christ’s second coming. These millennial aspirations began to wane halfway into Philip’s reign, however, and as the sixteenth century progressed toward its end, Spain was plagued by misfortunes—failed harvest, recurring epidemics (including the devastating plague of 1599–1600), economic crisis, defeat of the Invincible Armada (1588), rebellion, disrupted transatlantic trade—that engendered bitterness, cynicism, fatalism, and “the resignation of defeat” among Spaniards.2 The economic woes worsened during the reigns of Philip III (1598–1621) and Philip IV (1621–1665); the incompetent reign of “the bewitched” Charles II (1665–1700) enhanced the collective mood of hopeless despair; and by midcentury the Spanish political and economic crises—including the sale of New World ofﬁces to forestall bankruptcy—accelerated the empire’s loss of its American colonies. Thus the militant reentrenchment of Catholicism coincided with the rise and decline of the Spanish empire that championed the Counter-Reformation cause. Female mysticism ﬂourished amid the volatility and ambiguity of the empire’s dizzying ascent reversed in short order by a precipitous fall. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European mystics “were for the most part from regions or social categories which were in socio-economic recession, disadvantaged by change, marginalized by progress, or destroyed by war.” Michel de Certeau continued to argue that radical Christianity, “a radicalism induced by disintegration,” was “formed against a backdrop of decadence and ‘corruption’ in a world that was falling apart and in need of repair. It borrowed the vocabulary of the Reformation, applying it to a biographical context: schism, wounds,” and reform itself.3 At the same time, mystics “were experiencing, in their shattered Christendom, another fundamental decline: that of the institutions of meaning. They were experiencing the disintegration of a sacred world.” Once it had been schismed, protested, and destabilized, the orthodox version of Catholicism discovered within itself compensatory subversions that challenged its sacrosanct institutional structure. Mystics posed a threat to Church hegemony precisely because “their solidarity with the collective, historically based suffering” forged a link between their miraculous agony—“a ‘wound’ inseparable from the social ill”—and the quest of masses desperate for miraculous salvation.4 Despite their manifest withdrawal and disdain for worldly affairs, mystics were microcosmic representations of the societies that produced them. They accentuated, rehearsed, atoned for, and exalted on their bodies the maladies and disintegration of the social body in which they shared. The trope of these “wounds” was revalued as they enacted it, however, because they redirected suffering, despair, defeat, austerity, and withdrawal toward positive and efﬁcacious ends. Mystics revived the conviction that “martyrdom is fruitful,” implementing at great personal cost a transformative reinterpretation of their “wounded” milieu.5 The individual was microcosm of the polity, and mystics found in corporalization a constructive, individualistic alternative to the failed collective salvation promised by imperial Catholicism. They dismissed the broken promise of salvation through mediated rituals and millennial visions by

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inverting collective defeat to declare individual victory—union with deity— without dependency on royal armies or clerical pomp. They were quintessential members of Christ’s mystical body but paradoxically on the margins of the Church. They were ostensibly subordinate to ecclesiastical and political authorities, but their intimacy with deity—beyond that enjoyed even by popes and kings—challenged the validity of all earthly hierarchies. Mysticism was empowered in the paradox of this conﬁguration, in this intermediary position—parallel to that of the Church—between God and the masses. The convalescent Church lauded mysticism while at once regarding it with suspicion, monitoring it, oppressing it, and, in the exceptional cases, coopting its major ﬁgures through canonization. One seminal challenge to the Church in Spain was posed by the Alumbrados (Illuminists) whose activity began around 1510, ﬂourished in Toledo around 1525, and later reappeared in Andalucı´a and Extremadura. Isabel de la Cruz, an early proponent of the strain of alumbrado heresy known as dejamiento, advocated withdrawal from worldly affairs in order to seek the soul’s unmediated union with God. The Inquisition intervened—Isabel was arrested for heresy in 1534—in part because the Alumbrados’ reclusive piety violated norms of social activity and responsibility (“they don’t want to do anything,” a Franciscan complained). More egregious was the Alumbrados’ disdain for external demonstrations of faith, because they believed that their salvation came through grace alone, channeled to them directly from God. An investigator for the Toledo Inquisition was shocked when the beata Catalina Ruiz informed him that God had pardoned her from confession and communion because the graces He bestowed on her were far in excess of any conceivable through sacraments.6 This unmediated relation with deity—“to be God with God, without intermediary or any element of otherness which could constitute an obstacle or impediment”—undermined the basis of the Church’s authority and threatened Catholic sacraments with obsolescence. The fear, in Spain as in Lima a century later, was that unmonitored, introspective Catholicism, particularly when practiced by females, would result in doctrinal aberrations, infringement on Church hegemony, disruption of hierarchy, erosion of sacerdotal monopoly on the divine, and the emergence of charismatics who—by intent or by default— would lead astray their massive, superstitious, and miracle-hungry followings. Having already suffered frontal assaults by the Reformation and Erasmian anticlericalism, the Church mobilized expeditious counteroffensives to control or eradicate emerging movements that advocated nonclerical Christianity. The relatively passive threat posed by the Alumbrados was readily politicized by association with Protestant heresies, thereby providing an expedient for swift and severe extirpation.7 A 1630 Inquisition document emphasized oracio´n mental (contemplative prayer) as a primary cause of the Alumbrados’ deviation from orthodoxy in the New World. Vocal prayer, which repeats the Church’s discourse by rote, was of little worth to the Alumbrados, whereas contemplative prayer, as an individualized means of uniting with God directly, provided everything necessary for

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the soul’s nourishment and salvation. The document also registered the Alumbrados’ belief that they were exempt from work or any superior order that might interrupt their mystical contemplation. Like earlier Alumbrados, they devalued sermons and sacraments, claiming that their perfection exempted them from external manifestations of the faith. The Alumbrados believed that they had reached a state of perfection, spiritual self-sufﬁciency, and freedom from this-worldly judgment. They acted under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; they experienced divine essence and the mysteries of the Trinity; and they believed that their burning love, raptures, and swoons were corporal signs of divine love bestowed on them. The Inquisition, of course, begged to differ, arguing that these frauds or heretics were only “illuminated with the darkness of Satan.”8 The massive appeal that contemplative prayer was acquiring throughout the Spanish empire aggravated the Church’s repressive overreaction against mysticism. The absence in mass of a few saintly hermits dedicated to the unitive pursuits of contemplative prayer was of little concern to authorities, but the popularization of such introspective, nonclerical Christianity would jeopardize Church hegemony and dogma. The severity of the oppression against potentially dangerous mystical strains is evidenced by the Inquisition’s processes against many activists who later became outstanding saints in the canon, among them St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and St. Ignacio of Loyola. Leading theologians, notably Fray Luis de Granada, were also censured and censored, precisely for popularizing nonmediated and potentially mystical religious practices that trespassed on or usurped sacerdotal privilege. The works of Granada, which directly inﬂuenced Rose of Lima’s religious exercises, circulated among many other contemporaneous spiritual handbooks that popularized self-instruction in contemplative prayer. Granada’s books were extraordinarily popular in Spain and the colonies—one bibliography notes more than four thousand editions—and provoked the wrath of Inquisitors who believed that this “internal form of religion was the great heresy of the age.”9 Censors attacked Granada and other Dominicans, including Bartolome´ de Carranza (the archbishop of Toledo), for what one scholar described as their attempt to “democratize perfection”—that is, to make accessible to lay people who had not taken vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience the same skills and rewards of contemplative prayer that were once reserved for nuns and priests. The spiritual handbooks offered an easy, do-it-yourself, and—for many—fraudulent formula that usurped the privileges and mocked true sanctity.10 For Melchor Cano, who greatly inﬂuenced Philip II, Christians who sought perfection without having made vows were “destroyers of religious orders” and “deceivers of the people.” Because they led the faithful to such misadventures, works by Granada and Carranza had “a certain ﬂavor of alumbrado heresy and even other errors that manifestly contradict Catholic faith and doctrine.”11 Three of Granada’s works were included in the 1559 Index of Prohibited Books, but renewed tolerance of mysticism later allowed for wide dissemination of popular theological tracts. Granada’s Book of Prayer and Meditation reap-

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peared in a revised version—the one read by Rose of Lima—that was approved by a commission of the Council of Trent in 1562.12 This new dissemination of autodidactic devotional tracts coincided with a proliferation of mystical works published in Toledo and Alcala´ under the supervision of Cardinal Xime´nez de Cisneros, who “helped to promote a visionary spirituality characterized by such mental states as trances, swoons, visions, dreams and ﬁts.” These editions, which included such mystics as Catherine of Siena and Angela of Foligno, were primarily intended for friars and nuns, but Cisneros seems to have wanted them distributed among the laity.13 Mysticism had yet another boost soon after through wide dissemination of writings by and hagiographic literature on Teresa of Avila, who provided a radical but endorsed Hispanic model for what nevertheless remained a contested practice, particularly for women. In colonial Lima, mysticism likewise provided a suspicious, alternative model for female religious expression beginning as early as the late 1540s. Sixteenth-century Lima was an isolated European enclave celebrating its grandeur amid earthquakes (including one in the year of Rose’s birth), pirate attacks, internal rivalries, epidemics, post-civil-war instabilities, and the always imposing threat of rebellion among indigenous and black majorities. The extraordinary economic growth symbolized by the mountain of silver at Potosı´, which had its maximum production between 1580 and 1630, overlapped with Rose of Lima’s lifetime and set the tone of opulence. Lima became “a ceremonial and luxurious world,” a great, self-styled American city with cosmopolitan ﬂair. This afﬂuence, constructed on the precarious foundation of the city’s whereabouts and circumstances, was coupled with ﬂourishing asceticism, penitence, and monasticism, as though a counterbalance had emerged from within in atonement for avarice and vanity.14 Mysticism was at home amid the luxurious instability of this splendid, churchish, precarious environment. True nuns cloistered in convents did not appear in Peru until almost 1560, but they were preceded by beatas who lived in pious reclusion, sometimes at home and sometimes in group homes, and who often were tertiaries, wearing the habit of the order with which they were afﬁliated. Like their Spanish predecessors, the beatas in Lima implicitly challenged institutionalized Catholicism by pursuing a more direct route to deity. Their extrainstitutional, austere Christianity provided an inverted complement to the rapacious imperialism, the sometimes spiritless pomp of ceremonial Catholicism, and the paradoxes and hypocrisies of a wealthy Church united in violent enterprise with Spain despite the inherent incompatibility of the gospel and imperialism. Peruvian beatas, sometimes described as creole or mestiza versions of their peninsular antecedents, were characterized by an interiorization of religious life, contemplative prayer, manual labor, asceticism and mortiﬁcation, holy simplicity, and a love of solitude. They were not Alumbradas by intent or self-deﬁnition, but they were regarded with suspicion and, when necessary, were associated with alumbrado heresy as an expedient to their oppression or punishment. “Beatas occupied an ambivalent position because they attempted to create a viable space for women that encompassed both the sacred and the wordly and yet remained separate from the strict enclosure of the

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convent and the responsibilities of the casa (household).”15 Luisa Melgarejo recorded in her notebook what she believed God had told her—“I want you to occupy yourself with nothing other than praying, writing, etc.”—but the Inquisition found in the revelation an index of heresy: “It seems as though she wanted to excuse herself from the labors of domestic work and live in leisure, which is suspicious.”16 Something of the Alumbrados’ evasion of acceptable social roles and responsibilities was thereby evoked to the beatas’ discredit, and it was compounded in the other direction by the enduring Inquisition complaint that women who had not taken vows were inappropriately leading an uncloistered, nunlike life that was insufﬁciently structured or controlled. The Inquisition of Seville was unambiguous on the point in 1575, complaining that “problems result from permitting that the said women wear the said beata habit without being encloistered” and advising that “it would be good to prohibit this manner of living.”17 Beatas nevertheless continued to prosper in the New World, and—the Church’s dismay notwithstanding—were highly esteemed in colonial Peru. The very quantity, visibility, and high public regard of beatas in Lima, as earlier in Spain, generated concern and mobilized the opposition against them. In 1622 a Jesuit complained to the Inquisition that because there were so many women who “have frequent ecstasies and even some who ﬂy above this city of Lima,” it was difﬁcult to determine “if it was divine business or their lies or the art of the devil.” The inherent bias that stacked the odds against beata religiosity was evident during the Inquisition investigation of Luisa Melgarejo: “Do not give credit to women in matters of visions and revelations and expositions of the Holy Scripture,” because God would not so liberally “deposit in such fragile vessels, and even less during such dangerous times, so many false visions and revelations of so many women.”18 It was within this context of accusations of alumbrado heresy, general suspicion of uncloistered female religiosity, presumption of falsity, and evolving conceptions of orthodoxy that the mysticism of Rose of Lima developed and was evaluated. While other beatas were punished in Inquisitorial dungeons, however, Rose was singled out and selected for the highly honoriﬁc and symbolic status as ﬁrst saint of the New World and patron of the Americas. That seemingly anomalous assessment is particularly paradoxical given the semblances between Rose’s religious practices and those of other beatas whose careers ended before the Inquisition, and given Rose’s personal connections with a religious community that was severely oppressed. One of Rose’s Dominican confessors and her ﬁrst hagiographer, Pedro de Loayza, was also the confessor of Marı´a de Santo Domingo and Isabel de Ormaza, both punished in the 1625 auto-da-fe´. Ine´s de Velasco and Luisa Melgarejo, both of whom were brought before the Inquisition in the 1620s, shared with Rose the Jesuit confessors Juan Sebastia´n Parra and Diego Martı´nez, the last of whom was censured by the Inquisition for fostering beata fantasies. Rose was also a prominent ﬁgure in a mystical inner circle organized around Gonzalo de la Maza and his wife, Marı´a de Uza´tegui, both of whom were likewise censured by the Inquisition. Included in the group were Melgarejo (who met Rose through

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Uza´tegui), Marı´a de Santo Domingo, Ine´s de Velasco, Ana Marı´a Pe´rez, and Juan del Castillo, all of whom, again, were also investigated or punished by the Inquisition.19 Rose’s expeditious rise to the altars is also surprising given the many contemporaneous Peruvian candidates for sainthood, and given the competitive advocacy of the orders to have their respective candidates chosen for canonization. Hardly a century after conquest Peru already had ten beatiﬁcation causes presented in Rome—four Dominicans (Rose of Lima, Juan Macı´as, Vicente Bernedo, and Martı´n de Porres), three Jesuits, one Franciscan, one Mercedarian, and one Augustinian. In the mid-seventeenth century the Dominicans were obliged to select and defend only one of their four candidates, and Rose of Lima was chosen. Many of the other candidates—all of them male—were later successful in canonization (Toribio de Mogrovejo, Martı´n de Porres, Juan Macı´as, and Francisco Solano), but Rose, against the odds, was chosen for the high distinction of being ﬁrst saint of the New World.20 No single explanation can adequately account for Rose of Lima’s expeditious canonization.21 Her success was the composite result of several interacting factors, which included the high regard of her humility and penitential asceticism; the promotion of her candidacy by various interest groups; the effective hagiographic construction of her identity; the enormity of her public devotion; and the general tendency of Counter-Reformation canonizations in directions that favored her candidacy, including a prominence of Hispanic saints, an increase in beatiﬁcation of females (although there was a signiﬁcant decline in the seventeenth century), a preference for her saintly proﬁle, and displacement of royal and noble saints by commoners. As illustrated in the following discussion of contributing factors, Rose of Lima’s sainthood was created through “interaction between clergy and laity, centre and periphery, learned culture and popular culture.”22 (1) Rose’s Penitential Asceticism. Rose’s severely mortiﬁed and essentially private mysticism contrasted sharply with the ostentatious, histrionic, and provocative religiosity that led many other beatas to the Inquisition. Hagiographies of Rose go to graphic extremes to emphasize her bloody ﬂagellations, her scalp perpetually wounded by a crown of thorns, her torturous bed, her merciless fasts, and her ever-innovative self-punishments. But combined with this gruesome penitential catalog was simultaneous emphasis of the attending modesty and humility, of Rose’s determination to keep her mortiﬁcations always hidden from public view (if only to hide them from her disapproving mother). Divine intervention collaborated. Of her mortiﬁed, starved body one would ordinarily see only “paleness and gaunt weakness, the cheeks sunken, the eyes hidden, and the whole face made into a portrait of penitence.” At an early age, however, Rose beseeched God that “her fasts and mortiﬁcation be hidden and not show on her face.”23 A healthy fac¸ade thus hid the emaciation from view, and many are the stories that depict Rose’s plump face, rosy cheeks, and corporal vitality despite the rigor of her fasting and mortiﬁcation. This mask covering her severe asceticism, combined with her overt efforts to disguise her penitential lifestyle, provided a laudable counterpoint to the loudly advertised exercises of

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other beatas. While the beatas regarded as false made a spectacle of their feigned or minimal mortiﬁcation, Rose evidenced “a singular modesty in hiding her penitence.”24 The privacy of mortiﬁcation was an index of the more comprehensive humility that was required of aspirants to sanctity. One of the signs of an authentic holy person was a sense of unworthiness to receive God’s graces. Like many other saints, Rose overestimated whatever petty, venial sins she may have committed. She regarded herself as the worst sinner in the world and her minor transgressions as atrocities worthy of the severe penance that she exacted on her body. Rose followed to the letter Fray Luis de Granada’s advice “to devalue all dignity and honor of this world, and love all indignity and dishonor.” Loayza dedicated a chapter to Rose’s self-deprecation (“a continuous disdain for herself ”) and, more generally, to her deep humility, illustrating how “she ﬂed from all vainglory.”25 Many others similarly described Rose as a “person of great humility and meekness,” totally devoid of “any kind of vanity and ostentation.” When people praised Rose’s sanctity or compared her to Catherine of Siena, she was tormented by sentiments of guilt, shame, and unworthiness, as though she were guilty of “public deception and the mendacious hypocrisy of usurped sanctity.”26 She found any praise unbearable and responded physically by trembling, crying, turning pale, or losing the capacity to speak. When after repeated refusals she ﬁnally agreed to write about her mystical experiences, she submitted her Mercedes collages with the humble request that her confessor—in her words—“correct whatever in the said work may be lacking due to my ignorance” and, if necessary, that he burn it. “One will ﬁnd many errors and omissions because this was explained in my hand, and if one ﬁnds that it is good it is due only to the favors [mercedes] of God.”27 Rose, in short, was a paradigm of the winning combination for meritorious beata status in her culture: severe mortiﬁcation accompanied by profound subaltern humility. In contrast with Rose’s reserved mysticism were the ostentatious spectacles of beatas guilty of “spiritual arrogance.” These were “women who deceive with their visions and raptures” to seek celebrity through exaggerated and inauthentic piety.28 The Inquisitors who evaluated beatas were of one mind with Diego Pe´rez de Valdivia, who explained that the prerequisite of authenticity was to suffer like Christ, to bear the burdens of asceticism and mortiﬁcation, and that therefore “any revelation that does not come very accompanied by the cross” is worthy only of suspicion. The case of Juan de Castillo is illustrative, for he, like many of the beatas, was regarded a less viable mystic due to insufﬁcient rigor in his asceticism and mortiﬁcation: “I wish very much to do great penitence,” he testiﬁed, but “I cannot because I am very busy.”29 Beatas are regarded as false “when they seek personal gains, gifts, honor, esteem, publicity” and when “they want to do business or [gain] power or be worth a lot” or climb socially. They are characterized more by talk than by mortiﬁcation, more by outings than reclusion, more by licentiousness than obedience. They have a “concealed presumptuousness,” they preach without credentials, “and they stray from the sure and ordinary doctrine” of Catholicism. To be regarded as

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authentic, beatas must “leave the road of arrogance and take the road of humility,” because “God called them to be the feet of the Church, to serve, to be humiliated, looked down upon, contemptible, to suffer confusions, to be the last and lowest in the house of God.”30 Many Lima beatas, including some who were acquaintances or who shared confessors with Rose, relied instead on a gaudy repertoire of stunts, “as though it were a comedy,” as one Inquisition record complained.31 Stigmata, mystical pregnancies, apocalyptic prophesies, giving birth to messiahs, and ﬂying over Lima complemented the more general theatricality of ecstasies and inspired ravings. Ine´s de Velasco (known as “the ﬂyer” for her levitations) entered mystical ecstasy through “acrobatic pirouettes”; Luisa Melgarejo burst into enraptured laughter; and other beatas marveled their audiences with moaning, bouts of crying, strange smiles, dramatic postures, and convulsive body movements.32 Such ostentatious, theatrical, proﬁt-oriented, provocative, socialclimbing, or boastful beatas were prey for the Inquisition, whereas pious, selfsacriﬁcial, self-effacing, obedient, heavily mortiﬁed, fasting beatas—regardless of the mystical efﬁcacy of their suffering—tended to be promoted by their confessors, revered as folk saints, and deemed likely candidates for canonization. The measure of authenticity was social as much as religious. A mystical experience became less “true” if it violated the social codes that governed beata (or, more generally, female) behavior. Mystical ecstasies, revelations, and public penitence were always considered dangerous, because even when not inspired by the devil only few mystics could engage in such practices with prudence, humility, and abnegation. Christ himself discouraged showy public worship in Matthew 6:1–7, and when female mystical expressions seemed excessive in sixteenth-century Spanish convents, Teresa of Avila referred to them as abobamiento (foolishness) instead of arrobamiento (mystical ecstasies). In Lima during Rose’s lifetime, the 1613 synodal constitutions speciﬁcally prohibited, under penalty of excommunication, that women in penitential habits scourge themselves during Holy Week processions, because these practices resulted in “many offences to Our Lord.”33 Inquisition documents similarly register disapproval for public displays and often cite the spectacle nature of mystical experiences as evidence of their falsity. As recorded in many confessions and testimonies, raptures often had a staged quality and were clearly directed toward, or even depended on, their audiences. In the 1620s the nun Ine´s de Ubitarte admitted to the Lima Inquisition that during her ecstasies she tried “to hear what the nuns were saying and doing in praise of her sanctity.” Angela Carranza, who was punished in the 1694 auto-da-fe´, was accused of staging her mystical spectacles “in the churches, plazas, and public places on the days when they were most populated.” Luisa Melgarejo had daily raptures in the Jesuit church, “normally at the moments when there were most people,” and then, when lunchtime came, she punctually stood up and went home. A witness who saw her in another church reported that she appeared to be enraptured throughout the entire mass. Melgarejo was totally motionless, without even blinking, but near the end of mass a servant came with a question: “She asked if she wanted her eggs

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fried or boiled.” Melgarejo opened her eyes, turned her head, answered the question—“fried”—and then went back into her trance.34 The question of audience was always paradoxical, because mysticism is a quintessentially private experience with social consequences, functions, and dependencies. Saints “were expected to play an impossible role”: they were not to “advertise themselves too explicitly” because humility was inviolable, but at the same time total humility “would result in anonymity.” Beatas, in this regard, had an advantage over cloistered nuns, who “generally lacked a vehicle for visibility: an obvious prerequisite for sainthood.”35 To be held in saintly esteem a beata would need to avoid the spectacles that jeopardized her authenticity, while at once escaping the absolute privacy that would result in anonymity and impede the social functions of mysticism, including those pertinent to canonization. In this context Rose’s notorious self-deprecation becomes strategic. “Saints could not publicly praise themselves, but, like all Christians, they could publicly denounce themselves.”36 Pride is sinful and the desire for publicity reveals false pretenses, but the humble could be exalted precisely through insistent denial of their virtues. One’s cause could be forwarded by its constant negation. Such afﬁrmation by negation would be worthless, however, if not backed up by the leaked secret of severe mortiﬁcation. The privacy of genuine penitential mysticism must be made visible, but without the gaudy spectacles that brought histrionic beatas before the Inquisition. Many saints found, sometimes by trial and error, an acceptable balance between public and private, with their social demonstrations providing an index to a mortiﬁed mysticism celebrated out of view. Catherine of Siena beseeched God to keep her stigmata invisible and quietly endured the pain of these unseen wounds. At the same time, however, her invisible wounds and swoons were complemented by saintly displays to which the public had ample access. On August 11, 1370, for example, Catherine wept so loudly in eucharistic ecstasy that her confessor “told her to try to stiﬂe her sobs” so as not to disturb the priests saying mass. In obedience she distanced herself from the altar, but she could not stop chanting (“in a low voice, but loud in spirit”), “I want the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Such scenes were publicly “witnessed on a thousand occasions” and were critical in forging awareness of Catherine’s special calling. Legend and hagiography helped along the cause with narrative embellishments that made the witnessed events more sensational: “Her body was sometimes raised up off the ground along with her spirit.”37 These displays, actual and textual, were accepted by the Church because they were heavily counterbalanced by behavior deemed indicative of authentic piety, including obedience, humility, and mortiﬁcation. When the balance tipped instead with the weight of spectacles, the beatas tended to be regarded as false. Rose of Lima’s public relations were similarly managed through complex interactions of humility, privacy, afﬁrmation through negation, and leaked secrets. The spectacle of mortiﬁcation was meticulously hidden from view, but at the same time traces were sufﬁciently visible to allow public imagination to sketch in—with considerable hyperbolic license—an image of the whole. God

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miraculously disguised the corporal consequences of Rose’s mortiﬁcations, but he also acted on the contrary to disclose the sanctity that remained hidden. In church, for example, Rose emitted an otherworldly luminescence in anticipation of the eucharist, and by this sign God (or the hagiographers) wished to make public the strength and passion of “the ﬂame that burned inside Rose’s chest.”38 To conceal and reveal, to deny and suggest, provided a basis for the elaborations and generation of legends that enhanced a beata’s saintly reputation while at once reserving her humility. The secret of Rose’s mysticism and mortiﬁcations was also leaked by nonmiraculous means. Members of her family heard the “uproar of her scourgings” on a regular basis, and in Gonzalo de la Maza’s house Rose “could not contain her screams” when overwhelmed by divine love, often in the presence or proximity of others. On one noteworthy occasion Rose ﬂagellated herself in private as always, but with such loud screams that “she was heard from afar.” This episode occurred when rumors of imminent apocalyptic doom were terrorizing Lima and intercession was necessary to placate God’s wrath. The screams, an invisible but audible spectacle, provided the basis for public devotion to Rose: her penance was the vicarious atonement that would save the city. Rose’s private agony had a public function. The laments from her deathbed were also heard “very far away,” announcing that this woman of “known sanctity” was passing to a new realm of intercession.39 Beata mysticism was thus an individual but socially interdependent experience. It relied on the collective ﬁrst to provide the context in which it was meaningful and then to acknowledge, accept, laud, and make socially beneﬁcial the mystic’s union with God. The public was the guarantor of mysticism as much as God was. Beata mysticism uniﬁed divinity and polity, Christ and creation, corporal and mystical body. Because audience was integral to the experience itself, the issue of contention shifted from public access to the means by which the beata’s mysticism was made visible. After frustrated attempts at communication, Rose kept much to herself until the last ﬁve years of her life, when through Gonzalo de la Maza she was integrated into a community that was receptive to the free expression of her mysticism. De la Maza and Uza´tegui themselves became her primary promoters, protecting her silence by speaking for her. They were ﬁrsthand witnesses of Rose’s experiences in their own home and, as respected and reliable third parties, they disseminated the wonders of Rose’s sanctity among Lima’s civil and religious elite. Uza´tegui was particularly important, because as Rose’s surrogate mother and conﬁdant she could question Rose on sensitive matters and then relay the wondrous secrets within and beyond the inner circle of admirers. Decisive also were Rose’s acquaintance with Juan del Castillo, who became her interlocutor in mystical discussion, and her spiritual direction by Jesuits, who, unlike her Dominican confessors, encouraged her mysticism and provided an open forum for its expression.40 By virtue of the mandatory spiritual directors—whatever their order—to whom she reported, a beata had a front-row, well-connected audience that provided for the initial broadcast of her extraordinary accomplishments.

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An intimate inner circle of direct supporters thereby provided a locus from which the good news radiated outward. Like many emerging saints, Rose indirectly communicated to her growing public through conﬁdants who discretely spread a story that, authorized now by their status and prestige, was readily enhanced by rumor and legend. She kept silent and tended to the business of her private asceticism and intimacy with God, and they promoted the public image of her holiness. She denied her sanctity, insisting on her sinful unworthiness, and they inverted and propagated that perception as an index of heroic humility and her true saintly character. A confessor-hagiographer (such as Pedro de Loayza was to Rose) or even a confessor was not totally abnegate in promoting a beata under his tutelage, because through her famed sanctity he “received a certain amount of derivative glory himself.”41 This fallout of prestige was particularly apparent in confessors who claimed that a “new” Catherine of Siena or Teresa of Avila had been fostered under their direction. A similar secondary gain accrued to de la Maza and Uza´tegui, whose status and notoriety in Lima were enhanced by having the “saint” living under their roof. Sharing in Rose’s piety, along with holding spiritual tertulias in their home, were integral aspects of their Catholic culture. They manifested their deep Catholicism as part of their social identity and responsibility as creole nobility, and in doing so they enjoyed a certain reciprocal prestige among peers. Devotion to Rose was also promoted unwittingly by her mother, who sought quite to the contrary to end the penitential mysticism. The mother, as the only active player who had ﬁrsthand access to Rose’s early exercises, often called them to the attention of her confessors in an effort to have them forbidden or moderated. She thus announced Rose’s mortiﬁcation by denouncing it, inspiring the friars’ admiration of Rose and providing for circulation of Rose’s feats throughout the monastery. The result was often the opposite of the one anticipated by the mother: rather than forbidding Rose’s mortiﬁcation, the confessors pleaded Rose’s cause before her mother, encouraging the mother to acquiesce to the demands of Rose’s special calling.42 The excesses of the Lima beatas regarded as fraudulent also contributed to enhancing public devotion of Rose, for they helped foster her image of true sanctity against which the counterfeits could be measured. A hierarchy of beatas, with Rose at the top, emerged during the last years of Rose’s life and then solidiﬁed after her death. When Luisa Melgarejo saw Rose, for example, she fell to her knees. Melgarejo meditated on Rose’s footprints, kissed them, and, if she had occasion to write to Rose, she did so likewise on her knees. The theatrics of Melgarejo and other beatas ultimately served their own demise while enhancing the sanctity that Rose’s decorum guarded in reserve. Melgarejo went into a dramatic, four-hour trance beside Rose’s deathbed, and during her ravings, which were transcribed and used in the canonization proceedings, she announced Rose’s glory in heaven. Visions of Rose in heaven were likewise announced by Marı´a Antonia and Juan del Castillo. One visionary reported that numerous “angelic spirits” surrounded the bed where Rose died and “made merriment and music” around her cofﬁn; another saw Rose coronated by the

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Virgin, and “the effects of this last vision were so public and unique, that people knowledgeable in matters of the spirit took it as certain and true. And everyone else.”43 (2) Religious and Civil Support. The strong religious and civil support that Rose of Lima enjoyed during the last years of her life and after her death were decisive in her expeditious rise to the altars. Outstanding among the distinguished and powerful ﬁgures who supported her were the mentioned de la Maza and Uza´tegui. Rose made the acquaintance of the de la Maza family in 1612, when Uza´tegui, having heard of Rose’s sanctity, approached and offered assistance to Rose and her mother in the Jesuit church. De la Maza soon became Rose’s strongest advocate and on many occasions interceded to defend her interests, even in practical matters. He arranged for Rose’s spiritual guidance by such key ﬁgures as Diego Martı´nez, Juan de Lorenzana, and Juan del Castillo, all “intimate friends of his” who frequented his home while Rose was in residence there.44 The recruitment of Lorenzana as Rose’s principal confessor in her last years of her life was particularly signiﬁcant. Lorenzana was a highly respected Dominican, a university professor, a man who was “equally informed and versed in ecclesiastical and political things,” and a prominent afﬁliate of the Peruvian Inquisition.45 Rose also had among her confessors Luis de Bilbao, who was likewise afﬁliated with the Inquisition. In 1625 Bilbao gave the sermon at the auto-da-fe´ that punished some of the beatas who were, like Rose, in the de la Maza circle. The approbation of Rose’s mysticism by Lorenzana and Bilbao provided the strong endorsement of inﬂuential Inquisition ﬁgures who, by a turn of fate or shift in perception, could as well have been strong detractors or adversaries. Their endorsement counterbalanced the reservations of other Dominicans who viewed Rose’s mysticism less favorably, and without it Rose’s destiny may have been precarious. Massive devotion to Rose among the popular classes was thus complemented by strong and activist support from Lima’s civil and religious elite. As a child Rose had had marginal access to nobility through her mother’s domestic school for upper-class children, but Rose gained entrance with status as her notoriety attracted Lima’s aristocracy. With the blessing of civil and ecclesiastical ﬁgures—de la Maza, Lorenzana—Rose became a socially acceptable icon among the nobility, no longer viewed in a servile role or as a cult ﬁgure among the disenfranchised poor. Elite women began to seek an audience with Rose, some by commissioning her needlework and others under the pretext of visiting her mother. Rose also had indirect contact, mediated through her confessor Alonso Vela´squez, with the vicereine herself.46 After her death, Rose’s solid position among the elite was clearly evidenced by those who carried her cofﬁn or paid formal homage to her remains, including the viceroy, the archbishop, all of the orders, and both cabildos. The testimony of de la Maza itemized the names of upper-class citizens and highranking colonial ofﬁcials who attended Rose’s funeral, touched the corpse, “and left happy with pieces of the palm” that they tore off the branch she was holding. The ﬁrst among the many who sought relics was none less than Francisco Verdugo, one of the two Peruvian Inquisitors in ofﬁce at the time.47 The relic-

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seeking elite devotees also began frequenting the house where Rose was born, and there were “so many people and carriages and horses at the door” that passage on the roadway was blocked. When testimony was taken for the processes of canonization, speaking on Rose’s behalf were “prominent employees of the Royal Audiencia, the Santa Cruzada and the milicia, university professors, canons of the metropolitan church, encomenderos of Indians and rich businessmen, all of whom belonged to the upper class.”48 Many female mystics gained access to elite social and political groups, particularly when the message of revelation favored a reigning interest or an oppositional design of dissent. A bride of Christ was a formidable ally, and the reciprocal support extended to her by powerful acquaintances was essential to her recognition and, sometimes, her safety. Some mystics were activists: Catherine of Siena is an outstanding example amid the politics of the Catholic Church’s Great Schism, and, in Spain, the Franciscan nun Marı´a de Jesu´s Agreda informally advised King Philip IV for some twenty years in the midseventeenth century.49 Rose of Lima evidenced nothing of such political ambition, and she objected, sometimes vocally and audaciously, to the materialism, but she nevertheless made peace with upper-class Limen ˜ os and enjoyed the corresponding beneﬁts. These were not material—by choice she slept in a wooden chair while living at the posh de la Maza residence—but socioreligious: unlike her family home, the elite milieu in which she now moved encouraged, valued, supported, and advocated her penitential mysticism. Rose also availed herself of the de la Maza home to die the good, visible death that is prominent in most hagiography as the ﬁnal act in which a saintly life culminates. “Even if I am struck by the illness in my mother’s house,” Rose told Uza´tegui, “I have to come to die in this house,” meaning the Uza´tegui–de la Maza home. Rose moved there two days before she was overtaken by her ﬁnal illness, and she died there the well-staged and well-attended death that, as Hansen put it, “was more worthy of applause than of tears and sobs.”50 Rose’s many confessors—eleven in total; six Dominicans and ﬁve Jesuits— provided a broad base of support but also of security in a sometimes hostile environment. The Council of Trent elevated the sacrament of penance, positioning the clergy squarely between the sinner and salvation, and the confessor of a beata served further as a spiritual director, a guarantor of orthodoxy, and a link to patriarchal hierarchy. Confessors encouraged the eucharistic piety cherished by beatas because it fostered the dependence of their essentially unmediated mysticism on sacerdotal powers and the celebration of mass.51 The beata-confessor relation was not without dangers, however, particularly because its hermeticism and hierarchical structure could lead toward heretical abuses. Inquisitors in Seville in 1575 condemned spiritual advisers who led astray the beatas “lost behind them” and who “[did] not permit them to do anything without their permission, nor [did] they allow them to confess with others.” This domination seemed “the invention of the devil and of vain men who, under the shadow of sanctity and religion, want to be served and obeyed by simple women.” Even more egregious were other “dishonesties and surprises,” sometimes of the amorous sort, that resulted from these intense relations.52

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Rose’s wide range and frequent change of confessors protected her from such errors, gave her the freedom (with de la Maza’s help) to seek confessors more receptive to her severe mortiﬁcation, and provided her with strong political support in two orders. When formal objections against Rose were raised, as they were in 1614, the strength and determination of her political support— civil and ecclesiastical—were decisive in clearing her name, solidifying her saintly image, and, ultimately, assuring her favorable reception at the Vatican. (3) Effective Hagiography. As discussed in chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions,” seventeenth-century narratives advocated Rose of Lima’s canonization in accord with hagiographic conventions and approved European models of female sanctity, notably through representation of Rose as a “new Catherine of Siena,” which was already in evidence in 1617. During her lifetime Rose herself conformed to a saintly prototype but at once was as “new” as the New World in which she emerged. This acceptable newness was enhanced in hagiographic representations of Rose that pursued an exotic American protagonist through a familiar European narrative. Hagiography also elaborated rose and garden tropes to construct Rose of Lima as a symbol of the Catholic Church “transplanted” to the Americas, as discussed in chapter 3, “Miracle of the Rose.” (4) Criollismo. The importance of emerging creole identity in the advocacy of Rose of Lima’s canonization has been stressed in particular by Peruvian historians. Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, for example, argued that “the diligent elevation of Rose of St. Mary to the altars was motivated by the political interest of the creole elite of the viceroyalty, which sought recognition by the supreme hierarchy of the Church in order to consolidate its prestige as a social group.” Highly bureaucratized canonization procedures made candidacy a long and expensive ordeal, and the Creoles in Lima bore the expense because Rose increasingly became “a symbol of the self-identity of the emerging creole ‘republic,’ ” and, again, the “symbol or coronation of emerging creole nationalism.”53 Strong and sometimes hostile rivalry between Spanish and Lima-born Dominicans also made Rose an attractive choice among the latter. Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla argued that “Rose was the saint that the creole Dominicans needed in order to defend the questioned spiritual authority of friars born in Peru and to recuperate the power and prestige that they had lost during the regime of viceroy Toledo.” Another Peruvian scholar, Luis Miguel Glave, stressed Rose as a product of urban, creole Lima as a cultural enclave surrounded by indigenous Peru.54 Spanish and mestizo children were born in Peru beginning in 1533, but the true emergence of a second generation occurred barely twenty years before Rose’s birth, in the 1560s. “That decade saw the ﬁrst mestizo revolts and the ﬁrst Peruvian born members of city councils. It was then that the very word ‘creole,’ as now commonly used, was introduced to Peru, for until that time ‘creole’ had referred only to Negroes, and the Spanish second generation were merely called Spanish like their fathers.”55 During Rose’s lifetime the bankrupt Spanish crown sought ﬁnancial relief through the active sale of New World ofﬁces, which enabled wealthy Peruvians to consolidate and formalize their political position. In the mid-seventeenth century, precisely when Rose’s can-

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onization began to seem viable, the creole cause was gaining the momentum that would culminate ultimately in independence. In the midst of this political contest Rose emerged as a symbol of creole nationalism, a guarantee of its legitimacy, an intercessor its cause, a sanctiﬁcation of its homeland, and a precedent for formal induction of the New World—on its own merits—into Christendom. In 1617, on the opening pages of the ordinary process in the cause for her canonization, Rose is aptly described as a “creole woman of this city.” The identity of the saint and of the creole homeland were together forged through mutual interrelations. As the creole struggle yielded beyond independence to struggles of the republican era, Peruvian nationalism adapted Rose to new agendas of identity and unity. In 1917, during tricentennial celebrations, faith in Rose was posited as an inalienable prerequisite to citizenship: “The people of Peru love their Saint Rose madly,” and therefore, “he who does not love her is not Peruvian.”56 (5) Dominican Advocacy. The progressive bureaucratization and complication of canonization procedures afforded a decided advantage for the candidates of well-established pressure groups, such as the religious orders. Canonization required an advocate in Rome to lobby for the cause of the candidate, and when, in 1657, the Dominicans in Lima decided to actively advocate Rose’s cause for canonization, they charged Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, a Creole and Dominican, with the responsibility. Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a was sent to Rome in the same year as the procurador general of his region, and while in residence there he dedicated himself also to promoting Rose’s beatiﬁcation.57 His tireless and skillful advocacy, particularly in the 1660s, made a decisive contribution to the success of Rose’s cause. Another essential contribution to Dominican advocacy was the timely 1664 publication in Rome of Leonard Hansen’s seminal hagiography, a work that deeply impressed Clement IX (Giulio Rospigliosi, formerly nuncio to Spain) just before he assumed the papacy.58 Precanonization propaganda is one of the primary functions of hagiography, and Hansen’s volume served exceptionally in this regard. During his short, two-and-a-half-year papacy, Clement IX actively expedited Rose’s beatiﬁcation, which he signed on March 12, 1668, at Santa Sabina, and also issued some seven briefs in Rose’s favor. In his will, Clement IX left funds for the construction of a Rose of Lima chapel in the Cathedral of Pistoya, his hometown. While such papal support obviously beneﬁted the candidate, it also afforded a reciprocal prestige to the pope. As Jacinto de Parra understood it, Clemente IX advanced Rose’s cause “in order to make his Pontiﬁcate more plausible and notable.”59 There was signiﬁcant competition among the orders to have their New World candidates canonized, and a “Dominican” explanation served to justify the selection of Rose of Lima as ﬁrst choice. In a December 1667 letter to Dominican priors, the head of the order in Rome observed that the honor of Rose’s imminent beatiﬁcation was appropriate because Dominicans were “the ﬁrst who, preaching the Holy Gospel and Rosary of the Most Holy Virgin, planted in those countries the faith of which this is the ﬁrst fruit.” The same note was sounded in a 1668 letter from Queen Mariana to all churches in her

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kingdom: the Dominicans were “the ﬁrst who in the company of the conquerors of Peru planted in those provinces the Catholic faith with evangelical preaching,” and Rose’s beatiﬁcation was heaven’s reward to the Dominicans “for this service.” The bull of canonization likewise observed that there were a multitude of saints from Asia, Africa, and Europe, but “only America lay hungry and sick” until the Dominicans “entered ﬁrst” into Peru and remedied that lamentable condition. In hagiography, too, God wanted to “reward” the Dominicans “for having been the ﬁrst to evangelize such remote parts of America.”60 There was also a certain consonance between Rose’s emergence in Spanish missionary lands and the foundation of the Dominican order in the early thirteenth century by St. Dominic, a Spaniard, for the express purpose of ﬁghting heresy. When followed to its conclusions, this line of reasoning yielded the conviction that the Dominican mission had made Rose of Lima possible. “Rose sprouted from Dominican Blood,” a 1696 account explained, meaning the spilled blood of missionaries martyred among natives. In reciprocation, the canonization of Rose, a de facto Dominican tertiary (though not indigenous), was a kind of trophy that retroactively recognized the Dominican’s successful evangelization of Peru. Rose became the patron of “the spiritual conquest of America,” doing more for the faith in Peru than “all of the Preachers together.”61 Jacinto de Parra, himself a Dominican, explained that the friars did the actual work in the ﬁeld, but “Rose animated them, gave instruction to the Ministers, called on Heaven to help them,” and therefore it must be Rose “to whom these victories are attributed.”62 A sermon given in 1668 similarly argued that Rose’s good example would facilitate conversion of the Indians “still obstinate in their inﬁdelity,” and a century later that thesis was still being tested in the ﬁeld, sometimes far from Rose’s home. In a 1788 letter an archbishop invoked Rose of Lima, among other saints, in an attempt to convince reluctant Chiriguanos to convert, here implying ambiguously that Rose, proposed as their model for imitation, was indigenous. The Chiriguanos should follow the good example of “Saint Rose of Lima, who was born, like you, in these kingdoms, and professed the Religion of Jesus Christ, the same one that we Spaniards profess.”63 In view of stubborn resistance among indigenous peoples, one panegyrist described evangelization in the tropes of Luke 8—planting but no harvest—to observe that God created Rose, the perfect ﬂower, in compensation for such barrenness. Such beliefs made Rose a secret weapon for imperial designs and inspired support for her canonization. In a 1624 letter, King Philip IV included among the reasons for his endorsement of Rose’s candidacy her “great beneﬁt to the souls of the Natives.” The pope concurred; Rose’s canonization would facilitate “conversion of the inﬁdels” throughout the empire.64 Rose, like Dominic and the Dominican friars, served in the antiheretical struggle for ecumenical Catholicism. One of the tasks of hagiography was to demonstrate that Rose as a “living example” also revitalized the faith of existing, nonindigenous Catholics, attracting them to the Church rather than to unorthodox devotions. Hansen developed the point at length, describing even overcrowding at the confessionals as

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Rose brought wayward Catholics back into the fold.65 Rose “preached from the grave” and ﬁlled in the pews, thereby allaying any lingering suggestions of having led her devotees astray. Queen Mariana was in on the theme in 1668 when she explained to the viceroy the need for ostentatious celebration of Rose’s beatiﬁcation in Lima, “so that with this example its inhabitants will be inspired to imitation.”66 (6) Advocacy of Queen Mariana of Austria. On April 16, 1618, the viceroy of Peru reported to the king of Spain the death of a woman “named Rose of Saint Mary, a beata in the Order of Saint Dominic, a woman commonly held as very exemplary and of extraordinary penitence.” He noted that Rose’s burial was delayed for days due to the massive outpouring of devotion, and that he was relating this information to the king “because this case is so unique.” Based on the testimony and miracles recorded in the apostolic process, on December 18, 1633, Philip IV instructed his ambassador before the Vatican to diligently pursue the cause for canonization, because Rose “was held and esteemed as a person chosen by God to receive his grace in this and in eternal life.”67 Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, the Dominican advocate of Rose’s cause, also received Philip’s approval as he passed through Madrid in 1659, and the king reiterated his support for Rose’s canonization in a subsequent letter to his Vatican ambassador on December 17 of the same year. After Philip IV’s death in 1665 his widow, Mariana (Vienna, 1634, to Madrid, 1696), led the regency for the minor Charles II and kept pressure on the Vatican for successful completion of Rose of Lima’s cause. The bull of beatiﬁcation, like most documents and papal correspondence concerning Rose’s canonization, underscored the importance of royal advocacy: “we are persuaded by the pious desires of the Catholic Monarchs.” Beatiﬁcation was granted “because of the continuous and beseeching pleas of our much loved son of Christ, Carlos Catholic King of Spain, and of our much loved daughter of Christ, Mariana, widowed Queen, his mother.”68 Philip IV was forty-one and Mariana of Austria, his niece, was thirteen at the time of their marriage. When she ﬁrst arrived in Spain, Mariana was “a naı¨ve little girl, vivacious and happy,” but years at court tempered her to the “unsociable, gloomy” character by which she is now better known. By the time her son, Charles II, was three, Mariana was “increasingly more withdrawn” and “did not tolerate ﬁrst the inﬁdelities and then the aging of her husband.” When Philip died she was thirty-one and Charles II was four. Mariana became morosely beata-like, with an extreme devotion to Counter-Reformation saints. Paintings of Mariana by Juan Carren ˜ o de Miranda, Juan Bautista Martı´nez de Mago, and Claudio Coello depict her in the black and white nun’s habit that she wore with a severity of conviction throughout her widowhood. She was “profoundly religious” and “prided herself on an affected piety that was excessive even for a society like that of Spain at the end of the seventeenth century, which was imbued with a strong religious spirit.” Mariana died in 1696 of what appears to have been breast cancer, enduring her atrocious sufferings with Christian fortitude.69 During Philip IV’s reign Mariana, as explained in a document from her

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era, “had nothing to do with governance” or anything else “that would distract her from her pious meditations.”70 She therefore lacked skills as regent and tended to rely on her confessor, the German Jesuit Juan Everard Nithard, for both political and spiritual guidance. Nithard was appointed Mariana’s childhood confessor in Austria and later traveled with her to Spain after her betrothal to Philip IV. After Philip’s death, Nithard became something of a valido, and, among his other deeds, encouraged Mariana’s active advocacy of Rose’s canonization. Mariana appointed him to various high posts, including General Inquisitor, by evading the last will of her husband, which prohibited the participation of foreigners in speciﬁed positions of stature. After Nithard was forced from the court in 1669, he was named an ambassador before the Vatican, and with the assistance of Mariana became a cardinal.71 He died shortly after, in 1671. The principal ambassador of Spain before the Vatican between 1667 and 1671, decisive years in Rose’s beatiﬁcation and canonization, was Antonio Pedro Go´mez Da´vila. Two saints born in Spain—Francisco de Borja and Luis Beltra´n—were canonized simultaneously with Rose in the April 12, 1671, ceremony, and in telling correspondence between Mariana and Go´mez Da´vila the phrase “the three new Spanish saints” references Rose in this company.72 While the Creoles were making ownership claims to Rose as their symbol of independent identity and, ultimately, sovereignty, the court in Madrid made a counterclaim to Rose as inherently and exclusively Spanish. Rival interest groups, each with its respective, mutually incompatible politics, worked separately toward achieving the same goal—canonization—that each perceived in a different manner. For Rose’s cause the net effect of this dual claim by Creoles and Crown was overwhelmingly positive and, perhaps, decisive in her expeditious success. Sermons given in Spain during beatiﬁcation celebrations often sought to establish links between Rose of Lima, peninsular Spain, and monarchy. Most poetically ambitious was a priest in Madrid who expounded at length on a cryptogram that revealed esoteric connections between Charles II (Carlos) and Rose (Rosa). Working with Carlos’s name, for example, he pointed out that by “taking away the C and the L, four letters remain, that say: ROSA.” Rose was embedded within Carlos’s being and kingdom, a true creation of the Hapsburg dynasty. The same mysteries were then explored in relation to Queen Mariana, “her name being composed of two, which are Marı´a y Ana.” The ﬁrst of these, which the queen shared with the Virgin, was pursued along maternal lines because the queen, like the Virgin, had “played the role of Mother of the Peruvian Rose.”73 By these reckonings Rose of Lima was quintessentially Spanish, a spiritual child of empire who was inextricably bound to Carlos by the mysteries of their names and to Mariana as daughter is to mother. (7) Massive Public Devotion. The news of Rose’s death spread rapidly through Lima and thousands of devotees, summoned by nothing other than the “spontaneous will of the community,” arrived for the viewing at the de la Maza residence, for the funeral at the Dominican church, and for the procession between the two. “There were inﬁnite people of all social stations,” Loayza

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wrote, and de la Maza testiﬁed that the people “did not ﬁt in the streets” and “were in the windows and on balconies.”74 Many other witnesses likewise noted that the crowds were “so extraordinary that there has never been anything like it”; that Rose’s funeral brought out “the greatest gathering of people that this witness has ever seen in this city”; and that “there were great crowds of people, and from the windows and roofs of the houses they acclaimed that the said Rose was a saint.”75 Beginning in the earliest documents, including the ﬁrst letters from the Peruvian viceroy to the king and from the king to his ambassador in Rome, the magnitude of public devotion was noted to justify Rose’s worthiness for canonization. Two of the four principle reasons given by the Congregation of Rites in support of Rose’s cause likewise pertained directly to the magnitude and fervor of popular devotion. The primary impetus behind the papal dispensations that accelerated Rose’s canonization was this same sensus ﬁdei, and one friar testiﬁed that if the pope had witnessed Rose’s funeral, with “the innumerable crowds of people,” then “without any more inquiry he would canonize her.”76 Pedro de Loayza adapted that observation as the closing words of the ﬁrst hagiography of Rose of Lima. The breadth and signiﬁcance of popular devotion was also duly registered in subsequent hagiography, including Hansen’s, which underscored and elaborated the vast public demonstrations of devotion. Rose’s popular following, like that of many saints and charismatics even into the present, was attracted primarily by the miracles attributed to her. On the street and in the plazas her miraculous capacities were more attractive than her orthodoxy, her conformity with hagiographic precedents, or her obedience to the Church. Rose’s work as a nurse among the poor and disenfranchised— “equally and without distinctions she served Spaniards, Indians, Negroes, and Mulattos”—provided an early basis for the postmortem association of her sanctity and curative powers. A small image of the Christ child that accompanied her, known as the “medico” or “doctorcito” (doctor or little doctor), further established links between Rose’s nursing, Christ the healer, and otherworldly favors generally.77 Rose’s home was inundated (much to her mother’s dismay) by destitute sick people seeking relief, and the mother later testiﬁed that when Rose died these people were devastated by the loss of their caretaker. Rose’s fame among black and mulatto populations, which constituted the majority in Lima during her lifetime, was also enhanced by her intercession on behalf of slaves, the humbling of herself before slaves, and the presence of slaves at her death. The beneﬁciaries of Rose’s postmortem miracles were almost exclusively poor and were primarily black and mulatto.78 When the masses turned out in droves to attend Rose’s funeral, their purpose was to place themselves in contact with a miraculous power and, ideally, to secure a relic embodying that power that would serve them miraculously in perpetuity. The requests for intercession were then, as they are now, decidedly this-worldy—cures for illness, resolution of economic and family problems, assistance with the difﬁculties of everyday life. A pregnant immigrant to Lima received help from Rose of Lima in the 1980s: “I asked that my

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daughter be light skinned with wavy hair, and she is.” Another woman reported that her ﬂower sales had increased thanks to Rose’s intercession.79 For each individual the miracle serves a speciﬁc need, and for the collective it serves as a principle of cohesion and belonging, a shared experience in the tangible presence of a sacred power closely identiﬁed with the community that congregates around it. This collective, built person by person, hope by hope, constitutes the popular political force that serves de facto to initiate canonization proceedings. The groundswell must be complemented by the aristocratic, clerical, and royal advocacy of Rose’s cause, and popular saintly regard of Rose must be solemnly pondered by the wisdom of the Church, but without this massive, visible, active, passionate, miracle-prone, popular following, Rose’s canonization would have no cause. The lower classes thus unite in unlikely partnership with aristocratic Creoles, with monarchy, and with the Church for a common endeavor that has different meanings, and different politics, for each of these interest groups.

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5 Mysticism as Dissent

The Politics of Canonization Rose died near midnight in Gonzalo de la Maza’s house, and by dawn the next morning “everyone of this city, without being invited or called together,” converged on Rose’s sacred remains. Hansen, following testimonies like those cited in the previous chapter, emphasized the magnitude and demographic diversity of the group, “nobles with plebeians, outsiders and locals, Spaniards and Indians.”1 To accommodate the mobs, the back doors of de la Maza’s home were opened, creating a ﬂow pattern, and the viceregal guard was summoned for crowd control. The masses knelt before the dead Rose, kissed her hands and feet, touched their rosaries to her body, and, mostly, sought relics—a petal from the ﬂowers around her, a piece cut off of her habit. They were there to make contact with the sacred corpse and to take back into their community its miraculous charge. The transport of Rose’s body from de la Maza’s house to the church of Santo Domingo, where the archbishop was waiting to receive it, was ceremonial. Members of the ecclesiastical cabildo carried Rose’s body for the ﬁrst of the eight blocks to the church. This unprecedented honor, generally reserved for high religious ofﬁcials such as the archbishop, established right from the beginning the pattern of privileged exceptions that would characterize most Church policy toward the posthumous Rose of Lima. Also evident from the start were the multiple exceptions and concessions made to accommodate the presence, will, and demands of the massive, potentially dangerous cult that had gathered in devotion to Rose. The original plan was to recite the ritual prayer for the dead on the cor-

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ner of each of the eight blocks en route to the church, but this was modiﬁed because the aggressive, relic-seeking masses were uncontrollable. The friars and the viceregal guard attempting to protect Rose’s corpse “could not pacify the huge crowd” and “could not defend [the corpse] so that they would not touch it and cut off pieces of the habit.” The authorities feared that only “a small part of her corpse” would reach its tomb.2 After just one block, “they took her palm, ﬂowers, and crown” and “they cut off the clothes she was wearing.” The Dominicans, designated to carry Rose’s body for the second block, decided not to stop for the ritual prayer, and during her carriage by friars of other orders across the subsequent blocks, and by the town council (cabildo) across the last, the prayer was dutifully and hastily recited at the corners, but without lowering the body from the shoulders of those carrying it, “fearing that they would tear the said body to pieces for relics.”3 In its undisciplined manner, popular devotion thus sought access to and possession of its immediate, tangible, sacred object, thereby forcing dispensation of established Church protocol and modiﬁcation of the authorities’ plans. When Rose’s corpse arrived at the church, Archbishop Bartolome´ Lobo Guerrero knelt down and kissed “the Saint.” The authorities had intended to celebrate the funeral rites, but the unruly crowds again forced a change in plan to protect the corpse from dismemberment. Lobo Guerrero ordered removal of Rose’s remains to the safe conﬁnes of the Dominican monastery. The order was carried out “with great difﬁculty,” the friars locked the monastery door behind them, and the reluctant crowds were ushered from the church.4 The corpse was secured in the novitiates’ oratory, where the archbishop and “the nobility and Lima’s ﬁnest” enjoyed a private viewing. “They touched her hands and kissed her clothing and touched her rosaries, and some asked for holy relics.”5 The emerging contest for access and ownership was thus inaugurated by this intimate viewing, during which the elite, free now of the frenzied, locked-out popular devotees, manifested its cultured devotion.6 Use of the sacred body by the elite and the masses was similar, however, as both sought contact and relics—one with civility and the other, conditioned in part by its numbers, with greater passion but less decorum. Rose’s corpse was guarded for the night in the oratory, under lock and key, but even this interior conﬁne proved to be unsafe because the monastery’s friars cut relics from Rose’s habit. The following morning the body was returned from the monastery to the church and was situated on a high platform, out of reach, for protection. Already at dawn the growing mobs “were pounding down the door of the said church.” When the doors were opened, “a multitude of people rushed in, pushing and shoving one another, and ﬁlled the whole church.” Hansen continued to observe that “the force and threats of the soldiers were useless to impose order on so many people.” It was impossible to celebrate the funeral service because “the church resonated with continual shouting” that declared Rose a saint, and “one could not hear the singing of the Friars who were in the chorus, nor could they hear or respond to the Priest and ministers who were on the altar.” The authorities attempted to regain control “but it was in vain” because “the shouting of the people prevailed.” Thus the mass went unheeded: “Almost

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no one could hear it.”7 The liturgy had been shouted down by popular devotion to Rose, and the authorities were incapable of restoring order. Yet more challenging was the crowd’s continued quest for corporal relics. Despite its secure location, the body was stormed so aggressively by hoards of devotees that “neither the many friars who were guarding it nor the Viceroy’s squadron of halberdiers was sufﬁcient to defend it.” The relic seekers stole ﬂowers, pulled out hair, and cut off pieces of her habit: “It was necessary to dress and re-dress Rose six times before her burial.”8 Body parts were particularly coveted, and many devotees attempted to “cut up the cadaver and take pieces as precious relics.” Someone managed to cut off a ﬁnger, either “with a knife or with their teeth.” The acquisition of relics took precedence over respect for the corpse, and, as Hansen reiterated, the crowd would have fragmented the corpse for relics had their efforts not been impeded. Given this “fear that they would cut the said body to pieces for relics” and fearing also a riot, Pedro de Valencia, the prelate, ordered that the burial again be postponed, “and much violence and force was needed” to empty the church.9 The people were forced out at midday, and the church doors were locked. On that same afternoon of August 25, 1617, Rose was buried secretly within the conﬁnes of the Dominican monastery to avoid the possible destruction of her corpse. When the crowds returned and realized that they had been deceived, and that their sacred object had been conﬁscated, they broke down the door between the church and the monastery in order to gain access to Rose’s tomb. Their blatant disregard for authority thereby graduated to an attack against the institutionalized Church as they challenged the counterclaim to Rose’s sacred remains. The authorities conceded under pressure to grant access to the tomb, and the masses, having no other relic, took handfuls of the dirt that separated them from the corpse. The dirt replenished itself miraculously.10 When the funeral rites were held on September 4 (the feast day of St. Rose of Viterbo), Rose was already famous throughout colonized Peru: “Her virtues were celebrated everywhere with applause and public displays of joy.” With the corpse safely stowed and the relic-hunting frenzy calmed, Lima now had its moment of devotion in accord with the ceremonial, liturgical procedures of the Church. The mass was attended by the viceroy and other civil ofﬁcials, the archbishop, the religious and civil cabildos, and the public. Marı´a de Uza´tegui testiﬁed that “no lady or gentlemen of this city was absent” and that there was “the greatest gathering of people that she had ever seen,” greater even then the rites “for kings and viceroys.”11 The comparison is telling: Rose, though of humble origins, had greater spontaneous attraction than the highest dignitaries of imperial government. Similarly suggestive connections between Rose and royalty became more prominent as Rose’s claim to sainthood progressed toward formal recognition. When the birth of the prince Balta´zar Carlos was celebrated in Lima in 1630– 1631, paintings of Rose of Lima and of Francisco Solano adorned the palace of the viceroy alongside portraits of the king and queen of Spain. This precocious linking of Rose with royal symbols evolved ultimately toward a reciprocal hom-

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age—indeed, a hierarchical inversion—that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. During celebration of Rose’s beatiﬁcation in Lima, “the portraits of monarchs paying homage to Rose” were prominently displayed.12 Visits to Rose’s tomb increased in tandem with the proliferation of miracles, and Church ofﬁcials gradually recognized the need to situate Rose’s remains at a more accessible site that could accommodate the popular demand. The informal cult thus again exerted a pressure that had decisive inﬂuence on Church policy. Lobo Guerrero, who earlier had been the Inquisitor in Mexico, ordered the transfer of Rose’s remains from their tomb in the Dominican monastery to a more public and prestigious new location beside the main altar in the Dominican church. Rose of Lima’s remains were moved to the church two years after her death, on March 18, 1619, with the archbishop himself among those who carried the cofﬁn during a solemn procession. Lobo Guerrero duly noted as rationale for the move the “public and universal acclaim, in Lima as in the entire kingdom of Peru,” of Rose as a saint.13 When the cofﬁn arrived from the monastery at the door of the church, the old problems immediately reemerged. The gleeful mob burst into shouts, applause, pleas, and sobs that drowned out the holy song accompanying the transfer. When the mass began, it, too, was ignored as the disorderly crowds sought only to touch their rosaries and images against Rose’s tomb. The pomp of the ceremony and the ofﬁcial word of God were of no interest to them, but despite their disregard for formal liturgy and dogma, Rose of Lima was honored with a saint-like entombment, beside the main altar of the church, precisely because their devotion, insistence, volatility, and number made it necessary. The policies toward beata religiosity in Lima became more intolerant shortly after Rose’s precocious rise to the altar. The intense repression of the early 1620s culminated in the 1625 auto-da-fe´ that punished some six beatas. Rose of Lima was already dead, but the Inquisition nevertheless intervened to regulate the postmortem reception and inﬂuence of her mysticism. The ﬁrst repressive incident occurred in 1622, ﬁve years after Rose’s death, when the Inquisition conﬁscated Rose’s papers, presumed to include her spiritual notebooks, as it opened a case against her friend Luisa Melgarejo.14 Matters got worse for Lima beatas a year later. The Inquisitor responsible for the repression, Andre´s Juan Gaita´n, expressed intolerance with “these women deceived in their visions and raptures” and hoped that the autos-da-fe´ would serve to curtail “the growing damage caused by the faked sanctity of these women, who we can almost call alumbradas.”15 The local Church’s acceptance of Rose of Lima had provided an approved prototype of beata religiosity, and, for better or worse, a number of young women sought to follow Rose’s example in their manner. When some of these beatas were called before the Inquisition they cited Rose of Lima as their model “to dignify their actions,” as one observer expressed it. Rather than strengthen their defense as they intended, however, this use in vain of Rose’s name tended, instead, to negatively affect her reputation: “As the sin of these others was discovered, something of the esteem for the said Rose was diminished.”16

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The association of Rose with these censured beatas precipitated Gaita´n’s decisive repression of her informal cult. Gaita´n ordered that Rose’s remaining papers, clothes, and relics be conﬁscated and that her corpse be removed—in the words of the Dominicans who complied with the order—from the “honoriﬁc tomb that was made in the Church with the permission of the Archbishop.”17 Luis de Bilbao—a caliﬁcador of the Inquisition, Rose’s former confessor, and the priest who gave the sermon when Rose’s body was ﬁrst moved to the altar tomb in 1619—was assigned the unpleasant task of gathering these “papers and pieces of her habits, bones and other things relating to her person” that were held and venerated in the Dominican monastery. Rose’s tomb was removed from the privileged altarside location that was well beyond her formal status (beatiﬁcation proceedings had not yet even been initiated) and relocated further from the main altar in the same church’s chapel of Catherine of Siena.18 Also precipitating the move of Rose’s tomb, in addition to her association with censured beatas, was the irreverent behavior of her devotees. The privileged location of the altarside tomb redoubled Rose’s saintly regard and consequently stimulated ever greater devotion, but problems arose because the multitudes worshiping Rose did not manifest proper reverence before the church’s main altar. In Hansen’s words, “it was necessary to take measures for observation of the reverence owed to the sacrosanct tabernacle of the Eucharist, which was on the main altar, and so that those who attended only to pray at the tomb of the virgin [Rose] did not turn their back to the altar.”19 Rose’s cult disturbed the celebration of mass, as earlier it had disturbed the funeral liturgy, without regard or respect for the priests and their rituals. The message that this popular devotion clearly emitted was that Rose of Lima had brought the multitudes into the church, but not for the purpose of worshiping the institutionalized God. The cult of saints—not to mention uncanonized saints—is proper in Catholicism only insofar as it serves as an avenue of intercession in a faith that must remain Christocentric. As a folk saint, in the Church but not of it, Rose rivaled monotheism. The move of Rose’s tomb away from the main altar was a ﬁrst step in recuperating deference, decorum, and the proper hierarchy of orthodox devotion. It brought “less impediment of divine ofﬁces” and less explicit competition between devotion to Rose and formal church services.20 In the broader context of the Inquisition’s oppression of beatas, the removal of Rose’s remains from the altarside tomb represented a signiﬁcant early effort to control and regulate uncloistered religiosity, to curtail the popular cult accumulated by a mystical fringe, and to enforce adherence of both mystic and cult to the dogma and protocol of the Church. Substantial changes in Vatican policy also affected Rose’s posthumous destiny. Canonizations were suspended in 1523 as a result of the Protestant Reformation, with a hiatus of sixty-ﬁve years before they were resumed. It was not until 1588, two years after Rose’s birth and twenty-ﬁve years after the conclusion of the Council of Trent, that canonization was again permitted, now under the authority of the Congregation of Sacred Rites. Post-tridentine revival of canonization brought tighter control of relics, popular devotion, imagery, hag-

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iography, and use of the title “saint.” In late 1602 and early 1603, Pope Clement VIII initiated deliberations on the informal cults of uncanonized saints, and Pope Paul V again raised the matter on several occasions. The governing premise behind these emerging policies was summarized in a 1610 treatise: “The authority to canonise saints belongs to the Roman pontiff alone.”21 Nothing was ﬁnalized until 1625, when Pope Urban VIII issued the two decrees initiating the process that culminated in the July 5, 1634, brief Caelestis Hierusalem Cive. In this document, “the pope forbade in the strictest possible terms any form of public veneration of persons who had not been canonized or beatiﬁed by the Holy See and also prohibited the publication of books recording the miracles and revelations of such persons unless they had been examined and approved by the ordinary and sent by him to the apostolic see.”22 Urban’s apostolic constitutions also required a ﬁfty-year waiting period before a cause for beatiﬁcation could be considered. Another canonization hiatus resulted: there were none between 1629 and 1658. Application of Urban’s ambitious reforms tended to be sporadic and local, and a copy of the 1634 apostolic constitutions never even reached Lima. In the New World as in Europe, popular devotion to uncanonized saints tended to continue, often with local church participation and endorsement. In 1639, however, Urban VIII’s 1634 constitutions were sent to the New World by the Dominican order in Rome, and the Dominicans in Lima were instructed to comply. Rose of Lima’s destiny was directly affected by this compliance. Amid signiﬁcant public protest, the Dominicans removed the paraphernalia of popular devotion that covered Rose’s tomb and then, more drastically, secretly removed Rose’s remains from the church and returned them to their original tomb in the monastery. The Lima Church’s collusion or acquiescence in premature cult devotion to Rose thus ceased abruptly as its allegiance shifted from local interests to institutional compliance.23 That shift, following the earlier compliance with the Inquisition, marked the completion of a sequential demotion: Rose was ﬁrst distanced from the main altar and then removed from the church completely. The lack of access to Rose’s sacred remains was “intolerable for the whole city.” Agitated mobs “full of anger” again directed their wrath toward the Church that had deprived them of their object of devotion, “screaming threats to the monastery.” The authorities attempted to persuade the “furious” community that it was in Rose’s best interest to obey the papal decrees, but informal devotion to Rose and, with it, “inﬁnite miracles” continued, because in the hearts and minds of devotees Rose’s canonization was a formality that would merely conﬁrm their conviction of her sanctity.24 If the church seemed emptier after Rose’s removal, it was because the crowds that had converged there dispersed for lack of the folk saint who had the miraculous power to attract them. The course traversed by Rose’s corpse maps her early rise and fall: from the monastery to the altar, from the altar to a secondary chapel, and from the chapel back to the monastery. Through these removals and the corresponding measures of cult repression, the Church sought not to demean Rose of Lima but to postpone popular devotion until she could be formally incorporated into

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the Catholic canon. Before such canonization Rose represented a rival demigod, distracting Catholics from the orthodox doctrine and practice of the true faith; afterward, Rose would beneﬁt the greater glory of Rome’s universal vicariate as an exemplary Catholic, a magnetic attraction, a channel of intercession to monotheistic deity, and an agent of cohesion rather than fragmentation. Rapid and exceptional measures were taken to incorporate Rose of Lima into the hierarchical structures of the Church.25 What is striking about these procedures is the systematic means by which the Church dispensed with its papally mandated laws in order to more quickly canonize Rose of Lima. At the same time that Rose’s informal cult was being oppressed, religious and civil authorities in the New World and the Old were working expeditiously to formally induct Rose of Lima into the canon. In the same year as her death the Dominicans, with broad religious and civil support, requested of Archbishop Lobo Guerrero that formal procedures toward canonization be initiated. The ordinary process was opened on September 1, 1617, and concluded on April 7, 1618. Some seventy-ﬁve witnesses testiﬁed.26 The documents were submitted to the Vatican and were reinforced by letters of support from the viceroy and the most important religious and civil bodies in Lima. King Philip IV likewise wrote to the pope and instructed his ambassadors in the Roman court to advocate the cause. On May 1, 1625, the Congregation of Rites determined that Rose’s reputation of sanctity was sufﬁcient to open her cause for canonization. The Congregation’s secretary at the time was Giulio Rospigliosi, later to become the pope—Clement IX—who beatiﬁed Rose of Lima. Testimonies for the apostolic process were taken between May 1630 and May 1632; some 183 witnesses were heard. A second impressive ﬂurry of letters advocating canonization followed, primarily in the early 1630s, from the religious orders, church ofﬁcials, and key civic institutions. Rose’s cause was presented to the Congregation of Rites on July 21, 1634, just a few weeks after Urban VIII mandated that the cause of a recently deceased candidate must be held for ﬁfty years before consideration.27 The rapid progress made before 1634 was thus abruptly halted, and Rose’s cause was destined for a delay until 1667. Active political and religious advocacy—notably by Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, the king, and the royal ambassadors to the Vatican—was successful in shortening this period of dormancy. On September 25, 1663, the Congregation of Rites requested of Pope Alexander VII that Rose of Lima’s cause for canonization be permitted to continue. Outstanding among the reasons cited was Rose’s growing “reputation of sanctity” along with the “veneration and devotion” and “devote desires” of her massive following. In its petition the Congregation of Rites cited evidence of substantial support in three letters from the king and nine from religious orders and “illustrious men” in Lima, among several others. It also duly noted that Rose’s cause had been suspended in compliance with Urban VIII’s constitutions, but requested exceptionally that the cause be reopened despite these recently adopted regulations.28 Pope Alexander VII (who, like Catherine, was from Siena), responded positively, mandating in September 1664 that the Church would “continue, activate, discuss, and conclude” Rose’s cause for canonization. The document

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from the Congregation of Rites to the authorities in Lima explained that Alexander VII, “favorably inclined to the requests and fervent entreaties” of the king’s ambassador, would allow Rose’s cause to continue, notwithstanding “that since her death . . . ﬁfty years have not passed, according to the norm prescribed by the Decrees of Urban VIII.” Three years were lacking at the time, but the effort to resume the cause had been in motion since 1657 and was endorsed by the king in 1659.29 Thus by royal, viceregal, and Dominican request the pope dispensed with recently promulgated Vatican policy in order to expedite Rose of Lima’s canonization, citing as rationale the magnitude and will of public devotion. Alexander VII died during the process of considering and approving miracles—a requirement of beatiﬁcation and canonization—and was succeeded in 1667 by Clement IX. Clement permitted that the cause continue, conceding to repeated requests from Queen Mariana (Philip IV had died). By unanimous vote on December 10, 1667, the Congregation of Rites recommended the beatiﬁcation of Rose of Lima. Clement IX beatiﬁed Rose on February 12, 1668, and the beatiﬁcation was formally celebrated on April 15 of the same year. In a March 9, 1668, letter to the viceroy of Peru, Queen Mariana reported that her ambassador to Rome, “carrying out my orders to solicit from His Holiness the beatiﬁcation of Mother Rose of St. Mary,” had successfully completed his mission.30 The news of Rose’s beatiﬁcation arrived in Lima on January 18, 1669. If earlier Rose’s remains had been removed from the church in compliance with papal decrees, now the bull of beatiﬁcation mandated that “her body and relics be exhibited for public veneration by the faithful.”31 On August 21, 1669, Rose’s remains were ceremoniously returned to the church and cult from which they had been secretly removed some thirty years earlier. The era of cult repression thus ended and was replaced by the about-face of extraordinary measures to usher Rose of Lima through the ﬁnal stages of canonization. Early efforts to recognize Rose as patron of Lima began in 1630, she was referenced as such in a 1659 report from Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a to the head of the Dominican order, and the cabildo in Lima endeavored to formalize this status in 1669. The viceroy, Conde de Lemos, approved, but the archbishop blocked the effort, citing the regulations of Urban VIII, which required canonization prior to patronage.32 The problem was resolved unexpectedly from above through Queen Mariana’s independent efforts to have Rose named patron of Peru. Moved by “the personal friendship that united him to the Monarchs of Spain” and by “the great royal services that these same have done for the Catholic Church,” Clement IX granted the patronage despite the prohibition, continuing the pattern of dispensations. The papal brief opened with the customary acknowledgment of concession to royal will: “We gladly oblige the desires of the Catholic Monarchs” noting that “the King Carlos and the Queen Marian strongly desire that the same Beata Rose be chosen and declared as principal Patron of the city of Lima or of Kings and of the entire kingdom of Peru.”33 Clement acknowledged that Urban’s apostolic constitutions “prohibit the said election as principal Patrons of Beatos still not canonized” and that

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“the necessary requirements are lacking for said election to be valid,” but he nevertheless decided “to acquiesce to the pious pleas and repeated requests that on this matter have been humbly made to us by the said King and Queen, Charles and Mariana.” Rose was named patron of Lima and Peru on January 2, 1669, in order to “facilitate her cult and veneration among a people who desire to honor her more each day, with true devotion both interior and public.”34 This regal and papal initiative to facilitate cult devotion is particularly suggestive in contrast with the earlier oppression, ﬁrst through Inquisition interventions and then in obedience to Urban VIII’s constitutions. Mariana was still not satisﬁed, however, and following the death of Clement IX she appealed to his successor, Clement X, to broaden Rose’s patronage to include all Spanish colonial possessions in the Americas and Asia. In a brief dated August 11, 1670—less than four months after Clement X assumed the papacy—Rose’s patronage was expanded as requested, again in violation of the apostolic constitutions.35 Three successive popes—Alexander and the two Clements—thus dispensed with papally mandated procedures in order to accelerate Rose of Lima’s cause. Rose, who lived between 1586 and 1617, was canonized by Clement X on April 12, 1671. The dates of the two Spanish saints who were canonized simultaneously with Rose—Francisco de Borja (1510–1572) and San Luis Beltra´n (1526–1581)—suggest the speed with which Rose was expedited through the process. The rapidity of her canonization in 1671 is yet more dramatic in contrast with the other contemporaneous candidates from Lima, whose causes were characterized more by inertia than expedition: Toribio de Mogrovejo (1538–1606; beatiﬁed 1679) and Francisco Solano (1549–1610; beatiﬁed 1675) were both canonized in 1726; Martı´n de Porres (1579–1639; beatiﬁed 1837) was canonized in 1962; and Juan Macı´as (1585–1645; beatiﬁed 1813) was canonized in 1975.

Sublime Subversions The Council of Trent encouraged veneration of saints as a means to propagate Catholicism, but “the long-range tendency of the Counter Reformation church was toward tighter control of the popular cult. Whereas Protestants came to place emphasis on the individual’s relation to God, the Catholic church assumed for itself the role of intermediary, allowing much less leeway for indiscriminate dependence upon supernatural folk heroes.” This tendency culminated in the early seventeenth century, when Pope Urban VIII’s constitutions formalized “the church’s drive against spontaneous and autonomous manifestations of lay piety,” in part because individuals perceived to be saints in popular veneration “challenged the clerical hierarchy on several fronts.” Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell concluded that the saints’ “very heroism was a standing reproach to the human frailties of the clergy, whether of the priest sorely tempted by the ﬂesh or of the bishop who lived in ostentatious splendor. The saints’ display of supernatural power, so direct and efﬁcacious, often over-

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shadowed the more remote and mysterious priestly miracle of the Blessed Sacrament. Saints’ cults could divide as well as unify the body of Christ.” Because unauthorized cults had often served as agents of fragmentation and localization, the constitutions of Urban VIII endeavored that saints would become “symbols of uniﬁcation.”36 Another scholar, Steven Ozment, pursued the latent subversive potential of sanctity more speciﬁcally into mysticism. Ozment argued that “medieval mysticism was a reﬁned challenge, always in theory if not in daily practice, to the regular, normative way of religious salvation.” Mysticism thrived on the exceptional, on God’s freedom to communicate directly with chosen individuals and to manifest his will and his word more forcefully through mystical union than through all the erudition and ceremony of even the most holy institution. In the perspective of Catholic bureaucracy it was profoundly disconcerting that “God had spoken more authoritatively through persecuted prophets, ragged ascetics, and even a braying ass than through the religious authorities who lay claim to his truth.” Even young girls without formal preparation—girls like Rose of Lima—could rise to a perfection “above popes and kings, beyond sacraments and laws, immune to wordly praise and condemnation.” Ozment concluded that “the mystical enterprise is transrational and transinstitutional. And because it is such, it bears a potential anti-intellectual and anti-institutional stance, which can be adopted for the critical purposes of dissent, reform, and even revolution.”37 Christ was executed for sedition, the ﬁrst Christians to become saints were martyred as dissidents, the ascetic movement in the Egyptian desert rejected social norms and values, and Christian activism—from the Jesuit reductions to liberation theology—was subversive or regarded so across the centuries. Mysticism, even when its practices, visions, and prophesies were not intentionally subversive, implicitly deﬁed the institution and its clergy by appealing to the superior power of the Bridegroom. The nuns of Helfta confessed their sins directly to Christ, a medieval Dominican nun took communion from his hand, Angela of Foligno challenged the clergy’s power to judge the sins of fellow humans, Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi received a visionary plan for conventual reform, and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque used visions politically to threaten institutions and hierarchies.38 It is in this context that one can best understand the paradox of active oppression of Rose of Lima’s informal cult, accompanied by simultaneous efforts to expedite her canonization. Through her penitential mysticism and its interpretation by her culture, Rose made viable an extra-institutional avenue to sacred power that attracted a massive following. Most devastating to the sacramental, sacerdotal Church was Rose’s position “beside the authorized institution but outside it and in what authorizes that institution, i.e., the Word of God.” Rose founded her religious claim in the Catholic deity, but through an intimacy with Christ—her Bridegroom—beyond that enjoyed by the clergy she implicitly challenged the efﬁcacy of Church intercession. Simply by remaining faithful to her mortiﬁed, mystical Catholicism, without any heterodox or political intentions, Rose threatened sacrosanct hierarchical structures, vi-

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olated the norms of protocol and social deference, rearranged religious priorities, and, along with her massive following, resisted institutional attempts at oppression. No overt act of deﬁance was necessary to manifest the inherent subversion of her agenda and to underscore the precariousness of the monopoly on divinity claimed by the Church. Her mysticism was ample, innocent, and ambiguous manifestation enough.39 Popes, bishops, nuns, and priests are products of bureaucracy, whereas mystics emerge outside of bureaucracy, without authorization, often in periods of institutional crisis or degeneration. Insofar as they are closest to God and furthest from the institution, they are symptoms of a Church not fulﬁlling its mission. Mysticism could become a “potent weapon” of dissent or reform “when the essence of Christian truth, which is love and union with God, became lost in the penultimate pursuits of speculative theologians and the boring routine of insensate clerics.” The loving vitality of mystical union challenged the wooden redundancy of the liturgy. In a religious environment in which ceremonial Catholicism often prevailed over personal devotion, Rose manifested a perfect “disdain of the world with a singular abnegation and renunciation of all its pomp and vanities.”40 Her severe asceticism, like that of the Desert Fathers whom she admired, was an implied negative commentary on the well-fed, ritual, socially inclined Catholicism of the majority. Rose made explicit commentaries—including one disparaging the viceregal palace—regarding the impossibility of true religious expression “among profane pomp” and worldly affairs. She also admonished friars who wasted time on “metaphysical disputes” that “consist of useless distinctions of terms” rather than venturing out from their comfortable environs to save indigenous souls.41 Rose’s penitential agony and mystical union established an urgent standard of authenticity against which theological pondering, ceremonial drama, and parlor Catholicism were necessarily paled. As an anti-institutional Catholic she succeed through anti-accomplishments (withdrawal, asceticism, selfdestruction) that attracted a following precisely because they challenged from within the Church a dominant but in some ways unconvincing or unfulﬁlling way of being Christian. Her immediate and intimate relation with Christ contrasted starkly with the institution’s abstract God, and this more tangible religious experience was generalized for the public through a proliferation of miracles attributed to her intercession. Rose offered a God that belonged to her people, a God who was wedded to them through her. The result was a massive cult that challenged orthodoxy, was difﬁcult to control, and participated in a popular Christianity in which dogma, sacraments, and clergy were devalued or obsolete. Rose’s competing claim to deity emerged within a rigidly hierarchical system that concentrated power in the symbolic ﬁgures of pope and king, both of whom reigned by divine right. Monarchy and papacy delegated absolute powers that ﬁltered down through a baroque bureaucracy designed, in part, precisely to stratify, fragment, and distribute power in order to prevent its usurpation by unauthorized claims. Power accruing to Rose of Lima from the masses of her informal cult, power surging from the bottom up, ran directly counter to

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this design of downward ﬂow through bureaucratic hierarchy. Rose’s power, like that of a revolutionary hero, accumulated without authorization among disenfranchised classes in deﬁance of institutional channels. Her devotees, not bound by the protocols that restricted her behavior, made manifest the inherent danger that her quietism held in reserve. This threat was then redoubled because Rose, unlike the revolutionary hero, had also acquired the support of the very civil and religious authorities that were being subverted. Situated between God and the masses, at once in and parallel to the institutionalized Church, Rose’s union with Christ bypassed all hierarchy to provide her devotees an alternative and more direct route to divinity. By freeing Catholicism from its bureaucratic encumbrances and restrictions, Rose channeled divine graces to the masses more immediately, tangibly, generously, and inexpensively than could the institutionalized Church. The royal initiative and papal compliance that expedited canonization indicate a cooperative effort to formalize Rose of Lima’s sanctity and to thereby reintegrate her wayward devotees into the ﬂock that has only one shepherd. Beatiﬁcation, canonization, and patronage in this perspective indicate the Catholic Church’s cooptation of a competing claim to deity by incorporating the informal saint and her cult into the authorized structures of church and state. I refer here to consequences rather than intentions. The Church endeavored not to eliminate an adversary but to honor and formalize the status of a mystic; by doing so it eliminated an adversary. Having failed to oppress an unauthorized devotion, the Church appropriated its object with rites. Canonization transferred the symbolic ownership of Rose from the popular classes to imperial institutions. Henceforth devotion to Rose was devotion also to the Church. In a letter to Limen ˜ os following beatiﬁcation, Clement IX noted the implied cooptation by allusion when he referred to the emerging saint as “your Rose or, better yet, our Rose.”42

“Obedezco pero no cumplo” Hagiographers relate that one day the youthful Rose and her mother received the visit of a few society women. All of the visitors implored that Rose adorn herself with a garland of ﬂowers. Rose resisted this vain beautiﬁcation, preferring humility and rejection of all courtly and carnal affairs that might offend her celestial Bridegroom. Her mother, in an awkward position between the guests’ insistence and Rose’s refusal, ordered Rose to put on the garland. Rose, in an awkward position between the conﬂicting demands of Christ and her mother, obeyed, but in the process improvised a protest. She attached the crown of ﬂowers to her head by jamming the straightpin into her scalp with such force that “the pin was so ﬁrmly in her ﬂesh that in order to remove it another person had to pull it out with their teeth.” As Hansen described the episode: “She jabbed a thick pin through the garland secretly and skillfully; and in this way she not only gracefully put on her head the crown, which for her was already a crown of thorns, but also attached it by force to her temples,

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achieving through this ingenious astuteness that what in the eyes of men was a festive adornment became for her an instrument of torment. Thus she obeyed her mother; thus her spirit ran with hastened steps to the aroma of her divine Bridegroom crowned in thorns.”43 Rose would obey insofar as her obedience at once constituted deﬁance. By putting on the crown of ﬂowers, Rose satisﬁed the obedience that she owed her mother; by jamming the pin into her scalp, she transformed the adornment into an instrument of mortiﬁcation. Thus the world was turned upside down to suit the agenda of penitential mysticism: “The ﬂower served her as a Thorn, and the pin as a ﬂower.”44 The society ladies wanted to make her more attractive to worldly suitors, and Rose inverted their intent by making herself more attractive to her cruciﬁed Bridegroom. She transformed the crown of ﬂowers into a crown of thorns. In this as in many hagiographic episodes, the question of obedience was inextricably bound to the ongoing conﬂict between mother and daughter. Many witness and hagiographers emphasized that Rose was “most obedient to the extreme,” but her mother nevertheless experienced this “blind obedience” as disobedience, evasion, deception, and mockery.45 The problems arose primarily because Rose’s mother sought the termination (or, later, moderation) of penitential asceticism and the redirection of her daughter’s life toward marriage, whereas Rose sought only progressively more severe mortiﬁcation conducive to her pursuit of mystical marriage. Rose’s youth, like that of many saints, was dominated by the struggle of these conﬂicting aspirations. The difﬁculties emerged because Rose’s sanctity required absolute obedience, not only to her spiritual directors but also to the very mother who was determined to impede her religious calling. Obedience to the mother was unavoidable but at once irreconcilably at odds with Rose’s mystical pursuits. Within this double bind Rose maneuvered to satisfy the demands of mutually incompatible agendas. Like viceregal authorities who resorted to the legal remedy obedezco pero no cumplo (“I obey but I do not execute”), she manifested tacit compliance while in fact exercising her own deﬁant will.46 Authority was thus subverted by acts that feigned to uphold it. Divinity sometimes collaborated. When her mother obliged Rose to wear gloves at night to soften, whiten, and beautify her hands, Rose “surrendered to the burdensome obedience.” As soon as Rose began to fall asleep, however, the gloves burst into ﬂames. God sent this miracle to permit her removal of the gloves “without being disobedient.” Rose, startled, tore the gloves off her hands and “saw clearly that they were giving off true ﬂames” that threatened to “burn down the house.” Once her mother had heard this frightful tale and saw the burnt hands that substantiated it, “she ceased to condemn her daughter to obedience for such insufferable torments.”47 Rose was capable of a profound subaltern deference when it served rather than jeopardized or compromised her religious vocation. In these cases her absolute obedience manifested a saintly self-denial that purged her will while at once enhancing the admiration of those who received or witnessed this deferent surrender. In her dealings with Gonzalo de la Maza, for example,

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Rose was obedient to the extreme. During the years she lived in his home she dared not even take a sip of water without ﬁrst asking his permission, “and this on her knees.” This ostentatious, formal obedience was inclined to err on the side of excess and, for good measure, was extended to all members of the de la Maza household, including the slaves.48 When Rose found herself trapped between her religious vocation and obedience to authority that impeded it, she often found a solution in overly literal fulﬁllment of a mandate. An order could be evaded or inverted precisely by slavish conformance to the letter of the law. One exemplary hagiographic sequence related how Rose used a stone instead of a pillow until her mother intervened to prevent it. The mother conﬁscated the stone, gave Rose a pillowcase, and ordered her to ﬁll and use it. Rose, as obedient as always, ﬁlled the case with splinters so that the pillow would replace the conﬁscated stone as a means of mortiﬁcation. When after a few days the mother realized what Rose had done, she emptied the pillowcase and—unwittingly entrapped now in the ambiguity of literalness itself—screamed a more speciﬁc order: that Rose ﬁll the pillowcase with wool. Rose obeyed, but she hid inside the wool sharp pieces of reed that she had broken off a basket so that her face would be pierced as she slept. Another round of punishments followed the discovery of these new wounds and their cause, and the mother again clariﬁed her order, demanding now that Rose reﬁll the pillowcase with wool and nothing but wool. Rose obeyed again, but with an innovative, excessive compliance that allowed her to escape the rigor of the command. She stuffed the pillowcase so full of wool, ramming it in with a stick, that the resultant pillow was as hard as stone. Exasperated and exhausted by this absolutist obedience, the mother succumbed: “From now on do as you please. Even if you kill yourself, even if I see you take your life with your own hands, don’t worry that I will say a word or interfere in any way.”49 This step-by-step progression of obedience-evasion through literal compliance illustrates, like the garland incident, Rose’s use of obedience as a means of resistance. If the mother imposes a pillow, Rose metamorphoses the pillow into stone. This miracle is fulﬁlled by quotas during a progression that begins with stone itself, that passes through pillows of assorted contents, and that ends with a pillow of pure wool that is as hard as stone. Rose’s will is detoured through inopportune orders but returns to a revised version of its point of departure. The mortiﬁcation forges its path around obstacles. All aspects of the profane world—due obedience, the discourse of the mother, the softness of wool, the crown of ﬂowers as adornment—are transformed into resources that facilitate Rose’s implacable calling. Strategic interpretation discovers in the mother’s order some ﬂexibility or incompletion that permits redirection of its intended purpose toward Rose’s penitential agenda. Rose’s expropriation of discourse that would impede her mortiﬁcation is particularly evident at the conclusion of the pillow episode, when the defeated mother articulates precisely the words that Rose would have scripted for her, the words of capitulation and liberation. The enemy is made an unwitting accomplice until she ﬁnally withdraws in unconditional surrender. Rose’s free-

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dom is won not by confrontation but by exploiting the terrain between the letter and the spirit of obedience.50 The struggle shifted into a higher register when Rose’s confessors assumed complete charge of her mortiﬁcation following the mother’s capitulation. Rose generally extended a formally impeccable obedience to her confessors, was often slavishly dependent upon them, and made it clear, as prudence obliged, that her mortiﬁcations were done only by the means and measure approved by her confessors. There was, nevertheless, a simultaneous exploitation of ambiguity. Juan de Lorenzana permitted Rose ﬁve thousand lashes within a few days’ period, but given her frail condition he forbade ﬂagellation with her customary iron chain, prescribing instead a knotted rope. Rose obeyed. But because it did not occur to Lorenzana to prohibit other penitential uses of the chain, Rose leveraged the imprecision to her advantage: “And thus wrapping the chain three times and tightly around her waist and pulling it tight, and putting a lock on the last links, she threw away the key.” The chain cut into her skin and—according to Hansen—her muscle and nerves, emitting the coldness of the chain inward and causing agonizing consequences until the lock fell open miraculously. The chain was pulled off her body “by jerks in many parts, bringing with it the skin and making blood ﬂow.” Rose’s confessors conﬁscated the chain to prevent her intent to repeat this mortiﬁcation, but they reacted to her tenacity and audacity not, like her mother, with reproaches and reprisals but rather with an awed admiration that silently endorsed and encouraged her agenda. The chain, coated with blood and with “pieces of ﬂesh stuck to it,” became a treasured relic of the Dominican monastery, and after Rose’s death some links emitted the delightfully sweet odor of sanctity.51 The qualiﬁcation of Rose as “most obedient” acquires special meanings in the context of the episodes that hagiographers offer to support it. While exalting the virtues of obedience, Rose’s confessors at once applauded her astute evasion of any obstacle that would impede her religious vocation. As Juan Mele´ndez later put it, “there is much to admire in this obedience, but much more in her suffering.”52 The confessors granted Rose the ﬂexibility to twist their orders to conform to her obedient behavior, rather than conforming her obedience and behavior to their orders. The appearances of proper authority and hierarchy were maintained, but Rose gradually molded her confessors’ acceptance of her transgressions and—here is the miracle—managed at once to attract their praise of her exceptional obedience. In the last analysis, despite the lauded obedience, Rose’s sanctity was forged by her rebellious character bound to an inalterable vocation that owed obedience only to God. She manipulated temporal orders not with malicious intent but because the mandates purporting to govern her were subordinate to the higher authority of divine will. Rose prudently avoided explicit disobedience that would have challenged her superiors and therefore been counterproductive. She opted instead to explore the ﬂexibility of nuance and to obey so strictly, so slavishly, that her very obedience constituted resistance. She found her freedom in strategic surrender, and she inverted hierarchy through a shrewd submission. If at ﬁrst Rose, on her knees, owed absolute obedience

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to her mother and confessors, in the end they were on their knees praying for her intercession.

Virgin Warrior From the earliest centuries of Christianity, imitation of Christ provided a means to transcend gender. According to Palladius, ascetic fortitude elevated the status of certain “manly women” who “through God’s grace have fought battles equal to men.”53 Jerome was explicit on the gender transformation of the female ascetic, noting that “if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”54 One such woman, known as Amma Sarah, observed that “according to nature I am a woman, but not according to my thoughts.” More ambitiously, she announced to the dismayed Desert Fathers around her: “It is I who am a man, and you who are women.” The role inversion implied corresponding hierarchies of gender (male above and female below) and ascetic tolerance (strength above and weakness below). Amma Sarah shed the inferior condition of female and was worthy of the valued “male” qualiﬁer because her Christian fortitude outdid that of her masculine companions. They were born into status; she rose by virtue of her deeds. Asceticism afforded women a means to become the equals of men and, further, to achieve a certain superiority because, as “weaker” beings, their “ascetic achievements in comparison to those of men were in effect greater.”55 This enduring belief was again popular in the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spanish empire. The concept of mujer varonil (virile or manly woman) was used, as on the desert, in reference to women who displayed a “manly” degree of fortitude in penitential asceticism.56 Typical were the comments of Jacinto de Parra, who observed that the mortiﬁcations endured by Rose of Lima were possible because “a manly spirit reigned in her womanly body.” Parra wondered when there was ever such a “mujer varonil, who denying the delicateness and affectation of her fragile sex undertook manly enterprises.” Evidence of providential design in these mysteries was discovered by Parra through the esoterica of contrived etymology: Rose’s original name, Isabel, was derived from a Hebrew word meaning “mujer varonil.”57 Hansen likewise treated the themes of Rose’s manly attributes, often by illustrating the heroic qualities—frequently her “heroic bravery”—that evidence her transcendence of “the female sex, terriﬁed and frightened by nature.” Her “manly and heroic spirit” was again linked to her tolerance of mortiﬁcation: “She seemed to have the strength of stone or metal” and “to tolerate with invincible bravery” the assault against her female ﬂesh.58 Rose herself marveled at the manliness of the brides of Christ who appeared in one of her dreams, “so immersed in work so alien to young women.” “Instead of needle and thread, their delicate hands were occupied by hammers, picks, chisels, and burins.” When the mujer varonil trope was literalized and pushed to its conclusions, Rose “desired another sex”: “to be a man, not a woman.”59 More common was militarization of the mujer varonil through the equa-

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tion of mortiﬁcation and warfare. In a tradition of “active, ardent, militant” mysticism, the body was the battleground where one’s will and one’s arsenal were tested.60 The victor and the vanquished shared one being in which the spirit and the ﬂesh went to war. “The insatiable eagerness that Rose had to make war on her body” made actual warfare seem like “child’s play.” In a monologue scripted by a panegyrist in 1668, Rose explained that “the love I have for my Bridegroom is a strong, brave, warlike, and totally military love.” This love “has put into battle order a squadron of soldiers dressed for war against myself, against my body and its passions.” When the battle was over, the white Dominican scapula covering Rose’s corpse was stylized as “an insignia, and ﬂag, under which she had battled.”61 Rose’s reﬂexive warfare was also redirected outward to represent her as a “Virgin Warrior” who fought the battles of her people. The classical myth of the Amazons, which had been revived and adapted to the New World, provided an antecedent. An expedition in 1622–1623 reported that it had arrived “to a land where they saw no men, only a lot of women,” known locally as “mujeres varoniles.” These female warriors were manly not for their fortitude in Christian asceticism but for their skills and bravery on the battleﬁeld. When their identity was assimilated to hagiography, Rose as a self-mortiﬁer and as a defender of Catholic Peru became a “brave Amazon,” “invincible and courageous Amazon,” and an “Amazon saint.”62 In more general celebration of her militant Catholicism, Rose was a “true warrior of Christ” who led Christian soldiers to victory.63 She acquired the “glory of a Caudillo” who “defends his Country from invasions” and “makes Barbarous Nations surrender to the Church.” She was “the only Strong Woman of the Indies” and as such served “to fortify Armies, guide them, animate them, inspire them, terrorize their enemies, and grant happy outcomes to their conquests.”64 Celebration of Rose’s beatiﬁcation in Lima included twelve companies of Spanish infantry and six of local militia that marched through the plaza and presented her their arms “as though she were a general.” Verses displayed during festivities at the same plaza in 1670 lauded the efﬁcacy of Rose’s patronage: “This land is better defended / By this delicate Rose / Than by the lance and sword.”65 As he sang the praises of the manly attributes that merited such military homage, Parra wondered what man, however great, could live up to Rose’s accomplishments: “Which of the ancient Emperors, however many unconquerable cities he defeated and innumerable Nations he subjected, could boast of having equaled” Rose’s fame? The tone was the same centuries later when the agenda had shifted from defense of the empire to celebration of republican independence: “To lack saints is to lack glory,” and therefore “America owes more to Rose of St. Mary than to Columbus, Washington, and Bolı´var.”66 These rhetorical links between Rose’s mortiﬁcation and warfare were enacted more literally during the independence struggles themselves. Francisca Zubiaga Bernales de Gamarra began at the age of twelve to follow Rose’s penitential example and sought parental permission to enter a convent. Later, however, Francisca’s friendship with Simo´n Bolı´var resulted in the redirection of her “manly”

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fortitude toward more practical ends. Under the title “La Mariscala” (marshal) she commanded a detachment during the wars of independence.67 The development of Rose of Lima as a virgin warrior had ample precedent in militarized advocations of the Virgin Mary. One of the earliest images represents Mary carried into battle on a chariot, as though she were a goddess of war.68 Following motifs in Genesis and Revelation, later iconography of the Immaculate Conception depicts the Virgin’s triumph over Satan, with her delicate foot crushing the head of a snake (or sometimes dragon). Some versions of this New Eve, such as the Virgin of Quito, carry weapons to kill the Satanserpent under their feet. This archetypal imagery provided a redeemed-female contribution to the cosmic triumph of good over evil, but apparition of the Virgin during warfare gave these images a more practical and tactical importance. In Iberia, the Virgin of the Pillar’s ﬁrst-century apparition to Santiago (the apostle St. James) in Zaragoza facilitated the early success of his missionary effort, and when the time for the Reconquest came in 718, the two again paired up for military exploits against the Moors. The Spanish conquest of Mexico centuries later was closely associated with miraculous intercession of the Virgin of Remedies, again reinforced by the warrior Santiago.69 During the conquest of Peru, Spaniards besieged in Cuzco had taken refuge in a tower, and the Virgin—still beside Santiago (or in some versions St. Michael)—appeared to extinguish the roof set on ﬁre by the attacking Incas. (Titu Cusi made a conﬂicting report that the ﬁreﬁghting was done by black slaves forced onto the roof ). In Franciscan versions, the Virgin who assisted the conquerors of Peru came directly out of Revelation 12:1—“the woman that Saint John saw in His Revelation”—with lovely, bellicose attributes: “as beautiful as the moon, chosen as the sun, terrible as well-ordered armies.”70 The Virgin frightened off the Incas with her face “more radiant than the sun” and cast dust or water into their eyes, incapacitating them and causing them to ﬂee. For Diego de Co´rdova y Salinas, this “gift of dew that she threw in their eyes” was a kind of benevolent prelude to baptism, and the Incas ultimately accepted defeat in gratitude because it brought the opportunity for conversion to Catholicism.71 While the Franciscans were making claims to this warrior as a Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, the Dominicans viewed her in their order’s preferred advocation as the Virgin of the Rosary. According to tradition, the Dominican’s Virgin of the Rosary statue, “the oldest image in Peru,” was brought to the New World by Francisco Pizarro, and it was thought to be a gift from King Charles V. Hagiographers established clear links between Rose of Lima, the Virgin of the Rosary statue in Lima’s Dominican church, and the militarized Virgin who appeared among troops to earn her title as “ﬁrst conqueror” of Peru.72 When some two hundred thousand Indians were ominously threatening an army of only six hundred Spaniards, as Hansen related the events in Cuzco, the Dominicans recruited celestial reinforcements. The Virgin appeared, “with the same face and in the same posture as the image in Lima.” The awestruck idolaters threw down their arms and submitted themselves humbly “to the gentle yoke of the Catholic faith,” thereby “leaving the darkness

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of inﬁdelity.” In honor of these feats and in anticipation of continuing protection, the Virgin of the Rosary was named patron of Peru, a title that Rose of Lima would later assume. In other expeditions on the northern frontier, the Virgin of the Rosary was again known as “the Conqueror” for her associations with multiple Spanish conquests, particularly the Diego de Vargas campaign in what is now New Mexico.73 Shortly before Rose’s birth, in 1571, the Virgin of the Rosary was also closely associated with the decisive Christian defeat of the Turks at the battle of Lepanto. According to Pope Pious V, the Christians were granted the victory due to the Virgin’s intercession in response to rosaries prayed to her by confraternities in Rome. Since then the Virgin and the rosary have been associated with Spanish Catholicism’s struggle against its various enemies. In a 1643 Lima celebration of the anniversary of the battle of Lepanto, the Virgin of the Rosary was made patron of the armed forces of Peru. In April 1671 she was brought out in procession to thank her for victory against the English in Panama.74 In September 1684 Lima’s highest religious and civil authorities accompanied her in another procession, and the confessor of the viceroy, a Jesuit, “gave a sermon about the victory of the emperor over the sultan of Turkey.” A Dominican preached on the same topic the next day, and a Mercedarian the day after. On the Virgin’s return trip to the Dominican church, “many women went along saying the Rosary in loud voices. It was an act of thanks to Our Lord for the intercession of his Holy Mother in the fortunate outcome of the empire. And so we all beseech Him that He grant [victory] in this South Sea against the enemy pirate who entered about the month of March of 1684.”75 Rose of Lima as a military symbol was also adaptable to the (not always compatible) struggles of those who beseeched her intercession. Her ﬁrst accomplishment was retroactive: Rose (like the Virgin) was the “Conqueror of the New World.” As worded in a 1670 hagiography, “Rose triumphed against the Idols of paganism in her Catholic homeland, Lima,” destroying “thousands of legions of devils.”76 Her military prowess was at the same time deployed on other fronts abroad to defend the political and religious interests of Hapsburg imperialism. An engraving produced around the time of her canonization featured Rose on one side—with the standard anchor imagery identifying her as protectress—and on the other a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe from Extremadura, who was the protectress of imperial Spanish Christianity. The Virgin of Guadalupe faced upward when one pressed down the engraving of Rose of Lima to make the print, as though the two protectresses were stamped from one stereotype. The iconography of militant Catholicism also depicted Rose of Lima with the king of Spain as they together defended the eucharist from assorted enemies of the faith. Against the Turks Rose was “a Heavenly el Cid” and “the face of Santiago,” and she transformed each soldier into a “frightening Lightning Bolt” that conquered with “holy wrath.”77 The same military prowess was beseeched by both opposing adversaries when independence approached in the early nineteenth century. A conservative faction defending monarchy invoked Rose for reactionary, antirevolutionary purposes, while more progressive others lauded Rose’s protection as they faced

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the dangers of transition.78 The revolutionary Creoles were particularly devout. An image of Rose of Lima presided over the Independence Congress of Tucuma´n on July 9, 1816, and the instructions given to General Jose´ de San Martı´n for the liberation of Peru and Chile speciﬁed that the campaign be conducted under Rose’s patronage. In the north, similarly, the ﬁrst Congress of Venezuela declared independence on July 5, 1811, in a chapel of St. Rose of Lima. The chapel had been founded centuries earlier by Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, who, following successful advocacy for the beatiﬁcation of Rose of Lima, had become bishop of Venezuela in 1673. After independence Rose’s chapel in Caracas was “at once a temple of two religions; it served ﬁrst as the altar of Christianity and later as altar of the cult of Freedom.”79 Indigenous rebels of the eighteenth century, beginning with the precocious Juan Santos Atahualpa, also recruited Rose of Lima to their cause. Before engaging in battle in 1743, Santos Atahualpa called for a procession of Rose in the company of St. Michael the Archangel. The invocation of Rose during many indigenous rebellions was inspired by an apocryphal prophesy that began to circulate in the Andes perhaps as early as the 1660s. Around 1667, a cacique from Jauja, Jero´nimo Lorenzo Limaylla, requested permission of the authorities to create a noble order for “descendents of Incas and Montezumas” under the patronage of Rose of Lima; his petition was denied.80 Antonio Cabo, one of the leaders of a 1750 nativist rebellion near Lima, characteristically announced that “Saint Rose of Lima had promised that in the present year of 1750 this empire would be returned to its legitimate owners.” This prophesy—sometimes attributed to other saints or coattributed to Rose and others—evidenced a nativism determined to eliminate colonial domination but to preserve some version of Catholicism. Many believed that Rose’s prophesy would be fulﬁlled in “the year of three sevens,” and a year prior, in 1776, the strength of this belief served to catalyze the failed indigenous uprisings directed by Juan de Dios Orcoguaranca and Jose´ Quispe Tupa Inca. Tu´pac Amaru II himself reportedly said that “the time for the prophesies of Saint Rose of Lima to be fulﬁlled is upon us, the time when it will be necessary to return the kingdom to its former rulers,” and he was surprised that the bishop of Cuzco was unfamiliar with the prophesy.81 In 1783, Felipe Velasco Tu´pac Inca Yupanqui, continuing the rebellion in Huarochirı´, recruited soldiers on the strength of Rose’s prophesy. And Rose appeared again in the 1805 Cuzco conspiracy led by Gabriel Aguilar and Juan Manuel Ubalde, who repeated that “the kingdom must be returned to the Indians themselves.”82 Rose was also invoked outside of Peru, notably in the 1867–1870 Chamulan rebellion, in Chiapas, that emerged from a syncretic cult to Rose of Lima referred to as “the mother of dissension.”83 These competing military claims to Rose of Lima and her powers index a struggle for ownership that replays in diverse quarters: between informal cult and institutionalized church, between rich and poor, between Creoles and Crown, between monarchists and republicans, between conquer and conquered. In cultural representations the multiple claims likewise compete and, in some cases, the struggle yields to attempts at reconciliation. A hagiography published in 1917, for example, incorrectly introduced Rose as a mestiza, with

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the “dignity of her Spanish ancestors on her paternal side and the gentleness of the Incas on her maternal side.” In a scholarly work written in 1940, Rose, “with some aborigine blood,” was the “representative product of the new stage of historical evolution” and the principle of Pan-American solidarity.84 This harmonious union of adverse factions was suggested earlier in a seventeenthcentury Cuzco-school painting in which indigenous nobles carried Rose on a litter as she presided over the Corpus Christi procession. Precisely at the same time, however, an Italian painting made for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome depicted a militant and intolerant Rose destroying indigenous altars of idolatry.85 Recent uses of Rose as a symbol of cohesion often recapitulate patterns that followed conquest. In the indigenous Andean village of Carhuamayo, the feast of Rose of Lima and the dramatized Death of Atahualpa have fused into a single, polyvalent ceremony in which the Inca dies, Rose reigns, and Catholicism is decidedly syncretic. Such a reconciliation of competing interests, however embattled internally, could not be reached in Lima when neo-Incan architecture was proposed for an early-twentieth-century basilica of St. Rose. The exterior of this temple, which was never built, would have been adorned with three sets of statues corresponding to the pre-Columbian, viceregal, and republican periods of Peruvian history. The use of Rose as an agency of reconciliation and unity failed, however, because adaptation of “the Inca style” to Christian ideals was met with scorn. “The massiveness of Inca architecture, no matter how much one idealizes it, is always deﬁcient for the plasticization of the light and spiritual Christian building, and even more so if a monument to St. Rose is concerned.”86 Indigenous symbols, here abandoned as deﬁcient, are valued and protected under Rose’s patronage only in accord with prevailing social hierarchies. As evidenced so clearly in the eighteenth century, Rose as a virgin warrior is easily defeated when her cause is indigenous Catholicism.

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6 Vicarious Atonement

Sin and Expiation By the early seventeenth century the Christian God had sufﬁcient cause for dismay with his New World creation. Divine wrath had been doubly provoked, once by persevering idolatry among the natives and again by the wayward Spaniards’ slack in earnest profession of Catholicism. All disasters visited on the unworthy creation— epidemics, earthquakes, rebellions, pirate attacks—were interpretable as punitive retributions from on high. As explained by a 1640 Spanish text, “there is in life no plague, nor war, nor hunger, nor sickness that has not been caused by some sin.”1 The same logic reckoned that if God were appeased he would bestow grace rather than punishment on his people and that the necessary atonement could be accomplished vicariously, as it had been earlier by Christ himself, with saintly scapegoats carrying the burden of penance that would redeem the sinful New World. Blood sacriﬁce was required to placate the wrathful God, and if one person did not atone vicariously, and sufﬁciently, then everyone would have to pay. During a 1609 earthquake, “Lima was washed with blood, and then / (God lifting his punishing hand) / the disturbed city returned to peace.”2 The common good would opt in lieu of this bloodbath for one or few penitents to carry the burden of expiation. Rose of Lima rose to that occasion. The ﬁrst great, collective body of sin that Rose of Lima expiated vicariously was that of native paganism. Peru had spent “centuries subjected to the tyrannical yoke of the Idols,” during which Satan reigned in Cuzco “as though in his Rome or Jerusalem.” God was “justly irritated with the Americas,” and especially with Peru, where

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evangelization met “the greatest resistance.”3 Mockery, apostasy, rebellion, cryptopaganism, messianic movements, clandestine cults, stubborn perseverance in idolatry, and general apathy toward Christianity all generated sin that needed to be atoned. The ungrateful indigenous beneﬁciaries of conquest (a painting in the Dominican monastery of Quito features the word “Jesus” bursting with ﬂame from the soldiers’ riﬂes) were doubly egregious: once for their centuries of idolatry and again, after having received the Good News, for their failure to embrace the true faith.4 Evangelization is not merely a responsibility of the “Order of Preachers” (as the Dominicans are known), but rather, as one Dominican explained, “a constitutive value of our Dominican being.” The Dominicans were the ﬁrst order to enter Peru, considered themselves responsible for its conversion, and celebrated Rose’s canonization as evidence of and reward for their successful mission. The most intensive campaigns to extirpate idolatry occurred between 1610 and 1660, thereby coinciding with the critical years of Rose’s construction as a saint. Hagiographers often literalized Rose’s emblematic role by emphasizing her desire to become a missionary in the ﬁeld. The motif had a precedent in the life of Rose’s role model, Catherine of Siena, who in her respective imitation of St. Euphrosyne hoped to disguise herself as a man, become a Dominican friar, and dedicate her life to saving souls.5 Rose similarly wished she were a man in order to dedicate her life to the conversion of natives or, that failing, to wander barefoot in penitential guise and call sinful Limen ˜ os to repentance.6 Rose of Lima’s relations with Indians tended more toward her vicarious penance for “so many barbarous souls” and, above all, toward a “burning desire to suffer martyrdom”: “She wanted them to tear her to pieces and to stretch her entrails like a net across the expanse through which so many miserable souls fall into eternal punishment, and to thus impede by some means so much perdition.”7 This grizzly fantasy followed to the letter the hagiography of St. Dominic, who explained to heretics that rather than a quick martyrdom he preferred to be killed “slowly, cutting me to pieces, bit by bit, holding up before my eyes the pieces you had cut off, then putting my eyes out and leaving my half-dead body to welter in its own blood.” As a woman Rose lacked access to “the most remote and most barbarous regions” where such missionary martyrdom occurred, but mortiﬁcation—a domesticated, protracted, self-directed martyrdom—provided symbolic compensation.8 The ﬁrst Christians to be regarded as saints were the martyrs who died for their faith during persecutions of the new religion as it spread through the Roman empire. These early Christians, like Christ himself, expected persecution and learned to suffer unjustly, with joy, in the image of their savior. Because they died for Christ and the faith, martyrs went directly to heaven and interceded there on behalf of other Christians who prayed at their graves for this purpose. Violent opposition and martyrdom made suffering an essential aspect of early Christian life, but by the early fourth century the persecution of Christians had ended, foreclosing martyrdom as the primary avenue to sanctity. Suffering for Christ consequently assumed new forms and meanings,

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among them a lifestyle of self-martyrdom. Mortiﬁcation—in the literal sense, from the Latin mortiﬁcare (“to put to death”)—became a “dying” for Christ by taking up the cross symbolically and putting to death the desires of the ﬂesh through asceticism and penitential exercises.9 This new spiritual martyrdom was pioneered by the ascetics who withdrew to the Egyptian desert. Their ideals were revived in the Middle Ages, particularly in the twelfth century, with inspiration from the Desert Fathers as epitomized in the life of St. Anthony. Literal martyrdom remained an avenue to sainthood, particularly among missionaries, but among medievals self-martyrdom through asceticism and mortiﬁcation was the more prevalent means to “die” for Christ and rise to the altars. Self-martyrdom became the predominant mode of female sanctity in the late medieval and early modern periods, when holy women “tended to be portrayed in a sacriﬁcial context and were sanctiﬁed to the extent that they castigated their bodies.”10 Portrayed ubiquitously in their milieu were the gruesome, scourged, cruciﬁed, and dead Christs who provided their model and inspiration. Rose of Lima, who was very much a part of this tradition, “emulated the sufferings of the Martyrs” through the systematic, purposeful destruction of her body. Deprived of literal martyrdom at the hands of natives, her stay-athome alternative made her the “instrument of reconciliation” for an America lost to idolatry.11 Her ongoing martyrdom became a way of life as much as a way of death. Excruciation was the norm as Rose directed against herself an arsenal of penitential mortiﬁcation, an endlessly imminent ritual death, destroying sin as she destroyed her body. The native who sinned and the missionary who saved were collapsed into the single protagonist of a ritual expiation. Rose’s ﬁgurative martyrdom, paralleling missionary agonies in the ﬁeld, was exalted in hagiography as the extraordinary, culminating accomplishment that endowed the friars’ martyrdom with enhanced meaning, efﬁcacy, and virtue. The martyred missionaries did not die in vain because “so much spilled blood of invincible Spaniards” irrigated the earth that produced this Rose whose canonization ﬁrmly rooted Christianity in the idolatrous Americas. Rose’s sanctity ﬁnalized the “victory with which our Catholic religion triumphed over the barbarous idolatry of the Indians” and thus guaranteed “that the Faith be preserved in the Indies, that it spread, and that those ignorant Nations subject themselves now easily to the gentle empire of the Church.” Rose was the “sacred victim of mortiﬁcations” whose spilled blood restored the ﬂow of divine graces that had been impeded for centuries by “the barbarous obstinacy of the Idolatrous Indians.”12 The sinful native outrages were compounded by the deplorable performance of the Spanish Christians themselves. The discovery of the New World promised a new age to be characterized by restoration of the primitive Church and return to the fundamental Christianity exempliﬁed by monastic humility and poverty. Christianity had become corrupt in Europe, but the New World provided the opportunity for return to the ideals of the faith. The Joachite age of the Holy Spirit, the restitution of the primitive Church, the millennial kingdom and New Jerusalem prophesied in Revelation, and the recuperation of

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Eden in the Americas all coalesced in volatile conﬁgurations to depict a new Church worthy of its New World. The Advent would be predisposed and Christian eschatology fulﬁlled via this partnership of divine will and human efﬁcacy. That was God’s plan for history, and the New World had a role as protagonist.13 The reality measured shamefully against that ideal, as though the original intent had been sacrilegiously distorted because commerce had displaced eschatology. Rather than the millennial kingdom of virtue envisioned by the friars, the New World evidenced ruthless conquest, insatiable greed among colonists, corruption in viceregal administration, worldliness and carnality among the clergy, divisive rivalries within and among the religious orders, and a ubiquitous but ostentatious Christianity that seemed more prone to pageantry and theocratic imperialism than to inner piety and the charity quintessential to the faith as mandated by Jesus. Rose was widely represented in jewel and precious metal tropes, as though she were the spiritual treasure that counterbalanced the frenzied materialism of colonial Christians. The late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century were the most lucrative years in colonial Peru, in good measure because production at the silver mine in Potosı´ was at its height between 1570 and 1620. This economic boom coincided paradoxically with the region’s greatest spirituality, and religious interpreters sought links between material wealth and its otherworldly counterpart. A tricentennial sermon given by a Dominican in 1917 explained that among the riches coveted by kings, Peru produced the gold of virtues, meaning Rose of Lima. A 1668 sermon referenced details from Rose’s birth to observe that “Rose was born a precious Pearl, and this deposited between two thick shells.” He then explained: “The afterbirth in which she came wrapped was so solid and strong that it was necessary to open it with a knife to give birth to the pearl.” Rose as a “precious treasure” was thus “doubly hidden,” in order to protect her and—we learn ﬁnally—her “virginal purity.”14 Hansen and Mele´ndez both observed that God had deprived Rose’s parents of material wealth but enriched them with the “treasure” of their saintly daughter.15 She was also associated with the golden rose traditionally given by the pope to a favored king on the fourth Sunday of Lent. The canonized Rose of Lima was the “true golden Rose” with which the king of Spain reciprocated the pope’s gift.16 In other variations on the theme Rose and her remains are “such rich treasure”; the “common treasure” of all Limen ˜ os; a “hidden treasure . . . of silver and gold”; a “very rich treasure,” “jewel,” and “diamond”; a “treasure more precious than that discovered in the rich mines of Potosı´”; and a “rich treasure” that “is worth more than pearls, than gold.” Seventeenth-century song lyrics observed that “Of the Indies of God, Rose is Gold,” and a twentiethcentury devotional poem mixed its metaphors to deliver a “diamondized rose.”17 A 1711 book of emblems depicted a hand testing gold by rubbing it against stone, and the caption explained that Rose’s body worn down by mortiﬁcation proved that her gold was solid. “Ophir, from which Solomon took so much gold to Jerusalem, is our Peru,” explained Mele´ndez, and Rose of Lima, the “precious jewel,” was also produced by this “richest land in the world.”18

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The spiritual wealth is always represented as superior to the material, but many colonial Spaniards and Creoles nevertheless seemed more dedicated to the pursuit of riches than to the profession of their faith. That generated collective sin. Sin required atonement. Rose provided it vicariously. Her virtue and penitential life were of such incalculable spiritual worth that she counterbalanced the accumulation of wealth, and of sin, in continental proportions. Rose thus puriﬁed wealth. Her blood cleansed it. The covetous materialism could continue undisturbed because Rose’s sanctity atoned for it. She puriﬁed herself and wealth in one and the same, almost alchemical process, “in the forge of tribulation.” As Hansen has it, “tribulation is for the chosen as the crucible is for gold.” The hellish tortures endured by Rose were “the greatest favors that God Our Lord granted her, because her soul was melted down and puriﬁed like gold in ﬁre, without a single stain remaining, in order to unite with God.”19 For colonial transgressions someone had to pay. Rose emerged, at least in hagiography, to purge on her ﬂesh the sins of the Christians around her. She suffered nightly scourges not only for her own “very great sins,” whatever they may have been, but also “for the Kingdoms of Peru, and her beloved Homeland Lima.” As Mele´ndez continued to explain, when Rose’s “Divine Bridegroom” saw “her back stained with blood, he remembered that she had it thus for us,” and therefore “he did not execute any bloody punishment, in view of so bloody a punishment” that Rose suffered on our behalf. Rose scourged herself mercilessly with an iron chain “to placate the wrath of an offended God, to temper his justice, and to solicit his mercy.” Jacinto de Parra concurred: “There is no doubt that God was justly angered by America, and especially by Peru,” until Rose’s vicarious atonement “placated the Divine wrath.”20 Rose did penance for the Church, for the souls in purgatory, for the conversion of Indians, for sinners, for the city of Lima, for her parents, for her spiritual advisers, for those who requested her prayers, for those close to death, and for those to whom she had some obligation.21 She took upon herself the penance for certain loose women whose suggestive dress left them exposed to “the eyes of the most lascivious young men.” She willingly suffered the illnesses that God had inﬂicted on others, and if she heard that someone had committed a mortal sin, she atoned for it with “a rigorous, bloody scourging.”22 The hagiographic Rose even proposed to Christ that he permit her to suffer the punishments of souls condemned to damnation: “I will place myself at the entrance to Hell, and all of the sufferings that you would give to the condemned, give them to me instead, because I will suffer them with pleasure.”23 The severity and expiatory purpose of Rose’s self-martyrdom were conducive to representations of her as a scapegoat or sacriﬁcial offering. In her crown of thorns “she seemed a coronated victim,” reminiscent of “the victims destined to sacriﬁce among pagans.” Rose was the “ﬁrst offering,” “the ﬁrst and most willing victim of expiation and reconciliation that America offered to Heaven,” and the “symbol of Christian meekness, of austere self-sacriﬁce.”24 She “sacriﬁced herself as a bloody victim,” Hansen explained, and “if heaven threatened the kingdom of Peru or Lima, her homeland, with some punish-

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ment, she tried to ward it off with her scourges.”25 Others similarly observed that Rose “sacriﬁced her entire body for the protection of others,” and this sacriﬁcial offering was so great that God “not only tempered but totally abandoned his just anger, and punishment, with which for such long centuries he had punished that New World.” Rose took the Dominican habit on the feast day of the grilled-alive St. Lawrence, “her burned heart consecrated on the living altar of Divine love.”26 The burden of collective salvation was commonly assumed by or assigned to penitential female mystics. Bona of Pisa offered her body in sacriﬁce when the overﬂowing Arno River threatened Pisa; Marguerite-Marie Alacoque was a “a victim offered to divine justice”; and Veronica Giuliani, who counted Rose among her models, wrote a letter in blood to inform Christ that, in her own words, “I make myself the mediatrix between you and sinners.”27 Self-sacriﬁce was particularly explicit in the life of Mariana of Quito, who is often compared in hagiography to Rose of Lima. According to Aurelio Espinosa Polit, her principal modern hagiographer, Mariana’s life can be summarized by a single word: “victim.” Mariana’s bull of canonization observed that she “offered herself totally to divine will as a propitiatory victim for her people, presenting her body ‘as a living sacriﬁce, holy and pleasing to God’ (Romans 12:1).”28 Mariana’s role as a sacriﬁcial victim was most dramatically evidenced in 1645, when Riobamba was devastated by an earthquake and tremors in Quito made the residents there fear similar destruction. In a sermon on that occasion, during Lent, the Jesuit Alonso de Rojas offered his life in expiation for the sins that were causing the earthquakes. Mariana, present at the sermon, appealed to God afterward, arguing that the priest was much needed in the city and asking that her life be taken instead. “And it seems that Our Lord accepted her offer,” as one witness explained, because Mariana was suddenly struck by the fatal illness of which she died two months later. The natural catastrophes ceased immediately upon Mariana’s assumption of the illness, reinforcing the common conviction that she “sacriﬁced her life to God for the health of her country.”29 In an ambiance sometimes dangerous, always precarious, and susceptible to hostile divine interventions, Rose of Lima came to be viewed, like Mariana, as a propitiatory sacriﬁcial victim who cancelled the debt accrued by Peru’s sinfulness. “Because of its great sins, God wanted to destroy this city with ﬂaming spears falling from heaven” observed one of Rose’s acquaintances, Ana Marı´a Pe´rez, but thanks to Rose’s intercession Lima was spared this and other conﬂagrations. Mele´ndez argued that around 1586 times were difﬁcult in the Indies generally and in Lima speciﬁcally due to pirate attacks and an earthquake that “devastated a great part of the city” and razed the two cathedral towers. But Rose, destined to be Lima’s protectress, was born the same year and the wrath of God was appeased.30 The Cabildo of Lima made a similar argument to the pope when advocating—already in 1632—that Rose of Lima’s patronage be formally recognized: “Because this city is more subject to earthquakes and diseases than others,” it is therefore “more in need of the protection of the friends of God.” Rose’s patronage was recognized in 1669, expanded in

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1670, and reafﬁrmed in her 1671 bull of canonization, which in a plea for continuing negotiated clemency beseeched God “through the intercession of this, his chosen one, averting his eyes from our sins, to have pity on us.”31 Rose of Lima and other female mystics of her proﬁle were well suited to vicarious atonement because they identiﬁed strongly with the cruciﬁed Christ. They wore crowns of thorns, carried crosses and hung from them, pierced themselves with nails, received the stigmata of Christ’s wounds in their bodies, scourged themselves in imitation of Christ’s ﬂagellation, and surrounded themselves with cruciﬁxes and images of the Passion. A fundamental purpose of penitential mysticism was precisely to continue Christ’s redemptive suffering on one’s own ﬂesh, to fuse with Christ by assuming his agonies. God’s suffering servants, as Christ told Catherine of Siena, “can be called another Christ cruciﬁed,” because “they have taken his task upon themselves.” This suffering beneﬁts not only the individual who endures it but also the mystical body as a whole, thereby continuing Christ’s mission of salvation through vicarious atonement.32 In hagiography Rose of Lima indeed seemed to be transformed into the cruciﬁed Christ, particularly at the time of her death. If during her life Rose “was a copy of Christ” for “having cruciﬁed herself with her beloved Bridegroom,” then during her death she became “a copy most similar to Christ” and even “a living portrait” of Christ on the cross. As her death approached Rose prayed in the Rosary chapel as though “in another Garden of Gethsemane.”33 Her moribund agonies were “true sufferings of the cross” and, accordingly, on her deathbed she felt as though she were cruciﬁed.34 Rose asked that the pillow be removed from beneath her in order to die with her head against wood, like Christ on the cross. When the end was imminent, she uttered two of Christ’s last words, “I thirst,” and water was denied to her as it had been to her agonizing Bridegroom. After death her face became “the face of the Lord, and it was not Rose at whom they were looking, but rather at Christ himself.”35 Through the cruciﬁxion “God himself sacriﬁces himself for the guilt of mankind, God himself makes payment to himself ”: “The creditor sacriﬁces himself for the debtor.”36 That arrangement brokered between Father and Son established a model for vicarious atonement as a balance of accounts in sin and expiation. The sin had to be bought off, the debt had to be paid, but not necessarily by the debtor. Accounts were transferable. Penance could be borne voluntarily by someone else. In its depiction of purgatory as a kind of debtor’s prison, The Golden Legend illustrated how the transfers are regulated by statutes: If “the person for whom satisfaction is assumed dies, he still is punished in purgatory, but, due to the punishment he endures personally and the penalty satisﬁed by others for him, he is freed more quickly, because God counts both payments as one sum total. Thus if the person owed a penance of two months in purgatory he could, due to suffrages offered by others, be freed in one month; but he is never released from purgatory until the debt is paid in full.”37 The accounting was in earnest among the German Cistercian nuns of Helfta, to whom Christ appeared periodically to inform them “exactly how many souls are released from exactly how much purgatory by exactly which

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devotions of the community.” In negotiating the salvation of her parents’ souls, Catherine of Siena’s prayers “sounded more like market transactions,” using words like “defrauded” and “established terms.”38 Catherine made a deal with God to atone vicariously for her father’s sins so that he would be granted direct entrance into heaven. After his death in 1368, Catherine had a vision of her father passing through the pearly gates and at once was struck with the sharp pain in her hip that she suffered, for his sins, until her own death. Catherine herself died and came back to life after the Virgin agreed that this borrowed time could be dedicated to sufferings that would free souls from purgatory. In other quarters, likewise, “penitential exercises released vast treasuries of indulgences to aid less zealous souls” and, when public penance was permitted, “sinners incorrigibly sought vicarious relief by subsidizing the sacriﬁces and prayers of others.”39 In early modern Spain, the trafﬁc in sin and penance was part of the tacit agreement between sovereign and subject. The king and his court “sinned happily” because they could count on “pious men and women” who mortiﬁed themselves to vicariously atone for these transgressions. The succession of sickly and dying children born to Mariana of Austria was regarded by many as divine punishment for the frequent extramarital adventures of her husband, Philip IV. At the time of his death Philip ordered that a hundred thousand masses be said for his soul, specifying that after the debt for his sins had been paid, any surplus indulgence should be applied ﬁrst to his ancestors and then to Spanish soldiers killed in war.40 Rose of Lima participated in this tallying of accounts between sin and atonement, offering her excess penance for those whose balance sheets scored high in sinfulness. A transferable account was established in a letter written by Rose to Fray Bartolome´ de Ayala, in which she took responsibility for Ayala’s sins and asked God to send the punishment to her. The friar sinned; Rose atoned. But, Rose continued, “I want more: that of my penance, fasts, and any other good deeds that I do in this life for love of my Lord Jesus Christ, you and I have equal parts.” By this second clause the friar not only made his way out of the red but began accruing gains in black ink. Rose named the Virgin Mary as “guarantor” to monitor her fulﬁllment of the promise and appointed the friar’s namesake, St. Bartholomew, to keep the books. In a similar arrangement Rose made an advance from her excess of good deeds to a moribund friar who, lacking enough of his own, feared for the fate of his soul. A balance of accounts was also central to Rose’s rainbow dream, in which Christ, holding a scale and measuring out careful allotments, made clear that his graces were bestowed only in compensation for her mortiﬁcations.41 Penance was not reluctantly tolerated but actively sought because the suffering body was a beata’s means of achieving redemption, mystical union, social status, and power. Collective crises caused by sin and remediable by vicarious atonement imbued religious suffering with social functions that afforded beatas extraordinary opportunities, including access to gains far beyond those otherwise available to their social station. Martyrdom was the ultimate weapon of the weak for those who suffered it purposefully and willingly. As

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Rose explained to beatas in Mele´ndez’s account: “Others are victorious by ﬁghting, we have to be victorious by dying.”42 Rose was powerful insofar as she was self-destructive, and her power was sacred insofar as that self-destruction was read as a propitiatory sacriﬁce, as a vicarious atonement beneﬁcial to her community. The more her self-destruction spared others from destruction, the more sacred power accrued to her account, making ever greater feats possible. As carried in the etymology of sacriﬁce—sacer (sacred) and facere (to make)— sacriﬁcial violence makes its victim sacred. The God to whom the sacriﬁce is ostensibly made tends to fade into the background as the saint herself becomes quasi-divine. Rose, like other saints, ultimately became “less a channel for power than a source of power,” of sacred power generated by her penitential self-destruction.43 Rose’s empowerment was more a by-product or unintended perquisite than a conscious objective of her mortiﬁcation. She redirected the beneﬁts of her suffering toward the community as her private mysticism engaged in silent enterprise with the public that made it viable. Out of her suffering and death came relief and life. The destruction of her body, like that of a scapegoat, rejuvenated the community as a whole. Miracles, grace, intercession, protection, and authentication all ﬂowed from Rose’s suffering to her community’s well-being, and her beneﬁciaries mythopoetically redoubled the gains by elevating Rose to heaven and to the altars as their advocate. Like those who tore relics from her corpse during the funeral, each accessed in prayer the power generated by sacriﬁcial suffering and applied it to personal needs. Rose’s power was detachable from its source and became negotiable, transferable, adaptable to varied agendas and needs. The dialectics between Rose and her community were governed by an unrecognized reciprocity: Rose’s quest for sanctity required a religious context and a destabilized social setting in which her inclination to self-injury was not only condoned but encouraged and regarded as efﬁcacious; and her culture, perceiving itself as sinful and the disasters it suffered as divine punishments, required a scapegoat who would take away the sins of the world. Rose’s sanctity emerged at the intersection of a great social need for atonement and her willingness to internalize this collective need (which corresponded to a personal need) and exact expiation through her suffering. Rose of Lima must be closely associated with her community in order for her vicarious atonement to be efﬁcacious, but at the same time the community must protect itself from contaminating fallout by exonerating itself from blame for her destruction.44 Those conditions were satisﬁed ideally by Rose’s voluntary and zealous self-immolation combined with perceptions of her inseparable unity with the society that produced her. As explained in a Dominican letter advocating beatiﬁcation, Rose was a “daughter born among us in our own land and homeland, of our own people with whom we deal and converse, nursed with the milk of our doctrine, and sustained with the good example of the friars of this house.” The bond between Rose and her city is evident even in the name “Rose of Lima,” which reafﬁrms the connection each time it is uttered. During her lifetime Rose was known and referred to herself as “Rose of St. Mary,” a name

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given to her by the Virgin of the Rosary, and it was by this name that she was canonized.45 The formal “Rose of St. Mary” subsequently yielded to the far more common “Rose of Lima,” just as Teresa of Jesus is more commonly referred to as Teresa of Avila and Mariana of Jesus as Mariana of Quito. Once the presumption of sanctity is veriﬁed by canonization, the qualiﬁers “of St. Mary” or “of Jesus” drop out of usage insofar as the beneﬁciaries’ locale— Lima, Avila, Quito—is stressed. But Rose’s reliance on suffering in order to gain religious and social status entrapped her in a closed circuit of escalating self-abuse. As a beata, outside of the accepted institutions of nunhood and marriage, she was laudable only insofar as she destroyed herself in accord with expectations established by hagiographic precedents. In this perspective it seems “more accurate to speak of forced sacriﬁce than of ‘self ’-sacriﬁce,” because the heroism of penitential mystics like Rose was the consequence of an implicit victimization.46 As Rose’s sanctity acquired social recognition she was further burdened with dreadful obligations, including escalating self-destruction as vicarious atonement, if only because her confessors validated the burdens that she imposed on herself. Limen ˜ os relied on Rose to suffer for their sins, ward off dangers, sanctify their realm, and be, for them, the saint that they permitted her to be for herself. If Rose’s self-destruction was based on untrue premises and unkept promises that are discernible in retrospect—that God wanted to marry her, that he loved her because she suffered, that her scourges bought off sin and warded off disasters—then she was exploited (unwittingly and without malice, to be sure) by the society that beneﬁted from her suffering. Nowhere was this lopsided exchange more visible than in the popular quest for miracles. In orthodox Catholicism a saint does not perform miracles but rather intercedes as an advocate and then serves as a channel of grace between God and the miracles’ beneﬁciaries. This nuance of intercession is generally lost in popular religion and, in a second-tier distortion, particular statues or paintings, rather than a saint or God, are themselves believed to perform miracles. Beatas such as Rose of Lima were regarded as miraculous during their lifetimes and particularly after death, and they thus provided their communities with local, tangible, immediate access to supernatural powers that otherwise remained distant, abstract, or complicated by sacerdotal intermediaries. Rose offered an immediacy unavailable through the bureaucratized religiosity of institutional Catholicism, but only because she successfully rehearsed the self-sacriﬁce of its God. Unruly mobs attended Rose’s funeral not to pay their respects but to seek individual gain through miracles and the acquisition of relics. The faithful made contact with her numinousness born of sacriﬁcial violence and took away a relic, even if only a handful of dirt from her grave, that made her sacred power portable. Christianity taught them that spilled blood cures, and freshly spilled blood, spilled for them, was all the more potent. Just as Christ “took our inﬁrmities and bore our diseases,” so Rose’s suffering would assimilate the suffering of others.47 Rose’s funeral was overwhelmed by “a multitude of cripples and sick people” who with “not unfounded” hopes of cure touched

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the sacred corpse and prayed for miracles.48 They resorted to Rose as a miraculous solution because their institutions—the church as well as the hospital— could not satisfy their needs. They beseeched her miraculous provision of the care, protection, security, stability, and well-being that their society and government could not guarantee. Mystical power was their remedy for institutional impotence. It was as compensatory as the scapegoats who generated it. It provided lacking solutions. And, as it in turn became institutionalized, it established reciprocal obligations. A remarkable broadside posted in 1805 by the Brotherhood of St. Rose of Lima observed that in Europe “our Brothers suffer so many and such varied afﬂictions.” In Lima, however, all was well—no famine, no epidemics, no strong earthquakes, no signiﬁcant enemy threat—because Rose intervened as necessary to maintain harmonious well-being. An 1811 sermon given in Lima similarly observed that while the world seemed to be in political collapse and moral crisis, Lima was well, thanks to Rose’s intercession: “We need not fear of the darkness that surrounds us everywhere.” Amid global turmoil, “Lima has not lost its serenity. The sword, hunger, and plague devastate entire Cities and kingdoms,” but Lima “abounds in all goodness.” The broadside accordingly concluded with a fund-raising plea addressed to “all of the residents of this Country” because all “enjoy her kind protection.” Three pesos annually, a kind of luxury tax for maintenance of these heavenly social services, were solicited to keep Rose of Lima pleased so that she, reciprocally, would continue to favorably exercise her patronage.49

The Poetics of Patronage The Sienese pope who canonized Catherine of Siena knew that a local saint had local advantages: “Who does not like, when he may do so with justice, to celebrate his own country, his own city, or his own family?” Catherine’s virtues were great, “but we admire them more because she like ourselves ﬁrst saw the light in the city of Siena.” Thanks to that bond between Catherine and her place of birth, “we anticipate more favors through her intercession than if she had been born in Africa, or in the Indies. Why should not the bonds that link us to the Saints, procure us some advantage?”50 When Rose of Lima died, her eyes would not stay closed. Despite the friars’ best efforts the eyes insistently reopened because the dead Rose could not “avert her gaze from her beloved homeland and countrymen.” She wanted to look after her people. Postmortem devotion to Rose spread rapidly throughout the viceroyalty because everyone hoped “to receive through her intercession consolation, defense, and favors.”51 Each individual citizen had a share in the beneﬁts generated by the collective in which Rose was born and sanctiﬁed. The precarious past had ended because Rose, the “daughter” of Lima and the bride of Christ, knew by experience “the needs of this City” and from heaven could provide accordingly. When a religious widow implored the deceased Rose to care for Lima, Rose dutifully appeared with assurances.52

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Intercession in heaven was preceded during Rose’s lifetime by her vicarious atonement to ward off God-sent punishments. According to tradition, in 1604 the Franciscan friar Francisco Solano, who was later canonized, gave apocalyptic sermons that caused panic in Lima. Solano prophesied that after a terrible earthquake Lima would be swallowed by the sea. The panicked city responded with spectacles of penance. The streets and plazas were ﬁlled with penitents scourging themselves, and the churches were kept open overtime for confession, but this collective effort to ward off the imminent doom was paled by comparison to Rose’s intercession. Rose spent that night ﬂagellating herself violently in “a veritable storm of lashes.” She scourged her entire body with an iron chain so severely that it seemed she would “break herself into pieces,” and she then fell to the ﬂoor “as though dead.”53 The devastation forecasted by Solano never materialized, and Rose was credited with saving Lima from the imminent doom. But if one presumes that Solano’s apocalyptic prophecy was always without substance (some, including Loayza, claim that Solano never even made the prophecy), then Rose’s selfﬂagellation for the salvation of Lima has no causal worth.54 Solano warned of a conﬂagration that in fact was not imminent; Rose scourged herself to ward it off; the subsequent absence of the conﬂagration was popularly perceived as the result of Rose’s effective intercession; Rose’s sanctity was enhanced by a self-injurious act that actually had no effect on preventing the anticipated conﬂagration; and Solano’s prophecy was veriﬁed and his reputation preserved, or enhanced, because the prophesied conﬂagration “came,” in effect, but was turned back due to his forewarning and Rose’s penitential intercession. All players—Solano, Rose, Limen ˜ os, God—derive their meanings within a selfreinforcing system of false causality in which Rose provided a symbolic solution to a symbolic threat believed to be real. She scourged herself nearly to death to save her homeland from an imaginary apocalypse, but, because the threat, the sins that caused it, and her atonement to avert it were all realties within her culture, Rose’s intercession established the harmony of a new equilibrium and, with it, the basis for her regard as savior and protectress of Lima. This reputation was then reinforced in July 1615 when another imminent catastrophe, this one more real, caused fear and panic in Lima. Dutch pirates approached the city’s port at Callao, the militia was mobilized, the women and children were ushered to the safehaven of churches, and by order of the archbishop the eucharist was displayed in all churches “to implore the help of the Lord, and to ask for his support against the enemies of his Church.” While others feared for their lives, Rose’s greatest fear was that the eucharist—the sacramental body of her Bridegroom—would be desecrated. She otherwise welcomed the hostile incursion—“the happiest hour had arrived”—as an opportunity to fulﬁll her great aspiration, “which was to suffer martyrdom for her Bridegroom.”55 When rumor held that the pirates had landed and were pressing toward Lima, friars took up arms to defend the monastery and Rose prepared “to give her life and spill her blood” to protect the eucharist. Rose encouraged the beatas swooning with fear beside her to embrace this “precious and fortunate occasion” to become a “bloody sacriﬁce” and “a victim for the

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divine victim.” She trimmed her habit for freedom of movement, rolled her sleeves up to the elbows, and prepared to “ﬁght and die for the divine Sacrament”: “I will expose my body, like a shield, so that it receives the blows and wounds that the heretics throw at the body of my Lord Jesus Christ.” The desire for protracted martyrdom, here yet closer to St. Dominic’s plea, was also reafﬁrmed: “I will beg the heretics not to take my life with a single blow but rather to dismember me little by little, making small pieces of me and dividing each part into tiny particles.”56 Rose’s anticipation of martyrdom (in hagiography) competes with a counterdiscourse (in testimony) that stresses instead her hope for victory with otherworldly assistance. “I have to go to the main altar,” she told her mother as they awaited the arrival of the pirates, and “with this rosary will make them all surrender.” Her mother laughed, but Rose chastised the disbelief and responded with a more emphatic reafﬁrmation: “With this rosary of the Mother of God I will make them all surrender.”57 The rumored attack never occurred. Rose waited until nightfall to hurry home under the cover of darkness, accompanied by her mother, because the habit trimmed for freedom of movement had left her limbs indecently exposed.58 In the earliest hagiography, written by Loayza in 1619, the pirate incident warranted only a mention, but in the later, major hagiographies its extensive treatment helped to solidify Rose’s status as Lima’s patron. For Hansen, Mele´ndez, and many subsequent hagiographers, Lima was attacked by pirates and potentially devastating consequences were avoided thanks to Rose’s intercession. In secular, historical perspective, however, the pirate attack, which had more to do with European politics than with Limen ˜ os’ accountability to God for their sins, never actually materialized beyond the threat near Callao, and Rose’s ﬂagellation had the causal power not to prevent the feared attack but only to generate such perceptions within her culture. In one perspective the earth that never quaked and the pirates that never attacked attest to the power of Rose’s intercession and the validity of the practices—mortiﬁcation, desire for martyrdom—that enact it. In another, the issue is trapped in a tautology: Rose is saintly because the calamities never occurred, and they never occurred because she is saintly. The more Rose’s suffering was associated with collective guilt, imminent punishment, and the need for atonement, the more it was regarded as efﬁcacious. In addition to its substantial contribution to Rose’s claim to patronage, the pirate attack also provided a basis for her identity as a Counter-Reformation defender of the faith. Unlike the many other feared and actualized tragedies in hagiography, the pirate attack was represented less as a divine scourge in response to sinfulness than as an assault against Catholicism by enemies of the faith. It thus required an alliance of earthly and heavenly forces to defend sacred interests from heretics. (Passing reference to the attack as a divine scourge created the strange situation of God at battle with himself, on one side as the attacker of the city—with the pirates as his instrument—and on the other as the exposed eucharist that defended and was defended by Catholics, including Rose, who implored heavenly intercession and prepared for battle in Christ’s name.)59 Rose intervened ﬁercely in response to the threat of Cal-

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vinist pirates, “transformed into a lioness” in order to “defend the Lamb on the altar.”60 Armed only with the rosary and reinforced by the greater (and again feminine) power of the Virgin Mary, she assumed her qualities as a mujer varonil and virgin warrior as she prepared to throw herself between her Bridegroom and the sword. The pirate episode contributed to the popular image, in evidence as early as 1649, that represented Rose of Lima holding an anchor (and sometimes a palm frond as a symbol of purity) in one hand and in the other a Christ child encircled by roses (and sometimes olive branches, in allusion to Rose’s two surnames).61 The anchor often supports a model of Lima, and the Christ child sometimes offers a wedding ring to Rose as his bride.62 Rose’s one hand knows what the other is doing: she effectively protects her city (supported on the anchor as a symbol of protection, salvation, and hope) because her status as a bride of Christ affords the powers of intercession.63 The anchorite earns the love of Christ through the suffering of her vicarious atonement, and Lima is refounded on her anchor. Fourteenth- and ﬁfteenth-century Italian antecedents of such protectress motifs depict other saints similarly holding models of the cities with which they are closely identiﬁed. A 1402 altarpiece shows St. Fina opening her cloak to reveal a model of her city, San Gimignano, safely sheltered beneath it.64 In some versions of Rose’s protectress image, the Christ child holds in his hands a globe with a cross on top of it.65 Rose is to Lima as Christ is to the world, both saviors of their respective realms. The city resting on a symbol of salvation held by Rose in the act of betrothal to a God encircled by her primary attribute (roses) leaves little room for doubt: Lima is under divine protection through Rose’s intercession. The shaky ground of earthquakes and other divine scourges is traded up for a heavenly suspension. The city that bore Rose becomes a miniature eclipsed by her towering presence as Lima is anchored to its protectress. Lima is re-founded on its salvation and exists in Christendom only insofar as Rose saved it, ﬁrst from calamities and then, as the New World’s ﬁrst saint, from perdition. In this perspective Rose’s self-martyrdom seems a foundation sacriﬁce, an earthquake unto itself that tears down in order to rebuild. The “buildings of guilt” that “sinners constructed on Rose’s back” were razed by her ﬂagellations to provide a sound foundation for her reconstruction of the New World in Christ.66 Once Rose was canonized and formalized as patron of Peru, her intercession could be called on at will to protect her jeopardized people. Despite insistent contemptus mundi discourse, however, the designated salvation—from natural disasters, from pirate attacks—was patently this-worldly. Survival in this life was of greater concern than salvation in the next, the soul was barely mentioned, and the saintly assistance that was solicited or volunteered was often military. On May 24, 1681, a procession left the monastery of Santo Domingo, en route to the cathedral, with statues of the Virgin of the Rosary, St. Dominic, and Rose of Lima, who were together beseeched for defensive intercession. “Extensive penances were ordered by the viceroy-archbishop to pacify God Our Lord for the evil and robbery that the English enemy perpetrated in this sea.”67

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In 1881, during the War of the Paciﬁc (1879–1883), Chilean forces approached Lima by sea, and attack seemed imminent. According to a 1917 Peruvian account, the city was saved by a “possible miracle” (later in same text “the great miracle”) comparable to Rose’s intervention against pirates in 1615. The Chileans intended to occupy and sack Lima, but “while the invader prepared to make innocent victims” of Limen ˜ os, the local ladies prayed for Rose’s intercession. Just then the rear admiral Petit Thouars, a French devotee of Rose since childhood, had a funny feeling. At sea near Valparaı´so, Petit Thouars, “who had an image of the Saint in his cabin,” was haunted by “an interior voice that said to him: ‘to Lima, to Lima.’” The admiral heeded Rose’s call, changing course despite contrary orders and arriving in time to prevent the Chilean invasion of Lima.68 More recently, during Peruvian conﬂicts with Colombia and with Ecuador, Rose of Lima “made her protective and tutelary hand visible” to aid her country’s army.69 Virgin patronage has a long history throughout Christendom. Female asceticism was lauded for its protective powers even in the fourth century, when an Egyptian Christian recommended that every household have its virgin, because “the salvation of the whole house is that one virgin. And when wrath cometh upon the whole city, it shall not come upon the house wherein a virgin is.” The paradigm of such protective virginity later became the Virgin Mary herself, who in innumerable advocations vanquished the enemies of Catholicism, drove off epidemics and natural catastrophes, and interceded maternally to protect her people and their interests. Beginning in the mid-fourteenth century, the Virgin appeared before Christ the Judge in hundreds of paintings, imploring his mercy toward the sinful humanity for whom she advocated as protectress.70 More similar to Rose of Lima iconography, and particularly to images of the protective St. Fina, were representations of the Virgin as the sheltering Madonna of Mercy. The Virgin protects beneath her maternal cloak what Rose protected on her anchor. Piero Della Francesca’s 1445 Misericordia altarpiece has as its center panel the Madonna of Mercy opening her blue mantle to shelter the kneeling townspeople. In Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Madonna of Mercy (1472), people from various social stations are sheltered under the protective mantle of the Virgin.71 As imperial Spain began expanding in the sixteenth century, the Madonna of Mercy appeared in Seville as Alejo Ferna´ndez’s The Virgin of the Navigators (circa 1543), with the Virgin now hovering over the harbor to protect ships, cargo, and crew (including Columbus and Pizarro) as they embarked on the perilous Atlantic crossing.72 The same motif took a more monastic turn in Francisco de Zubara´n’s Virgin of the Carthusians (circa 1625), in which the Virgin’s cloak, held up by angels, houses kneeling monks.73 Paintings of the Italian Renaissance provided source material for iconographic tradition in the Spanish colonies, and the Madonna of Mercy and her protective mantle thus also appeared in eighteenth-century Cuzco- and Quito-school paintings. In one somewhat licentious image from the Cuzco school, St. Pedro Nolasco and the infant Jesus not only are sheltered under the Virgin’s cloak but also nurse at her protruding breasts.74

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Whether supporting the city from the symbol of salvation, sheltering and nurturing it under a protective cloak, or sparing it from harm by intercession, the virgins in iconography and hagiography are attached almost corporally to the social bodies from which they emerged. There is a certain fusion of the protectress and her homeland, resulting sometimes in the representation of the city itself as a women or goddess “who harbours the inhabitants in herself like children.” The Greco-Roman goddess Tyche (the deiﬁed personiﬁcation of fortune) was depicted crowned with towers to symbolize her role as a city and at once guardian of the city. Most semitic goddesses were also “ﬁrst understood as the protectresses of a people or a city,” and in both the Old and New Testaments these cities were gendered as female.75 Babylon was a whore, Jerusalem and Israel were Yahweh’s sometimes unfaithful wife, and the New Jerusalem—femininity perfected—was a radiant bride. Once the Virgin Mary and, by extension, other virgins were associated with this descending New Jerusalem, they were further integrated into the “classical tradition of personifying cities and institutions as goddesses.”76 The recently encountered Americas were often allegorized as an exotically voluptuous woman, sometimes seated on a crocodile, who disposed her body to the ravishes of conquest.77 This allegorical image was included among the dozen large paintings that adorned the formal celebration of Rose of Lima’s beatiﬁcation in Rome, but with an innovation: in allusion to the emerging saint, the feminized America held roses in her hand and was illuminated, as was the New World behind her, by St. Dominic’s torch.78 In another Roman church on the same occasion a painting depicted “the city of Lima in the form of a beautiful matron crowned with Roses and with three crowns in her hand,” again seated on a crocodile. The designation of Rose through one of her primary attributes (the crown of roses) was similarly explicit in an eighteenthcentury Peruvian or Bolivian painting that personiﬁed not only Lima but all America as Rose of Lima.79 In these images the allegorical woman is civilized, Christianized, and transformed into Rose of Lima as representative of the new America, itself tamed from its savage wildness by incorporation, through Rose, into Christendom. The voluptuous pagan body has been conquered by virginal purity. The homeland and its patron fuse with one another and with their God. If Rose is assumed by mystical marriage into the body of Christ, becoming with him one ﬂesh, then so are her realm and her people. Rose became the synecdoche of the Americas, the homegrown saint who sacriﬁced her part for the whole, sanctiﬁed her locale, attached its history to Christian eschatology, and mimed in miniature—from her penitential agonies to her glorious union with Christ—her people’s anticipated destiny.

7 Spiritualized Symptoms

Man is the cruelest animal against himself; and whenever he calls himself “sinner” and “cross bearer” and “penitent,” do not fail to hear the voluptuous delight that is in all such lamentation and accusation. —Friedrich Nietzsche

The Mother In Rose of Lima’s life, as in the lives of many saints, the father’s presence was insigniﬁcant in comparison to the mother’s predominance. This pattern had an exceptional precedent in the life of Christ himself, in which the Virgin Mary overshadowed the elderly Joseph (at least in post-biblical representations) who, in any case, was a foster parent standing in for the absent God the Father.1 Rose’s detached and seemingly inconsequential father (Gaspar Flores), who was also elderly (sixty-one when Rose was born), testiﬁed that “he in no way knew of nor understood” his daughter’s penitential practices. The latter admission seems to belie the former, but both attest to his parental limitations. When he was asked what time Rose usually returned to the house from her cell in the garden, the father responded that he did not know because “he went to bed early.” Hagiography developed at length the conﬂicts between mother and daughter, but the father merited hardly a mention. His insigniﬁcance and the mother’s dominant role within the home were also registered implicitly by common reference to Rose’s domicile as her “mother’s house,” whereas her adoptive home was the “Contador’s house,” in reference to Gonzalo de la Maza.2

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The absence or indifference of a shadowy father might be a norm of domestic matriarchy—the mother was head of household and caretaker of children, while the father earned a living outside of the home—but its coincidence in the lives of Rose of Lima, other penitential saints, and many modern neurotics nevertheless suggest its importance as a formative factor. Masochism, for example, symbolically “abolishes the father” because “the masochistic contract excludes the father and displaces onto the mother the task of exercising and applying the paternal law.” During the childhood of many masochistic patients, the paternal ﬁgures “were usually absent or too disturbed” to function satisfactorily, and some masochists suffered in childhood the combination of an extremely weak father overshadowed by a strict but inconsistent mother.3 Self-mutilators also report absent fathers and excessively protective and dominant mothers, and anorexics describe their fathers as, among other qualiﬁers, “passive” and “emotionally absent.”4 The battle of wills between Rose and her mother (Marı´a de Oliva) dramatized the interaction of two irreconcilable worldviews, one strictly religious and the other predominantly secular. Their competing interests were mutually exclusive. The major confrontations ﬁrst concerned the mother’s desire that Rose marry well and then, that having failed, the mother’s attempt to moderate Rose’s asceticism.5 The mother had a legitimate concern for the well-being of a daughter who was systematically destroying herself with fasts, mortiﬁcations, and sleep deprivation. What Rose and her hagiographers perceived as torments imposed by the mother—obliging Rose to eat, sleep, and moderate the mortiﬁcation—were what others might regard as responsible maternal interventions. The mother attempted to curtail the asceticism “because of how much she loved her [Rose], believing that one day she was going to fall dead” from so much self-abuse. Religious arguments condoning severe mortiﬁcation failed to convince Rose’s mother, who believed instead that credulous and overzealous confessors were destroying her daughter by approving and encouraging excessive practices. The devil got the blame when one of Rose’s penitential handbooks wound up torn to shreds and thrown into the chicken coop, but one wonders if Rose’s mother was not responsible. Indeed, when Juan de Lorenzana ﬁnally prohibited use of Rose’s torturous bed, the mother dismantled it and threw the pieces into the river.6 The mother’s strong reactions may have unwittingly reinforced the anomalous behavior that they were intending to curtail. Her opposition was counterproductive insofar as it catalyzed Rose’s all the more vehement quest for autonomy through religious self-abuse As the battle lines were drawn and the adversaries took their positions, Rose’s destiny was clariﬁed. The mother’s wellintentioned but pathogenic parenting is also suggested in Rose’s earliest years. As an infant Rose was abnormally still and rarely cried or displayed emotion. According to her hagiographers, Rose cried inconsolably on only one occasion, when her mother took her for a visit to “a certain noble lady who wished to meet her.” Rose’s crying forced the distraught mother to return home, and as a consequence the mother decided to avoid upsetting Rose by exempting her from subsequent outings. Hagiography interpreted the episode as a precocious

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expression of Rose’s disdain for worldly affairs and as an early victory in her battle for saintly reclusion, but it could as well be read as an index of the conditioning (which later became a mutual co-conditioning between mother and daughter) by which Rose’s character debilities were unwittingly reinforced by her mother’s reactions.7 Rather than nurturing the child’s sense of comfort and security outside of the home, the mother withdrew Rose from the world, fostering a tendency toward social isolation that may not have been providential. As Rose grew older she began to defend this accustomed withdrawal consciously, now with clearly religious purpose. The earlier absence of crying yielded to tempestuous protests: “With tears she begged her mother not to take her out.” The protests were necessary because the mother had reversed her policy of protective domestic seclusion when the time arrived for courtship. Rose, who had already committed herself to the Bridegroom, resorted to selfinjury as a means to escape the dreaded outings and protect her reclusion. On one occasion Rose dropped a large rock on her foot and on another she rubbed ajı´ (chili) into her eyes, swelling them closed, in order to evade the social outings that her mother had planned. As Mele´ndez explained in reference to the ajı´ incident, Rose “suffered that pain with great pleasure, in order to avoid the greater pain of going out.”8 The self-inﬂicted pain was a form of pain aversion. Having failed to reverse the isolationism that she had earlier defended, the mother succumbed to Rose’s injurious insistence by resuming her support of reclusion: “From then on she tried to excuse her from the outings for the said contacts and visits.”9 Mortiﬁcation was becoming efﬁcacious. The social isolation won in childhood by crying was recuperated in adolescence by self-injury. The conﬂicts of will between Rose and her mother generally conformed to a pattern. The mother intervened to moderate some ascetic behavior; Rose resisted deﬁantly but strategically, testing the limits of obedience; and the mother, ﬁnally reduced to exasperated resignation, freed Rose to do as she pleased. Communication broke down as mother and daughter stuck to their scripts and the drama was reenacted repeatedly. The mother did not understand “the mute language with which God spoke to her” through Rose’s deﬁant resistance. Rose “said more than she said”: her words vowed slavish obedience, while her actions narrated resistance in compliance with the complicit higher authority whose mute message the mother failed to heed.10 The miracle was granted when a starved and mortiﬁed Rose beseeched God to disguise her sunken eyes and “very pale” face so that the evidence of her asceticism would be hidden from her mother.11 With the assistance of her formidable allies—God, several confessors, Gonzalo de la Maza, Marı´a de Uza´tegui—Rose prevailed in her struggle for freedom. The mother only acquiesced of necessity, however, and during Rose’s lifetime she was never supportive of mortiﬁcation and never convinced of its propriety. When Rose died, the mother seems to have experienced an overwhelming sense of relief, as though her daughter were ﬁnally ﬁnished, even if only in death, with the terrible sufferings that she had brought on herself.

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During Rose’s moribund agony the mother was “very upset and tearful,” but when Rose’s death ﬁnally came the mother was overtaken by “great delight” and was “exceedingly joyful” and “full of laughter.” In Hansen’s account, she “almost could not prevent herself from jumping for joy” and separated from the group “in order to more freely loosen the reins on her happiness.”12 The hagiographers interpreted this joy as delight in Rose’s heavenly glory, but the mother’s reaction also suggests the complex emotions expressed when a loved one’s suffering ﬁnally ends. The mother had witnessed some twenty-ﬁve years of her daughter’s systematic self-destruction and its end, however painful, may have also brought considerable relief. The subsequent events, including the funeral devotions, the initiation of canonization proceedings, and the dead Rose’s celebrity among the elite, must have had a profound effect on Rose’s mother. All of the convictions by which she lived where overwhelmed by her culture’s vociferous preference for the counterversion that had been insisted by her daughter. In 1629, after her husband’s death and now herself over sixty, Rose’s mother, as Rose had prophesied, took the Dominican habit and entered the convent of Santa Catalina. The prophesy fulﬁlled was a ﬁnancially attractive arrangement (the dowry was subsidized) for a poor widow, but also a demonstration of how the mother’s perception of her problematic daughter, of monastic Catholicism, and of her own identity had been gradually transformed over the years. Amid overwhelming evidence the mother capitulated to the dominant view: her daughter was a saint. Instead of Rose folding to the will of her mother, the mother was reborn in the likeness of her daughter. The mother even took a name, “Marı´a de Santa Marı´a,” that followed her daughter’s precedent (Rosa de Santa Marı´a). Rose had jettisoned her given name in pursuit of spiritual independence, and her mother reestablished the kinship by taking a like name in turn. When the encloistered Marı´a de Santa Marı´a became ill, she was given an image of Rose as a means of convalescence, and “after having given many kisses to the image of her daughter,” Rose’s mother was cured.13 One of the most enduring psychological traumas of Rose’s youth resulted precisely from the change of name from “Isabel” to “Rose” during infancy. As described in chapter 3, “Miracle of the Rose,” Rose of Lima was originally named “Isabel” after her maternal grandmother (Isabel de Herrera), but her name was later changed to “Rose” pursuant to a miracle. The young girl subsequently found herself entrapped in a double bind as her mother and grandmother each defended their respective, irreconcilable positions at Rose’s expense. Question three of the ordinary process summarized the dilemma: “The said grandmother whipped her and beat her when she responded to the name Rose . . . and not to that of Isabel, and, conversely, the said mother did the same when she responded to the name of Isabel.” Rose was punished no matter which name she responded to: “She found herself entangled in persecutions from them both” and “she was threatened everywhere by the whip and paid for sins that she had not committed.”14 If she sought her mother’s approval, she was punished by her grandmother, and if she sought her grandmother’s approval, she was punished by her mother. The love of one meant

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the punishment of the other, and the love of both was conditional. Rose had no uncontested name and nowhere to turn for love free of guilt, loss, and pain. Her idea of love and her beleaguered identity were formed as she learned to suffer “for sins that she had not committed.” These conﬂicts continued until Archbishop Toribio de Mogrovejo, “undoubtedly moved by a superior impulse,” conﬁrmed the girl with the name “Rose.”15 Fraught with scruples over her new name’s suggestion of vanity, however, Rose later appended the Virgin’s name to her own and thereafter called herself “Rose of St. Mary.” Both her original given name (Isabel) and her surname (Flores y Oliva) fell into disuse as she distanced herself from the earthly ancestry that impeded her penitential mysticism and claimed instead a celestial lineage. The acquisition of the Virgin’s name was a decisive step in the development of the Virgin of the Rosary as Rose’s surrogate mother. One hagiographer observed that Rose loved her actual mother but “had another mother,” the Virgin of the Rosary, “whom she loved more with a more heartfelt love.” The Rosary Chapel, where the statue of the Virgin was located, was described as Rose’s second home, and in visions there the Virgin referred to Rose as “my daughter.”16 Catherine of Siena also provided surrogate motherhood that separated Rose from her mother, as did, in this world, Marı´a de Uza´tegui, both of whom Rose called “mother.”17 Because “in her mother’s house she could not exercise her manner of living,” and in order to free Rose from the burden “of the food that her mother made her eat,” Uza´tegui and her husband, Gonzalo de la Maza, took Rose into their home for an extended residence so that “her virtue would grow.” According to de la Maza’s testimony, Rose’s mother, unable to contend with the penitential asceticism, commended Rose to the care of the more tolerant Uza´tegui: “She handed her over as a daughter so that as such [Uza´tegui] would take charge of her.”18 As the daughter of the Virgin, Catherine, and Uza´tegui, Rose was freed of the maternal bonds that restricted mortiﬁcation. Whereas the actual mother obstructed self-injurious religious practices, the surrogate mothers—two of them in another world—encouraged Rose ever forward down the path of severe mortiﬁcation. There was ample hagiographic precedent for Rose’s substitution of an unaccommodating mother with otherworldly surrogates. When Catherine of Siena’s family treated her as a lowly servant to punish and dissuade her religious calling, she imagined that her home “was the holy house of Nazareth, her father Jesus Christ, her mother the Blessed Virgin.” The adolescent Catherine’s fantasy resonates with complexity because it espouses Christ with his mother and because Catherine later regarded herself as the bride of the same Christ here depicted paternally, but more relevant in the present context is the disownership of her actual parents in favor of these celestial surrogates. A similar foster parentage was yet more explicit in Teresa of Avila’s autobiography. Teresa’s mother died when she was around twelve, and, she wrote, “when I began to understand what I had lost, I went in distress to an image of our Lady, and with many tears beseeched her to be my mother.”19

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These imaginary surrogate parents, particularly in Catherine’s case, are reminiscent of the common narcissistic fantasy in which children imagine that they are adopted. Believing themselves to be inﬁnitely greater than their parents, some children fantasize that they are of elite or even divine origin but, through twists of fate, wound up with the mediocre foster parents from whom they separate in fantasy.20 As in the lives of aspiring saints, they thereby replace a genealogy deemed to be inferior with a heritage worthy of their ambitions. Normal modern children abandon this fantasy in adolescence, but Rose maintained a conscious, lifelong conviction that her surrogate parentage by otherworldly personages was a reality. No one is surprised when God turns up among transcendentalized parental ﬁgures, but the forms of his appearance among female mystics is sometimes striking. Christ, who was otherwise Rose’s Bridegroom, also assumed attributes characteristic of her mother. The femininity of Christ was predisposed because, having no human father, “his body came entirely from Mary and was therefore closely associated with female ﬂesh.” Honorius Augustodunensis explained: “God makes human beings in four ways: from the earth, as Adam; from man alone, as Eve; from man and woman, as us; from woman alone, Christ, since he reserved the privilege for himself.”21 As discussed in chapter 9, “The Purgatory of Love,” Christ most explicitly assumed a quasi-maternal role when he brought Rose of Lima to nurse at the wound in his side as though it were a breast. Whereas in many other hagiographies the infant saint refuses the maternal breast (either as a precocious fast or in protest of carnal sin), in Rose’s infancy the dried breast had nothing to offer. Already in infancy it is suggested that Rose’s sustenance will be otherworldly and that the biological mother (who cannot provide) will be replaced by heavenly surrogates who nourish body and soul abundantly. The mother’s dry breast is the antithesis of the plentiful bounty offered by the wounded Christ.22 Interrupted lactation during Rose’s infancy became the paradigm of an ensemble of early deprivations, and the unfulﬁlling mother was replaced in fantasy or ecstasy by a cast of surrogates that came to include a motherly Christ. Christ’s maternal role was less dramatically but more insistently evidenced in Rose’s conception of his love. Rose aspired to mystical marriage with her divine, male Bridegroom as she declared independence from her mother, but Christ as she experienced him—domineering, demanding, totalitarian, controlling, pain- and guilt-inducing—reiterated signiﬁcant aspects of the mother’s character. In some modern clinical cases, God is constructed from maternal rather than the more common paternal sources, and relations with the mother generate the internal object through which God is loved and symptoms are formed. In these instances, as in the life of Rose, the father is often insigniﬁcant or emotionally empty, and there is a conspicuous absence also of God the Father. The pathogenic, “overprotective, intrusive, and controlling mother” is “unable to perceive her child as separate” and prevents the child from pleasures that are not derived from her. Through totalitarian control, this “omnipotent mother” impedes the child’s separation and normal development

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as an autonomous individual.23 To maintain maternal love and approval, the child must forfeit subjectivity and individuation as he or she is absorbed by the overwhelming parent. When Rose turned from her mother to her lover these dynamics were adapted in the transition. Each bride of Christ must dismantle her subjectivity in order to make herself worthy of the absolutist love of her Bridegroom. She surrenders herself totally until ﬁnally her subjectivity is obliterated—“You are she who is not; whereas I am He who is,” Christ told Catherine of Siena. Teresa of Avila received the same message; the soul is “totally consumed,” God told her, as it is overwhelmed by his being: “It is no longer [the soul] that lives, but I.”24 Much the same was expressed in Galatians 2:20: “I have been cruciﬁed with Christ,” and therefore, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”25 In poetic homage to this erasure of subjectivity, Rose’s face (like her name) seems never her own. In infancy it turned into a rose; in her youth it was miraculously masked by a healthy facade that hid its true appearance; in adulthood it was transformed into the face of Catherine of Siena; and after death it became, precisely, the face of “Christ himself.”26 Rose “is transformed into her Beloved, unmaking herself and remaking herself as one and the same with him.”27 Christ’s love is won through absolute submission, through gradual erosion of the boundaries between the diminishing self and the all-encompassing God. According to Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, “God is so pleased by this annihilation that He increases its [the soul’s] nonbeing and makes His dwelling there, because He cannot and does not wish to unite Himself to any soul without this annihilation.” Mystical marriage requires an “annihilation” that, in Rose’s case, resembled (or ﬁnished) the incomplete destruction of individuation begun by her mother. The punishing love that assaulted her subjectivity during childhood was duplicated through a process of revictimization that contributed to her conception of, attraction to, and fatal love for her Bridegroom.28 Julian of Norwich addressed Christ as “my kind mother, my gracious Mother, my most dear Mother,” but in Rose’s life, dominated by a mother only “too good to hate,” a different motherly Christ emerges.29 Rose’s Christ made negative maternal attributes divine. In his implacable demands he resembled the mothers who precipitate modern anorexia by imposing “a strict moral code with rigid, narcissistic, grandiose ego-ideals” on subordinates trapped within “a pleasureless, controlling atmosphere.” He is a domineering, jealous lover who deprives his brides of any desires of their own or any pleasures not derived from him.30 “I must renounce all pleasures,” Marguerite-Marie Alacoque reported after speaking to Christ, because “He alone sufﬁced.” Christ exacted Rose’s absolute devotion, kept her locked in a cell, accelerated her selfdestruction with his impossible expectations, and offered manipulative, unloving love in reciprocation for her subordination and suffering. Rose, like modern masochists, desperately solicited his affection and acceptance through slavish devotion, mediating her love through ideations of guilt and unworthiness. She sacriﬁced herself to sustain the illusion of maternal love that was transcendentalized with all its cruel deﬁciencies.31

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Christ was also represented in Rose’s life as the antithesis of the mother, assuming in this conﬁguration a position that was sometimes occupied by the grandmother. The mother defended one of the polarized positions, while Christ and the grandmother alternatively defended the other, with Rose trapped in the crossﬁre. Just as in her childhood Rose was incapable of satisfying the mutually exclusive demands made of her after the name change, so later she was caught again in a double bind as her mother and Christ both bound her by obedience to incompatible obligations. Rose’s management of this dilemma was most efﬁcacious in the many scenes (discussed in chapter 5, “Mysticism as Dissent”) in which she found ways to more or less reconcile the irreconcilable mandates by innovative obedience that turned the letter of the law against its spirit.32 If her mother obliged her to wear a crown of ﬂowers but Christ preferred that she wore a crown of thorns, then Rose would don the garland in respect for maternal authority but at once jam the hatpin into her scalp to simultaneously comply, as best she could, with Christ’s demand. The double burden of irreconcilable demands also affected Rose’s schedule and workload, “working during the day for her mother, and at night for her heavenly Bridegroom.” The family depended on the income that Rose generated through gardening and handiwork, and her mother was therefore ill-disposed to tolerate what she regarded as a waste of valuable work time on excessive devotions. A miraculous solution was envisioned in one of Rose’s dreams when Christ ordered her to work—not pray, work—exclusively for him. Rose had the dream while she was in residence at the de la Maza household, and she related it to her surrogate mother, Uza´tegui, but the dream was set, as Rose put it, in “my mother’s house.”33 The Bridegroom of this dream was a stone worker. He gave Rose stones to cut and heavy tools for this purpose, assured her that he would provide her parents with “the assistance necessary to support them,” and left.34Rose did little of the work that Christ assigned to her, however, because she tended instead to the pressing obligations in support of her family. When Christ returned and saw how little Rose had accomplished, he took her by the hand, led her to another room, opened the door, and showed her a “great number of young women, very pretty and very richly dressed with garlands on their heads.” They were all actively working stone softened by their tears. Before he revealed these industrious, beautiful brides, Christ asked Rose if she thought that she toiled alone, and upon opening the door to the workshop he afﬁrmed, “you are not alone.” With these magic words Rose’s white habit was transformed “and she saw that she was dressed like the others,” a richly adorned bride of Christ, “and seeing herself so elegant she wanted to return to her mother to tell her.” The dream concluded as Rose woke with that desire.35 During Rose’s dark night of the soul, when she felt that Christ had abandoned her, she lamented the competition of multiple brides who distracted her Bridegroom’s attentions. In the dream, however, this harem of competing brides seems more a multiplication of Rose herself, a kind of task force accomplishing the laborious obligations that were too excessive for any one individual. Rose is transformed into their likeness and their status precisely by the

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words (“you are not alone”) that reveal that her labor is shared. When Rose becomes one of them, the dream expresses by inversion their multiple representation of her (which also eliminates competition for the Bridegroom’s love). Rose’s perception of her own labor, or, at least, the perception of Rose’s labor by others, may have provided a precedent for the dream: “Many women together do not work as much as she works alone.”36 The dream reconciled the competing demands that the mother and Christ made on Rose. It multiplied her into a workforce to provide labor sufﬁcient to the dual obligations, and it contracted the polyvalent “good marriage” that simultaneously satisﬁed Rose’s mystical aspirations and her mother’s quest for a son-in-law who would provide ﬁnancial stability. Indeed, the dream ends when Rose awakens with the desire to tell her mother the good news and to show off her long-resisted beautiﬁcation, acceptable now because the adornment came from Christ. Rather than remaining trapped between the mutually exclusive demands of her mother and Christ, Rose was liberated because the dream made her true desire—mystical marriage—a means of satisfying rather than frustrating her mother’s demands. Christ never supported Rose’s family as promised, but the dream nevertheless absolved guilt for the time-consuming devotions by providing—thanks precisely to these devotions—an otherworldly windfall more lucrative than Rose’s labor.37

Traumatic Reliving Early in life Rose suffered a series of illnesses, accidents, painful cures, and punishments that were frequently related to her mother. The ﬁrst trauma was food deprivation resulting from the mentioned interrupted lactation before Rose had reached eight months. Rather than hiring a wetnurse, the mother suspended feeding because Rose “was always very still” and “never gave signs of having the necessity to eat.” According to Mele´ndez, efforts to spoon-feed Rose with soups (like the later efforts to force-feed her) were futile, because “they served only to torment her without nourishing her.”38 When Rose was three years old the heavy lid of a trunk slammed down on her thumb. Rose responded “very calmly”: “Lift the lid because it is pressing down on my ﬁnger.” The crushed thumb soon became infected and emitted “a very bad odor,” but Rose remained strangely indifferent, “without making any sound or demonstration that anything was wrong with her.”39 A surgeon, Juan Pe´rez de Zumeta, was called, and as he “pulled out almost all of the ﬁnger nail” and then “tugged out the roots that remained,” Rose’s reaction was dissociative, “as though the ﬁnger that suffered were not hers.”40 Also during her third year Rose suffered an abscess in her ear. When medical treatment failed to cure the infection, the surgeon cut into the ear’s cartilage “to make a path and divert the pestilent humor.” As a result of the surgery, “her ear was missing a piece for the rest of her life.”41 While others were “fainting” at the sight of “the furrows made by the surgeon’s knife,” Rose again remained stoically undaunted as the blood ran down onto her shoulder.42

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A year or two later, when Rose was four or ﬁve, her scalp broke out in a painful rash. The afﬂiction was complicated by an ill-advised home remedy devised by Rose’s mother, who applied a corrosive compound of arsenic and sulfur to the scalp and then wrapped the head to seal in this treatment. Rose bore the pain silently, “as though she were made of marble,” although “now and then her body trembled.”43 Visiting girls reported to the mother that the salve was causing Rose pain, but the mother nevertheless interpreted Rose’s silence as a sign of well-being and left the treatment on the scalp throughout the night. When the wrapping was removed the following morning, the mother discovered to her horror that the scalp was swollen to deformity and covered in wounds and blisters, “with some pieces of ﬂesh raised like buttons.” The surgeon was again called and, “seeing that after some days he could not remove the pus,” he continued a long curative procedure that lasted for forty-two days. Rose again endured the cure without reaction, as though she were “a dead body.”44 The cabildo felt obliged in the mid-sixteenth century to inform the viceroy about public complaints against surgeons who “err in their cures, being the cause of many deaths,” but folk cures may have been worse.45 Rose suffered the consequences of another home remedy some seven years after the scalp incident, when she was around twelve. The family was temporarily residing in Quives when, as her mother testiﬁed, Rose became “crippled in her feet and hands.” Hansen attributed the problem to a “contraction of nerves” in response to the “excessive coldness of that region,” but given the actual, moderate climate of Quives the incapacitation may have been precipitated or aggravated by other factors, including psychosomatic reactions and the cold water that Rose poured on herself as a mortiﬁcation.46 Whatever the cause, Rose’s mother had a remedy that redoubled the sufferings. To warm the crippled extremities the mother tightly wrapped Rose’s arms and legs in vulture skins and instructed Rose not to remove them. When after ﬁve or six days the mother, distracted by her husband’s simultaneous illness, remembered to remove the skins, she discovered the arms and legs “covered in blisters and as though they had been burned with ﬁre.” In this case as in the preceding examples, Rose suffered ﬁrst the illness and then the cure, but always “without showing that it was she who suffered and had pain.”47 This litany of childhood misfortune was complicated by a corresponding series of illnesses, some of them possibly of psychosomatic origin. “Her whole life she suffered very great and diverse illnesses and attacks,” Rose’s mother testiﬁed, and her father’s sparing deposition added that she suffered from “pains in the jaw and pain in the lungs and she spit up blood and great fevers and other illnesses the names of which this witness does not remember.”48 The forgotten ailments included gout, angina, asthma, sciatica, nausea, vomiting, and arthritis. Hansen described Rose’s body as “consumed by continuous illnesses” and cataloged the causes of her chronic pain: “inﬂammation of the interior muscles,” particularly in the jaws and throat; asthma to the point of suffocation; “sciatica and pains in the side”; “very intense” stomach and heart pains; and “nerve contractions.” He also mentioned “cruel torments in the

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hands, in the feet, in the head, and in the nerves.” These lifelong ailments took a serious turn for the worse during the last three years of Rose’s life, but she responded to the pain with the same disclaimers that she had used in her childhood: “It hurts a little” and “It’s nothing.”49 Rose’s suffering through accidents, illnesses, and cures was compounded by what today might be regarded as child abuse. Amid the little said of Rose’s father was his accidental discovery of her crown of thorns when in anger he struck her on the head and was surprised by the ﬂow of blood. More explicit were representations of the mother’s sometimes imprudent parenting. It is difﬁcult to assess the mother’s true demeanor because she was hyperbolically represented as an antagonist, but it nevertheless seems that in her exasperation she treated Rose severely. The mother herself testiﬁed that during the course of eight or nine years she responded with physical punishment to Rose’s refusal to “bleach her hair blonde or dress up,” among other beautiﬁcations conducive to courtship. “She punished her many times, and this with much cruelty, beating her and dragging her by the hair, pinching her with all her might, and whipping her on the back with a quince branch.”50 The mother resorted to abuse in order to moderate Rose’s self-abuse, thus playing the hand dealt to her ﬁrst by Rose and then by the hagiographers. According to the testimony of Pedro de Loayza, Rose was treated with this “extreme harshness” well into her adult years. Mele´ndez observed that the mother punished Rose doubly, “with screaming and with beating,” and this burden was again redoubled by simultaneous abuse from the grandmother.51 “Those who should have given her most caresses, her Mother and her grandmother, gave her most sorrows.” Rose was slowly beaten into submission: she looked down at the ﬂoor and kept her silence, except to say, “I will do what you order.”52 The hagiographers interpreted Rose’s history of childhood traumas as “a rehearsal and prelude” of the tribulations that she would later endure, a training “in the school of suffering.” The dried breast was the beginning of her abstinences; the rough treatments from her mother “were all introductions to suffering”; and the illnesses and cures were “only preludes and rudiments with which her spirit learned in advance how to treat her body, as though it did not belong to her.”53 A hagiography published by the Catholic Church following Rose’s canonization described some of the early childhood torments (the surgeon, the scalp treatment) and then clariﬁed: “So that it is understood, her inclination to suffering was born at that time.” During her life “God afﬂicted her amply,” but then “she came to be the torturer of herself through her longing for suffering.” Hansen similarly implied a quasi-causal link between her painful past and her mortiﬁcations when he referred to Rose as “accustomed to and desirous of suffering.”54 Rose as the “torturer of herself ” exponentially increased the sufferings that she endured from accidents, illnesses, cures, and punishments. Rather than seeking alleviation, she endeavored to enhance the severity and frequency of her suffering, to give suffering the dominant role in her life. Both Hansen and Mele´ndez concluded that Rose had a body “only in order to make it suffer.”

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Her daily schedule entailed twelve hours for prayer, spiritual exercises, religious reading, and mortiﬁcation; ten hours of work to help support her parents (during which she also prayed); and two hours for sleep.55 To keep herself from falling asleep during the nighttime devotions, she banged her head against the wall, punched herself in the sides, hung by her hands from the nails of a huge cross, and hung by her hair from a peg in the wall. For the two hours of sleep she fabricated a torturous bed of irregular logs tied together, the cracks between them ﬁlled with broken rooftiles and ceramics. She slept on this bed for some ﬁfteen years until her last principal confessor, Juan de Lorenzana, forbade its use three years before her death. Rose then slept on a board or, while in residence at the de la Maza residence, in a chair, “resting her head a little against a pillar of the bed in which Don Gonzalo’s younger daughters slept.”56 Lorenzana also intervened near the end of Rose’s life to moderate her routine mortiﬁcations because “she whipped herself cruelly, and thus her back was bruised and wounded, due to the excess of her scourges.” Her mortiﬁcations until then were ingeniously designed and redesigned to assure the comprehensive wounding of her body. She starved herself until her frail body was reduced to a “bag of bones.”57 She wore a crown of thorns with ninety-nine barbs and rotated it regularly so that all parts of her scalp would remain perpetually wounded. She shaved her head so that the barbs would pierce her scalp, she tied ribbons to the crown to enable her to pull it down more tightly, she lowered it to one side on Fridays to injure the sensitive skin above the ears, and she punched it into her head when some occasion seemed to merit extra penitence. For many years, until repeated “vomits of blood” inspired her confessors to order disuse, she wore a hair shirt that “had sleeves, and from the neck it extended downward to below her knees.” She tightly swathed her upper arms, sometimes with cilice bands; she girded her waist with a chain; and she rubbed her breasts, sides, and underarms with “nettles and tiny tips of thorns, so that there would be no part of her body free from suffering.” When Rose realized that the bottoms of her feet remained untormented, she stuck them into the oven. Finally, Hansen summarized, she maintained a concerted assault against her entire body, “from the bottom of her feet to the top of her head.”58 A psychological reading of Rose’s childhood history in relation to these subsequent mortiﬁcations arrives at the same conclusion as the hagiographers—the early traumas were prelude to the later self-injury—although by a different route and with different meanings. The self-imposed suffering that became increasingly severe in Rose’s life was partially the consequence of a troubled childhood punctuated by excruciating episodes. When Rose, the victim of sufferings through accident, illness, medical procedures, and punishment, made the transition from a victim to a “torturer of herself,” she began to actively master a passively experienced trauma, to “appropriate the inevitable” and take control of the suffering to which she had been obliged to submit helplessly.59 Absolute submission to pain, now self-inﬂicted, became a form of deﬁant assertion. If dissociation sought escape from the aggressor and separation from trauma, then traumatic reliving took the next step, an afﬁrmative

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one, by identifying with the aggressor, becoming the source of pain, and reclaiming suffering as a “weapon of the weak.”60 “Frustration and trauma are converted to triumph,” and, because the suffering was bound to love for the Bridegroom, “the victim of childhood is revenged, becoming the erotically successful victor.” “The trauma is recapitulated” through its symbolic repetition, but “the victim becomes the victor.”61 At the same time, the meaningless suffering of the illnesses, punishments, and accidents that continued into adulthood were reinterpreted and endowed with religious meanings. They provided the foundation on which self-injury built for a comprehensive agenda of purposeful suffering. On her deathbed Rose herself made a connection between her agonizing ailments—which she regarded as meaningful and beseeched God to intensify—and the painful traumas that she had suffered as a child. Rose likewise found ways to appropriate the maternal punishments that continued in her adult years, incorporating them into her penitential arsenal. If “every parapraxis is a successful discourse,” then the accidents in particular are suggestive as indirect mortiﬁcations. Even the slavish servitude to the mother was symbolically reiterated in asceticism: Rose treated her body “like a slave, and it served her like a slave.”62 By integrating the multiple involuntary and self-inﬂicted sufferings into her arsenal, Rose (with ample support from her religious culture) transformed the meaningless agony into an agency of expiation and a way of loving God. The double bind that rewarded love from one maternal ﬁgure with punishment from another; the inconsistency of the mother’s demeanor, in which violent outbursts alternated with loving care; the inability of Rose to meet her mother’s demands and Rose’s subsequent sense of failure, worthlessness, and guilt; the battles of will that Rose lost until the war was ﬁnally won; and the succession of agonies associated with maternal care—from the interrupted lactation and home remedies to the punishments—all contributed to Rose’s predisposition for severe mortiﬁcation. This ensemble of misfortunes corresponds in signiﬁcant detail with the childhood histories of self-abusers across a range of disorders today. The most common causes of clinical self-injurious behavior are parental deprivation and, especially, violent abuse; religious preoccupations and delusions; masochistic gratiﬁcation; survival through partial sacriﬁce; the need to assert control or mastery; sexual conﬂicts; and a compensatory search for lacking physical affection.63 Those, like Rose, who abuse themselves later in life have almost invariably suffered a parental assault during childhood. Many abused children “internalize the cruel paradox of blaming themselves for their victimization by parents,” taking charge of the punishment because they believe themselves worthy of contempt.64 Some infants injure themselves in response to deprivation of maternal care, and many schizophrenic children were victims in infancy of physical abuses that became “precursors to subsequent self-mutilation.” One schizophrenic boy, whose symptoms at the age of seven included ritualistic and compulsive behavior, had serious feeding problems through and beyond his ﬁrst year. His parents responded with beatings, food deprivation, and threats of abandonment, and he reacted, in turn, with increased ritualistic behavior

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(which brought more beatings), a tendency to withdraw, psychosomatic illnesses, and self-injury.65 A childhood history that leads to masochism is also “marked by signiﬁcant disturbances in the pleasure economy from birth,” including “a childhood of prolonged hostility and deprivation” intermixed with “ephemeral, inconsistent moments of warmth.” Some bulimics likewise “internalize the emotional unavailability of the caretaker as evidence that they are unlovable, worthless, and deserving of punishment.”66 In a study of borderline personality disorder, “high levels of dissociation, self-mutilation, and childhood abuse” were found among female inpatients. “An early history of surgical procedures or illness,” like Rose’s, also predisposes repetitive self-injury, and some severe sadomasochists had been “traumatized by medical procedures in infancy and childhood.”67 In all of these cases, a child who suffered a “parent associated with pain” later “borrows the authority for the drive to punish” and makes that punishment reﬂexive.68 A psychic trauma need not be a single event but, rather, as in Rose’s case, can be “a group of provoking causes” that “exercise a traumatic effect by summation.” Rose’s mortiﬁcation as a “disguised repetition with modiﬁcation” of the childhood trauma emerges as a defensive, reparative attempt to move from passive helplessness to active mastery. Rose took charge where once she succumbed, repeating “the unassimilated experience in an effort to control, to master, to assimilate it.”69 In the compulsion to repeat one does not consciously remember the traumatic experience “but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action.”70 Rose endlessly rehearsed the transformation of suffering into love with the early trauma embedded in her rituals. Repetition of the trauma “tends to open old wounds,” in Rose’s case quite literally, but in her religious milieu the wound was a sign of love, of healing, of salvation. Once Rose took command, the pain was inﬂicted under her orders and within her symbolic world, accumulating meaning and value as the ritual of its repetition was reﬁned.71 Rose’s passage from passivity to active mastery resulted paradoxically in a signiﬁcant increase in her suffering. As virtue was made of a necessity, the pain—now both virtuous and necessary—was redoubled. The trauma was reclaimed in progressively more severe rehearsals as self-destruction became a means of self-preservation. Rose was victor but also self-victim, and her mortiﬁcation was an adaptive survival strategy that at once became a maladaptive entrapment in the vicious cycle that would cost her life. Once the dreadful conviction to self-abuse is made, pain becomes “the magical means by which all wishes are gratiﬁed.” Opportunities are therefore sought to “convert any situation into a voluntary occasion of asceticism.”72 Rose’s escalating self-destruction was suffered deeply, but it was also heavily compensated by the secondary gains of independence, prestige, power, social status (including hierarchical inversion with authority ﬁgures, among them the mother), love, erotic pleasure through pain, mystical marriage, and sainthood. Her early use of self-injury was instrumental to her struggle for autonomy or control in an environment dominated by her mother. Mortiﬁcation, as

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Freud put it with more general reference to neurotic symptoms, becomes her “weapon which she can use for her defense and misuse for her revenge.”73 A modern patient explained that self-injury gave her “a feeling of control when I cannot ﬁnd control in the environment.” She added that it was enjoyable, that it made her “feel real,” that it was a “release from emotional pain,” and that it was “a form of security.” Slicing themselves with razors afforded other girls “the epitome of personal freedom by which they could reassure themselves that they had some mastery over their fate.”74 Taking control of suffering also offers a measure of relief, security, and power to masochists. The “masochistic performance” tends to “berate, belittle, or actively destroy the self or part of the self,” but it does so “in order to obtain some psychic reward or relief of tension.” Grandiosity and a sense of superiority are the masochists’ rewards for enjoying what others dread. “The eroticization of pain and self-mutilation usually has acquired the meaning of a triumph over life and death, over pain and fear, and, unconsciously, over the entire world of object relations.”75 Quests for strength, pride, and dignity are forfeited in masochistic abandonment to weakness and dependency, but masochists achieve compensatory (if illusory) power and autonomy through manipulative control of their environments by suffering. Rose injured herself to meet the Bridegroom’s demand for her wounded love, and through this “seductive imitation” or “seduction of the aggressor” she coopted the “loving, erotic complicity of the threatening person.”76 Having once suffered at the will of parents, the masochist endeavors to “anticipate actively what might be feared to occur to one passively.” By bringing the pain-inducing experience upon oneself, “the masochist excludes the possibility of being tortured or punished in an unexpected and uncontrollable way.” Mortiﬁcation in this sense is a lesser-evil tactic, a symbolic effort to ward off an anticipated greater injury: “I have hurt myself, therefore you no longer need to persecute me.”77 Expectation and fear of cruelty lead to submission as a survival tactic, but once the cruel and omnipotent aggressor is internalized and turned against the self, there is “an exhilarating sense of power and enjoyment, of freedom from fear, pain, and dread.” The ego of the masochist “asserts its autonomy in pain.”78 Something of the same liberation, mastery, and empowerment is also apparent in anorexia nervosa, in which quests for autonomy and control are paradigm. Anorexia is generally understood by clinicians as “a pathological response to the developmental crises of adolescence,” with refusal of food as an expression of the “struggle over autonomy, individuation, and sexual development.” As one patient explained to her psychiatrist, “I hate myself when I’m eating, it represents ‘dependency.’ I feel superior when others eat. If I do not have to eat, I feel independent and in control.”79 An anorexic uses food deprivation to reverse the dominating hierarchy established when the mother controlled her food and, by extension, her life. Like the “no” that emerges with individuation during infancy, the anorexic’s negation of food declares independence, challenges patterns of subordination, and affords a degree of manipulative control.80 These same dynamics were central to the medieval saints whose

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fasting, like anorexic dieting, likewise tended toward self-starvation in search of the corresponding rewards. Rudolph Bell’s “holy anorexics” were characterized by “a need to establish a sense of oneself, a contest of wills, a quest for autonomy,” and the medieval religious women studied by Caroline Walker Bynum used “eating, feeding, and not eating” as a means “to control their bodies and their world.”81 As one modern anorexic put it, “as my weight decreased, so did my helplessness,” and “I became convinced of my own omnipotence.” The anorexic moves from a “helpless hyperobedience to the wishes of others” to a “wonderful sense of release and power.”82 The comment of another anorexic indexed how freedom is gained from the mother’s absolute power by introjecting it to dominate one’s body: “You make out of your body your very own kingdom where you are the tyrant, the absolute dictator.”83 The autonomy of anorexic girls is sabotaged in childhood, and they sabotage their bodies to get it back. The anorexics’ refusal of food is a reciprocal “form of overcontrol”; she shifts “the contest from an outer world in which she faced seemingly sure defeat to an inner struggle to achieve mastery over herself, over her bodily urges.” Apparent in severe cases of anorexia, are “expectations of perfection, omnipotence and omniscience” and “the demand to be the one and only, worshipped by all.”84 The seemingly displaced religious concepts describing anorexic identity— “worshipped,” “omnipotence,” “omniscience”—echo back into Rose’s case, in which a degree of these now ﬁgurative aspirations were indeed literal gains of the “apotheosis” realized through fasting and mortiﬁcation. Even in modern cases, “religious asceticism might be used as an alternative to anorexia nervosa to defend the individual from the threat of adult sexuality.” The anorexic, desexualized by starvation, acquires a saintly androgyny because “the woman has been killed off in her.” Appetite and sexuality are related urges that anorexics and “holy anorexics” must tame or obliterate.85 Rose’s victory in these quarters was recognized as genuinely religious, but like these patients suffering from various pathologies she found in self-abuse a triumphant sense of autonomy, identity, security, relief, love worthiness, and power to control herself and the world around her.

Erotic Agony Explicit representation of Christ’s cruciﬁxion is “conspicuously absent” in Christian iconography before the ﬁfth century. Once it came to be widely represented, the preferred image through the ninth century was “a robed, openeyed victorious Christ hanging on the cross.” During the ninth and tenth centuries, however, “a shift in emphasis from Christ the victor to Christ the victim took place in the thinking of the church,” and, accordingly, the “victorious reigning Lord” was replaced by “the suffering human victim.” In iconography from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, there was a decided predilection for gory representation of this victimized Christ as scourged, cruciﬁed, and

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dead. In paintings of the saints, similarly, “scenes of torture proliferate” and were reinforced textually by the best-selling The Golden Legend, which seems in its grizzly depictions a kind of “torture manual.”86 Morbidity, self-deprecation, mortiﬁcation, and rejection of the world—all of which are considered pathological today—were celebrated manifestations of sanctity in Rose of Lima’s culture. “No civilization had ever attached as much importance to guilt and shame as did the Western world from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries.” Contemptus mundi discourse argued insistently for “hatred of the body and the world.”87 Life on earth, “a long martyrdom ending in death,” was to be despised and lived as though in exile, preferably in a cloister. Corporal desires led to perdition, and ﬂeeting earthly joys were punished in hellﬁre. Each human was “a bag of excrement” and “food for worms.”88 Diego Pe´rez de Valdivia’s instructional handbook for beatas accordingly advised that the body be regarded as a corpse “full of worms, and that smells awful.” “Our cruel and principal enemy is the ﬂesh,” he continued, “and until the hour of our death it does us evil: until that hour one must punish it.”89 And ﬁnally, he summarized, “the role of the bride of Jesus Christ is to suffer hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness, a bad bed, a bad house, a bad cell, insults, affronts, contempt, dejection, and every kind of humiliation.” “Deny yourself, take up your Cross, humble yourself, be meek” and keep the body “always corned and abused and upset.”90 Rose learned the lesson well. She saw herself as a “poison,” a “pestilent contagion,” the “disgusting cancer of the human race,” and the “disgusting breast cancer of nature, and foul-smelling dregs, and plague of women.”91 Through “a continual disdain and dejection of herself ” she believed and tried to convince others “that among all creatures she was the most abominable, the most pestilent, an execrable blemish on her wretched times, a stain on the world, and the cancer most harmful to the entire human race.” If she were praised even slightly, she “was tormented, became mute, burst into tears, was engulfed in the abyss of humanity.”92 When Rose once overheard Gonzalo de la Maza singing the praises of her sanctity, she ﬂed in horror to “wound her breast with blows” and “punched herself in the head, to wound herself with the barbs of her crown [of thorns].” While others regarded her as a saint, and while her eleven confessors were hard-pressed to discover even some venial sin to justify absolution, Rose was obsessed with purging her plethora of “most grave sins.”93 She believed that all of the terrible sufferings that she inﬂicted on herself were a fraction of what she deserved. Penitential mystics fathomed the depths of guilt (like modern masochists) because the perception of sinfulness increased in proportion to one’s holiness. As Teresa of Avila put it, “the pain of sin gets greater as one receives more of Our Lord.”94 The unavoidable martyrdom of early, persecuted Christianity provided a precedent that was extracted from its historical context to promote humiliation and mortiﬁcation across the centuries: “For Christ’s sake I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difﬁculties.”95 The faithful are granted “the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for

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him as well,” and the kingdom of heaven is offered as their inducement.96 The greater the pain, the greater the gain. The historical Jesus himself suffered only brieﬂy, during the Passion; at other times, far from a paradigm of asceticism, he came “eating and drinking” and was accused even of sensuality.97 Penitential mystics like Rose of Lima nevertheless claimed imitation of Christ as the rationale for a lifetime of asceticism and excruciation. In reading Christ’s life they privileged not the virtues of his doctrine or the glory of his resurrection but the few devastating days that were dominated by defeat, humiliation, and suffering. They believed that “it is more perfect to imitate Christ in his sufferings than in his actions.”98 Selective interpretation of the rich and polyvalent scriptures provided masochistic inclinations with a God suited to their needs, an abused God of love who, Rose believed, required mimetic self-abuse of those who loved him. The predominant culture of the early modern Church—from hagiographies and the paintings on walls to sermons and the tutelage of confessors— conditioned female mystics to love their cruciﬁed Bridegroom by suffering. Rose of Lima loved by suffering, she loved so much that she suffered, she loved her lover’s suffering, she loved to suffer for love, and she measured the love that she gave and received on a scale of excruciation. “Loving you I suffer sweet violence,” Rose told Christ in Hansen’s account, and in one of Rose’s collages a winged, cruciﬁed heart bursts into ﬂames of “pure love” that boast the caption, “life is a cross.”99 For Rose’s role model, Catherine of Siena, “suffering and sorrow increase in proportion to love” and “putting on the nuptial garment” was the equivalent of suffering. “Suffer courageously even to the point of death,” God told Catherine, “and this will be a sign to me that you love me in truth.”100 Mechthild von Magdeburg advised that one “suffer pain lovingly”; Veronica Giuliani was “in love with suffering”; Marguerite-Marie Alacoque believed that “loving is suffering”; and Teresa of Avila, in her “suffering love,” described the love of God as “a continuous martyrdom.”101 Without suffering there is nothing but the void of longing, itself painful, for a God who must be loved in absentia. The self-inﬂicted pain was offered up in loving devotion, and the reciprocal God-sent sufferings were accepted as though they were the absent caresses. All of the intensity of loving—passion, ecstasy, frenzy, heartsickness—was diverted into an exquisite agony that was at once craved and barely tolerable. The relation between suffering and love was made clear to Rose of Lima when Christ appeared to her holding a scale that counterbalanced her mortiﬁcations and his graces. The relation was proportional but also chronological: “After mortiﬁcation comes grace.” Rose suffered her entire life with the conviction that “the number and magnitude of graces would correspond to the severity of her torments.”102 “Increase my pain,” she pleaded to her Bridegroom, “as you increase my love.”103 On her deathbed, in a kind of sprint toward the ﬁnish, Rose prayed for unprecedented agonies, “giving thanks to Her Divine Majesty for the sufferings he had sent her.” God recognized Rose’s love worthiness by granting especially painful and prolonged moribund torments,

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and Rose, faithful until the end, responded in verse: “My God, my Lord, my Jesus, my husband, and my love, give me suffering.”104 This desire to suffer was pursuant to Christ’s cruciﬁxion as an expression of his unfathomable love. Christ loved his brides so deeply that he accepted a torturous execution to save them, but he then paradoxically demanded repayment in reciprocal suffering. This demand (like the eternal torture of souls in hellﬁre) seems contradictory with the theology of Christian love, evidencing instead an egocentric, contingent, almost vindictive love that exacts retribution in kind. Christ “lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride” and through the cruciﬁxion “the price had been paid for all,” but the Christ of nuptial mysticism nevertheless required that his brides relive his suffering in their ﬂesh.105 He was bound to the cross by “nails of love” for them, so they, if they are worthy of his love, must reciprocate with pain of equal measure. “Behold this nail,” Christ told Teresa of Avila, “it is a sign that from today onward you will be my bride.”106 A bloody, cruciﬁed Christ appeared to Catherine of Siena in a ﬂood of light and said: “Look at how much mortiﬁcation and torment I experienced for you, so it would not be difﬁcult for you to suffer for me.” When Marguerite-Marie Alacoque balked at an act of mortiﬁcation, Christ reproached and encouraged her, marveled at her ingratitude, and pointed to his many wounds suffered for her sake.107 When Rose of Lima was reluctant to lay on the torturous bed that she had fabricated, Christ reminded her that it was a “bed of ﬂowers” compared to his cross. His disdain for her slack mortiﬁcation on another occasion catalyzed a long depression, accompanied by inconsolable bouts of crying and augmented penitence, because “the bride of the Cruciﬁed was ashamed” to seem “free of the torments of the cross and exempt from suffering.”108 Mortiﬁcation was pleasing to Christ, and insufﬁcient suffering provoked withdrawal of his love. His love was measured by the suffering that he demanded of his brides (as of himself ), and their reciprocal love was expressed by rising to the occasions with which he blessed them. Preoccupation with guilt, ritualized self-abuse, absolute submission and suffering in love, and “ecstatic abandonment to misery and self-degradation” are held in common by penitential mysticism and masochism. Aspects of Rose’s beliefs and practices likewise intersect with masochism at the nexus it shares with other personality types and disorders. Common to masochism, paranoia, and Rose’s history are identiﬁcation with the role of a victim; unwitting provocation of what one fears; compensatory grandiosity that defends against competing feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, and depression; and expectation of punishment for success or self-assertion. Character traits at the intersection of masochism and narcissism include striving for perfection, vacillation between grandiosity and insecurity, and hypersensitivity to criticism that doubts or challenges authenticity, all of which are prominent in Rose’s mystical pursuits.109 Rose’s ideas of reference suggest combinations of masochism, paranoia, and narcissism as self-importance emerges from selfpunishment: “If some disaster or misfortune occurred in her home or outside of it, she did not doubt that her crimes were responsible.”110

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Masochistic narcissism is again suggested by Rose’s “very extraordinary yearnings to suffer for Christ.” The impetus for the suffering is displaced from Rose to God as self-injurious behavior is represented as sacriﬁce in obedience to highest authority. Among those who injure themselves today, “ascetic pride regularly exhibits the idea of self-sacriﬁce for the purpose of regaining participation in omnipotence,” as though to say, “I sacriﬁce myself for the great cause, and thus the greatness of the cause falls on me.”111 Rose evidenced these beliefs most explicitly through her conviction that by ﬂagellating herself nearly to death she could ward off the cataclysm that God planned for Lima. This ideation, like those among masochists, is insulated with humility and a commitment to self-defeat, but the presumption of cosmic inﬂuence through selfinjury nevertheless signals an essential, beleaguered narcissism.112 Narcissism is particularly apparent in the “unmistakable pride” of masochists and mystics who nurture a gratifying self-deprecation not merely as another great sinner or wretch but as the greatest in the world, without peer. In mysticism self-hate must be as absolute as the love of God to which it is bound, and the narcissistic pride resides precisely in claims to the exclusivity of this perfected worthlessness. Rose regarded herself as “the poorest and most humble creature in the world,” “the most ungrateful sinner,” and “the worst sinner in the world.”113 But the masochists’ lowly self-image contrasts sharply with their idealized aspirations to perfected goodness and total surrender in loving generosity. Rose lived by exaggerated standards of perfection that engendered feelings of worthlessness, inauthenticity, self-contempt, and worthiness of punishment but that also brought the exaltation of otherworldy privilege. Absolutist self-deprecation soars to the heights of its narcissistic potential when it becomes, as it did for Rose, the criterion of eligibility for marriage to God.114 Profound worthlessness ﬂuctuates with grandiose ideations, the one announced publicly and the other celebrated privately. Self-debasement and self-abuse become routes to the narcissistic ideal of being godlike by being God’s bride. Aspects of Catholicism and, particularly, penitential mysticism provided self-abuse a precedent, forum, method, legitimacy, purpose, and meaning.115 Neurotics and psychotics “appropriate any cultural trait” and adapt it to their symptomatic or symbolic needs; mystics do the same selectively. Hagiography, iconography, spiritual tracts, confessors, sermons, peer culture, and the high social regard of asceticism and mortiﬁcation provided a support system and a range of options from which each mystic drew to personalize her self-injurious experience.116 The prototype saints, such as Catherine of Siena, further contributed by providing not only a modus operandi for rote imitation but also a formative psychological model that assisted young beatas in directing potentially pathological impulses toward exceptional social contributions. In these ways Rose’s predisposition to self-abuse was culturally nurtured and channeled toward its laudable, constructive development. Her behavior remained anomalous, however, precisely because the conditioning cultural factors require their dialectical complement in psychological predisposition. Very few women, even very few beatas and nuns, behaved as Rose did, despite the

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strong cultural inducements to mortiﬁcation in colonial Lima. Behavior is conditioned by cultural expectation, but the options are multiple. Rose chose the narrow path of severe mortiﬁcation because something in her character made that choice desirable, and possible. Her culture provided the truth of shared delusions that made the choice meaningful. The association of love and suffering during Rose’s childhood resurfaced in her conception of the Bridegroom and in her use of mortiﬁcation to express love and love worthiness. She surrendered with “a sense of sacriﬁcial sexuality”; the pain was eroticized because the Bridegroom was loved.117 The intensity of Rose’s pain became the index of her love, in part because Christ, like her mother earlier, offered an injurious love that Rose internalized and turned upon herself. Whereas the childhood traumas were actually imposed by the mother and other external sources, however, the God-sent sufferings were entirely self-imposed by internal representations. Both Rose’s loving and wounding were self-directed after this detour through an internal object. The Bridegroom, because he does not exist as such, inﬂicted no suffering on Rose; she rather introjected the cultural construct of a wounding God and with it wounded herself. The Bridegroom, his abusive love, his totalitarian possessiveness, and his unfaithfulness are ideations that have no empirical reference beyond the texts and images (also without referents) with which they dynamically interact. An imaginary lover can have any attributes; Rose’s correspond in signiﬁcant detail to the love partners chosen by masochists. As a masochistic woman rehearses a conﬂict between the need for love and the experience of hostility, she often pairs up with a narcissistic, jealous, controlling lover who both punishes and gratiﬁes. Suffering is the price she pays “to win the master’s love.”118 Like Rose, she idealizes her love object, is unworthy of this ideal, blames herself for the relationship’s failures, and lives in fear and trembling that even a minor transgression will result in her total abandonment. Masochism is a “pathological way of loving” in which love is expressed as self-negation and suffering; the godliness of the love partner is protected by denying his cruelty, introjecting it, and turning it upon the self; desperate love is reciprocated with injurious nonlove; and the rejecting partner is continually re-won by endless acts of submission and self-sacriﬁce.119 In an experiment conducted in the 1960s, monkeys learned to press a lever to avoid being shocked. A second contingency was then introduced: a lever press prevented the original shock, but it also produced a shock of lesser magnitude. “As the experiment progressed the self-administered shock was gradually increased until it equalled the aversive stimulus being avoided.” The monkeys continued to press the self-punishing lever even when it no longer represented the lesser of two evils. When the shock of the original lever was totally eliminated, the monkeys punished themselves unnecessarily with the second lever, administering the same shock intensity that they had previously struggled to avoid.120 Humans will similarly expose themselves to pain if by doing so they avoid what they regard to be more severe consequences, or if, as in the monkey

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experiment, an aversive stimulus is paired with a positive reinforcer. Studies in behavior psychology demonstrated that when an aversive stimulus is selectively paired with a positive reinforcer, “it can acquire the power to control behavior in a direction opposite from the usual suppresive effect,” leading one toward repetitive, self-inﬂicted suffering that would normally be avoided. B. F. Skinner recognized further that masochism could “automatically generate conditioned aversive stimuli” that itself becomes positively reinforcing.121 Cultural conditioners in Rose’s milieu (which was a controlled environment) provided the positive reinforcement that made her mortiﬁcation possible but also perhaps inescapable. She ﬂed her trauma by inﬂicting pain on herself, the selfinjury was positively reinforced by her culture (particularly the confessors who modiﬁed her behavior), and pain aversion resulted—as in the monkey experiment—in repetition of self-injury. A certain dependence on pain was also conditioned by the masochistic fallacy that loving God and experiencing God’s love were possible only through suffering. Similar entrapments in self-injurious cycles are suggested by psychoanalysis and biochemistry. A psychological dependence on pain can develop as one’s identity becomes inextricably bound to self-injury and one “is forced to maintain his emotional security, his self respect and moral pride, by a selfsacriﬁcing way of life, turning himself, often enough, into a martyr.”122 Pain dependency can be accompanied by “pain-dependent provacativeness” through which one “controls the administration of pain from external sources” (mother, Bridegroom, confessors) to complement self-injury and enhance “painful gratiﬁcation.” In chronic and severe cases, the development of a habitual dependence on pain, as though it were a narcotic, is not uncommon. The body releases endorphin during painful experiences, and through the repetitive selfinﬂiction of pain one may become addicted to endorphin release, “pursuing painful events for this end.”123 Pain dependency is also predisposed or reinforced by sleep deprivation and social isolation, both of which were prominent in Rose of Lima’s life.124 Just as anorexics end up “addicted to starvation” for psychological and biochemical reasons, so chronic self-injurers become dependent on pain. Cultural factors (preoccupation with thinness, religious meanings of fasting and self-injury) “recruit” predisposed individuals to these detrimental behaviors, and psychological and biochemical dependencies can then perpetuate systematic self-destruction.125 When outsiders asked Catherine of Siena why she did not eat like everyone else, she responded, “God for my sins has afﬂicted me with a special kind of illness that makes it impossible for me to eat; I should like to be able to eat, but I can’t.” As Raymond of Capua explained it, “she suffered more from having to eat than a famished man does from being unable to.”126 The same was true after Rose’s fasting became severe: “Eating was most difﬁcult for her, and therefore she did not do it.” She was unable to digest food and vomited frequently, and to force her to eat, according to one of her confessors, “was to kill her.”127 A certain tension is thereby generated between virtuous abstinence and the inability to eat due to some incapacitation or dependency. Catherine solved

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the problem by explaining her inability to eat as a God-sent illness, but fasting as mortiﬁcation implies hunger or craving and a spiritual conquest of this corporal desire. If “the smell of meat alone” was repulsive to Rose, then the refusal of meat was more a comfort than a mortiﬁcation. The conditions for virtuous abstinence were indeed met earlier in Rose’s life when the smell of cooking food stimulated an appetite that she triumphantly deﬁed to keep her fast. She was drawn to the food, smelled it, and “when she most wanted to eat it, pushed it away and gave it to her brothers and sisters.”128 Once Rose crossed the threshold into inedia, however, some foods, particularly meats, affected her “as though they were poison,” causing high fever and what seemed to be an allergic reaction: “The paths of respiration were closed almost completely.” If food were to play an authentic role in mortiﬁcation under these circumstance, it would not be through abstinence but precisely through eating, even in excess, to catalyze greater suffering. In a context in which suffering is desirable and illness is welcomed as a God-sent purgation, meat should have been prominent on Rose’s menu. The same inversion obtains when self-injury becomes addictive and in some sense gratifying. If mortiﬁcation was Rose’s “greatest pleasure, and comfort,” and if “depriving her of the opportunity for so much pleasure, without any doubt, was her greatest mortiﬁcation,” then self-injury was hardly penitential.129 Those who injure themselves today often describe the experience as a pleasurable release of unbearable emotional pressure. “I felt very happy, relieved and like a burden came off me, like steam being let out of me,” explained a young man who amputated his right hand with a circular saw.130 Another young man responded to homosexual fantasies by enucleating his right eye and cutting off his right hand with a hacksaw. During these mutilations he felt at peace and free of pain, and afterward, in the emergency room, his vital signs were normal and there were no indications of shock.131 Self-injurious schizophrenic children likewise seem oblivious to pain during mutilation and in some cases ﬁnd it pleasurable. These and other self-injurious acts are typically precipitated by mounting tension—including or accompanied by anxiety, guilt, and psychotic symptoms (such as hallucinations)—and followed by a sense of pressure release, gratiﬁcation, pleasure, and dissipation of the precipitating symptoms.132 The frequent coincidence of sexual conﬂicts and self-injurious behavior has led some clinicians to relate this buildup and release of tension with that experienced during sexual self-satisfaction: “As a tension-relieving device, self-mutilation may be analogous to masturbation.”133 In this view mortiﬁcation, among its many other meanings, may serve as a satisfaction of erotic urges as they intermingle with self-aggression. The mystics’ penitential agenda is complicated when mortiﬁcation becomes in some sense pleasurable. Colossians 2:23 warned that “delight in selfhumiliation” and severe corporal discipline “serve only to indulge the ﬂesh,” and mystics who use mortiﬁcation as an expression of love are particularly prone to such indulgence. If penance becomes an end in itself rather than an “instrument of virtue,” if it serves the will and the ﬂesh, then penitents “sin against their very perfection.”134 Penitential mystics endeavored to transform

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anything pleasurable into another occasion for suffering, but through an unintended reciprocal transformation the suffering itself became in some sense pleasurable. Such “pleasure through pain,” the “experiencing as pleasurable some painful process,” is the essence of masochism.135 As everything pleasurable (food, corporal desires, social contact) became painful to mystics, the pains of asceticism and mortiﬁcation provided compensatory pleasures. Mortiﬁcation often serves to purge sexual desire, but through its dual association with prohibited sexuality and the love of the Bridegroom this suffering can assume erotic qualities. Just as Christ’s suffering on the cross purged the sins of the world, a penitential mystic’s mortiﬁcation puriﬁes her sin-ridden ﬂesh to make her worthy of the heavenly bedchamber. A true virginal bride of Christ prefers mutilation to “drowning the lily of her chastity in a cesspool of lust.”136 Male saints plagued by lustful visions and temptation rolled in brambles, whipped themselves senseless, jumped in cold water. When tormented by memories of his lustful past, one monk stuck his left arm into a ﬁre until the ﬂesh burned away from the bones and “lust troubled him no more.” When another servant of God was tempted by a real or imagined beautiful woman, he beat himself with a rod until blood ﬂowed and then, for good measure, threw himself into icy water and commenced a lengthy fast.137 A sixteenthcentury priest tempted by the ﬂesh took a pot from the ﬁre “to overcome the heat of temptation with that of boiling water.” Thus he “gravely injured his bodily parts that had refused to obey reason.”138 Rose of Lima was also “most seriously tempted by the devil” and mortiﬁed her body in response. The outstanding episode occurred once around midnight, when Rose, praying in her garden, “saw coming out from among the banana trees the ﬁgure of a handsome man dressed in white, and he approached her to try to force himself upon her.” Rose frightened off this “man or devil” and immediately “whipped herself with an iron chain, until her body shed a lot of blood.”139 In later hagiographic accounts the eroticism was enhanced by attributing temptation to Rose (rather than depicting the intruder as a potential rapist) and by tightening the relation between the feared encounter and the resultant mortiﬁcation. As Mele´ndez has it, Rose turned her back on the intruder and ﬂed, “because these temptations of purity are best defeated by ﬂeeing.” She ran inside, locked the door, “undressed, and with an iron chain . . . gave herself so many and such bloody lashes that the blood ran down to the ﬂoor. Sad tears mixed with the terrible currents of her blood, and amidst sighs and complaints she sent them to her Bridegroom, telling him that he had abandoned her, leaving her at such dangerous risk.”140 The precipitating crisis, the undressing to scourge herself, and the moaning and groaning to her Bridegroom as the chain opened her ﬂesh all suggest an autoerotic displacement from the sexual encounter to the ﬂagellation that occurred in its place. Even without these hagiographic embellishments, however, eroticized self-injury—the “lust of pain”—is suggested.141 If no mysterious intruder actually lurked behind the banana leaves in pursuit of Rose’s favors, if the man or devil was a vision or an illusion (which seems likely given the circumstances and his description), then all aspects of the incident—from

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the “encounter” to the scourge—were dimensions of a single fantasy that posed a sexual threat in order to resolve it. Aroused by the horrifying encounter, lashing her naked back frantically and crying out to her Bridegroom, Rose repressed and at once expressed the prohibited erotic desire. The doubly efﬁcacious mortiﬁcation purged as it satisﬁed. The sexual encounter was imagined and evaded, and the substitutive suffering was eroticized and offered to her heavenly lover. Far from rejection of the ﬂesh, religious mortiﬁcation is a means of emphasizing the denied body by keeping it ever present in pain, by investing the pained body and the mortiﬁcation that wounds it with erotic and spiritual meanings, and by elevating this wounded, spiritualized eroticism toward an incarnate deity—embodied and wounded like his bride—who is conceived as a lover pleased by her suffering.142 However spiritual mysticism may be, without the body its entire agenda breaks down. Mysticism is facilitated by somatic practices (fast, mortiﬁcation, sleep deprivation), is experienced somatically (in ecstasy, swoons, spasms, locutions, burning love, synesthetic sensory experiences), and occurs at the limits where body, mind, and soul ebb and ﬂow over and into one another. Asceticism, mortiﬁcation, eucharistic devotion, imitation of Christ, and loving the Bridegroom are all mediated through a restless ﬂesh that alleviates its tensions.

Delusional Truths As her mother testiﬁed, Rose “deeply loved solitude” and had “little interaction and contact with people.” Many others similarly described Rose as “very devoted to solitude” and “a very withdrawn woman.”143 Loayza depicted her “ﬂeeing from the world” and recorded her longing for “those happy old times” when ascetics found solitude in the desert. Inspired by the legendary Mary Magdalen, Rose hoped to ﬂee “in search of some crag or dense forest, where she could hide from people and give herself entirely to God.”144 During childhood Rose avoided playing with visiting children, preferring to retreat inside the house or to a “corner full of manure and ﬂeas.” One of her confessors testiﬁed that while it was “natural for children to play with others, she was usually seated in a corner of her house praying.”145 Hansen also emphasized that from her earliest years Rose remained withdrawn, avoided contact with other children, preferred to be “hidden and alone,” and repaired to “the darkest part of the house, which was what she most desired.” The social isolation continued in Quives, where, according to her mother, for four years Rose “never left the house,” not even to go into the yard, with the exception of a single outing that was forced on her.146 Before her cell was constructed beside the family’s home in Lima, Rose spent most of her time in the small room where her parents slept: “She withdrew there day and night, whenever she could, to enjoy the said solitude.” Later she repaired to the cell “where no one could talk to her” and often remained there “from six in the morning to ten or eleven at night.”147

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This physical reclusion was complemented by psychological withdrawal when Rose could not avoid the company of others. “Living with everyone, she lived withdrawn from everyone,” as Mele´ndez put it. She avoided eye contact or looked down at the ﬂoor and used prayer as a means of evasion. Loayza noted that a short prayer composed by Rose at the age of ﬁve was rehearsed constantly, “sleeping and awake, alone or in company.”148 Through the vocal or silent incantation of this hypnotizing litany Rose enforced a mental barrier between herself and the world. “She reduced everything to prayer,” Mele´ndez added, and Hansen underscored how her oral prayer “was continuous,” even “when she conversed with others.”149 In early childhood Rose lulled herself into a trance-like state through repetitive prayer, and later, isolated in her cell, she spoke or sang simple prayers—“love is God, God is love”—for two or three hours to disappear into hypnotic devotions. For Rose, as for Catherine of Siena, “everything she saw and heard was a burden to her, except for the thought of Him she loved.”150 Devotional reclusion and psychological withdrawal can be mutually reinforcing. When worldly affairs overwhelmed Catherine of Siena, she “built up in her mind a secret cell” and repaired there out of harm’s way. Catherine prescribed this survival tactic to Raymond of Capua when he found himself unable to cope: “Make yourself a cell in your own mind from which you need never come out.” Whether in her cell in the garden or in this cell of the mind, Rose found necessary refuge for reveries and rituals of love. In its isolationism Rose’s withdrawal is reminiscent of what today is known as schizoid personality disorder, which entails “a pervasive pattern of detachment from social relationships and a restricted range of expression of emotions in interpersonal settings.”151 While true social contact was avoided, Rose populated her solitude with a pseudocommunity of imaginary companions, including her Bridegroom, the Virgin, and a cast of saints. Her guardian angel also kept her company and ran errands, like “a relative or one of the household servants.”152 Many children retreat into fantasy safehavens that protect them from paininducing parents, and Rose’s history—from the childhood traumas to the devotional reclusion—parallels this defensive withdrawal. The extreme is found in multiple personality disorder, in which children who have no other refuge from unbearable abuses, often sexual, escape into false selves. Less severe dissociation is common among victims of incest, who surrender their bodies because they have no choice but withdraw mentally into an impenetrable “cell” in their minds. A protective dissociative separation can also exile the self outside of the body rather than hiding it deeply within. It is not uncommon for rape victims “to ﬁnd themselves ﬂoating above their own body, feeling sorry for the person beneath them who is being assaulted.” Out-of- body dissociation is also essential to mysticism, in which the ﬂesh is abandoned in a swoon or stupor as the soul engages with the love of God. This standing outside of oneself in a state of otherness is carried etymologically in “ecstasy” and its ﬁrst deﬁnition: “The state of being ‘beside oneself,’ thrown into a frenzy or stupor, with anxiety, astonishment, fear, or passion.”153

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Disassociation from pain was evident in the childhood traumas described earlier, when Rose resided in her body “as though it belonged to someone else” and tolerated the accidents, illnesses, surgeries, and treatments “as though she were not a living thing.” When surgeons examined Rose’s dislocated arm and explained that she would be partially paralyzed, Rose’s nonresponse came with the usual ﬂattened affect, as though what they said “had nothing to do with her or that arm belonged to someone else.”154 On her deathbed, when paralysis incapacitated one side of her body, the “dead” arm and leg were innovatively dissociated when Rose granted them independent identities as the son and daughter that she never had. Like those who become “dead to themselves” because “a state of affective ‘deadness’ was a necessary defense,” Rose separated from her body ﬁrst of necessity and then in ecstasy.155 Her body was abandoned in this deathlike numbness because her disembodied triumphs came at its expense. Mysticism is necessarily delusional, from start to ﬁnish, if the Bridegroom it loves is nonexistent, but like the many delusions by which humans live it merits provisional truth. The most complete understanding of mysticism accepts its delusions both as such and as truths. When an individual actualizes a collective delusion (Christ marries virgins) through a personal experience (Christ married Rose), the experience is true within the subject and her culture while remaining delusional from outside. A mystic who introjects and lives by the collective delusion is guaranteed the truth of her delusional experience. She lives and dies certain of its indisputability in the same way that others abide by collective constructs (morality, justice, marriage) that condition human reality, but the veracity of her conviction nevertheless remains culturally contingent. If religion generally is a shared delusion, then mystics are its maximal expression, with all of the tropes, from the Song of Songs to the transubstantiated eucharist, literalized and enacted as realities.156 In mysticism the delusion rises to its highest truth. Pathological delusions are likewise entitled to a certain truth, usually an absolutist truth around which external reality is reorganized.157 In this case, however, what is true for a given individual is in conﬂict with the dominant culture’s allegation of falsity. In the following statement a psychotic woman found a fortuitous consonance between her own inclinations and aspects of Catholic practice as she interpreted them, but she nevertheless remained psychotic: You dress in this little bride suit in the second grade and you go through all your sins. You make your ﬁrst holy communion and become the bride of Christ. Being raised as a Catholic two things are really good. Dying was one of them and self-mutilation was another one. Because the saints would lay on horsehair and beat themselves and slice themselves and do all these things that were very spiritual and very . . . you’d get time off of purgatory for suffering more on this earth. You were such a bad person, you were always a sinner, you were always on the verge of going to hell. One of the places you

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wounds of love could go when you died was limbo, and the reason I wanted to go there was because God wasn’t there. And the nuns were quite violent too—I remember being hit and clubbed so I was shaking all the time and I ﬂunked ﬁrst grade. And they told us about these saints, that their hands would open up and start bleeding just like Jesus and their feet would bleed and a lot of us would cut ourselves secretly—little nicks in our hand, little razor blade cuts, sticking ourselves with nails; we wouldn’t tell the nuns but we’d all do it. And I just started slicing up my arms and burning myself and I think I learned a lot of that behavior not only from Catholic school but I learned it in the psych ward we’d share.158

Symptoms were formed by appeal to behaviors that “already exist in muted intensities within the patient’s social ﬁeld,” notably in the supportive Catholic and hospital cultures that, contrary to their intentions, channeled this woman’s troubled disposition toward pathological self-injury. “The bodies of some mentally ill self-mutilators can be thought of as a stage upon which is enacted a personal drama that reﬂects, in varying proportions, personal psychopathology, social stresses, and cultural myths, especially those of a religious nature.”159 Christ’s cruciﬁxion still provides a dominant paradigm. Major acts of selfmutilation, such as eye enucleation and castration, are usually religiously motivated by identiﬁcation with Christ, preoccupation with penance and puriﬁcation, literal interpretation of scripture, diabolical possession, and response to hallucinatory commands. A woman was ordered by God to cut out her tongue with a razor; a man blinded himself, explaining that “God told me to, to prevent people suffering”; and another man, distressed by his sexual transgressions, ﬁrst castrated himself and later cut off his penis and burned it, stating, “Even if I do get certiﬁed [as legally insane] and in the eyes of the world I am mad, it is far better for me to have cleansed myself.”160 Christianity endows these absurd self-mutilations with a transcendence that is valid only within the psychotics’ delusions, but these delusions correspond to the meanings of selfinjury that were recognized both individually and collectively by the mystics. In another case a paranoid schizophrenic partially removed his right eye with forceps a few nights before Christmas. He described the procedure with characteristic dissociative stoicism as “not very painful.” The delusions contributing to this enucleation were both religious (with appropriate biblical reinforcement and his own “Christ-like” appearance) and sexual, including a concern that he might be “a molester of little boys.” He described his mother (like Rose’s) as “the boss: aggressive, always right, the ﬁnal authority, the disciplinarian.” He was increasingly concerned about the meek, submissive behavior that resulted from his mother’s domination. His father had died when he was young, and this absence was compensated only by the “passive, depressed man” who his mother later married. The mother was also “seductively involved with her son” and the relationship was “highly sexualized.” In analysis this patient expressed no regret over the loss of his eye; on the contrary he emphasized the relief that followed his daring assertion of individuality that,

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in his words, “forceably, dramatically, represented a break from a submissive position.” Self-injury, as in Rose’s case, was a radical expression of independence. The patient improved after hospitalization and medication, but subsequently he broke down and was incapacitated. “As a consequence, his mother washed and fed him and slept with him.” Four years later he appeared in an emergency room complaining of an “accidental” eye injury. He is now blind. “By sacriﬁcing part of himself,” his analyst biblically observed, “he saved the whole.”161 Another male paranoid schizophrenic removed his left eye with his ﬁngers because of his “sins” and because he “wanted to save the world.” He had intended to remove his genitals but, ﬁnding no instrument suitable to the task, “removed the eye instead.” His mother was overprotective and domineering. He feared that others would somehow read his obsessive religious and sexual thoughts, particularly those concerning homosexuality. Members of his church convinced him that, in his own words, “if I believed, I could talk to the ghost of my dead father,” but there was a condition: “I would have to give up control of my own life and do the will of God.” He began to receive the Holy Spirit “and heard the voice of the Lord,” along with that of his dead father, who “explained the meaning” of his past life. God talked to him constantly, took control of his mind, and made promises but also demands. After hospitalization and medication this patient improved, feeling, as he put it, that he “had done sufﬁcient to atone for my transgressions.”162 There are obvious cultural and behavioral differences between these schizophrenics and Rose of Lima, but there are also similarities that merit recognition. For both Rose and the psychotics, the self-injury is religiously meaningful and purposeful, is accompanied by visions or locutions, and is motivated by concerns for sin, salvation, atonement, and vicarious suffering. In both cases biblical and hagiographic precedents provide role models, religion and sexuality intermingle, the struggle for autonomy from a dominating mother ﬁgures prominently, and the self-abuse is facilitated by dissociation and volitional surrender in response to an implied or explicit divine order.163 Mysticism and schizophrenia also hold in common the sensation of union with God, the loss of temporal and self-object boundaries, the “omnipotence of thoughts,” a powerful sense of exaltation, and “certain structural phenomena such as the heightening of perception and the feeling of transcendence.” “My whole being was ﬁlled with light and loveliness,” explained one schizophrenic, and another described mystical union: “I feel so close to God, so inspired by His Spirit that in a sense I am God.”164 Many schizophrenics experience “an almost mystical sense of mental and physical well-being,” with “incredible powers of insight and wisdom.” Their ideas come in epiphany, “like brilliant ﬂashes of insight,” “without the need for consciously directed thought,” and, like contemplative mystics, many think “in images rather than words.”165 One deeply religious woman diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic was praying in church when, she reported, “all of a sudden I was ﬁlled with brilliant white light. I was it. It was me.” She felt “tingly and radiant,” at one with everything, “overcome with love and joy,” and “ecstatic.”166 Some subjects of experimentally

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induced contemplative meditation also had experiences similar to those of mystics, including visions of light and the dissolution of self-object boundaries. One woman felt as though everything, herself included, dissolved into an amorphous, enveloping bundle of energy.167 The loss of voluntary mind control leads psychotics (like mystics) to believe that an external authority, often God himself, has taken over their lives. God orders their world and behavior through the voice—their own—that they hear inside their heads. Whereas the psychotic “is subjected to the violence of being compelled to hallucinate,” however, the mystic “is in harmony with the visions his conscious belief unconsciously produces.”168 Some clinicians regard schizophrenic “mysticism” as a defensive, therapeutic search for a solution “through religious surrender.” In religious psychosis, as in mysticism, “self-mutilation may be regarded not only as a destructive act but also as a creative one,” as a disintegration of the body in an attempt to preserve or restore some greater (even cosmic) integration.169 Rose was spared the “violence” of hallucinations because her visions and locutions were consonant with the collective delusions that conditioned them, but she shared with religious psychotics this therapeutic, creative use of self-destruction as a means of individual and collective salvation. Like many delusional psychotics, Rose also recruited otherworldy allies. Catherine of Siena and other saints who visited Rose assisted her religious pursuits and her triumph over worldly obstacles, but Rose’s most important accomplice was the statue of the Virgin of the Rosary. The relevance of this statue’s discourse is indexed precisely by its silence. No one, not even Rose, claimed that the Virgin or the infant Christ in her arms ever spoke a word. The statue rather communicated to Rose “in a very subtle manner,” through “mute voices” and a “diversity of signs,” including changing facial expressions.170 Rose’s interpretation of these silent expressions was decisive in her pursuit of sanctity. The examining commission questioned Rose carefully on her communications with the Virgin of the Rosary and the Christ child. Juan del Castillo wondered, for example, if the infant Christ who proposed marriage was heard audibly or through an “intellectual locution,” meaning a silent voice perceived internally. Rose replied negatively to both options and explained instead that, “looking face to face at the Christ Child,” meaning the statue, “what the Christ Child said came into her mind, and that in this way she understood him very clearly.”171 The message was not in what Christ said, but in her interpretation of the changed expression on the statue’s face. As Mele´ndez put it, Rose “read on his expression, as though it were a book, everything that he said to her.” Rose also explained to Castillo that once “she saw that something very beautiful came out of the mouth of Jesus Christ and entered into her mouth” and that by this means “she and Christ communicated.”172 One of the Virgin’s most decisive, silent communications authorized Rose to lead a religious life, like Catherine of Siena, outside of the convent. In 1606 Rose was invited by Marı´a de Quin ˜ ones, founder of the Franciscan Convent of Santa Clara and niece of Archbishop and later Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo, to

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be one of the convent’s founding sisters. She was encouraged to accept because within the cloister “she could serve God with greater freedom.” Gonzalo de la Maza explained that Rose had “a great desire to go to the said monastery” because of the “afﬂictions and spiritual unease” that she suffered at home, but her mother objected because she depended on Rose’s company and continued work in support of the family.173 Rose, ambivalent because her desire to leave home conﬂicted with her familial obligations, consulted with her confessors, who advised that she enter the convent. With the permission only of her bedridden grandmother and without the knowledge or consent of her parents, Rose left home secretly to enter the convent “as though she were going to mass, with one of her brothers, without saying anything to her mother.” According to de la Maza, the mother never knew that Rose intended to leave home forever until he told her so after Rose’s death.174 During her secret escape toward the convent, Rose stopped at the Dominican church for the blessing of the Virgin of the Rosary. A miracle changed the course of her destiny. When the praying Rose “tried to get up to go on with what she had planned, she could not; it seemed as though she had been nailed to the ﬂoor.” Rose’s entire body was paralyzed and, according to Uza´tegui, she spent hours in that situation: “She heard one mass and another, doing everything she could to stand up, and she could not.”175 The efforts of Rose’s brother to move her were equally futile. The paralysis ceased only when Rose realized its secret meaning: the Virgin would not allow her to proceed because she objected to Rose entering the convent. Freedom of movement was restored when Rose promised the statue that she would return home to serve her mother.176 Near the end of Rose’s life, around 1614, Rose’s mother changed course and began to advocate that Rose enter a convent, because she feared that Rose would be left in a precarious social situation if her aging parents were to die. At the mother’s request, de la Maza and Uza´tegui encouraged Rose to enter a convent and offered to pay the dowry. Rose was opposed then to becoming a nun, but in deference to authority she left the decision to four Dominicans (whom she had chosen), promising to abide by their majority opinion. The vote among the friars was evenly split, and Rose’s will to remain outside of the convent was thus accommodated by default.177 The confessors’ interest in having Rose encloistered in 1606 was partially a response to the Inquisition’s mounting intolerance of beata mysticism. They believed that Rose would pursue her religious calling more securely within the institution designed for that purpose, and that the convent would further serve as “a safe asylum for her purity.” Rose herself, however, was ambivalent. She was attracted to the convent as an escape from her oppressive mother, but, conversely, she wanted to remain, like Catherine of Siena, a beata afﬁliated with the Dominican order. Loayza observed that Rose “would gladly have been a Nun, if there had been a Convent in this City of her Mother Catherine of Siena.” Gonzalo de la Maza similarly reported that Rose would become a nun only in a Dominican convent of Catherine of Siena, which was not founded in Lima until after her death.178 All of these assertions, like Rose’s own as re-

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ported, were prudent to underscore that Rose avoided the convent not because she rejected it as an institution but because there was no convent of the order with which she identiﬁed. Rose’s ambivalence about Santa Clara was further complicated by her mother’s disapproval. The mother objected to the convent because of independence and income issues, but also because she had not yet abandoned the hope of convincing or obliging Rose to marry. Rose found herself embattled by her own desire for escape, sanitized by the confessors’ desire to have her encloistered, as these confronted the mother’s contrary demands. The resistance of the mother was sufﬁciently foreboding to inspire Rose’s ﬂight without maternal consent, and en route Rose solicited the compensatory blessing of her surrogate mother, the Virgin of the Rosary, who tended to be more accommodating. “It was public knowledge that Rose received whatever she asked of the Queen of Heaven before that image,” and this instance is no exception.179 Entering the convent would free Rose of maternal oppression but deprive her of maternal love, however abusive it may have been.180 It would also (unawares to Rose) remove the antagonistic counterforce that deﬁned Rose’s quest for autonomy and, contrary to the mother’s intentions, pushed her ever forward toward her difﬁcult destiny. Entering the convent would further require that Rose leave behind her surrogate mother, the Virgin of the Rosary, and that she relinquish her cherished aspiration (“so fervently and with so many tears she desired”) to become a Dominican tertiary like Catherine of Siena.181 Rose may also have been overwhelmed by guilt as she escaped unannounced to abandon the family that depended on her presence and labor. Returning home, conversely, would have been disobedient to her confessors and unfair to the nuns awaiting her arrival at the convent. It would have required that Rose continue to tolerate her mother’s domination, which included the oppression of penitential devotions and the insistence (although eroding) on marriage. On the positive side, however, a return home would reestablish Rose in a familiar environment, would alleviate guilt, and would recuperate the dream of becoming a Dominican tertiary. Double bound by irreconcilable demands, paralyzed by indecision, Rose ﬁnally heard the message that came from beyond her wearied resources to resolve the irresolvable dilemma. The Virgin’s slow articulation indexed the intensity of Rose’s conﬂict; the message, like Rose herself, was paralyzed en route. No clear response came quickly from the Virgin because no clear emotion was projected for retrieval. When the discourse of the Virgin was ﬁnally understood, it authorized Rose to make her move—to reverse her move— without reprisals. Rose’s destiny was redirected by a sign from the Virgin (corporal immobility) that communicated disapproval, and all earthly claims and concerns were rendered moot by this indisputable judgment. The Virgin’s veto had signiﬁcance not only for Rose but also for those who sought to have her encloistered and, later, for the hagiographers who developed the episode as evidence of her special calling to a saintly life outside of the convent. Rose returned home because the conﬂict of abandoning her mother and the recuperation of her highest aspiration combined to defeat the counterforces op-

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posing them. Shortly after, on August 10th of the same year, Rose took the Dominican habit as a tertiary. If the statue of the Virgin of the Rosary did not actually communicate to Rose through paralysis, then to whom may this silent discourse be assigned? There seem to be three interrelating factors that contribute to the statue’s discourse. The ﬁrst is a cultural predisposition that admits the reality and authority of such communications. Rose can expect silent messages because the statues of her culture were expressive. Immediately after her death, for example, many Limen ˜ os thought that the same statue of the Virgin of the Rosary was sweating. This claim was rejected as erroneous by learned Dominicans, but they provided instead a counterclaim—the statue emitted “brightness and joy”—that made manifest the same predisposition.182 The Virgin’s communications to Rose occurred within this context of animistic imagery, but their speciﬁc content was determined psychologically. Rose projected her thoughts, fears, needs, and desires onto the statue and then retrieved them as though their origin were external. Her unspoken discourse returned as that of the Virgin; a monologue was experienced as a dialogue. The religious culture in which this occurred, including later hagiography, then revisited these monological exchanges to provide the third contributing factor: endorsement. The Virgin’s discourse was contingent on validation by those authorized to evaluate its verisimilitude, and this endorsement, even if only because its criteria were known as Rose anticipated the message, had a voice when the Virgin spoke and then again afterward. Rose’s private psychological experience was socialized and purged of its delusional qualities insofar as the Virgin’s communications were regarded as authentic by respected arbiters. The statue expressed Rose’s discourse, but the chorus and audience also had a say in this othered, overheard soliloquy. The content of the Virgin’s other communications to Rose also suggest retrieved projections. When Rose was uncertain about her name change, the Virgin provided the needed approval. When Rose believed her imitation of Catherine of Siena was “a public deception and hypocrisy of usurped sanctity,” the Virgin dispelled doubt with reassurances of worthiness. When Rose wanted to build a cell in the garden despite her mother’s opposition, the Virgin communicated consent with a miracle and on the strength of this intercession Lorenzana, de la Maza, and Uza´tegui convinced the mother to capitulate.183 And when Rose was humiliated because a sacristan neglected to give her a frond for the Palm Sunday procession, the Virgin awarded her the most sublime compensation, mystical marriage. In all of these cases an appeal in Rose’s “asylum of misfortunes,” meaning the Rosary Chapel, neutralized some adverse emotion or situation—shame, doubt, guilt, obstacles imposed by the mother—in order to challenge authority or appease Rose’s conscience. The Virgin’s negation of the plan to enter the convent similarly alleviated the tension of conﬂicting emotions and authorized Rose to defy superiors with impunity. Rose’s own arguments to herself or others would have been inappropriate or inefﬁcacious in these circumstance, but those same arguments rerouted and represented as discourse of the Virgin were incontestable.184

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The sign by which the Virgin communicated, paralysis, suggests a somatic reaction to conﬂicts that Rose could not otherwise resolve. She lacked the option of willful resistance, but her body could protest by incapacitation. Rose’s indecision and ultimate rejection of an honoriﬁc invitation to enter the convent might also indicate a symptomatic withdrawal in response to fear (congruent with social isolation) and to a tendency toward self-defeat (congruent with masochism). Modern anorexia nervosa is often precipitated by an opportunity for a major growth accomplishment, such as the receipt of a scholarship or another prestigious but demanding award. “As if terriﬁed of their progress toward independence,” which they nevertheless desperately seek, these youths retreat precisely at the moment when liberating opportunities become available. In compensation for their withdrawal, “asceticism provides the way to an exhilarating sense of power, not to accomplish practical growth objectives, but as a subjective experience divorced from the external world.”185 The resemblance of Rose’s paralysis to a hysterical symptom is also suggestive. Conversion disorder, which is part of a greater complex formerly referred to as hysteria, entails “the presence of symptoms or deﬁcits affecting voluntary motor or sensory function that suggest a neurological or other general medical condition” but are generated by psychological factors. These “pseudoneurological” symptoms include other phenomena in Rose’s repertoire: “loss of touch or pain sensation,” hallucinations, seizures and convulsions, and body-part paralysis that is “sharply demarcated by an anatomical landmark rather than according to dermatomes.” The description of this last symptom evokes the youthful Rose’s paralyzed hands and feet: “The more medically naı¨ve the person, the more implausible the presenting symptoms.”186 Other aspects of hysteria also correspond to Rose’s disposition, including “an incurable despair,” “a never-ending search for absolute perfection,” and the belief that one must suffer “all the evils that can befall humanity.”187 Rose’s “sickly mysticism” further suggests the psychosomatic ailments of hysteria, and, particularly, the neohysterical classiﬁcation known as somatization disorder. The diagnosis requires pain symptoms (a history with four body sites), gastrointestinal symptoms (at least two), sexual symptoms (including sexual indifference), and pseudoneurological symptoms, excepting any of these that can be fully explained as a known physical condition.188 All of these symptoms appeared in Rose’s history; their deﬁnitive causes are beyond our reach. But if generally “there is much ‘physical’ in ‘mental’ disorders and much ‘mental’ in ‘physical’ disorders,” in Rose’s case the distinctions are virtually dissolved by sleep deprivation, severe fasting, self-injury, mystical states, and illnesses (such a asthma) that have both physical and psychological causes. Some or many of Rose’s inﬁrmities were undoubtedly somatoform, but she was free of the histrionic personality (characterized by self-dramatization and emotional lability) that tends to accompany them in hysteria. Flamboyant beatas theatrically displayed their need for attention, but self-injury sufﬁced for Rose as a means to accentuate her uniqueness.189 Rose’s paralysis in the Rosary Chapel most closely resembles what today would be regarded as “catatonic rigidity,” meaning “maintaining a rigid posture

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and resisting efforts to be moved.”190 Rather than suggesting pathology as it would today, however, Rose’s catatonia validated her claim to the Virgin’s intervention. The immobilized body was a recognized sign of mystical authenticity. During her ecstasies before the eucharist Rose remained immobile “twenty-four hours, without sitting or standing to eat or drink,” “as though she were made of marble.” Hansen described her staring blankly for hours, “without blinking” or “moving her face even for a single moment,” oblivious to noises and to others in the crowded church who accidentally bumped against her.191 If something approached her face, “she did not move her eyebrows, nor blink, nor close her eyelids, nor move her face.”192 Her confessors and others around her were amazed by this absolute and prolonged immobility. Gonzalo de la Maza reported that the praying Rose would spend “entire days and nights without corporal movement.” Rose locked herself away from Thursday to Saturday, “without eating, without drinking, and without moving from a corner; as though she were nailed to the ﬁrst spot she occupied.”193

Desolate unto Bliss In his Anatomy of Melancholy, the seventeenth-century English scholar Robert Burton observed that Catholicism’s prolonged fasts, exhausting meditations, obsession with damnation, excessive solitude, and preoccupation with eternity could only result in melancholy.194 Freud later described melancholia (closely associated with what is now called depression) as “an affection which counts among the most notable of its exciting causes the real or emotional loss of a loved object. A leading characteristic of these cases is a cruel self-depreciation of the ego combined with relentless self-criticism and bitter self-reproaches.”195 The ideas and practices cited by Burton and the loss of a love object and selfdeprecation underscored by Freud are both characteristic of Rose of Lima’s mysticism. The mystics’ preoccupation with scruples, guilt, loss, selfaccusation, self-loathing, affective piety (intensely emotional spiritual experience), and crying (including the proto-Magdalen cult of tears) all intersect with the expressions of melancholy. “My servants live in weeping,” God explained to Catherine of Siena, “in bodily distress and contrition of heart, in watching and constant prayer, sighing and lamenting, torturing their ﬂesh to win the salvation of these others.” Ancient medical beliefs suggested that a melancholic temperament was also conducive to virginity, because an excess of ﬂuid humors led to sensuality while “dry” bodies were more inclined to chastity. In the tradition of the (dehydrated) Desert Fathers, it was thought that damp humors could be purged from the body by sobbing out “Christ’s supreme gift of tears.”196 Rose of Lima was often debilitated to the verge of unconsciousness by inconsolable bouts of crying. In one deep depression she “spent entire days crying” because Christ had reprimanded her for inadequate mortiﬁcation. Loayza, who witnessed the incident, added that the depression and crying were aggravated by insomnia and that the confessors intervened to stabilize Rose’s

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emotions because otherwise “she would have died of the pain.” Melancholy is also suggested in Rose’s dark night of the soul. For one or two hours a day, over the course of some ﬁfteen years, Rose agonized because she felt abandoned by her Bridegroom. During this “unbearable separation from God, after having experienced mystical union,” Rose, like the bride in the Song of Songs, “searched, called, moaned for her Bridegroom” and was “overwhelmed in this abyss of interior darkness and spiritual desolation.”197 The somatic response to this psychospiritual crisis brought symptoms reminiscent of an anxiety attack or phobic reaction: “She spent this entire time trembling, fearing, her heart palpitating, like someone agonizing in the last throes of life,” until ﬁnally “she was almost dead, with a thousand anguishes, with cold sweat, her heart palpitating, her body stiff.” Because all of these sufferings were associated with “the absence of the Bridegroom,” they recall Freud’s description of the lost love object and the torturous emotions and insatiable craving that result from rejection, abandonment, or loss in love.198 Rose mourned the absolute loss of her lover daily, and the consequences of this scheduled crisis were expressed both somatically and psychologically. The psychological complexity is redoubled and veers toward masochism if one again considers that the Bridegroom lacks reality outside of Rose’s love. The Bridegroom was necessarily absent because he did not exist; what Rose yearned for was his presence as an internal object. Rose ﬁrst fell desperately in love with a constructed Bridegroom (a cultural and psychological cocreation) and then turned this construct adversely upon herself as she suffered an abandonment for which only she, as director and cast of this psychodrama, could be responsible. The Bridegroom as an idealized love object turned upon the love that created him and wounded it with his absence and cruel demands.199 Masochism is also suggested by Christ’s reprimand of Rose for insufﬁcient mortiﬁcation. Rose reprimanded herself with discourse attributed to Christ, responded with an enhanced sense of guilt and worthlessness, and increased the self-injury in reparation to win back the lost love and love worthiness.200 During the normal process of falling in love, “the ego becomes more and more unassuming and modest, and the object more and more sublime and precious, until at last it gets possession of the entire self-love of the ego, whose self-sacriﬁce thus follows as a natural consequence.” Freud described this process of love as a “devotion” and concluded that it was ultimately narcissistic: “The object has been put in the place of the ego ideal. . . . It is even possible to describe an extreme case of being in love as a state in which the ego has introjected the object into itself.” The subject “has taken form in a constituent relationship to the object: the latter is part of the subject himself.”201 In her absolutist love Rose introjected her Bridegroom as the essence of her own identity, with all of the devotion, sacriﬁce, and self-erasure described by Freud. Object and narcissistic libido intermixed indistinguishably because this lover, unlike those described by Freud, had no external reality. Rose lived only to unite with and dissolve into her Bridegroom, to abandon herself entirely to obsessive love, to live inside love and to have no other reality. She loved

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herself by loving Christ inside her, and she hated herself, punished herself, because her unworthiness made her idealized lover ﬂee to inaccessible depths of her psyche. “The subject will create an imaginary reality, a world of projections which will be no less real than the things one touches or sees, but which will be endowed, in return, with a power of constraint equal to that of perceptible reality.”202 The Bridegroom, absent in poetic homage to his nonexistence, conﬁned Rose to love-lost suffering punctuated with epiphanies that revitalized her sorrow and longing. Her idea of love, not her lover, locked her in a cell. Masochistic love is characterized by desperate attraction to partners who are unwilling, unavailable, or unable to reciprocate. It is “the pleasurable suffering of unrequited love” and a “pathological infatuation with an unattainable love object.” Rose, like modern masochists, was drawn to a love object whose stature was so great that she was dwarfed to an insigniﬁcant nonentity by comparison. As God was humanized, Rose was dehumanized. Her love expressed the common masochistic fantasy of “being devoid of all will, of all power, of being absolutely subjected to another’s domination,” while offering in return an unconditional, eternal, abusable love.203 Her own insigniﬁcant being was happily self-sacriﬁced for the greater glory of the lover through whom she lived. It is partially for this reason that “masochists often feel like impostors in the world,” a feeling that Rose expressed explicitly. They disappear to themselves and live out a script of pleasurable domination, acting “as an extension of their partners.”204 In Rose’s case—here is narcissistic masochism at its ﬁnest—the partner, too, is an imposter, constructed for the purposes of selfsubmission through painful, pleasurable domination by an illusory but exalted other. Masochists project their idealized self onto the partner and then identify with this projection as a substitute for their devalued self. Rose projected onto a cultural construct regarded as a lover and then vacillated between polar selfimages—a worthless nonentity and the bride of Christ—as her transforming identity was negotiated.205 Romantic relations with an idealized and inaccessible love object are also central to the delusional disorder known as erotomania or De Cle´rambault’s syndrome. This psychosis, dominated by the delusion that one is loved by a person (a politician, a movie star) who is in some sense superior, frequently entails an “idealized romantic love and spiritual union,” like that of Rose and her Bridegroom, rather than a sexual fantasy.206 In hysteria, similarly, there is a “seductive attachment to a man who represents power and who is in principle inaccessible” to the woman who desires him. The hysteric makes this romantic choice, in part, because her desire is for an unsatisﬁable desire, for a love object that must remain out of reach. Her ideal lover, like Rose’s divine lover, is humanized but at once remains intangible, “a guarantee against the threatening realization of her own wishes.”207 The love object of mysticism, Christ as Bridegroom, is accessed spiritually but remains sexually out of range because he has no corporal reality. Chastity is preserved as virgins direct their love toward an erotic body that is untouchable. Absence is the Bridegroom’s essence. Gregory of Nyssa explained that

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the bride who longs and searches for the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs, which provided the prototype, “is told by the watchman that she is in love with the unattainable, and that the object of her longing cannot be apprehended.” The bride thus feels “wounded and beaten because of the frustration of what she desires,” but then “the veil of her grief is removed when she learns that the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulﬁllment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.” The satisfaction of desire is in its frustration, in the unconsummated quest. The masochist is a happy victim of “interrupted love.”208 The essence of mystical love is longing. Mystics fall in love with desire, with the exquisite agony of absence and anticipation. Their almost tangible lover is always just out of range, even when they hold or kiss him. His absence is the sign of a nonexistence that, because it goes unrecognized, makes the suffering pleasurable and interminable. Mystical love is “a desire to live in anguish” for a love object so sublime that one can neither possess it nor bear the fear of losing it.209 Rose labeled the wings of a heart ﬂying toward God with “pure love” and “holy fear.” Love becomes lovesickness, passion is intensiﬁed by absence, and craving for reunion masks the apprehension of its unthinkable satisfaction. If, as Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, the Bridegroom’s “physical presence will only deepen, never cure” a bride’s ardent yearning, it is because the physicality of that presence is always intangible, always a visionary presence, an illumination through which a caressing hand would pass. The Bridegroom coincides with Alexandre Koje`ve’s deﬁnition of desire: “the presence of an absence.”210 The present absence fosters desolation unto bliss.

8 Psychosexual Faith

Eroticized Scripture An erotic love poem, the Song of Songs, somehow entered the canon of a faith inclined otherwise to repress sexuality, and Christian mysticism seized the opportunity. Among exegetes one might expect a prudent deemphasis or a discreet, perhaps embarrassed, tolerance of the Song of Song’s anomalous presence, but instead the Song, which makes no mention of God, was singled out for special attention. In the ﬁrst century, Rabbi Akiba defended the Song’s inclusion in the Bible by arguing that “all scripture is a holy text, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of the holy.” During the Middle Ages the Song of Songs was the most commented book of the Old Testament, and its continuing inﬂuence through the early modern period was decisive in the symbolic formation of female mysticism.1 The Song provided a canonized precedent for the use of erotic imagery to represent the love of God, hagiographers missed no opportunity to elaborate, and many female mystics understood and expressed their love of Christ as nuptial and often explicitly sexual. The Song of Songs itself was derived from ancient love poetry and wedding songs that intermixed erotic and fertility images in celebration of the beloved and her body. The Song held in common with these antecedents the vivid depiction of sexual attraction, intoxication with the charms of one’s beloved, longing and lovesickness, the overcoming of obstacles to unite, and the joys of physical intimacy.2 These decidedly worldly themes led Christian exegetes toward allegorical interpretations that gave the romance otherworldly meanings. In the earliest Christian references to the Song, such as that of Hippolytus in the third century, the Bridegroom and the bride were

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equated, respectively, with Christ and the Catholic Church. This interpretation endured across the centuries and was propagated throughout the CounterReformation Spanish empire—the Church is “Wife of God incarnate” in the 1613 synodal constitutions of Lima, for example—but it was also complemented by other interpretations.3 The most inﬂuential early exegesis of the Song of Songs, that of Origen, again viewed the text as a “drama of mystical meaning” rather than a “hymn to ﬂeshly union,” but Origen equated the bride not only with the Church but also with the human soul.4 The Bridegroom, Origen wrote, was “the word of God, burning with celestial love” for his bride, “whether she is the soul, made in his own image, or the Church.” The allegorical meanings of the bride were thereby redoubled, providing the basis for a long history of polyvalence and the intermingling of competing meanings. Other interpreters, among them Honorius Augustodunensis, further complicated the ambiguity by adding the Virgin Mary to the compound identity of the Song of Song’s bride. The bride of Christ thus acquired a threefold identity as Church, soul, and Virgin.5 Once the Virgin Mary—the mother of Christ—was linked to the bride of the Song of Songs, she was frequently represented as her son’s wife. Antecedents for the mother as lover of her son-god are found in many ancient mothergoddess devotions, which generally entail a fertility goddess accompanied by a young male deity, often a dying and resurrecting deity, who is both her son and her consort. Mary as the bride of her son was particularly conspicuous in Rupert of Deutz’s innovative interpretation of the Song of Songs, which dismissed competing allegorical interpretations of the bride to privilege Mary as “the only beloved of Christ.”6 The Golden Legend characteristically observed that with her Assumption the Virgin became “spouse of the heavenly bridal chamber,” and an early modern text pressed this nuptial imagery toward a more suggestive consummation: “The glorious body of the Son so closely united itself to that of this purest Mother that He penetrated into it and she into his.”7 In a contemporary Andean myth, the Virgin Mary appeared with “her husband Jesus Christ” during the creation of the world.8 Late medieval and early modern art also widely represented Mary as the bride of Christ. This expressly nonmaternal Virgin radiates in youthful beauty, enthroned beside her Bridegroom. In a sensual sixteenth-century Dutch school painting of the pieta`, the Virgin hugs her dead son-lover in an amorous pose and kisses him on the mouth, while his hand rests on his groin. In Peru, Bernardo Bitti’s Holy Family of the Pear (1584) features a decidedly phallic pear held in the anatomically correct position over the groin of a large Christ child (not an infant) who caresses the Virgin’s chin with his left hand while an aged Joseph, in the background, looks on.9 In ancient art the caressed chin was a sign of erotic solicitation, “allegorized to express the union of Cupid and Psyche, the god of Love espousing the human soul.” Medieval artists used the same gesture in representations both of profane love and of the Christ child in amorous relation to his mother. The caress of the chin was “a sign of erotic communion, either carnal or spiritual,” by which artists designated that Christ, having chosen Mary for his mother, was now “choosing her for his eternal

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consort in heaven.”10 In some medieval images, Christ and his mother embrace as Bridegroom and bride for the Song of Song’s “kiss on the mouth.”11 Mary’s identity as mother and bride of her son also commingled with other familial conﬁgurations to represent her in all female roles of kinship. At the conclusion of the Divine Comedy, Dante referred to Mary as the “daughter of your son.” Orthodox Church iconography of the Dormition similarly represented Mary as “a little girl held in the arms of her son, who now becomes her Father.”12 A sixteenth-century hagiographer made reference to a commissioned painting in which Mary drinks from the wound in Christ’s side, as though it were a breast, while holding him in her arms, thereby adding an inverted maternalism to the parental relations. Fray Luis de Granada summed up the predominant conﬁgurations when he imagined the Virgin lamenting the dead Christ with these words: “You are my son, my father, my husband.”13 This multiplicity of relations between Christ and bride was also evident in the lives of other virgins. A 1917 sermon by a Dominican observed that Rose of Lima was Christ’s bride but also his sister, because Rose was “the favorite daughter of the Most Holy Virgin.” Christ himself referred to Catherine of Siena as his “daughter” in the very words by which he married her, and (or because) Catherine conceived of Christ both as Bridegroom and father.14 A twelfth-century interpretation of the Song of Songs described each nun as “a daughter of God, and a mother of Christ, and a bride of the Holy Spirit,” and Clare of Assisi urged a woman entering the cloister to think of herself as a bride, a mother, and a sister of Christ. As God explained it to Margery Kempe, “thou art a very daughter to me and a mother also, a sister, a wife and a spouse.”15 Because the Virgin Mary was also represented as the Church, the New Eve, and the apocalyptic woman of Revelation 12:1, among other identities, her marriage to Christ became a loaded trope of innumerable variations. The union of Christ with the Virgin’s composite identity served well as a paradigm of consolidation, “the eschatological consummation of divine and human, the union of all that was divided.”16 The bond was also forged by early gendering of the Church—“the male is Christ, the female is the Church”—that reinforced representations of the Church, like Mary, as “our mother,” as “that Jerusalem which is above” (before it descends as a bride), and, following Song of Songs imagery, as “the spotless spouse of the spotless lamb.” In a twelfth-century illumination of Bede’s treatise on the Song of Songs, Christ and the Church depicted as a woman are embracing and kissing on the mouth.17 This suggestive prelude to an eroticized, eschatological consummation is further complicated by the theology of Christ’s mystical body, which equates the Church not with the Virgin but with Christ himself. The marriage of bride and Bridegroom assumes a reﬂexive quality as the lover and the beloved, son and mother, Christ and Church, turn out ultimately to be one and the same. Because the Church is Christ’s bride and at once his own mystical body, “as head, he [Christ] calls himself the bridegroom, as body, he calls himself ‘bride.’ ”18 A similar reﬂexivity obtains in the loving attachment of mystics to a Bridegroom who exists only as an internal object.

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Gregory the Great readily acknowledged the Song of Song’s conspicuous eroticism—“in this book are mentioned kisses, breasts, cheeks, thighs”—in order to argue that “by the words of love that is below, the soul may be moved to love that which is above.”19 Bernard of Clairvaux seized the opportunity. Rather than the intellectual route to divinity posited by scholastic theologians, Bernard advised that the soul approach God with passionate love and desire. His emphasis on the young lovers of the Song as tropes for God and the soul (“the soul who loves may be called by the name of spouse or bride”) provided impetus for the emotive love mysticism that conceived of union with deity as mystical marriage.20 The bride “desires to have her Beloved between her breasts” and receives him “ﬂowing from heaven into her intimate affections, and even into the innermost part of her heart.”21 The progression toward mystical union entails an ascent up Christ’s body in spiritual kisses, with the “kiss of the feet” and then the “kiss of the hand” as preludes to the ultimate “kiss of the mouth.”22 The much interpreted “kiss on the mouth” in Song of Songs 1:1 is, in Bernard’s exegesis, the kiss that Christ bestows on his bride, the soul, to impart the gift of the Holy Spirit. This kiss is so potent that it results in a metaphorical pregnancy: “No sooner has the Bride received it than she conceives and her breasts grow rounded with the fruitfulness of conception.”23 As Gertrude the Great described it, a kiss from Christ is “so efﬁcacious that now you die to yourself, and in your death you cross over into God and become one spirit with him.”24 She also represented this union of bride and bridegroom more erotically: “O my dearest dear one, I might seize you in my innermost [self] and kiss you warmly so that, truly united with you, I might cling inseparably to you.”25 With Christ’s permission, Rupert of Deutz entered the altar to enact these tropes on the body of his cruciﬁed Lord: “I held him, I embraced him, I kissed him for a long time. I felt how deeply he appreciated this sign of love when in the midst of the kiss he opened his mouth so that I could kiss more deeply.”26 The transition from spiritual to erotic encounter was facilitated in female mysticism when Origen’s concept of the soul as bride gravitated toward the female ﬂesh and settled “heavily, almost exclusively, on the body of the virgin woman.” Tertullian used the phrase “married to Christ” to describe Christian virginity as early as the third century, and medieval female mystics defended this claim to exclusivity: “While Bernard of Clairvaux considered every sainted soul to be the bride of Christ, Gertrude restricted divine intimacy to virgins like herself.”27 Mechthild of Magdeburg took another stride toward both exclusivity and carnality by making Christ’s bridal chamber accessible only to a virginal elite. As the Bridegroom explained it to Mechthild of Hackeborn, “the delicious intimacies of my divinity” are reserved for these virgin brides.28 The script and imagery from the Song of Songs structured the encounters of bride and Bridegroom for centuries. In the least imaginative cases the courting Christ wooed and seduced using approved poetry straight from the canon. Thus to a fourteenth-century Dominican nun Christ sang, “My beloved, my darling, my beautiful, my love-sweet dear, honey is under your tongue,” and

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“my sugarsweet and honeysweet love, my darling, my pure one, you are mine and I am yours.” A seventeenth-century woman was seduced into becoming a nun when the Bridegroom similarly won her heart with lyrics from the Song of Songs.29 Once they took their vows, the favors of these untouchable brides were reserved for their divine suitor. In a ﬁfteenth-century German illustration the Christ child was depicted as a wooer of nuns, knocking on the convent door and pleading in paraphrased Song of Songs verse to gain access to his “most beloved.”30 The medieval formula, “through Christ the man to Christ the God” captures the essence of mysticism’s tendency to love God as though he were human. “I could only think of Christ as a man,” Teresa of Avila observed unambiguously, and she fell in love with his “Sacred Humanity.” Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi described the bride resting “in the bed of Jesus’ humanity.”31 The abstraction of a godhead or holy spirit becomes corporal, interactive, and almost tangible when the deity is a god-man and a lover. The visionary now has something to see, someone to accept her human affections, someone to caress her and to receive her caresses. There was an allegorical extrapolation from the lovers of the Song of Songs to the relation between God and the soul, but as soon as these ﬁgurative displacements were made, the trope turned back on itself to deallegorize the lovers by transposing their erotic encounter to a very human Christ as Bridegroom who loved virgins—not just their souls— as brides. The sexual content that was purged by allegory returned transcendentalized to become psychosexual. The allegory is so literally faithful to its source that the trope collapses and the Song’s eroticism becomes a means of devotion and a tenet of theology. When virgins reach heaven, Origen wrote, “their mouth will kiss their bridegroom”; “Virgin hands will touch the Lord, and the purity of their ﬂesh will give Him joy.”32 Thus emerges one of the governing paradoxes of mysticism: the love of God by female mystics vowed to virginity is represented as corporal and erotic. This reintroduction of eroticism into a faith from which it otherwise has been purged was also accomplished by misreadings of the Bible. The more sexuality was forced out of the body, the more it inﬁltrated devotion. The most outstanding Old Testament example occurs at the beginning, in Eden, with the sexualization of the original sin in paradise. Insofar as the biblical source in Genesis is concerned, the sin of Adam and Eve had no sexual content; it rather involved disobedience to Yahweh by eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The sexuality of the offense was later interpreted into the text by appeal to Adam and Eve’s realization that they were naked and to the punishment— painful childbirth ever after—that seemed to ﬁt the imagined crime of pleasurable intercourse. Eve and her successors were also sentenced to necessary domination by their husbands because, as Fray Martı´n de Co´rdoba explained, they are “more ﬂesh than spirit” and more inclined than men to carnal temptations. Isidore of Seville concurred: “The word femina comes from the Greek derived from the force of ﬁre because her concupiscence is very passionate: women are more libidinous than men.”33 Sexualization of the sin in Eden has its outstanding New Testament com-

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plement in representations of Mary Magdalen as a whore. The two key women of the New Testament are posed at opposing ends of a polarized sexual scale, with Mary’s absolute virginity (even in motherhood) at one end and Magdalen’s prostitution at the other. This quiet sexualization of the narrative becomes more boisterous when one factors in the absence of textual basis for Magdalen’s prostitution. Tradition introduced the lust that the narrative lacked, even if only to undo it through repentance, and counterbalanced it with Mary’s constructed virginity. The representation of Magdalen as a whore is based on misinterpretation of Luke 7:36–8:3, in which Christ was a guest at the home of a Pharisee. Christ was approached by a “sinner” who carried a jar of ointment, washed his feet with her tears, dried them with her hair, kissed them, and anointed them. Christ forgave her sins because she had shown him “great love,” but this phrase tended to be interpreted as a reference to a past in prostitution, during which she “loved much,” as many translations have it.34 Magdalen entered Luke’s narrative shortly after this episode and later, after the cruciﬁxion, appeared with ointment at the dead Christ’s tomb. These two factors—her proximity in the narrative to Luke’s sinner and the common function of annointment—made the primary contributions to her conﬂation with the sinner.35 Also contributing were the “seven demons” from which she had been freed, and her introduction among other women who “had been cured of evil spirits and inﬁrmities.”36 The context suggests that Magdalen’s demons refer to some psychological or physical disorder, but they tended to be interpreted as allusions to a prostituted past in support of her conﬂation with Luke’s sinner. Without any scriptural basis other than easily avoidable misinterpretations, Mary Magdalen—a close associate of Christ, a key female ﬁgure of the New Testament, and a primary witness to the resurrection—was thus transformed into a prostitute. The erroneous equation of Magdalen and Luke’s sinner was dogmatized in the late sixth century when Pope Gregory the Great declared that Mary Magdalen and the unnamed sinner in Luke 7 were one and the same person. In Gnostic writings (between the late ﬁrst and the fourth centuries) Magdalen was prominent but without mention of sin or prostitution, suggesting that these embellishments most popular during the Middle Ages were absent or unimportant in early Christianity.37 Iconography made substantial contributions to Magdalen as “the apotheosis of a Christianized Venus.” Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images represented Magdalen as “a sensuous penitent” whose beauty and eroticism were stressed.38 In Corregio’s painting, Magdalen’s “blatant sensuousness, curves, bare nipple and plump leg beckon the spectator’s scrutiny, betokening a VenusMagdalen in whose form and content the line between holy and profane is drawn very ﬁnely indeed.”39 The transmutation of the penitent Magdalen into a Venus ﬁgure—“Venus in sackcloth”—began in Italy during the ﬁrst decades of the sixteenth century. Magdalen became a “goddess of Love” or a “Venus of Divine Love”: “She ascends from the excesses of sensual love to the heights of spiritual love,” bringing her sensuality to the summit. Titian’s widely copied Magdalen eroticized her image by adapting the classical pose of the Venus

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Pudica (“Venus of Modesty”), which expressed “the dual nature of love both sensuous and chaste.”40 Suggestive poses and facial expressions in seventeenth-century art created a kind of “pious pornography,” with “a voluptuous nude fondling a death’s head and gazing lovingly aloft.” In Auguste Rodin’s late-nineteenth-century Christ and the Magdalen, the couple seem to be making love on the cross.41 In the instances of both Magdalen and Eve, scripture was invested with sexual content that became integral to Christian doctrine, imagery, morality, and devotion. Many of the themes that converge in biblical eroticism—actual and contrived—were anticipated when Bishop Hippolytus of Rome (c. 170 to c. 235) described Magdalen as a New Eve and equated her with the Song of Songs’ bride. Just as the bride searched for her bridegroom in the Song of Songs, so Magdalen, the New Eve and bride of Christ, searched for the risen Christ, the New Adam and Bridegroom, in the garden.42 Magdalen and Eve were more tightly connected to one another and to God’s plan for history in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip. Mortality resulted from the differentiation of the sexes following the fall in Eden, which destroyed androgynous unity. “When Eve was still in Adam death did not exist,” the Gospel of Philip explains. “When she was separated from him, death came into being. If he again becomes complete and attains his former self, death will be no more.” The Gospel used the bridal chamber, where lovers like Christ and Magdalen become “one ﬂesh,” as the trope for recuperation of androgyny and, through it, of life everlasting.43 Primordial reunion by copulation appealed not to misrepresentation of Magdalen as a penitent whore but to her legendary or actual status as a lover of the historical Jesus. The Gospel of Philip suggested a sexual relation between Christ and Magdalen and observed that the disciples expressed jealousy and disapproval because Christ “loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth.”44 Tradition provided the apotheosis of that amorous relation by representing Magdalen as a bride of Christ destined to celebrate her nuptials in heaven. Regardless of whether Magdalen was actually Christ’s lover, the sexual intercourse that was otherwise demeaned and prohibited here became (as it did when the Virgin was the bride of her son and the New Eve) the very means by which Christian eschatology is fulﬁlled. A sexual sin was made responsible for the fragmentation of primordial unity, and an erotically represented mystical marriage was introduced as the agency of reparation. The New Eve unites with the New Adam, and a millennial kingdom commences. John insinuated much the same in Revelation 21:2, where he envisioned the culmination of Christian history as the New Jerusalem descending from heaven like “a bride adorned for her husband.”

Return of the Repressed Sexuality on a cosmic scale is complemented on earth by everyday religious practices that ﬁnd ways to express and repress the forbidden. “Grant me chastity and continence,” prayed Augustine, “but not yet.” Origen foreclosed the

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waiting period by castrating himself—becoming a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven”—in literal pursuit of Matthew 19:12. Richard of St. Victor illustrated a progression in the love of God with a series of erotic images, including betrothal, the marriage ceremony, and copulation to consummate marriage. Bernard of Clairvaux believed that “the love which tends to union with God” included “an accompanying love tending to union between human persons.” He intentionally used love imagery in preaching to men who had entered the Cistercian order as adults and whose worldly experiences, including sexual relations and marriage, might be adapted to their love of God.45 Eroticism by negation, or by frustration, is suggested by the practices of Irish monks who took “women into bed with them to challenge the devil to combat.” Extracurricular activities turned a convent into “a brothel of Venus” in Verona.46 Along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, such romanesque churches as the Colegiata of Cervatos in Cantabria have explicitly sexual images—women with their legs behind their heads displaying disproportionate vaginas, for example—prominently engraved in their facades. The Mexican nun Marı´a de Jesu´s Tomellı´n was so prone to lustful thoughts that she could not shake hands with other nuns or “join her own hands one with the other” because this self-contact alone was sufﬁcient to kindle “burning ﬂames of impure sensuality.” And even when the ﬂesh was pure, men pursuing the paths of mysticism frequently discovered that they were “sullied with the liquid of the carnal ﬂux,” as St. Bonaventure put it, and “this is something that mystics consider intrinsic to their experience.”47 Christianity and the sexuality it prohibits have also intermingled in the everyday life of Catholics outside of convents and monasteries. According to Jacobus de Voragine, the feast days of saints once had vigils during which “men, with their wives and daughters, went to the church and there spent the night by torchlight; but because many adulteries occurred during these vigils, it was decreed that the vigils be converted into fasts.” In early modern Spain, similarly, “religion mixed disrespectfully with the things most alien to its sacred ministry” as churches again served for amorous encounters: “The most sacred places were frequented more with the intent to look for an occasion to sin than to ask for forgiveness.”48 Penitential self-ﬂagellation bloodied the streets during Holy Week, but writers of the epoch, including priests and monks, and especially foreign observers, noted that this theatrical penance was often a means of courtship and seduction: “The ﬂagellant thinks less about expiating his sins than attracting the admiration of beautiful eyes.” A pause for an excessive scourge before the window of a loved one was received as a sign of affection, and when a ﬂagellant saw a beautiful woman he would pause beside her, shake his wounded body, and splatter blood on her dress. The women honored by this gallantry duly recognized the ﬂagellant with reciprocal gestures of gratitude.49 The interactions of Christianity and sexuality in our own times are strikingly illustrated by innovations in psychopathology. At the far side of the spectrum is a man who was sexually aroused by sermons and ejaculated, without masturbating, during mass. Also worthy of honorable mention is a topless

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woman “in a cut-out nun’s habit” at an S&M party; “she had a huge wooden cross she had made, with a dildo on the long end of it.” More common are the many priests who have inappropriately vented their repressed sexuality by taking advantage of the parishoners entrusted them, either through homosexual abuse of boys or solicitation of sexual favors from female confessants.50 In 1599 an Inquisitor in Peru reported that “it seems there is hardly a priest who has not sinned in this way,” meaning by solicitation in the confessional, usually with indigenous women who had been convinced that sexual relations with priests was not a sin.51 The Inquisition in Mexico responded to solicitation with repeated interventions across the centuries, including the mandatory posting of a 1783 broadside that established norms to impede sexual contact between priest and confessant, even to the degree of prescribing grids through which probing ﬁngers could not pass. Sexuality gained more open, even orgiastic, expression in Catholic cults and mystical movements, notably the Alumbrados, whose devotions “begin with the love of God and end with the love of Venus.” For some Alumbrados in sixteenth-century Spain, “man and woman in the matrimonial act, that is, carnal copulation, were more united to God than in prayer.”52 Libertine sexuality has also characterized some Christian sects in modern times, notably the Children of God movement that spread from California to Latin America in the 1970s. This eclectic sampling suggests a broad backdrop to the signiﬁcant interaction of Christianity and sexuality that occurs in nuptial mysticism. The imagery is most graphic when the devil takes the blame. In his tireless effort to make Catherine of Siena succumb to the temptations of the ﬂesh, the devil sent her “images of many men and women who joined together and did lascivious and ugly carnal acts, and said vulgar and very dirty words.” Mariana of Quito was similarly plagued by “infernal spirits in the form of naked men and women, who with repugnant and abominable acts tried to disturb her most pure body.”53 The devil also accosted Rose of Lima as an “image of impurity disguised as a man” and “playing the role of a lover.” He made lustful suggestions with his eyes and mouth, but the unseducible Rose responded with ﬂight and self-ﬂagellation.54 Ine´s de Ubitarte, a Lima nun brought before the Inquisition in 1625, was more accommodating. She explained that the devil entered her cell in the form of a man and “she felt that he had lain on top of her and known her carnally, feeling that his member entered her.” Spanish beatas possessed by the “spirit of fornication” frequently reported sexual relations with the devil who appeared to them as handsome young men but also as horses, foxes, and goats. In the Middle Ages, snakes and toads were the lustful demonic creatures of preference. Christina of Stommeln related that a snake crawled all over her, entered her body, and stayed inside her for eight days. The devil in the form of a snake also crawled into Benvenuta Bojani’s bed and pressed himself to her naked body until after a while (“note again the interval of time”) she threw it against the wall. On another occasion the devil told Christina that it was sinful to live in celibacy and that all of her suffering was meaningless. Every night for six weeks he appeared to her with a woman and a child, and he and the woman

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copulated in front of her. “There is no joy greater than the joining of a man to a woman and that which a woman has with a child,” the woman explained to Christina.55 The eroticism tends to be most welcome when Christ, who assumed the “likeness of sinful ﬂesh” to save us, is the lover who visits mystics. The thirteenth-century Hadewijch described in no uncertain carnal terms how Christ penetrated her until she was enraptured in the ecstasy of love, and afterward she felt as though she and her Bridegroom “were one without difference.”56 Others, like Angela of Foligno, responded to Christ’s command: “You shall be naked.” Angela “stripped before the cruciﬁx and offered herself naked to Christ,” and on Holy Saturday, 1294, she found herself in ecstasy in Christ’s tomb, kissing him on the chest and the mouth as he hugged her against his body.57 In Mexico, a semi-naked Christ child appeared to Catarina de San Juan and enﬂamed her love “almost to the point of causing a rapture, and rendering violent her impulse to clasp the Child God in her arms, to no longer be held back by the shackles of her virginal reserve.” Catarina “became intoxicated, and blind and out of her senses, she threw herself down to kiss his feet, then the sacred wounds, and embracing ﬁnally the divine body, she experienced an abyss of pleasures and inexplicable joy.”58 Christ also appeared before another Mexican beata and “asked her to uncover her breasts and to have intercourse with him.”59 Hagiographies of Rose of Lima lacked such indecorous speciﬁcity, but Rose did repair daily to her cell to “enjoy the tight embraces of her divine Bridegroom.” When asked why her cell was so small—ﬁve feet long and four wide—Rose responded that it was large enough for “herself and her Bridegroom.” Hansen enhanced the erotics by referring to the cell as the couple’s “bridal chamber.”60 The cell had a wooden cross, slightly taller than Rose, and as “the new Magdalen” she would “give to the sacrosanct cross many and very tight embraces” and place “the softest kisses on the sacred wood.” In iconography, Rose undressed from the waist up to scourge herself before her cruciﬁed Bridegroom.61 Juan Mele´ndez compared Rose’s virtues to breasts and explained that it was these virtue-breasts that attracted Christ’s love and made him choose her for his bride. Rose “opened her breast to the caresses of her lover” and “Christ, as Rose’s elegant Suitor, searches for her, courts her, woos her” so that her “ﬂaming breast” would be reserved for him.62 Fantasies of sexual relations with Christ sometimes intermingled strangely with the reality of mystics who had worldly experience. “When thou art in thy bed, take Me as thy wedded husband,” Christ told Margery Kempe. If she loved him “as a good wife ought to love her husband,” Christ continued, “thou shalt have the same reward in heaven.” The suspicious husband of St. Elizabeth of Hungary burst into the bed chamber and pulled back the blankets to discover his wife in bed with the cruciﬁed Christ.63 Dorothea of Montau was in the habit of using rapture to disengage from sexual intercourse with her husband. Christ later explained to her, “frequently I seized [rapui] you from your husband when he still lived and thought he possessed you.”64 When Ine´s Velasco, a beata with close ties to Rose of Lima, made love with her husband, she “did not feel any

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pleasure” because throughout the experience “she was always thinking about God.” Christ reciprocated with like sentiments—“Ine´s, I am your lover and your husband”—and afterward, Ine´s related, she felt him “on my breast and inside my soul” and “the Lord put his face against mine and I felt this in my very ﬂesh and felt a great satisfaction.”65 Mystical love can also result in seminal ﬂow. Ine´s de Ubitarte was visited in her cell by a man she believed to be Christ. She ﬁrst resisted the sexual advances, but then “in a great ﬂame of sensuality she let him in” and “she kissed his parts and in that pleasure there was effusion of semen.” The corporal secretions are often represented ﬁguratively in such metaphors as “God’s seed.”66 In describing nuns as brides of Christ in 1708, a priest typically used fertility tropes to observe that nuns receive “in their virginal land, the seed of the divine word.” Other images were more suggestive. For the thirteenthcentury mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, God was “the dew dripping into the ﬂower”; Christina of Hane referred to the “divine ﬂow of love” into the soul; and Mechthild of Hackeborn described female mystics “liqueﬁed in divine love.”67 In mystical marriage God presents himself to his bride and “He touches her, He embraces her, He penetrates her, He ﬂows into her faculties,” while she, “ravished by His charms and by the spectacle of His beauty . . . holds Him, embraces Him, clasps Him closely, and, all on ﬁre with love, she ﬂows, she plunges, she buries and loses herself deliciously in God with sentiments of inconceivable joy.”68 The examples could be multiplied, but these few adequately illustrate the erotic expressions of mystical love and the interactions of chastity and visionary sexuality.69 Nuptial mysticism thrives at the nexus where body and soul, or body and mind, renegotiate a compromise. The body is disadvantaged in the negotiation but tends to insist until its interests are recognized. Teresa of Avila described her transverberation with the body’s role ﬁrst denied and then reafﬁrmed, emphatically, by addendum: “It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share.” For some, including Gregory the Great, Christian love intensiﬁes on a continuum whose ecstatic extreme is erotic, “for agape that is strained to intensity is called eros.” When the bride of Christ removes the veil from her eyes she sees “the ineffable beauty of her Spouse” and is “wounded by a spiritual and ﬁery dart of eros,” like Teresa. The affair is entirely erotic pursuant to the Song of Songs, but “no one should be ashamed of this, whenever the arrow comes from God and not from the ﬂesh.”70 The bride’s body maintains its virginal reserve because the sexuality is consummated in ecstasy, intangibly, and because “she loves not in the concupiscence of ﬂesh, but in the purity of spirit.”71 The protection of virginity and of decorum were also provided by loving Christ under ﬁgurative representations that allowed for intense, corporal experiences while avoiding explicit sexuality. The most common forms were the eucharist (hovering between its vehicle and tenor—the wafer and Christ’s body); the sacred heart (a synecdoche of the loving body, but free of sexual explicitness); and the innocent but precocious Christ child. Eroticism more generally found expression under sacred cover in medieval religious art, which

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had “far more physical and sensual intimacy than secular art of the same period.” The sacred body was not displayed as itself but as a trope, “pointing to a signiﬁer beyond in a higher realm,” and prevailing taboos could thereby be circumvented: “The only male body in medieval art that is truly naked and open to the gaze of male and female desire is that of Christ.”72 In seventeenthcentury Lima, Angelino Medoro, an acquaintance of Rose, made an outstanding contribution to this iconography of desire with his sexy Jesus of Humility and Patience, which depicts an eroticized, suffering Christ in a translucent groin cloth. Jacobo Zoboli’s eighteenth-century Mystical Rapture of Saint Rose, with its suggestive posturing of Rose in relation to the Christ child in her arms, is also noteworthy for its sensual, sacred intimacy.73 Marriage to Christ as an infant rather than as an adult is one of the signature peculiarities of nuptial mysticism. The choice is even more intriguingly complex because the cruciﬁed Christ is prominent in mysticism but often yields to the child for betrothal and matrimony. The deity tends to split between the cruciﬁed Christ as model for penitential exercises and the infant Christ as Bridegroom. The Christ who lived between these poles, between the infancy and the death, receives barely a mention. Also conspicuously absent, in Rose of Lima’s life as in that of other nuptial mystics, is the resurrected, gloriﬁed Christ who triumphed over suffering and death. Mystical devotion focused on the wounded, bleeding, suffering, cruciﬁed Christ as a model for mortiﬁcation, and on the pure, prepubescent, emasculate infant Christ as object of desire. Devotion to the Christ child combined with the childlessness of his brides for an eroticized mystical maternalism. Odd competitions with the Virgin could result. Agnes of Montepulciano convinced Mary to let her hold the Christ child for a few hours, but “when Mary wanted the child back Agnes refused, and the two of them engaged in a ﬁerce tug-of-war” before Mary prevailed. Agnes, a bride of Christ with maternal inclinations, sought to separate the child from his mother, Mary, who was also the bride of her son. These comminglings of maternalism and nuptial eroticism were also expressed when the Virgin handed the Christ child to Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, who “tenderly held him to her heart . . . and appeared to melt completely with love.”74 Gertrude van Oosten and Margery Kempe expressed a “maternal tenderness toward the baby Jesus” that likewise intermixed with “erotic yearnings.” Some medieval nuns’ reenactment of the nativity “involved much fondling and kissing of ﬁgures of the baby Jesus,” who was at once a Bridegroom.75 In iconography Rose of Lima is represented in both maternal and nuptial poses, the former reminiscent of Virgin-and-child imagery and the latter, far more common, featuring an infantile Bridegroom held by Rose, encircled by ﬂowers, and offering the ring of betrothal.76 Female mystics also took the Christ child to their breasts to nurse, sometimes by divine mandate, and in whatever forms were available. The fourteenth-century Dominican nun Margaret Ebner was ordered by the infant Christ to take him out of the manger and breast feed him, and she complied by holding the statue against her “naked heart.” Eroticized maternalism was more explicit in the experiences of Christina of Markyate. The Christ child

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spent a day with her and she “pressed Him to her bosom” as would a mother, but then passion overwhelmed her: “And with immeasurable delight she held Him at one moment to her virginal breast, at another she felt His presence within her even through the barrier of her ﬂesh. Who shall describe the abounding sweetness with which the servant was ﬁlled by this condescension of her creator? From that moment the ﬁre of lust was so completely extinguished that never afterwards could it be revived,” perhaps because it had found another outlet.77 In lyrics attributed to Rose of Lima, she asked: “How will I love you, Lord / Being your creation / And you being my loving Creator.” One way was to accentuate the Lord and Creator’s most docile representation, to reduce him to a scale not only human but infantile. The infant Christ was a manageable god, a god whose might, majesty, and masculinity were reserved in the distance while his presence was gentle, dependent, and nonthreatening. He was a quasiandrogynous, cherublike toddler with appeal even to women with aversions to men. A Spanish Dominican tertiary, Martina de los Angeles y Arilla, had such an extreme fear of men that she was horriﬁed even by the male saints who appeared to her in visions, but she enjoyed an intimate relation with the childlike non-man—a “beautiful youth, affable and kind”—with whom she joined in mystical marriage. Such a baby Bridegroom desexualized the erotic encounter of mysticism, providing for love of the male, anthropomorphic God while shielding the virgin from his true masculinity and virility. The infant’s innocent body puriﬁed the nuptial imagery that so often seemed indecent when mystics related physical encounters with Christ as an adult. Religious culture collaborated in this quest for purity with revisionist adjustments. Censorial interventions—both in conception of the love object and in hagiographic representation—perhaps also contributed to greater presence of the eroticized adult in Inquisition records than in the lives of canonized saints.78 At the same time, however, this infant displays talents beyond his years. He precociously rehearses the cruciﬁxion, sits up to give audience, hands the keys of the kingdom to Peter, eats grapes, reads books, “and long before normal toddlers learn to put round pegs in round holes, he deftly slips a ring on St. Catherine’s ﬁnger.” He further evidences “a build of Herculean musculature at the outset of life” and “a controlled, athletic agility in standing, striding, grasping” and other dexterities.79 Thus “the depicted Christ, even in babyhood, is at all times the Incarnation—very man, very God,” and very concealed beneath his infantile innocence. In many paintings the erect penis of the infant Christ provides an “emblematic virility,” a sign that represents but at once understates the adult manliness that hangs on the cross.80 The precocious toddler nevertheless had mobility limitations that posed problems of representation. Rose of Lima reported that for years she “saw before her the Child Jesus” during contemplative prayer, and that “from the Child Jesus to her soul and her body there came something of great delight,” something like a ﬂowing ﬂame. It was the infant Christ who proposed marriage to Rose and as such he was represented in nuptial iconography. In related imagery, however, there was a revisionist tendency to represent the Bridegroom

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as a young adult capable of the courtship attributed to him. The Christ who strolled hand-in-hand with Rose in the garden was often represented as an adolescent or young man—bearded in one painting—of Rose’s approximate age or slightly older.81 In an eighteenth-century version from Lima, Christ is a decidedly unmanly young adult, as though his age were increased in conformance with the courtship narrative—so he could walk and romance—while the infantile unmanliness was preserved through the effeminate depiction.82 Why is virginal mysticism experienced and represented in corporal, erotic, and matrimonial tropes? And why is the climax of mysticism experienced and represented as union with a deity whose humanity, carnality, and sometimes virility are stressed? One common answer appeals to the poverty of language; there are no words adequate to the experience. “Bearing in mind certain limitations on human language and experience, it is hardly surprising that most great mystics have described their relationship with God in words which are equally appropriate to a far commoner intense emotion, the pleasure of sexual love.” Attempts to articulate ineffable mysticism break down for want of words, and corporal tropes provide compensatory expression. Rose of Lima explained that when Christ appeared she experienced a sudden “blaze of ﬁre,” but she then withdrew the comparison and pleaded ineffability by adding, “it was not ﬁre, but rather something that she could not express.”83 The experiences of mystical love, according to this argument of ineffability, must resort to corporal imagery to gain approximate, if imperfect, expression. “Although it is a crude comparison,” wrote Teresa of Avila, “I can ﬁnd no other that would better explain what I mean than the sacrament of marriage.” One of Rose’s hagiographers similarly argued that “as there is not a closer union than that which joins a man and woman in marriage, Almighty God makes use of this expression to assist us to comprehend the union which He contracts with just souls by grace and charity.” Others, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, were less apologetic: “No sweeter names can be found to embody that sweet interﬂow of affections between the word and the soul, than bridegroom and bride.” In matrimony all things are shared, including “the same marriage bed” because husband and wife “are ﬂesh of each other’s ﬂesh.” Bernard concluded, therefore, that “if a love-relationship is the special and outstanding characteristic of the bride and groom, it is not unﬁtting to call the soul that loves God a bride.” The bride of Christ receives her beloved in the “marriage bed of the heart.”84 There is nevertheless something peculiar about the expression of sacred union with God in terms of the eroticism and matrimony that are forbidden to mystics. The claim to rhetorical exigencies would seem more tenable if the eroticism were in the articulation only and not in the experience itself, and if the tropes were only matrimonial—along the lines of a chaste, spiritual marriage, for example—and not explicitly erotic. Psychoanalysis explains this paradox by understanding the erotic tropes of mystics “as a therapeutic language that allows them to lift a repression by the direct investment of substitute representations.” Some who defend mysticism argue contrarily (but similarly)

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that humans live in an anthropocentric universe presided over by an anthropomorphic deity and that we necessarily experience our realities, and more so our intense emotions, through our bodies: “Because we are of the ﬂesh and are begotten through the concupiscence of the ﬂesh, our yearning love must begin from the ﬂesh; yet, if rightly directed, advancing under the leadership of grace, it will be consummated in spirit.” God himself became ﬂesh so “that He might ﬁrst win back the affections of ﬂeshly creatures who could not love otherwise than in the ﬂesh, to the salutary love of Himself that is purely spiritual.”85 Hypostatic union, by which the Word of God joined with human creation through the incarnation, provided a paradigm for the interactions of body and soul. The Word became ﬂesh and divinity united with humanity, just as divine love and the mystic’s ﬂesh come together in a body that houses a soul. The hypostatic union of divinity and creation was described, precisely, like mystical love, as “a marriage which it is impossible to deﬁne.” The love of mystic and Bridegroom “joins two together not in one ﬂesh, but in one spirit, and makes these two no longer two, but one.”86 The body-bound experiences and tropes of mystical marriage are ultimately transitory, however, serving as transitional expedients toward a “ﬂesh that would eventually be restored to its full integrity at the Resurrection.” Christ’s incarnation through the body of a virgin catalyzed a mutation: “Human and divine began to be woven together, so that by prolonged fellowship with divinity,” including mystical marriage as its highest achievement, “human nature might become divine.”87 In the interim divine nature became human. For Bernard of Clairvaux, ever enamored of the Song of Songs, the incarnation was a kiss through which “the whole fullness of Divinity poured Itself into that Nature in the ﬂesh,” uniting God and his creation. Honorius of Autun brought the union inside the bridal chamber, where “the bed is the Lord-Man, in which God the bridegroom rested with his bride, our nature.”88 These two arguments—that mysticism is expressed in nuptial and erotic tropes for lack of a better alternative, and that our experiences are necessarily corporal—have their merits, but when pushed for a stress test they reveal inadequacies. In a passage attributed to Augustine, the cruciﬁxion is described as follows: “Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber; he went out with a presage of his nuptials into the ﬁeld of the world. . . . He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there, in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman for ever.” This motif of Christ the Bridegroom making love on the “hard bed of the cross” has endured across the ages. In the thirteenth century Christ described the cross to Mechthild of Hackeborn as the bridal bedchamber in which he consummated his love for humanity, and in the twentieth century a tract explained similarly that “it is on Calvary that the bride, cleansed by the love of her Spouse, was embraced by him to become ‘one body’ with him.”89 Neither the poverty of language nor the corporal nature of human experience can account for representation of Christ’s cruciﬁxion as the consum-

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mation of a marriage. The cross as a bed and the cruciﬁxion as copulation are forced metaphors imposed upon rather than derived from their text. Not even the bridge of love can span the distance between the vehicle (a torturous execution) and the tenor (sexual relations of husband and wife). Rather, an entirely unerotic event—a sacriﬁcial victim nailed to a cross—was eroticized after the fact by a Catholic subculture (most Christians would not regard the cross as a marriage bed) for purposes that suited their devotion. Eroticization of Christ’s cruciﬁxion was catalyzed in mysticism by chastity, the exaltation of penance and mortiﬁcation as expressions of love, and the conception of an exceedingly human deity. It is not ineffability or our corporal experience of reality that transforms the cross into a marriage bed; it is the need for an erotic God. The devotion does not conform to the deity; the deity conforms to the devotion. Once such models are institutionalized and legitimized, they perpetuate (like the Song of Songs) a free-for-all of variations on the theme. From outside of the subculture that produced them, these religious experiences and expressions can seem extreme, even bizarre, but from within penitential mysticism, which loved God by sharing his eroticized suffering, they make supreme sense. Catherine of Siena participated in the execution of a young Perugian man whom she had brought back to the faith. She awaited his arrival at the chopping block and, she wrote, “before he arrived I knelt down and stretched my neck out on the block, but I did not succeed in getting what I longed for up there.” Catherine longed for death as mystical marriage; the condemned man would have it in her place. He arrived “like a meek lamb,” and when the moment came to put his head on the chopping block Catherine said to him, “Down for the wedding, my dear brother, for soon you will be in everlasting life!” Depiction of the execution as a wedding initiated a circulation of identities in which the prisoner, Catherine, and Christ intermingled in various conﬁgurations. The prisoner’s execution reenacted Christ’s cruciﬁxion, and as Catherine reveled in a shower of this sacriﬁcial blood her mystical marriage was rehearsed vicariously: “He knelt down very meekly; I placed his neck [on the block] and bent down and reminded him of the blood of the Lamb. His mouth said nothing but ‘Jesus’ and ‘Catherine’ and as he said this, I received his head into my hands, saying, ‘I will!’ with my eyes ﬁxed on divine Goodness.”90 Marrying God and holding a severed head blissfully to one’s breast seem improbable complements, but Catherine’s nuptial aspiration to be “engulfed and drowned in the sweet blood of God’s Son” imbued the execution with special meanings.91 Rose of Lima’s moribund agonies were similarly represented as preludes to matrimony, and when she died after extended suffering, the mood in the house was “of jubilation and joy,” as though, Hansen explained, “a wedding were being celebrated.” A vision revealed that in heaven, too, “festivities and music” were under way, summoning Rose “to the ﬂowered wedding bed of the divine Bridegroom,” where “in eternal union she would consummate spiritual marriage with God.”92 Death was not only festive (which should be expected, given belief in heaven) but also nuptial, with explicit anticipation of wedding-night pleasures. By the time Rose of Lima was conceiving of her Bridegroom at the turn

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of the sixteenth century, two mutually inﬂuential precedents, experiential and textual, had established the protocols by which mystics loved and hagiographers wrote. The conventions of explicit erotic relations with Christ (kissing, fondling, copulation, sucking at Christ’s “breast”) combined with the means of achieving and expressing those relations (virginity, mortiﬁcation, contemplative prayer, eucharistic devotion, suffering) to provide Rose with a devotion that suited her constitution. The eroticism of mystical experience and literature owes not to the existence of a God who is sexually desirous of mortiﬁed virgins but, rather, to the creation of a God equipped for the spiritualized sexuality he must satisfy. The desire and the eroticized suffering originate with the mystics, are projected onto the deity, and return to the mystics as a mandate. The Song of Songs offered a canonical precedent and a complex of tropes, and centuries of derivative and exegetic literature reinforced the propriety of loving God erotically and provided the means and resources. Once Catholicism endorsed erotic love of God by canonizing its proponents, mysticism provided the opportunity for satisfaction of needs that, for whatever reason, including vows of virginity, could not be satisﬁed conventionally. Repressed sexuality found symbolic expression through eroticized suffering and ecstatic love for an incarnate Bridegroom. A contradictory and thus highly charged experience for body, mind, and soul was generated when women whose identity was bound to virginity engaged with Christ, “a virgin born of a virgin,” in an erotic encounter that not only preserved their virginal purity but manifested it, demonstrated it, enacted it.93 Sexuality was rerouted through self-injury that was endowed with erotic and transcendental qualities as it became mystical but not quite disembodied love for the Bridegroom. In mysticism the sexuality was at once afﬁrmed and denied, sinlike and sinfree, corporal and soulful, pleasurable and painful, spiritual and inseparably bound to our most basic animal instinct.

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9 The Purgatory of Love

The Wound as Breast Among the most loaded tropes in the history of Christian mysticism is the wound that a lance opened in Christ’s side during the cruciﬁxion. In this unlikely and at once so typically Catholic image, many of mysticism’s predominant themes converge. The wound in Christ’s side is a refuge; a nuptial bedchamber; a womb from which one is reborn into eternal life; a breast that nourishes, infuses the soul with grace, and provides erotic pleasure; a pair of lips that kisses; a ﬂower; a warehouse that stores mystical paraphernalia (a wedding ring for Veronica Giuliani; a garment “the color of blood” for Catherine of Siena); a well of living waters; a showering fountain of blood that washes away sin; an attribute of the New Adam; and a symbol of Christ’s ﬁnal contribution to a vicarious sacriﬁce by quotas.1 As “a sanctuary of the just,” the wound in Christ’s side provided a safehaven in which to live wounded inside the wounded body of God. Penitential mystics entered the wound saying, as Fray Luis de Granada has it, “this is my home” and “here I will reside.” Bernard of Clairvaux alluded to the “dove in the cleft of the rock” in the Song of Songs to more generally describe the wound as a place of solace, of “safe sure rest for the weak.” Others who viewed Christ as “the cleft rock” counseled that the faithful “do not ﬂy only to him but into him,” because the cruciﬁxion made “holes in the wall of his body, in which, like a dove, you may hide while you kiss them one by one.”2 Angela of Foligno saw Christ place the heads of friars into the wound in his side, and Catherine of Siena joined a procession that disappeared into a body at once corporal and mystical: “I saw the Christian people and the Inﬁdels entering into the side of Christ

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cruciﬁed. And I passed in their midst by desire and affection of love, and I entered with them into sweet Christ Jesus.”3 Entry through the side wound provided access to Christ’s sacred heart, which, according to tradition, was also pierced by the lance. As explained by a medieval English text, Christ “let his shield be pierced, his side opened up, to show her [the bride] his heart, to show her how deeply he loved her, and to attract her heart.” The wound in Christ’s side opened the “Divine Bosom” and made the sacred heart accessible. “Surely his heart is laid open through his wounds!” exclaimed Bernard of Clairvaux, and Bonaventura advised nuns to slip into the Lord’s heart through this access cut by the lance.4 For many medieval mystics the divine heart was a house with a bedchamber in which the brides of Christ were rewarded “the joys of heaven.” A medieval German image depicted a huge heart superimposed over the chest of the cruciﬁed Christ, and the viewer entered that heart through its wound to see in miniature Christ and a nun, his bride, exchanging vows. The heart is accessed through the wound, and the brides of Christ take comfort in the “sleep of love.”5 Christ’s side wound was also frequently represented as a breast. In these instances nourishment and eroticism interact dynamically, with some visions stressing one or the other while many consolidate both into the polyvalence characteristic of mysticism. Corporal and spiritual nourishment were stressed when Rose of Lima was offered the “divine breast” through which Christ gave sustenance “not to Rose’s mouth, but to her heart.” She had been famished but unwilling to break her fast when “the holy Side of Christ Our Lord,” the “breasts of the Bridegroom,” came to her lips and revitalized her instantaneously.6 A painting that adorned the basilica during celebration of Rose’s beatiﬁcation in Rome depicted “Rose faint with hunger, and our Lord applying to her lips the wound in his Side in order to restore her strength.”7 Christ “put her lips to the wound of his most holy side, breast feeding her there like a very loved daughter.” The Jesuits in Rome also prominently displayed an image of Rose “enjoying the sweetness of the wound in the Side of Christ” during their 1668 celebrations.8 Other descriptions imbued the nutritional breast with a muted eroticism. Rose approached “the breast of the naked Christ” and “applied her lip to the lips of that wound,” as though a kiss were being shared. A Jesuit sermon at the time of beatiﬁcation described at length how Rose “applied her lips to drink that blood produced in the heart of her Bridegroom, that is in that burning forge of love” where “blood is transformed into vital spirit.” William of St. Thierry explained earlier that the bride of Christ resorts to the surrogate lips of the wound as breast because she is not yet worthy of God’s true lips: “Since that everlasting blessed union and the kiss of eternity are denied the Bride on account of her human condition and weakness, she turns to your bosom; and not attaining to that mouth of yours, she puts her mouth to your breasts instead.”9 Drinking from the wound in Christ’s side became a leitmotif of mystical and hagiographic literature. For some mystics, notably Catherine of Siena, a drink from the wound was contextualized by repeated use of breast-feeding

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imagery to describe union with and love of God. “And just as a baby draws milk through its mother’s breast, so souls in love with God draw him to themselves through Christ cruciﬁed.” Therefore: “Let your heart and soul burst with the heat of love at this breast of charity through the ﬂesh of Christ cruciﬁed.” Teresa of Avila also compared the soul’s relation to God with that of a child at the mother’s breast, because Christ’s “divine breasts” release comforting graces as “streams of milk.”10 A common variation features the morbidly intimate gesture of Christ pulling one hand free from the cross in order to embrace the bride who presses her lips to his wound. This image appears in the iconography of Rose of Lima as it had earlier in texts and images of, for example, Angela of Foligno, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, and many female Dominicans. MargueriteMarie Alacoque described how Christ pressed her “mouth to the wound in his side, holding me tightly there for three or four hours, yielding delights that I cannot express.” The dialogue repeated during these “divine caresses” included “everything is found in my pleasure” (Christ) and “O my Love!” (MargueriteMarie). Margaret of Oingt facilitated the divine embrace when she “took out the nails and carried Christ’s body between the arms of her heart, and kissed and swooned over the wounds.”11 In another variation, the mother superior of a Visitationist convent was surprised when she bent forward to kiss the feet of Christ: “The cruciﬁx leaned toward her, and she found herself with her lips stuck to the wound in the side of Our Savior.” As the fourteenth-century monk of Farne summarized, addressing Christ, “thou dost stretch out thine arms to receive me and bend down thy head to kiss me; thou dost bleed that I may have to drink, and open thy side in thy desire to draw me within.”12 Some visions and images convey a soothing sense of mystical bliss induced by Christ’s maternal milk, but others more severely depict penitential mystics drinking Christ’s blood, either directly from the wound or as it poured into their mouths or a chalice. In an eighteenth-century fresco of Rose of Lima by Jose´ Vergara, the glory of Rose in heaven was represented precisely by Christ squirting blood from his side into her open mouth. The two-way trafﬁc between lactating breast and bleeding wound was facilitated by the medieval belief that the female body produces breast milk by processing blood. The association of menstrual blood and milk dates back to Empedocles (482–423 b.c.) and was also treated by Aristotle and, ﬁve centuries later, Clement of Alexandria.13 Christ alluded to his heart as a source of “living waters” and offered himself as a source of drink for the thirsty, and 1 Peter 2:2 advised that Christians, “like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk” on which they would grow toward salvation. Blood was to the wound as milk was to the breast, and intermingling all around was the rule. The interchangeability of blood and milk was also widely evidenced in episodes of martyrdom. Following the decapitation of Catherine of Alexandria, “milk, instead of blood, pours from her neck, a miraculous token of her virginity.” When St. Cristina’s breasts were cut off, “milk ﬂowed from them instead of blood,” and in another martyrdom the same torture culminated in an inversion: “All saw milk ﬂowing from the wounds and blood from the severed breasts.”14

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The trope of the wound as a breast contributed to the larger symbolic complex of Christ as a mother. As Julian of Norwich explained, “the human mother may put her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus simply leads us into his blessed breast through his open side.” Christ “has breasts, lest he should be lacking any one of all duties and titles of loving kindness.”15 Bernard of Clairvaux was exemplary in his use of maternal images in reference to Christ (along with other male ﬁgures), and he advised that the faithful “suck not the wounds, but rather the breasts of the cruciﬁed,” because “He shall be as your mother to you.”16 God the father and the holy spirit were similarly endowed with the maternal lactating breast, and the Church, its mission, prayer, and the learning of doctrine were also frequently represented in nursing tropes.17 Yahweh was described as a mother in several Old Testament passages, and in the ﬁrstcentury Christian “Odes of Solomon,” the paternal God announced, “my own breasts I prepared for them, that they might drink my holy milk and live thereby.” Ode 19 was more explicit: A cup of milk was offered to me: and I drank it in the sweetness of the delight of the Lord. The Son is the cup, and He who was milked is the Father: And the Holy Spirit milked Him: because his breasts were full, and it was necessary for Him that His milk should be sufﬁciently released; And the Holy Spirit opened His bosom and mingled the milk from the two breasts of the Father; and gave the mixture to the world without their knowing.18 Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi had a vision of the infant Christ at the breast of God the Father, and in her ecstasies God revealed to her an entangled, gender-bent ensemble of relations between maternalism and eroticism: “Come, my little daughter, come my bride, for I will take you into the house of your mother, namely my Divinity.” There, God says, he will lead his bride— “my dove, my beautiful one”—“into the bedroom of my humanity, into the bed of your mother.” Divine love “enters the breast of the eternal Father. From the Father’s breast it proceeds to the Word’s [wounded] side, and from the side to His heart. There it reposes and feeds.”19 The eroticized relations of this God are as complex as his gender is indeterminate. When the feminine soul of St. John of the Cross united in mystical union with a feminized god, the experience of the saint and Christ—here both men in female guise—is suggestive: There he gave me His breast . . . And I gave myself to him, Keeping nothing back; There I promised to be His bride. Female lovers of God, for their part, unite as women in amorous ecstasy with a feminized man. They put their lips to the lips of a man-woman’s wound that

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is likened usually to a breast but that also, given its form, can resemble a vagina. The medieval equation of menstrual blood and breast milk fortiﬁed this conﬂation of the breast and the female genitalia, as did the rose tropes common to the vulva and Christ’s wound.20 Also contributing to the vaginal poetics were the various “births” from the New Adam’s wound that reiterated the “birth” of Eve from Adam’s side. Ecstatic experiences at Christ’s breast-wound were fostered by religious culture, hunger, wounded eroticism, eucharistic devotion, and issues of maternity. Psychological factors also seem to have been signiﬁcant, as suggested by the life of Catherine of Siena. Catherine’s mother, Lapa, gave birth to twin daughters but had lactation sufﬁcient only for one. Catherine was chosen for the privilege of maternal nursing and the twin, fed by a wetnurse, did not survive. Lapa subsequently had one additional child, her twenty-ﬁfth, and named the girl Giovanna after the child who had died. This second Giovanna died at about the same time that Catherine succumbed to the (sinful) vanity of beautifying herself for courtship at the encouragement of her older sister, Bonaventura. Matters were further complicated by Bonaventura’s own death, in childbirth, during this same period, and by the consideration of obliging Catherine to marry the dead sister’s husband.21 These experiences and the attending survivor guilt made decisive contributions to Catherine’s conception of God. The Christ she loved was a Bridegroom but also a breast-feeding “mother with her favourite child.”22 “We must do as a little child does who wants milk,” Catherine wrote, “we must attach ourselves to the breast of Christ cruciﬁed.”23 She came to that attachment via a penitential detour. Catherine was caring for a woman with an ulcerous breast when the stench exuded by the wound overwhelmed her with nausea. Appalled by her lack of charity and sinful repulsion before God’s creation, Catherine “bent her face down over the sick woman’s breast, [and] put her mouth and nose to the horrible sore.” When the nausea recurred on another occasion, she “collected up into a bowl the fetid stuff that had been used to wash the sore, along with all the pus” oozing from the breast, and drank it.24 Christ duly rewarded this outstanding performance with a prize suited to the achievement. By drinking the blood and pus, he told Catherine, “you made yourself especially pleasing to me.” Christ placed “His right hand on her virginal neck and drawing her toward the wound in His own side,” he offered her “the fountain of life.” Catherine put her lips “over the most holy wound, and long and eagerly and abundantly drank that indescribable and unfathomable liquid.” Her “soul and body were both equally nourished by the power of the Spirit,” and the result was miraculous: “She never wanted food or was able to take it,” opting instead for a variant ingestion of Christ’s body through almost daily communion.25 Each time we take the eucharist, Fray Luis de Granada observed, we “put our mouth on the side of Christ, and we begin to drink his precious blood.”26 A relation is thus suggested between the complicated breast feeding of Catherine’s early life, the fasting practices that began in her youth, the drinking of secretions from the patients’ wounded breasts, the “nursing” at the breast

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of a maternal Christ, the subsequent inedia and eucharistic devotion, and the insistent breast and lactation images that were central to her mysticism. Catherine’s lips migrated from her mother’s breast to the sick woman’s to Christ’s, drinking along the way milk, blood and pus, and a eucharistic blood-milk. Eating and drinking the secretions of wounds is a complex symbolic act that reappears in the lives of many mystics. Rose of Lima picked up a bowl of putrid blood that had disgusted her and “with holy wrath drank down all that blood without leaving a single drop.” Angela of Foligno drank pus and ate scabs from her patients and described these delicacies with a simile—“as sweet as the eucharist”—that again associated the patient’s body with Christ’s.27 Patients and Bridegroom were indistinguishable to the seventeenth-century Margaret of the Holy Sacrament, “and in putting her mouth to their [her patients’] sores ﬁlled with ulcerous pus, she had the impression that these were the sacred wounds of Jesus Christ, and felt that her mouth was ﬁlled with His precious blood.” Francis of Assisi kissed the wounds of lepers, Catherine of Genoa rubbed her nose in pus and ate scabs and lice in order to overcome her nausea, and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque confessed, “when I had to clean up the vomit of a sick patient I couldn’t prevent myself from doing it with my tongue.”28 In seventeenth-century Mexico, the always innovative Catarina de San Juan drank milk from the Virgin’s breast and ate maggots from Christ’s wound. Afterward she checked with her confessor to be certain that she could take communion after having eaten this substantial meal, which in itself was a kind of eucharist.29

Flames of Passion and Wounds of Love The ﬁre imagery so common in nuptial and penitential mysticism has multiple, interacting meanings. Prominent are passion and burning love (the Spanish mystics’ “living ﬂames of love”); symbolic eroticism; punishment, purgation, and puriﬁcation (as in hellﬁre and apocalyptic holocaust); martyrdom (literalized by such martyrs as St. Lawrence, who was grilled to death); forging or melting into union with divinity; synesthetic sensations (“a ﬁre and a love and a sweetness”); the fusion of love and suffering into a single ardent experience; the pyrotechnic demonstration of volcanic love for God (ﬂames burst from the mystic’s body); the setting of the world on ﬁre (Luke 12:49); the ﬂaming sacred heart; the holy spirit (via the tongues of ﬂame at Pentecost); and the interrelations of these with other mystical motifs (hot coals turn into roses). Using tropes still common today, Jerome spoke of women “burning with desire” and “the ﬁres of lust” and of the “hot little body” of a well-fed girl “exposed to the thrills of easy living.” When the Lima nun Ine´s de Ubitarte had intercourse with the devil disguised as a man, she too was “inﬂamed in a great ﬁre of sensuality.” Rose of Lima’s avoidance of social and sexual intercourse was represented by a glass-covered candle in order to explain that both ﬂames and virgins are safer when they are protected from exposure.30 Only

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Christ had access to the burning love of his brides, and when he kindled a medieval Benguine with his caresses, she “felt her breasts ﬁlled by such an incandescent glow that it spread through the rest of her body” until her blood was “boiling from the heat.” In The Golden Legend, Christ set Mary Magdalen “totally aﬁre with love of him.” Allusions to Magdalen’s contrived past in prostitution (her nickname, “the sinner”; the false etymology that makes “Magdalen” signify “remaining guilty” ) quietly eroticized her ardent love. “This woman burns so with the love of God,” explained a seventeenth-century Jesuit, “that she cannot bear to wear clothes.”31 Others, including Teresa of Avila, pursued a different interpretive course to link Magdalen’s burning love with penance: “This ﬁre of the love of God burned so vehemently” that her suffering was “one continuous martyrdom.” God explained much the same to Catherine of Siena, but the ﬁre of love could also induce a protective anesthesia. An ecstatic Catherine collapsed on glowing coals and remained there for several hours, but she was not burned because the ﬁre in her soul “was able to nullify the natural power of the visible ﬁre.”32 When ﬁre challenged ardent love of God during the grilling alive of St. Lawrence, he did not “feel those ﬂames, due to the heat of his faith.” St. Dionysius sang praises to the Lord as he was burned naked on an iron grill: “Thy word is reﬁned by ﬁre, and thy servant has loved it.” Augustine explained: “The love of Christ could not be conquered by any ﬂame, and the ﬁre that burned on the outside was less ardent than the ﬁre within.”33 Fire was fought with ﬁre, and the divine ﬂame always prevailed. When Christians were the perpetrators rather than the victims of execution by burning, the meanings of ﬁre adjusted accordingly to guarantee righteousness, usually by appeal to purgation. A sermon given during the Lima Inquisition’s 1605 auto-da-fe´ explained that in hell “obstinate sinners will be burned in the soul,” so therefore, “let their bodies be burned alive here, so that they begin to experience the frightful hell that awaits them.”34 The ﬂames of love experienced by mystics are corporal burning sensations that cannot be attributed to a natural cause. Their gradations include simple heat, usually around the heart, which can radiate to other parts of body; intense ardors, in which the heat becomes unbearable; and material burning, which sets clothes on ﬁre and blisters the skin. Rose’s hagiography describes burning love in all degrees. At the age of ﬁve, “divine love began to boil in her heart.” Her cheeks were rosy because the ﬂame of love burned inside her.35 When her mother obliged her to sleep wearing gloves in order to enhance the pale, delicate beauty of her hands, the gloves burst into ﬂame and nearly burned down the house. A prayer attributed to Rose concluded, “burn me desire me consume me in the ﬁre of your divine love.”36 In her dark night of the soul Rose suffered afﬂictions that she described as worse than being burned alive, and when God reentered her after the absence, her soul was “inﬂamed and all bathed in light.” Divine love brought “the unbearable heat of the heart, which was like an oven.”37 Rose’s constant inner ﬁre began to blaze when she made direct contact with her Bridegroom. Radiance, sparks, and ﬂames were emitted from her face

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as in prayer she burned “with the ﬁre of Divine love.” When she hung by her hair to pray through the night, her body shined in the darkness like a lantern. In mystical trance she was “a burning coal,” with her brightly luminous face again “giving off some sparks.”38 When she ingested or even anticipated the eucharist, “her face shined visibly” due to the “interior ﬂame that burned in her breast.” Her cheeks “emitted ﬂames,” and “rays of light” shot out of her eyes with unbearable brightness.39 “Flames sometimes burst from her mouth,” and, according to the tardy testimony discussed earlier, one priest feared that his hand would be burned as he approached her to serve the eucharist.40 Figurative adaptations were also prevalent: “With the prodigious rays of your virtues you illuminate the New World,” exclaimed Jacinto de Parra in a panegyric addressed to Rose, and in a 1698 Mexican sermon, “Rose burned in living ﬁres in order to liberate man from mortal ﬂames.”41 Rose’s ardors were also erotically suggestive. Christ’s presence ﬁlled her with a sensation of “very great delight” and synesthetic complexity, including “a supernatural, most gentle warmth” and the “fragrance of some rays of glory” that overwhelmed her. These pleasurable emanations—“burning ﬂames of a ﬁre so loving, and sweet”—ﬂowed from the Bridegroom into her body and soul.42 In another vision Christ appeared to her “face to face, in his entirety from head to foot,” and, Rose related, “from his face and body to my soul and my body came some rays and blazes of glory.” Hansen described these as “inexplicable ﬂames of glory” that emanated from “the humanity of Jesus Christ” and penetrated the depths of Rose’s soul.43 The resultant inﬂammation was uncontainable, and its eruptions made Rose “a volcano always burning with the love of God.” As Mele´ndez put it, “the loving volcano of her breast loudly announced the Divine ardor in which she was burning.”44 Burning love was closely associated with and often accompanied by an arrow or dart of love, sometimes itself hot or ﬂaming. Two overlapping trope clusters, one of inﬂamed passion and the other of piercing and penetration, were prominent ﬁgures of mystical eroticism. The chubby, cherub-like Christ child was analogous to Cupid, as both pierced the heart with arrows to ignite the love of their targets. Seventeenth-century popular prints depicted arrows shooting from Christ’s ﬁve wounds to the hearts of the faithful, and some mystics, Catherine of Siena among them, were pierced by rays of blood that likewise shot from Christ’s wounds to mark them with the stigmata. When Christ asked Rose of Lima to be his bride, the words penetrated and wounded her heart as though they were “arrows and darts of love.”45 Being wounded by the Bridegroom’s arrow of love is so painfully delightful that the body of its happy victim swoons. It is a “most pleasurable wound” that makes one “die of love” in a voluptuous little death. Insatiable craving for the wounding Christ, and for the wound itself, is the quintessential desire of mysticism. Once the soul is wounded with the Bridegroom’s love, Teresa of Avila explained, “it would never want to be cured of that wound.”46 Mysticism is love unto death. Catherine of Siena’s heart split “in two down the middle” due to the “violence of love” inside it, and she was dead for four hours before God revived her. Others longed for the privilege—“Slay me with love”—and imag-

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ined penetration lovingly: “How kindly will thy gentle heart / Kiss the sweetkilling dart!”47 The most celebrated mystical piercing is the transverberation experienced by Teresa of Avila in 1559 and related in chapter twenty-nine of her autobiography. An angel appeared to Teresa and, as she described it, “I saw in his hands a long gold dart” that was ﬂaming at its tip, and with which he “pierced my heart a few times.” The piercing caused Teresa intense pain that was inexplicably, ecstatically pleasurable and that left her “burning in God’s great love” and desirous of nothing but God. Teresa’s transverberation is the subject of dozens of paintings, as well as Gianlorenzo Bernini’s infamous sculpture, Ecstasy of St. Teresa (1645–1652), in the Cornaro Chapel altar of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.48 Bernini depicted an intensely erotic religious ecstasy, a sensual swooning with the mouth open seemingly around a moan and the body loosened in surrender. “The little death of sexual pleasure is confounded with the ﬁnal death of the body” but also with mystical ecstasy, “dying from the love of God,” as an experience of orgasmic intensity.49 Veronica Giuliani reported a transverberation that coincided in signiﬁcant detail with Teresa’s. On Christmas Day, 1696, Veronica related, “I seemed to see in the hand of the holy Infant, a rod of gold, at the point of which was, as it were, a ﬂame of ﬁre, and at the foot, a small piece of iron, like a little lance; and He placed this rod against His own heart, and the point of the lance in my heart, and it seemed that I felt my heart pierced through and through.” With this piercing, Veronica continued, “He made me understand that He had bound me to Himself by a closer tie.”50 In Veronica’s experience the Christ child himself does the piercing in a heart-to-heart, loving penetration that alludes to, extends, or reciprocates the lance wound inﬂicted on his own body. It is almost as though the two hearts were linked by the lance, or the love, that wounds them both. Rose of Lima never experienced transverberation or the stigmata, but her hagiographers provided rhetorical compensation. When she looked at an image of the Christ child, Rose “was ignited and burned with new ﬂames of love and incredible pleasure” because it seemed that the child (again reminiscent of Cupid) shot at her rays of light and of love, “as though they were ﬂaming arrows.” From another painting “arrows of ﬁre shot out at her breast,” and in a vision the Christ child “inﬂamed her soul with burning arrows.”51 Christ’s words of betrothal to Rose were “arrows that penetrated the most secret depths of her heart.” For Jacinto de Parra, Rose was “penetrated with the ﬁre of love, like an iron removed from the ﬂames of the forge.”52 Fire and piercing also characterized Rose’s deathbed sufferings. In her moribund agony she felt as though “a hot blade penetrated her right temple” and continued down to her foot, “and that a ﬁery knife pierced her left arm and her heart.” Her mother added that the left side of her groin “was pierced by a lance, that crippled her entire body.”53 Mele´ndez elaborated: “It seemed to her that her temples were being pierced by a hot blade, and that from her feet to her head she was being pierced by hot skewers; that her entrails and sides were being pierced by a dagger,” while into her head “nails were being nailed

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with a hammer.” Suffering in death was the ﬁnal act of loving God in life, and it accordingly assumed like expressions of wounded passion. Rose fused her agony with the “torments of her cruciﬁed Love, with whom she felt nailed to the cross through all parts of her body.”54 In two series of collages created by Rose a few years earlier, the imagery was also dominated by piercing, burning, and the two combined. These images were discovered in 1923 by the priest Luis Getino in the convent established at the residence of Gonzalo de la Maza, where Rose died. The ﬁrst sheet, of Mercedes (literally “favors,” implying wounds of love), has three images; and the second, which continues the Mercedes and includes a mystical scale of ascension toward union with God, has thirteen. A document in Rose’s hand mentions a gloss that accompanied the images, but this manuscript has never been located and was probably destroyed around 1622. The collages consist of cut-out images pasted onto pages, with text and drawings added on and around the images. The heart piercing in Rose’s images is done by a dart, a lance, a harpoon, a bolt of lightening, an arrow, a nail from Christ’s passion, and a ﬂaming spear. The Mercedes sequence begins with the image of a cross superimposed on a lance-wounded heart. The caption, which circles the heart, reads: “First merced that I received from God: with a lance he injured me and went into hiding.”55 The Bridegroom wounds with love and disappears, and in his absence the yearning bride wounds herself loving him. The second merced repeats a common image of female mysticism: the Bridegroom internalized. Here the Christ child in miniature is depicted inside of Rose’s heart, with a cross above him.56 In the third image Christ is absent visibly, but the caption explains that “God ﬁlled the space of the heart with his love, making it his home.” A cross is above the heart, and the heart has four wings—each inscribed with the caption “ﬂying toward God”—that lift it heavenward. In the text accompanying these images, Rose wrote: “I received these three mercedes from divine mercy” after “having suffered close to two years of great sorrows, tribulations, despair, neglect, temptations, battles with devils, false accusations of confessors and others, sicknesses, pains, fevers, or, to say it all, the most severe punishments of hell that can be imagined.”57 In these Mercedes and comments as throughout Rose’s life, suffering is the prerequisite to love that is itself experienced in wounds. The collages on the second sheet are also dominated by images of piercing and burning. The ﬁfth image has a heart pierced by a “lightning bolt of God’s love”—quick, sharp, brilliant, hot, heavenly—that comes down from above and makes a right-angle turn to pierce horizontally, almost as though it were a knife cutting downward. In the next image the heart is shot through “with an arrow of divine love”; in the eighth, by a giant nail from the cross; in the eleventh, “with a harpoon of ﬁre he has injured me”; and in the twelfth, a lance-like weapon pierces the heart, with a caption explaining, “Heart wounded with a dart of divine love, calls out for he who wounded it.”58 Image nine is wrapped with a caption on the “ﬁre of the love of God,” and in the wound at the heart’s center one reads, “Only one who has already labored with love is healed.” In

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the eighth and fourteenth images, Rose’s pierced, cruciﬁed heart bursts into ﬂames.59 The implied phallicism of the various inﬂamed, piercing objects is most graphic in image thirteen, in which a large nail, more like a peg in its roundness and diameter, points directly at an elongated wound in the heart. The caption reads, “Oh happy heart that received as counter-dowry [en arras] a nail of the Passion.”60 The word “passion” resonates in the ambiguity of its double and here related meanings of suffering and amorous excitation. Flames burst out of the top of the heart. In other images the shape of the wound is suggestive (particularly in image ten), and the harpoon in image eleven penetrates one of these wounds at a phallic angle and explodes emitting ﬂames. In the penultimate image, just prior to entry into heaven, suffering has ended as the heart ascends toward the Bridegroom with Song of Songs exclamations of joy: “Rapture—drunkenness in the wine cellar—secrets of divine love. Oh happy union, a tight embrace with God.”61 Rose’s winged heart, puriﬁed and poised for mystical union, settles down on the cross. The top of the cross penetrates the bottom of the heart as Rose and her Bridegroom link up for the ﬁnal union, which bears no cross.62

Mystical Marriage Second-century Christians believed that virginity endeared one to Christ, who assumed the ﬂesh “to deliver us from error and from this use of the generative organs.” During the course of the third century the concept of virginity “gathered momentum at a surprising rate. It was accompanied by the emergence of what can best be called a ‘sensibility,’ almost an ‘aesthetic,’ of virginity.”63 In the Middle Ages and early modern periods, virginity was essential to sanctity, and any breaches in abstinence disqualiﬁed aspirants to sainthood. Rose of Lima preserved “her virginity until she died,” wrote King Philip IV to advocate her cause, “for which she was considered to be and respected as a person chosen by God.”64 Virgins were formally recognized as the brides of Christ in rituals inﬂuenced by the this-worldly institutions of matrimony and patriarchy. Through a vow of virginity and espousal to Christ, a woman could withdraw herself from the marriage market in early Christianity, even despite parental protests. Were she later to relinquish her vow and marry, some, here Basil of Caesarea, considered her to be an adulteress, “dishounoring her union with the bridegroom” in order to “give herself over to licentious pleasure.” Tertullian argued that virgins be veiled like other brides, “for you are wedded to Christ. To him you have surrendered your body. Act as becomes your husband’s discipline.”65 The practice of veiling actual brides in early Christianity was a symbol “of the woman’s forsaking all others and keeping only unto her husband, and submitting to his rule over her.” The veil was also worn by widows as evidence of “the obligation to constancy,” and, later, was adapted to brides of Christ

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consecrated to their Bridegroom.66 During the ceremonial vow of virginity advocated by Jerome, a virgin appeared before a bishop who covered her head with a bridal veil, saying “I wish to present you . . . as a chaste virgin to Christ.” The woman responded: “The king has brought me into his chambers.”67 The term “castimony” appeared in some ninth-century texts to signify chaste matrimony to Christ, and by the middle of the tenth century castimony was celebrated formally: “High Mass with a special episcopal blessing of veil and habit paralleled the growing solemnity of the secular wedding ceremony. The prospective nun’s male guardian gave her away. She was married to Christ with ring and crown. She was interrogated and her oath conﬁrmed, and ﬁnally she proceeded in her new habit to the altar carrying a lighted candle in memory of the wise virgins.”68 The rite of becoming a nun was also modeled on the marriage ceremony in some Spanish American convents, even to the degree of dressing the nun as a bride and following the ceremony with a wedding banquet. As described in a 1789 text concerning the Dominican convent of St. Rose of Lima in Puebla, Mexico, a prelate put a ring on the ring ﬁnger of the nun-in-making and, “handing her the Child Jesus,” recited words in Latin that espoused her to Christ. Some modern orders, such as the Franciscan Missionaries of the Divine Motherhood at the Ladywell Convent in Surrey, England, still celebrate the consecrations of novices with a nuptial ceremony. The novices dress as brides in long wedding gowns with lace veils, and “they are in love with Him as other women are with their husbands.” Everyone celebrates following the ceremony, eating wedding cake.69 In these rites of consecration “the Church is establishing as sacred not only a person but a virgin-person married to Christ in religious profession.” The rite is “deliberately modelled upon the marriage liturgy,” and its every detail “accents the literal interpretation of the virgin’s marriage to Christ.” “Enshrined as it is in the Holy Sacriﬁce of the Mass, virginal consecration becomes a wedding feast” and the eucharist is “the marriage Banquet in which the bride takes, eats, and is wholly satisﬁed.” The rite of consecration, combined with the mystery of the eucharist, interweaves “Christ’s sacriﬁce and the virgin’s oblation” as bride and Bridegroom become as though one ﬂesh. “The virgin delivers the secret of her person to her Bridegroom in a supernatural manner and on a supernatural plane. The essential surrender, however, is present, and the act of loving exchange is, moreover, what it will be forever in the celestial wedding feast.”70 The idea of Christ as Bridegroom had antecedents in Judaism. Yahweh was often depicted as the husband of Israel—“You will call me, ‘My husband’ ”—and he sometimes regarded his unfaithful wife as a whore, punishing her severely. The formula offered by Yahweh in Leviticus 26:12—“I will be your God, and you shall be my people”—paraphrased the wedding vow of bridegrooms to establish the bond between God and creation.71 In the New Testament, Jesus referred to himself as a bridegroom and compared the kingdom of heaven to a wedding feast. “I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians, and Ephesians drew parallels between husband and wife and Christ and Church.

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In Revelation the “marriage of the Lamb” anticipates a nuptial banquet and, as noted earlier, the New Jerusalem descends “as a bride adorned for her husband.”72 Rose of Lima’s quest for mystical marriage required ﬁrst that she forsake and evade earthly suitors. One day, the hagiographers relate, her blonde hair was soiled with mud thrown by her brother. Amid the laughter of other children Rose protested the defacement of her beauty, but her brother defended himself by arguing that the hair so cherished by Rose was a diabolical snare to trap men in hellﬁre. In response Rose chopped off her sin-inducing hair, enhanced her asceticism, and made a precocious vow of virginity at the age of ﬁve.73 Cutting off her hair was “also cutting off the hopes of her mother” that she marry, and as such it was the ﬁrst maneuver of a long, concerted offensive to sabotage her eligibility for courtship. The mother tried tirelessly to school Rose in “the vain pomp” of society because such was essential to attracting a husband, particularly a wealthy one.74 Rose resisted implacably, and as a consequence her self-inﬂicted suffering to evade courtship was redoubled by coercive abuse—“slaps in the face and kicks”—in punishment for her obstinacy.75 The mother adorned her to make her attractive for marriage, and Rose undermined the adornment to make herself attractive for mystical marriage. Rose used all resources in her arsenal—fasting, asceticism, self-injury, illness—to make herself unappealing, even repulsive, to the suitors who her parents forced on her. She endeavored to “erase and mar the natural attractive beauty of her face” and “tried not to look good to men.”76 The task was selfescalating: “Seeing that her penitence did not eliminate the beauty of her face,” she took ever greater measures to “disﬁgure that rosiness.” Finally, Rose’s beauty was replaced by gaunt emaciation, exempting her from the desire of suitors and reserving her virginity for the Bridegroom. Her ascetic appearance was complemented in attire with the Franciscan habit that Rose wore, following her mother’s capitulation, until she took the Dominican habit at around the age of twenty.77 The sullen face and sackcloth habit broadcast the message that Rose was a beata rather than a bachelorette. Parental pressure to marry and marry well is recorded in the lives of many saints. A family in ﬁnancial constraints aspires to their daughter’s (and their own) socioeconomic ascent through marriage, and the daughter resists to defend otherworldly pursuits. In early colonial Peru “practically all marriages were strategic alliances arranged with a view to improve the partners’ wealth or social standing,” and “the classic type of match in the Indies was that in which the man had acquired wealth or power and now wanted to gain matching social prestige by marrying a woman of higher birth, though often poor.” When Rose’s mother had found the perfect (if not “classic”) match, she argued, as one hagiographer imagined it, “I have arranged for you a great marriage that will be for you a life of happiness and for us a support in old age. The ﬁance´ is noble and very rich; he is the only heir of his family.”78 Rose’s response was nevertheless negative because the prospective husband was dwarfed by his otherworldly rival. “Would it make sense to abandon the creator for the creation, God for a man, however handsome and rich he

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might be?” As Mele´ndez scripted it, “This Gentleman may be quite noble; but I would not marry him, even if it made me a Queen, because the best Crown of this world is still of this world, and although being a Queen is a great thing, it is better to serve now and be a Queen later.”79 For many saintly girls, “it was the presence, not the absence, of a prospective bridegroom that activated desire for perpetual chastity.” Rose had already made her vow of virginity, but the pressure to marry solidiﬁed her resolve, catalyzed self-injury as evasion of courtship, and escalated visible protests of her identity as bride of Christ. The combination of virginity and mystical marriage provided her a peerless husband together with a rationale for avoidance of interpersonal love relations. Rose suffered threefold to defend the “vow of virginity that she had made to her Bridegroom”: once to deface her beauty, again in acts of self-injury to evade social contact, and ﬁnally in the retaliatory punishments from her mother.80 On Palm Sunday, 1617, Rose was kneeling in the Dominican church awaiting a palm frond as they were distributed by the sacristan in preparation for a procession. For some reason, probably an oversight, the sacristan neglected to give Rose a palm, and she was humiliated and crushed by this omission. Rose should have received a palm, as she had in previous years, “as a sister of the holy order whose habit she was wearing.”81 Tortured always by scruples, Rose reckoned that God had deprived her of the palm due to her sinfulness and unworthiness. This ideation, regardless of any basis in fact, had special ﬁgurative signiﬁcance (in light of the ensuing mystical marriage) because the palm is a symbol of virginity. The palm and virginity were closely associated in The Golden Legend, in which the “Virgin’s palm,” a term still used centuries later in colonial Lima, was connected to Mary herself. Burying a palm with the deceased was a Spanish practice reserved for virgins, and in Lima deceased young virgins were buried with a palm and garland. The palm and the garland were also sometimes given to novices as they took their vows to become brides of Christ.82 The “denial” of a palm to Rose thus carried an implicit, symbolic commentary: if palms were for virgins, and if Rose was denied a palm by God through the agency of the sacristan, then there must have been a sin to suit the punishment. (I refer here to ﬁgurative relations; Rose’s actual virginity is not in question.) Visionaries provided evidence in excess to dispel any uncertainties that might result from such symbolic associations. After Rose’s death Alfonsa Serrano saw her carrying a “virgin’s palm” in a heavenly procession as she approached the Virgin to be coronated with a garland. Juan del Castillo also had a vision of Rose holding a palm frond that was explicitly related to virginity, and Hansen later reassured that it was a “manifest sign of her purity.”83 Rose herself seems to have responded to the Palm Sunday incident more with indignation than with the guilt-ridden humility described in formal hagiography. Once she recovered from the insult of not being given a palm, she reacted with a renewed, compensatory rejection of what this world had to offer and made her appeal to higher authorities. “My Lady,” Rose prayed to the Virgin of the Rosary, “I do not want palms from men.” She pleaded instead to receive

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her palm (the symbol of her virginity) directly from the Christ child held in the Virgin’s arms: “She wanted it from his most holy hand.”84 The Virgin turned toward the Christ child; the child gazed at Rose with amorous passion; Rose returned the loving gaze; and then the child, “inﬂamed with love,” offered more than she requested: “Rose of my heart, be my bride.” In lieu of the palm that she had been denied and the otherworldly palm that she had solicited, Rose received “the lily of the valley,” meaning Christ himself, who as the Bridegroom in interpretations of the Song of Songs was also associated with the palm tree.85 Symbols of purity—rose, lily, palm, childhood— intermingled as the mystical marriage was contracted. Rose sought a palm and received instead a marriage proposal that was the maximal authentication of her virginity. The palm tropes then yielded to a variation on the theme as the lily of the valley was exchanged for a virginal rose. Rather than giving Rose the palm of virginity, Christ, in effect, staked his claim to her palm, and her rose, by giving himself as Bridegroom. He contracted rights to her virginity that rendered her ineligible for palms. The sacristan’s oversight thus became a prophetic anticipation of espousals not yet revealed, thereby restoring in retrospect the providential design of the omission. Rose’s visionary betrothal lacked the required wedding ring. Other brides were more fortunate. A medieval German image of the consecration of virgins depicted marriage en masse as each kneeling nun awaited her turn to receive a ring from the Christ child held by the Virgin. In a fourteenth-century Old Czech life of Catherine of Alexandria, Christ was a handsome lover with golden locks who sang an epithalamium in a “sweet, precious voice” before he delivered the wedding ring.86 Paintings commonly depict Catherine of Alexandria kneeling or genuﬂecting as the Christ child, in his mother’s arms, places the ring on her ﬁnger, and this motif was adapted to the mystical marriage of Catherine of Siena.87 The guest list for Catherine of Siena’s wedding included the Virgin, St. John the Evangelist, the apostle Paul, St. Dominic, and the prophet David, the last of these playing “sweet strains on the harp.” The Virgin held Catherine’s right hand as Christ slid onto it a ring that was invisible to others but never out of Catherine’s sight. In such sixteenth-century paintings as Fra Bartolommeo’s Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine, with Eight Saints, the infant Christ leaves the Virgin’s lap to place the ring on Catherine’s ﬁnger.88 Colomba da Rieti, a ﬁfteenth-century Italian beata who, like Rose, consciously imitated Catherine, also experienced mystical marriage authenticated by an invisible espousal ring. For another bride of Catherine’s prototype, Veronica Giuliani, Christ pulled the wedding ring out of the wound in his side and, assisted by the Virgin, placed it on Veronica’s ﬁnger. According to Hansen, Rose aspired to an espousal in imitation of Catherine, who “received the wedding ring from the very hand of Christ,” but no ring came with Rose’s vision.89 The pragmatic Rose expedited a solution. She recruited one of her brothers to have a wedding ring made “as a sign that she was married to the Child Jesus.” The ring “was gold, with a heart made of stone, and above it a Jesus, and some letters around it said, ‘You are my wife, Rose of my,’ with the heart

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made by its shape.”90 Other versions stress that the inscription miraculously reiterated Christ’s words of betrothal: “Rose of my heart, be my bride.” On Holy Thursday, 1617, Rose brought the wedding ring to the Dominican church, and after lengthy pleas she managed to convince the sacristan to place the ring in the tabernacle where the sacramented body of Christ was stored. Thus Rose arranged “to bury her heart” (represented in the inscription) with her dead Bridegroom, “so that when the dead Christ resurrected, her heart would resurrect with the living Christ.”91 The wedding ring spent the next day or days—the accounts are conﬂicting—in the tabernacle with the body of Christ, awaiting his resurrection for a wedding ceremony. After mass on Good Friday another sacristan attempted to return the ring to Rose, but “she refused to accept it, and she told him to give it to the father maestro Fray Alonso Vela´zquez, because she had to receive it from his hand.” That evening Rose informed her surrogate mother, Marı´a de Uza´tegui, that she would be getting married on Easter Sunday. Uza´tegui, shocked, asked with whom, Rose responded, “with her bridegroom Jesus Christ,” and the two agreed that Uza´tegui would attend “because it is not right for daughters to be married without their mothers being present.”92 Reservations overcame Alonso Vela´zquez, however, who tried to return the ring to Rose and refused to put it on her ﬁnger. Vela´zquez feared “what could be said by those who might see” the mock wedding, but his reluctance was no match for Rose’s determination and persuasion: “Father, this is the will of God, and there is no fear that anyone will see it.” As de la Maza summarized this exchange, “although the said maestro Fray Alonso Vela´zquez had some difﬁculties with putting the said ring on the said blessed Rose there, later they were resolved by what she said to him and he put it on the said ﬁnger.”93 Rose’s two arguments, one spiritual (it is the will of God) and the other practical (no one will see) recuperated the friar’s surreptitious collusion in realization of God’s will. Signiﬁcant concerns regarding the propriety of the mock wedding were also made manifest by Rose’s principal and most prestigious confessor, Juan de Lorenzana. Lorenzana was originally scheduled to say the resurrection mass and afterward place the ring on Rose’s ﬁnger, but in the end he prudently excused himself from both.94 The mock wedding was staged with secrecy and haste on the morning of Easter Sunday, 1617, in front of the statue from which the proposal had come. Vela´zquez said mass with “the ring placed under the altar cloth,” and afterward he slid the ring on Rose’s ﬁnger “with such discretion, concealment, and secrecy” that “not even her own mother saw it, nor other people who were there.” Uza´tegui testiﬁed that she herself would not have known what occurred had she not been apprised in advance. Rose wore the ring from that day until two days before her death some ﬁve months later, when she gave it to Uza´tegui’s daughter, Micaela de la Maza.95 The ring was fabricated, the Bridegroom was represented by a reluctant surrogate, and the semisecret wedding tested the limits of orthodoxy and decorum. That necessarily unsatisfying scenario inspired revisionist compensations. Hansen and Mele´ndez made the resistance to the mock wedding (from

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Vela´zquez, Lorenzana, and the two sacristans) dissipate by understating or completely eliminating the friars’ role. The “mystical” lacking in Rose’s marriage was also written in after the fact. Outstanding was Mele´ndez’s account, in which “the ring came to her miraculously, and put itself on her ring ﬁnger.”96 In conformance with the precedents of Catherine of Alexandria and Catherine of Siena, iconography ﬁnished the job of making the staged marriage miraculous. One of the earliest images, an engraving by Juan Bautista Barbe released before 1649 (some twenty years before beatiﬁcation), depicts Rose, in a Dominican habit, holding a bouquet of roses that encircle the Christ child. The semi-naked infant extends a hand outward from the bouquet to offer Rose the wedding ring of mystical marriage. Innumerable subsequent images reproduced this motif of active espousal by the Bridegroom.97 The disappointing events of 1617 were thus covered over by the fac¸ade of texts and images that enhanced the mysticism of Rose’s marriage and integrated the mock wedding into the paradigm established by precedent. Iconography and formal hagiography accorded to the disturbingly mundane event the otherworldly participation that viable mystical marriage required. If mystical marriage is a trope for the soul’s union with Christ, however, then all such wedding ceremonies, even those in which the Bridegroom participates, belie a compensatory literalization. Were mystical marriage—the most sacred, sublime, transformative union—genuinely achieved, then why would Rose or other mystics demean it, or even forfeit time and reclusion to rehearse it publicly, with the charade of a mock wedding? The very event undermines the verisimilitude of the union that it ostensibly formalizes or commemorates. The outward demonstrations of weddings, rings, bridal parties, and honeymoons seem more unitive with religious society and cultural constructs than with divinity. Mystical union with God’s awesome love would withdraw one forever from the vacuous trappings of this world rather than instigating a staged ceremony. The attempt to repair damaged pride after the palm incident, the coerced participation of the sacristans and Vela´zquez, the boastful announcement to Uza´tegui, the absence of Lorenzana, the mock wedding itself, and the visible wearing of the fabricated ring all suggest Rose’s insistence on a drama that would authenticate a lacking mystical marriage by enacting it with her support community. Mystical marriage is more compelling as a symbolic complex in which the varied strategies for uniting with God are integrated into a comprehensive agenda. It serves as the master trope for a range of interrelating practices, some alluding to this-worldly marriage (bride and Bridegroom, romance, eroticism) and others (eucharistic devotion, mortiﬁcation, contemplative prayer) contributing to mystical union without being necessarily nuptial. The composite of these multiple unitive pursuits makes Christ a ubiquitous, absolute presence in body and soul. He is incorporated by ingestion, inscribed on the body, carved into wounds, housed in the heart, dissolved on the tongue, guarded in the sanctum of sealed virginity, dominant in the ﬁeld of perception, visualized in prayer, and loved in the fullness of his humanity. As mystical marriage vacillates between its double meanings—nuptial and

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unitive—the non-nuptial methods of union are eroticized. The term “eroticism,” at least in psychoanalytic usage, encompasses the psychosexual expressions of mysticism but more broadly designates the drive to “create and maintain ever greater unities,” sexual and nonsexual, including those with God.98 The erotic, which is to say unitive, purpose of mysticism is implemented by such practices and phenomena as eucharistic devotion, drinking from Christ’s wound, virginity, mortiﬁcation, stigmata, heart devotions, veneration of the holy foreskin, and contemplative prayer. Each of these is separable from the composite for the convenience of exposition and analysis, but ultimately it is precisely the interrelation and interdependence of these means that endows mysticism with its totalizing power. The various practices of mysticism ﬂow into, over, and against one another; they guarantee one another; they imbue one another with resonant polyvalence; and they rediscover one another when sexual (rather than only unitive) eroticism bends their innocence to its needs. Eucharistic devotion shares with nuptial mysticism the taking of Christ’s body into one’s own. Through the mystery of transubstantiation the consecrated wafer becomes—literally—the body of Christ, and mystics who ingest it are “two in one ﬂesh” with their Bridegroom. Marriage and communion intermingle in the quest to unite with a carnal deity. When Rose of Lima took communion, Hansen observed, Christ “entered her corporally.” Catherine of Siena communicated often “so that not only her spirit might be united with the Eternal Spouse but also her body with His body.”99 For a Peruvian beata who imitated Rose, “a God disguised in the likeness of bread was the object of her most ardent love.”100 As explained by a twentieth-century nun, “through her vow of chastity the virgin has surrendered to the Lord the secret of her person,” and this is celebrated “in the sacrament of the Eucharist, where Christ gives Himself to the virgin in the measure of her surrender to Him.” In virginity, however, “the physical fact of sex and its psychological impact” on the bride of Christ do not cease. Rather, “the energies of love which, for the marriage partners, converge in the sexual act are, for the virgin, channeled (sublimated, if you will) into a transcendent, though not less real, union with the Lord.” The eucharist taken into the virginal body parallels copulation in marriage. Communion is consummation, “the perfect culmination of the chaste and divine marriage of Christ and His bride is the Eucharist.”101 The eucharist is food “not only for the soul, but also for the body,” and it satisﬁes the multiple needs of both. In the least nuanced instances, the eucharist seems almost a spiritual aphrodisiac that inﬂames ecstatic passion as soon as the tongue tastes the wafer. When mystics directed their hunger toward the eucharist as “an acceptable object of craving,” they at once directed their eroticism toward the eucharist as an acceptable object of desire.102 Catherine of Genoa “used hunger as a metaphor for insatiable desire” and “eating as a metaphor for love.” The starved Angela of Foligno described an encounter with Christ as “love and inestimable satiety, which, although it satiated, generated at the same time insatiable hunger, so that all her members were unstrung.”103

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Appetites and satisfactions intermixed until the insatiable, satiated hunger culminated in an erotic swoon. Eating and loving—communion and ecstasy—were related in Bernini’s Cornaro chapel not by conﬂation but by proximity. The chapel includes a relief of the Last Supper (the ﬁrst serving of the eucharist) as the “liturgical equivalent” of its centerpiece, in which the pierced Teresa experiences her “intense and exceptional communion with God.” Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi was served the eucharist by a half-naked, sensual Christ, and she received this part of his body into the “tabernacle of God” that abstinence, chastity, and mortiﬁcation had made of hers.104 Already in fourth-century Carthage, one Lucilla “introduced the practice of kissing the Eucharist before taking it into her mouth,” and a twelfth-century Cistercian nun went from the “refectory” of the eucharist to the “spiritual dormitory” where she slept blissfully in Christ’s arms. “Oh, God,” exclaimed a male bride of Christ, “to love you is to eat you.”105 Fasting, like virginity, prepared mystics to take Christ inside their bodies. Inedia was the conquest of spirit over ﬂesh and, as such, a recuperation of prelapsarian purity. Eve fell by eating and concupiscence, and mystics rose by starving and virginity. While others were earthbound by the weight of their vices, mystics were soul-like for ascension. Freedom from food combined with virginity for recovery of an edenic ideal. As far as Tertullian was concerned, a full stomach led to “an obsession with the lavatory” and nothing else remained “but to pass on from this to thoughts of lust.” The early Christians known as the Encratites (meaning “continence”) combined abstention from sexual intercourse with dietary restrictions, “for the eating of meat was held to link human beings to the wild, carnivorous nature of animals, as intercourse linked them to the sexual nature of brute beasts.”106 In the fourth century Gregory of Nyssa described the sense of taste as “the mother of all vice,” and in the early ﬁfth century John Cassian explained that “it is impossible to extinguish the ﬁres of concupiscence without restraining the desires of the stomach.” Jerome and Cassian both taught that meat and wine excited sexual lust, and Peter the Chanter more poetically weighed in with “the stomach and the genitals are close together.”107 If one is what one eats, as the saying goes, then fasting mystics who ingested little or nothing other than the eucharist were transformed into the body of Christ. “Renunciation of ordinary food prepared the way for consuming (i.e., becoming) Christ,” and “one became Christ’s cruciﬁed body in eating Christ’s cruciﬁed body.”108 The more one ate the body of Christ in lieu of other foods, the more completely one was assumed into his being. By emptying her body and ﬁlling the void with the transubstantiated eucharist, the mystic herself was transubstantiated. Whereas other food “transforms itself into us and becomes our own substance,” Christ’s body “transforms us into itself.” The body of Christ and the communicating bride form “so strong a bond of love” that “the two of them become one and the same thing,” just as “food and he who eats it become one and the same thing.”109 Inedia, chastity, and eucharistic devotion made the mystic’s body “a living host of Jesus Christ.”110 As

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the eucharist dissolved on the bride’s tongue, the bride dissolved into the Bridegroom. “I am the true food and drink,” Christ told Rose of Lima, and she went “entire weeks without eating or drinking anything” that was not his body. The eucharist made her “so full that she felt like she had eaten and very well,” even to the degree that “she thought she would burst if she ate anything” afterward.111 Abstinence was complete satisfaction; the void was overﬁlled by God’s plenitude. The Word was made ﬂesh, and the ﬂesh was made bread: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my ﬂesh.”112 God transformed himself into ﬂesh and his ﬂesh into bread, and the consecrated eucharist recapitulates that process in reverse as the bread is transubstantiated back into the body and the Word. Rose abstained from meat (carne in Spanish is both meat and ﬂesh) and ate instead this interactive, living breadmeat, this trope (bread represents the body) undone (bread is the body) that satisﬁes all appetites, corporal and spiritual. Nursing at the wound in Christ’s side as though it were a breast also carries interacting meanings of eroticism and transformative nourishment. A drink from the wound was an alternative communion, a eucharistic celebration unmediated by clergy and leaning decidedly toward carnal intimacy. The mystic’s lips suck the wound in Christ’s side to drink directly from the source, to make contact with Christ’s body, love, and suffering rather than with a mysterious, eucharist substitution. The themes of eucharistic devotion—nourishment of body and soul, ecstatic passion, transformation of the mystic into one ﬂesh with Christ—all obtain, but given the intimate contact with the wounded Bridegroom the accent often falls on eroticism. Teresa of Avila described how the bride of Christ, “sustained with the divine milk with which her Bridegroom is nourishing her,” enters a state of “celestial inebriation,” “like a person who swoons from great pleasure,” because “she is held up in those divine arms and fastened to that sacred side and those divine breasts.” When she is “wholly penetrated by the immense greatness of God” she “delicately compares this state to the breasts, saying: ‘Your breasts are better than wine.’ ”113 In breast-feeding, as in lovemaking, two linked bodies unite in a kind of oneness as life ﬂuids stream between them.114 In copulation, semen (the ﬂuid of procreation), and in breast-feeding, milk (the vital food with which one body sustains another), ﬂow between those who are united. Maternal lactation surges from the abounding wellness of the body that produces it and ﬂows through the softness and comfort of swelled breasts lovingly offered. The ﬂuid offered by Christ’s breast-wound, in contrast, was the bloody consequence of torture and death, offered not in the pillowy bliss of maternal nursing but, rather, from a ﬂat, hard, unaccommodating, and gashed surface whose macabre severity was redoubled by the body itself hanging from the cross. Blood from the wounded Christ ﬂowed into the mouths and over the faces and bodies of his brides, nourishing them, ﬁlling them, and covering them with the vital lifeforce that likened their wounded bodies to his. Unity was consolidated as Christ’s blood was taken in and over the bodies

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of mystics, nourishing them spiritually and physically, cleansing them of sin in the shower of vicarious atonement, marking them, and placing their mouths in contact with a very masculine Bridegroom under the cover of maternity. The breast wound provided, like the eucharist, an alternative food that satisﬁed hunger and sexual appetites as it transformed the nourished bride into the ﬂesh of the Bridegroom who nourished.115 Many of the other meanings of the wound—as maternal lactation, as a nuptial bedchamber, as an attribute of the New Adam, as a womb—likewise contributed to the poetics of unity through one body’s transformative infusions into another. By eating Christ in the eucharist and drinking his blood at the wound, a mystic became “suffering ﬂesh with his suffering ﬂesh”: “To eat God was to take into one’s self the suffering ﬂesh on the cross.”116 The penitential mystic also united with Christ by reliving his suffering in her own body, as though her ﬂesh were already his. Eucharist devotion, nursing at the wound, and imitative suffering through fasting, asceticism, and mortiﬁcation all interacted to expedite the quest for unity. One fused with Christ by ﬁlling the void of one’s hunger with his body, but also by “killing” oneself (mort-iﬁcation) in order to keep his death alive, to purify the ﬂesh that would be received in his bedchamber, to love him by suffering as he loved humankind, and to continue the penitence of vicarious atonement. Transformative identiﬁcation with Christ was sometimes actualized in reverse during the sufferings of literal martyrdom. The martyrs of early Christianity were assimilated to Christ through torture and death in his name, but to alleviate their agony Christ sometimes “entered into the martyr and undertook all suffering in his or her place.” In mortiﬁcation the mystics suffer as though they were Christ, and in these reversals Christ suffers as though he were the martyrs. On both sides of the equation Christ and his faithful are united, as though one ﬂesh, through the common purpose of their pain. The martyr dies like God for God, and the mystic “dies in God to himself.”117 Identiﬁcation with the cruciﬁed Christ was at times so intense that his very wounds were cut anew into a mystic’s body. Virginity and mortiﬁcation approximated Christ’s sacriﬁce, but the stigmata duplicated it: “I bear in my body the marks of Christ cruciﬁed.” Some mystics described Christ hugging them so tightly that his image was pressed into their ﬂesh, like wax impressed by a seal.118 In 1224 Francis of Assisi’s passionate identiﬁcation with the cruciﬁxion resulted in stigmata on his hands, feet, and side. Later stigmatist have been almost exclusively female, and their stigmata, like other mystical piercings (such as Teresa’s transverberation), mark their bodies with the wounded unity of mystic and Bridegroom. As Yahweh said to Abraham regarding circumcision, “thus shall my covenant be marked in your ﬂesh as an everlasting covenant.”119 Catherine of Siena ardently longed to be cruciﬁed with Christ, “pierced through and nailed with him for love.” She had taken communion and was contemplating the cruciﬁx when suddenly ﬁve blood-red rays shot down from the cross and painfully pierced her body. Through the eucharist and the stigmata, inside and out, Catherine fused with the sacriﬁced Christ. Her suffering,

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virginity, and erotic attachment to the Bridegroom provided context for this totalizing union. Correggio captured something of this complexity in his painting Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine [of Alexandria], with St. Sebastian, in which the themes of matrimony, wounded love, piercing (with allusions to stigmata and arrows of love), and martyrdom interact.120 Sebastian, looking on and holding arrows, is a witness to the nuptial scene while a quasi-erotic martyrdom is staged in the background. Early Christian tradition placed the lance wound on the right-hand side of Christ’s chest, but in later iconography, beginning around the mid-seventeenth century, the wound migrated to the left-hand side. That transposition was related to another: some stigmatists received their chest wound on the side of their body opposite to the one wounded in the image that they contemplated, because, as in a mirror reﬂection, left and right were inverted as they faced the cruciﬁx. As a piercing ray shot out from Christ’s right-hand side, it wounded the left-hand side of the viewer, and vice versa. The stigmata appeared on a mystic’s body in conformance not only with the speciﬁc image that served as model, but also with how the stigmatist identiﬁed with Christ. If a mystic felt herself to be pierced—like Catherine—with rays coming from the cruciﬁx to her body, then she was wounded on one side; and if she identiﬁed with Christ as though she were cruciﬁed with him, coterminous with him, then the wound was on the other side.121 In either case, unity with Christ and his suffering was diagramed on a body that actualized old wounds in new ﬂesh. The one “became” Christ and the other linked to him through rays of pain, but both rehearsed his suffering as though their ﬂesh were his. The union of the mystic and her Bridegroom was also accomplished through a range of experiences involving the heart. Some heart imagery, including Rose’s Mercedes, was closely related to the stigmata. The wounds of love in mystics’ hearts paid homage to the wounded heart of Christ, which, according to tradition, was pierced when the lance opened his side. The Blessed Charles of Sezze experienced the pains of Christ’s wounds without visibly manifesting the stigmata, but after death a wound and the ﬁgure of a cruciﬁx were found on his heart, along with “the exact facsimile of a nail buried in the heart, 4–5 inches in length.” On Charles’s body the exterior wounds of the stigmata were complemented or replaced by interior wounds that “cruciﬁed” the heart. Veronica Giuliani drew a picture of the cruciﬁxion images that were impressed on her heart, and after death an autopsy conﬁrmed that the heart’s right side bore the wound and instruments of Christ’s Passion.122 When Chiara of Montefalco (or “of the Cross”), abbess of an Augustinian convent, died in 1308, the nuns took upon themselves the task of an autopsy, believing that her saintly body should not be profaned by a male barbersurgeon. Astonishing discoveries were made when the body was opened with a razor. Sister Chiara was known to repeat the words “I bear the cruciﬁed Christ in my heart,” and Christ informed her of his intent to plant the cross there. When the autopsy revealed a heart oversized “not without mystery,” the nuns opened it and “Sister Francesca felt with her ﬁnger that in the middle of one section there ran a nerve; and when she drew it out, they saw to their amaze-

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ment that it was a cross, formed of ﬂesh.” It then occurred to Sister Giovanna that the heart might harbor other mysteries, and after further probing the nuns discovered a representation of the whip with which Christ was scourged. Berengario Donadei, the Bishop of Spoleto, doubted the authenticity of these discoveries and headed a commission to investigate. He took the heart and “with a gesture of scorn and disdain opened it,” only to discover—the Lord be praised—not only the authenticity of the cross and whip but also other symbols of the Passion, “all so truly represented that Berengario on touching the point of the Spear and the three Nails was pricked by them as though they had really been of iron.”123 In absence of such miraculous phenomena, the relation between a mystic’s love and Christ’s Passion could always be expressed by mortiﬁcation. Marguerite-Marie Alacoque burnt or carved the name of Jesus on her breast, Jean of Valois drove nails into her breasts, and Veronica Giuliani carved a cross over her heart and with the blood wrote “a fervent protestation of love.”124 In a ﬁfteenth-century German woodcut, as in Rose’s graphics, the heart of a lover is brutally subjected to various tortures—“pummeled, squeezed, sawn in half, pressed with thumb-screws, and speared like so many kebabs”—because both profane and sacred love, and both male and female, wield the power to wound. In a thirteenth-century Dominican image, the roles of wounding love are reversed when a bride thrusts a lance into the cruciﬁed Christ, wounding his heart just as he wounds his bride’s.125 In a fourteenth-century image the gender roles are more visibly reversed as a feminized Christ points to the wound in his side while his bride aims the phallic lance with which she will penetrate his body. In another image the virtue of Charity, embraced by Christ who pulls an arm off the cross for this purpose, reciprocates love by stabbing Christ in the heart. All of these examples, from Veronica’s self-carving to Charity’s stabbing of Christ, are variations of “the reciprocal penetration of lover and beloved.”126 Each gains entry into the other, and mutual wounding forges a bond. Unitive identiﬁcation with Christ’s suffering was also emphasized in devotion to the Sacred Heart. The very image of the Sacred Heart—often represented as a lance-wounded heart encircled by a crown of thorns, topped with a small cross, and emanating ﬂames or light—consolidated the themes of the side wound, piercing and burning, mortiﬁcation, and ardent, wounded love. The cult of the Sacred Heart was signiﬁcantly advanced, and its iconography was ﬁrmly established by the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque in the late seventeenth century, but heart imagery and the corresponding themes were common much earlier among the thirteenth-century German Cistercian nuns of Helfta. Characteristic of this devotion is the transformative identiﬁcation of the mystic’s heart with that of her Bridegroom. Mechthild of Hackeborn advised Gertrude to meditate constantly on “the love of your heart hanging on the cross,” and after Mechthild herself entered the wound in Christ’s side, her heart and his became “a mass of gold melted into one.”127 The Sacred Heart was the font both of love and of living waters, and the lance wound opened an access. Vital liquids and love overﬂowed because the pierced heart could not contain them. Some mystics, Gertrude among them,

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drank from the heart by nursing at the wound, as though Christ’s passion were being drawn with ﬂuid sustenance into their bodies. Devotion to the Sacred Heart provided intimate access to a bodily organ that was associated with love but not sexual.128 Like the eucharist (the sacramented body) and the Christ child (the emasculated body), the Sacred Heart was a carnal, masculine object that could be loved erotically as an expression of virginity. Hearts were offered and exchanged between Christ and his brides as another manifestation of loving union. “Take my heart from me so that it may no longer be mine but dwell with you in an indivisible love,” Gertrude said to Christ. Catherine of Siena was pierced “by a ray of sunlight like a sharp arrow” that shot from Christ’s heart, exited through the wound in his side, and entered her heart. Later Christ returned, “opened her left side, took out her heart, and then went away,” leaving her without a heart.129 When he returned again he replaced her missing heart with his own, and it seemed to Catherine “that her heart entered into the Lord’s side and became one heart with His.”130 Marguerite-Marie Alacoque saw her heart received into that of Christ, inﬂamed by his love, and then returned to her chest; and Rose of Lima heard “the distant voice of the Bridegroom who said to her, ‘Give me your heart.’ ” During the course of a near-fatal illness without apparent cause, Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi suffered forty days of ecstasy during which she repeatedly relived the Passion, exchanged hearts with Christ, and received the stigmata.131 In a seventeenthcentury painting, she holds her heart in her hand and faces Teresa of Avila, who is transverberated through the heart by the ﬂaming dart.132 The bride’s heart is removed, inﬂamed, replaced, exchanged; it belongs to the beloved, and it bears his wounds. Its piercing cuts in one direction toward mortiﬁcation and in the other toward penetration by Cupid-like arrows of love. The heart is wounded or stolen but not broken. Sometimes it is simply offered to Christ, “carried away” by the beloved, just as in profane love one surrenders the heart as a symbol of everlasting love and unity. In a fourteenth-century ivory mirror case, a kneeling lover offered his heart to a standing lady in a gesture similar to the elevation of the eucharist during consecration.133 The heart, like the eucharist, is a synecdoche of the body, sacriﬁced in a quest for unity. Love transubstantiates one’s heart into the heart of the beloved. Christ’s holy foreskin was another mysterious devotional body part that contributed to erotic unity. The Hebrews had adopted circumcision, an Egyptian custom, as a sign of their separation from other nations and their mark as Yahweh’s chosen people. Moses was saved from the imminent death that Yahweh planned for him only because his wife, Zipporah, circumcised her son and touched Moses with the foreskin, making him “a bridegroom of blood by circumcision.” As God explained to Abraham, “You shall circumcise the ﬂesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you.”134 Circumcision during early Judaism, as in Egyptian practice, had “a sexual as well as a cultic purpose,” being a “premarriage initiation ritual, preparing the bridegroom’s organ for procreation.”135 The marked penis was an appropriate sign of God’s covenant with his chosen people because by sexual use of this organ a man “became, in a special sense, a co-worker with God,” partici-

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pating in the creation through procreation. Yahweh promised Abraham exceptional powers of procreation—“I will make you exceedingly fertile”—in return for the covenant marked on the penis.136 Philo Judaeus, a Jewish philosopher in Alexandria, explained how circumcision facilitated intercourse, and many other writers similarly expounded on the advantages and disadvantages of circumcision in sexual relations.137 Figurative variations alluded to the penis through another body part of love: “Circumcise yourselves to the Lord, remove the foreskin of your hearts.” A “spiritual circumcision,” baptism, later replaced the Hebrew rite among Christians, but Christ himself, a Jew, had been circumcised on the eighth day after birth.138 Christ’s circumcision and his severed foreskin enjoyed a certain popularity in medieval and early modern Catholicism. In iconography the circumcision was represented as the ﬁrst of Christ’s ensemble of salviﬁc wounds and was therefore “conceived as continuous with his work of redemption.” Christ came to expiate Adam’s sin, and “his Circumcision becomes, as it were, a ﬁrst installment, a down payment on behalf of mankind,” until the balance was paid on the cross. A “blood hyphen” links the last wound (the side gash) with the ﬁrst (circumcision) as atonement is realized by quotas.139 In words attributed to Christ by Richard Crashaw, the circumcision offered “the ﬁrst fruits of my growing death.” Rabbinic traditions similarly united the blood of the sacriﬁcial paschal lamb and the blood of the circumcised penis in their theology of salvation.140 Some dozen churches claimed possession of Christ’s foreskin, but it was venerated not as much in relation to atonement as to the procreative penis from which it was cut. Christ’s foreskin as a miraculous relic eased labor pains and was an antidote for infertility and impotence. In one legend the Virgin gave the holy foreskin to Mary Magdalen, and in medieval rumors nuns abused it for sexual stimulation.141 Devotion to the foreskin in mysticism was more symbolically erotic and consonant with other unitive practices associated with sacriﬁcial ﬂesh. Wondering where Christ’s foreskin could be, the Benguine Agnes Blannbekin suddenly discovered that it was in her mouth, and “so great was the sweetness at the swallowing of this membrane that she sensed a sweet transmutation through the muscles and organs of her whole body.” The image of the foreskin on Agnes’s tongue consolidates sexual and eucharistic meanings for a polyvalent, transformative, loving union as Christ’s ﬂesh dissolves into her own. Mariana of Quito united with her “bridegroom of blood by circumcision” more penitentially, cutting herself on the annual feast of Christ’s circumcision in order to bleed together with the penis. A medieval German image superimposed a wounded heart over the groin of the cruciﬁed Christ, and two angels held a chalice beneath to collected the sacramental blood.142 The bleeding penis in this image seems to feed into the Sacred Heart—a kind of blood hyphen in reverse—and two bloods mingle as the cruciﬁed body is drained. The heart as a substitutive, desexualized love organ here reveals what it masks. Most explicitly nuptial was Catherine of Siena’s repeated assertion that the wedding ring of her mystical marriage was the foreskin cut from Christ’s penis.

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Raymond of Capua apparently found this indelicate choice inappropriate and in his hagiography of Catherine replaced it with a bejeweled gold ring.143 Catherine’s choice was nevertheless the perfect emblem of a bloody mysticism that admitted eroticism in brutalized deformations. The foreskin ring around her ﬁnger afforded constant contact with the body of her human, sacriﬁced God. It was a beﬁtting “ﬁrst installment” on the wedding night forthcoming in her Bridegroom’s bedchamber, and in the interim it inverted the gender conﬁguration of sexual encounter. Rather than a man entering and being surrounded by a woman’s body, Catherine’s ﬁnger entered and was encircled by a synecdoche of Christ’s penis. The passive man lent his body to the visions of a determined woman. Christ is ingested as the eucharist, housed in her heart, showered over her in blood, imprinted on her skin, suffered in her ﬂesh, and wrapped around her ﬁnger. Contemplative prayer contributed a disembodied but nevertheless essential complement to the more corporal means of uniting with Christ. In its highest degree, the prayer of transforming union, “God gives Himself to the soul and the soul gives itself to God in a certain consummation of divine love.” The puriﬁed mind “perfects its contemplation of God” and thus “is made divine in what it contemplates.”144 One “becomes” God because there is nothing but God on one’s mind, just as through inedia and eucharistic devotion one “becomes” God because there is nothing but God in one’s body. In nuptial mysticism, however, the puriﬁed mind contemplates God’s humanity. As the mind closed out everything but Christ, it closed in on a human body. Psychosexual rehearsals were the rule when an incarnate God ﬁlled a virgin mind. Union was enacted by envisioning it. The contemplating mind was a theater in which religious images came to life holding scripts adaptable to personalized dramas. If a foreskin was needed, a foreskin was provided. If hunger intermingled with passion, a wound pressed against one’s lips. If guilt overwhelmed a fragile conscience, a castigating locution made demands. Unitive prayer accessed an internal love object, a warehouse, and a cast of otherworldly characters. The mystic provided the direction. Thus mystical marriage, in its broad sense as mystical union, was realized through a range of erotic and nuptial expressions; through incorporation of Christ’s body and blood (including “milk”) into one’s emptied being; through virginity; through reliving of Christ’s Passion in one’s mortiﬁed ﬂesh; through heart exchange, heart surrender, “cruciﬁed” hearts, and carriage of Christ in one’s heart; through stigmata and other piercings; and through a mind ﬁlled with nothing but God. The intent was transformative: a systematic erasure of subjectivity as the mystic was assumed into divinity. Mysticism is dynamic, polyvalent, and intense because its means and meanings remain in ﬂux, couple and cluster, pile up in palimpsests, reform one another, displace one another, and circulate between the literal and the ﬁgurative. Incomparable in such simultaneity and potency is the eucharist, a wafer that is transubstantiated into Christ’s sacriﬁcial ﬂesh and at once remains a wafer. Mystics fell in love with it, craved it, burst into ﬂame when it touched their tongues, and swooned with passion as it overwhelmed their senses. It

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satiated and caused insatiable longing. It made their ﬂesh one with the absentee Bridegroom inside them. It nourished their bodies, illuminated their souls, ﬁlled their emptiness, ignited their ecstasy, and made their wounded love sacriﬁcial. Fasting prepared the body; virginity made it worthy; inedia hastened transformative union; and the breast-wound, bleeding in their mouths, demystiﬁed the mystery of carnal presence. Nuptial mystics were overwhelmed by the eucharist precisely because this totalizing symbol mobilized an inundation. The profound effects could be more astounding only if transubstantiation never occurred, if the mystics swallowed nothing but bread. In that case mysticism attests to the godlike powers of delusion.

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Notes

chapter 1 1. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 76; and Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 47. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is also attributed to God in Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 40. 2. From a letter by Rose to Fray Bartolome´ de Ayala appended to Domingo Angulo, Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Estudio bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: n.p., 1917), 236. The letter is also in Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 156. 3. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:278. The second quoted passage is from Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 33. For a similar opinion in hagiography, see Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 32. In a poem by a medieval nun, Christ says: “The sicker you are, the dearer you are to me.” Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Michel Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 167. 4. Hansen, Vida admirable, 321, and 320, respectively; see 319. 5. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Juan de Lorenzana, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:216; see Hansen, Vida admirable, 314– 323. The second quoted passage is from Parra, Rosa laureada, 2; see Hansen, Vida admirable, 54. 6. See the image in Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et

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al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 148. For another example of this popular motif, see Laureano Da´vila’s eighteenthcentury painting in Corporacio´n Cultural de Las Condes, Santa Rosa de Lima: El tesoro americano—Pintura y escultura del perı´odo colonial (Santiago de Chile: Corporacio´n Cultural de Las Condes, 2000), 38. 7. Hansen, Vida admirable, 155. See also Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 143. According to a 1668 hagiography, Rose was the winner even when she lost because the pain was beneﬁcial. See Breve relacio´n de la prodigiosa vida, y maravillosos milagros de la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Madrid[?]: n.p., 1668), 2. Dice are a symbol of the Passion. The passage in the previous sentence is from Fray Antonio Rodrı´guez, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 143. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 159. For an image see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 66. For a related parable told by God to Catherine of Siena, see her Dialogue, 128. Better behaved was the Mexican Catarina de San Juan. Christ as a handsome youth cut ﬂowers and offered them to her, but she responded that she wanted only him. See Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 53. 8. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 69 and 11, respectively. The following quotation is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 153; see 154. See also Bruno, Rosa, 142. For unlikely apparitions and actions of the Virgin Mary, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 49–50 and 161, and Bruno, Rosa, 145. 9. Hansen, Vida admirable, 113. 10. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue. For errors see 164, n. 7, and 171, n. 19; for Bible citations see 228, 244–245, 250, and 252. Repetitions are throughout the text. In The Golden Legend, the resurrected Christ consults with apostles as though they were his cabinet, and, abiding by their advice, decides in favor of the Virgin’s Assumption into heaven. See Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:82. 11. In a survey conducted in the 1980s among immigrants to Lima, only 5.3% indicated devotion to Rose of Lima. Manuel M. Marzal, Los caminos religiosos de los inmigrantes en la gran Lima: El caso de El Agustino (Lima: Pontiﬁcia Universidad Cato´lica del Peru´, 1988), 80–81. 12. Quoted in Marı´a E. Heise and Teresa Valiente, “El mundo maravilloso que nos rodea,” Amazonı´a Peruana 18 (December, 1989), 148. 13. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Enrique Dussell, Historia general de la Iglesia en Ame´rica Latina: Introduccio´n general (Salamanca, 1983), 561; and Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima: Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 13. 14. For a succinct overview of the bulls, see J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469– 1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 90–91. 15. Nancy E. van Deusen, “Instituciones religiosas y seglares para mujeres en el siglo XVII en Lima,” in Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano (2nd corrected ed.) (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1997), 217. Regarding the effort to pietize the city, see Nancy E. van Deusen, “Deﬁning the Sacred and the Worldly: Beatas and Recogidas in Late-Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6/4 (1997), 451. 16. The quoted passage is in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Interna-

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cional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 533. For a list of saint candidates, with dates, see Luis Miguel Glave, De Rosa y espinas: Economı´a, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 1998), 148. 17. Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 50, 45, and 45, respectively. 18. Note that this context can be as much ideological as historical or cultural. One of Rose’s confessors, Alonso Vela´zquez, reprimanded her for drinking the blood (exaltation of the act came later in formal hagiography), but a contemporary scholar described the act as “a heroic example of charity.” See, respectively, Bruno, Rosa, 72, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 83. 19. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 37. 20. “A society which is no longer religious imposes its rationality, its own categories, its problems, and its type of organization upon religious formulations.” Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 141. 21. The quoted phrase is from Sermo´n que el muy reverendo Padre Fray Pedro Gutie´rrez Florez . . . predico´ en el Auto general de la santa Inqusicio´n en la ciudad de los Reyes a 13 de marzo de 1605 (Lima: Antonio Ricardo 1605), 16. There is “an implicit assumption among some historians that the student must not only respect the native’s point of view, but limit his or her interpretation to what would be acceptable to the ‘native.’ ” In addition, “The student who questions the saints’ ofﬁcial motives is accused of a patronizing attitude or of projecting his or her own cultural bias on subjects of study.” In the opinion of this author, however, “Once we achieved an understanding of what our subjects said they were doing, it is necessary that we examine other possible interpretations of their activity.” In note 17 on the same page he quotes Winston Davis: “Understanding a foreign culture presupposes both empathy and genuine distance. Simply putting that culture into the categories of one’s own civilization inevitably causes distortion and misunderstanding. On the other hand, all goodwill and objectivity notwithstanding, it is also impossible to understand a foreign culture simply by introducing it into our thought-world on its own terms. Interjection is not interpretation.” See Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 18. 22. “Modern historians realize, or should realize, that they themselves are media, no less distorting than their sources.” Kleinberg, Prophets, 68. 23. For a sampling of opinions, see Pierre Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church,” in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 205; Hugo Lietaer and Josef Corveleyn, “Psychoanalytical Interpretation of the Demoniacal Possession and the Mystical Development of Sister Jeanne de Anges from Loudun (1605–1665),” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 5/4 (1995), 259–276; Raquel Serur, “Santa Mariana de Quito o la santidad inducida,” in Petra Schumm, ed., Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigacio´n del barroco iberoamericano (Vervuert: Iberoamericana, 1998), 210; Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 73, 133–134; Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 109; Susan Haskins, Mary Mag-

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dalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 189; Eric John Dingwall, Very Peculiar People: Portrait Studies in the Queer, the Abnormal and the Uncanny (New Hyde Park, New York: University Books, 1962), 127 and 132–133; Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 8 and 38–39; Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), 299; Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 1–53; David Rampling, “Ascetic Ideals and Anorexia Nervosa,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 19 (1985), 89; Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 88–89; Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sexuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 223–226; Jacques Lacan, El seminario de Jacques Lacan, Libro 20, Aun, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Buenos Aires: Paido´s, 1981), 92–93; Andre´ Green, De locuras privadas (Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores, 1990), 219; Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or The Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 22 and 41; Da´maso Chicharro, “Santa Teresa en su entorno histo´rico y social,” in Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, ed. Da´maso Chicharro (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 1987), 19; Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 104; and William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 301–339. Additional sources are found throughout these notes and those to the section “Sanctity and Insanity.” 24. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 178. 25. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 86. 26. Ibid., 85. At times, however, Bynum observes that modern and medieval viewers of erotically suggestive religious paintings might coincide in their perceptions: “The sexual overtones modern viewers ﬁnd in such depictions may have been apparent also to medieval viewers.” Ibid., 278. 27. Ibid., 86–87. 28. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xviii (“I argue that for most of Western history body was understood primarily as the locus of biological process”), and Bynum, “Female Body,” 162, respectively. 29. For an example, see Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 38: “Only by becoming a female body was it possible for God to become the focus of an eroticized gaze.” 30. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 381–383. Several additional examples are in Camille, Medieval Art of Love. Preoccupation with sexuality is evident throughout John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, eds. and trans., Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 31. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 161 and 162, respectively. The ﬁrst quoted passage in this sentence is from Bynum, Holy Feast, 247, and the others are from Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 152–153. 32. Bynum, Holy Feast, 248 and 247, respectively. 33. The quoted passage in the ﬁrst sentence is from Bynum, Jesus a Mother, 162. See the remainder of the paragraph, where the customary disclaimer softens the as-

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sertion, particularly following the italicized “we,” and the sexuality attributed earlier to mystics is reassigned to contemporary observers. The quoted passages in the second sentence are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 246 and 28, respectively. 34. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131 and 133; see 169. 35. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 257. 36. Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, 180 and 181, respectively. The sentences that follow in Mazzoni’s text quote Bynum to explain why the discussion of psychosexuality is inappropriate. 37. The question quoted parenthetically and the previous passages concerning Alacoque are from Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 21. 38. The ﬁrst two quoted passages are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 248, and the third is from Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 166; see the reiteration of the sublimation argument on 133–134. 39. Jonas, France, 31. 40. Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Love in Christian and Jewish Mysticism,” in Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 210, 226. 41. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 132. Some mystics “use these mystical signiﬁers as a therapeutic language that allows them to lift a repression by the direct investment of substitute representations” (165). The second quoted phrase is from Elizabeth Robertson, “The Corporality of Female Sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret,” in Renate BlumenfeldKosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 269. 42. Mary Jane Klimisch, The One Bride: The Church and Consecrated Virginity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 131, n. 18, and 141, respectively; see 128. See also Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 83. 43. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 670 and 673–674. 44. J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 431. 45. Sigmund Freud, quoted in ibid., 433. 46. Sigmund Freud, “Two Encyclopaedia Articles,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 18:256. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:75 and 79. 47. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 97; see 75 and 102. “What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitution or surrogate.” Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-dreaming,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), 9:145. On related dynamics of substitutive satisfactions, see Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 23:201. To understand sublimation, “we must keep in mind that transforming the sexual instinct nevertheless serves to satisfy it” (Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 158). 48. Bell, Holy Anorexia, 149. 49. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 7.

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50. This exception is itself suggestive as a period prejudice relative to her inquiry. Over the centuries the same mystical phenomena have been “diagnosed” variously—as melancholy and hysteria, for example—which likewise represented the concerns and science of their times. 51. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 139–140. “As in modern anorexia, ‘control’ was a basic issue to medieval women who adopted relentless fasting as a kind of self-deﬁnition” (142). 52. The quoted passages are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 207. “Psychosomatic manipulation” in mysticism is casually equated with hysteria and conversion disorders in Bynum, “Female Body,” 165. 53. Bynum, Holy Feast, 207. 54. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 143; two pages earlier she made the common, erroneous assertion that “it is easy to give psychosocial explanations.” See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 194–207. 55. Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 37–38. These authors offer an occasional psychological observation: for examples, see 41 and 235. 56. Harley C. Shands, “Momentary Deity and Personal Myth: A Semiotic Inquiry using Recorded Psychotherapeutic Material,” Semiotica 2 (1970), 9. See Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 36: “It is in reference to this structural network that pathology manifests its deviance.” Homosexuality is a good example; it becomes depathologized as it gains social acceptance. 57. Bell, Holy Anorexia, 16 and 178; see 20. 58. Richard Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition,” in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 15. 59. The quoted phrase in the ﬁrst sentence is from Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, 28. The quoted phrases in the subsequent sentences are from Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 53 and 89; see 197, n. 11. Mujica Pinilla offers no examples of such studies. For a reductionist argument by the author of these accusations, see 140, where centuries of tradition and popular belief are dismissed as erroneous because Mujica Pinilla has “deciphered” the hidden “mystical” meaning of an iconographic motif. 60. The quotations on the symbol are from Anthony Wilden and Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 230. The following quotation is from Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 55. 61. Herbert Thurston, quoted in F. A. Whitlock and J. V. Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization: An Historical and Psychophysiological Enquiry,” Psychological Medicine 8 (1978), 195. 62. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria, 37; JeanMartin Charcot, quoted in ibid., 20; Richard von Krafft-Ebing, quoted in ibid., 41; and ibid., 26. Freud felt that “neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed or who felt too weak to face it.” Sigmund Freud, “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 11:50. 63. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 15, and Antonio Pierozzi of Florence, quoted in Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 170. 64. For an example, see Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 50.

notes to pages 18–22

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65. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 281 and 299, respectively; see 275. If delusions are “false beliefs that are not accepted by one’s subculture,” then by this deﬁnition Rose was not delusional. Robert L. Spitzer et al., DSM-III-R Casebook (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1989), 382. 66. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 454–455. 67. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 135. Nor does he ﬂinch when he feels diagnosis is appropriate: after a careful analysis of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, he wrote: “I would not hesitate to identify the torments she relates as hysterical” (166). See also 153 for mystical ecstasy as an “autoerotic inversion of sexuality” and “a piously camouﬂaged masturbatory orgasm.” 68. See Ihsan Al-Issa, “Social and Cultural Aspects of Hallucinations,” Psychological Bulletin 84/3 (1977), 577. See also Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, “Visions and Psychopathology in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 170/1 (1982), 41–49. 69. Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 7. 70. Richard A. Shweder, “Cultural Psychology—What Is It?” in James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt, eds., Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1–2. 71. Preface to Stigler et al., Cultural Psychology, vii. 72. I am adapting an insight from Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 27–28. This fallacious relation between the pain endured and the authenticity of the mysticism, critical in Rose’s times, is still argued by scholars today. 73. Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 343. See Kleinberg, Prophets, 4: “to investigate the psychological processes occurring within the saint on the one hand and the culturally determined audience expectations on the other.” 74. For a summary of null-reference arguments, see Richard A. Shweder, Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 40. 75. Armando R. Favazza, with Barbara Favazza, Bodies under Siege: Self-Mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 191. For examples of saints mutilating their breasts, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 90; Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, St. Francis de Girolamo, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. Paciﬁcus of San Severino and St. Veronica Giuliani . . . (London: C. Dolman, 1839), 260; McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 521; and Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 166. For a modern clinical case of breast slashing, see L. E. Emerson, “The Case of Miss A: A Preliminary Report of a Psychoanalytical Study and Treatment of a Case of SelfMutilation,” Psychoanalytic Review 1 (1913), 43. 76. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 316. The second quoted phrase is from Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 191. 77. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 28, 28, and 44, respectively. 78. Ibid., 191, 44, and 44, respectively. Most contemporary self-mutilators who report religious visions are diagnosed as schizophrenics. For an example, see Robert A. Clark, “Self-Mutilation Accompanying Religious Delusions: A Case Report and Review,” Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 42/6 (June, 1981), 245.

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notes to pages 22–26

79. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 27 and 37, respectively. 80. Whitlock and Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization,” 190–191 and 201. For similar disrupting ecstasies during mass in the life of Catherine of Siena, see Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 70. See also the more favorable clerical reception in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 97. 81. K. V. Truhlar, “Virtue, Heroic,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGrawHill, 1967), 14:709–710. 82. A reverse shift occurred as mysticism gained precedence after 1300. See Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 533. 83. For some exceptions, see Bynum, Holy Feast, 297; and William N. Davis, “Epilogue,” in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 190. After Simone de Beauvoir cataloged graphic acts of saintly humility (drinking the water that lepers were washed in, licking up a patient’s vomit), her translator felt obliged to interject a footnote: “All this frightful madness can hardly fail to remind the worldly reader of masochistic horrors reported by psychiatrists.” de Beauvoir, Second Sex, 676. 84. Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, ed. J. H. Crehan (London: Burnes Oates, 1952), 343–344. 85. Salvador Velasco, Rosa de Lima (Villava, Pamplona, Spain: Editorial OPE, 1967), 252 and 101. 86. Sheila Kaye-Smith, Quartet in Heaven: Four Portraits of Saintly Women (Garden City: Image Books, 1962), 136 and 216. 87. Loayza, Vida, 30. Rose’s exhaustion and “broken health” (Hansen, Vida admirable, 27) may also have caused difﬁculties in memory and focus. For an example, see Bruno, Rosa, 117. 88. Hansen, Vida admirable, 177 and 133. 89. Loayza, Vida, 35. 90. Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:299. 91. Testimony of Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 180 and 172, respectively. See Loayza, Vida, 59. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 160, where confessors prescribe lettuce—believed to be soporiﬁc—as a cure for Rose’s insomnia. 92. Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1673), 15. 93. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 55; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:336; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 134. See also Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2: 299. 94. Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 37; see 143. See also Bell, Holy Anorexia, 172. 95. Hansen, Vida admirable, 218; see Bruno, Rosa,18. 96. Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 139–140. See Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de las fundaciones, ed. Jose´ Marı´a Aguado (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1973), 150–159 and 166– 174. But Teresa, in her own words, was also “deeply tormented and disturbed” by inexperienced confessors who doubted the authenticity of mystical experiences. “Everything is immediately condemned as from the devil or melancholy.” From Interior Cas-

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tle, quoted in Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 113. Rose of Lima felt the same: she tried to communicate her experiences but “no one understood her” (Juan del Castillo, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 136). 97. Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, 254. 98. Oscar D. Ratnoff, “The Psychogenic Purpuras: A Review of Autoerythrocyte Sensitization, Autosensitization to DNA, ‘Hysterical’ and Factitial Bleeding, and the Religious Stigmata,” Seminars in Hematology 17/3 (1980), 210. For comparable medieval mutilations, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131–132 and 182. 99. The quoted passage is from the nuns’ book of Unterlinden quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 210. 100. 2 Corinthians 5:13. See Acts 26:24. On claims as interpretive, see Ralph W. Hood Jr., “The Empirical Study of Mysticism,” in Bernard Spilka and Daniel N. McIntosh, eds., The Psychology of Religion: Theoretical Approaches (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 225. Many mystics describe their frenzied love for the Bridegroom as insanity. See Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131–132 and 134. 101. The examples are from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:155 (St. Agatha); 1:324 (St. Julitta); and 2:161(Christian woman). Paul’s quotation is from 2 Corinthians 12:10. 102. The quoted passages are from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 90. 103. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Loayza, Vida, 84 (two passages); Hansen, Vida admirable, 42 (two passages); and Loayza, Vida, 71. See also Diego Pe´rez de Valdivia, Aviso a gente recogida, ed. Alvaro Huerga (Madrid: Universidad Pontiﬁcia de Salamanca and Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1977), 221, where brides of Christ must live in reverse. The monks under Bernard of Clairvaux were compared to mountebanks “walking on their hands: their life and their images invert the values of the world”(Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 144). 104. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, biografı´a de Juana de Ontan ˜ on (Mexico: Editorial Porru´a, 1966), xxvi (“Vivo sin vivir en mi / y tan alta vida espero / que muero porque no muero”). Almost identical wording is in St. John of the Cross’s “Coplas del alma que pena por ver a Dios.” See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 164, where similar verse is attributed to Rose of Lima. The second quoted phrase is in Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 289. 105. The quoted phrase is from Loayza, Vida, 88. 106. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 239; and the second is from Philippe Arie`s, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 353. On beauty after death, see Loayza, Vida, 113; Hansen, Vida admirable, 110; and Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 167. 107. The quoted passages are from, respectively, 2 Corinthians 12:9; Ambrose, quoted in Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:278; and Gertrude of Helfta, quoted in Colleen McDannell and Berhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 103. 108. John Donne, The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: New York University Press, 1968), 344 (Holy Sonnet 171). 109. Granada, Libro de la oracio´n, 165–166. 110. The quoted phrase is from Catherine of Siena’s bull of canonization, ap-

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pended to Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna, ed. E. Cartier (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 400. For a variation on the theme, see Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:366. 111. The quoted phrase is from Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 12:29. Christ compares heaven to a wedding banquet in Matthew 22:1 (see 25: 1) and Luke 14:1–24. 112. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 331; the second is Juan de Lorenzana, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 168; see 166. See also Loayza, Vida, 105. In the Dominican Laudes liturgy for Rose of Lima, the Bridegroom and Rose enter the nuptial banquet together. Andre´s E. Bejas et al., Santoral dominicano en Ame´rica Latina: Laudes y vı´speras (Quito: Oﬁcina de Coordinacio´n de la Familia Dominicana en Ame´rica Latina, 1992), 58. 113. Quoted in Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 187. See Ezekiel 28:13. 114. The quoted phrase is from Jose´ Manuel Bermu´dez, Sermo´n panegı´rico de la admirable Virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1782), 6. 115. The Butler’s passage is from Herbert Thurston and Donald Attwater, eds., Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Complete Edition (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1962), 3: 445. The 1937 passage is from Marian Storm, The Life of St. Rose (Santa Fe: Writers’ Editions, 1937), 5. The 1962 work is Kaye-Smith, Quartet in Heaven, 136. For a summary of imitation and admiration, see Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: FourteenthCentury Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 12–14. Elsewhere even apocalyptic prophesies attributed to Rose are defused so as to “not frighten anyone.” See the conclusion of Ricardo Miranda Tarrillo, “Los barcos atracara´n en la Plaza Mayor,” Gente (September 10, 1993), 20–22. 116. The French account is from Vizconde de Busierre, quoted in the anonymous prologue to Hansen, Vida admirable, xxix. The quoted Faber passages are from F. W. Faber, preface and afterword to Jean Baptist Feuillet, The Life of St. Rose, ed. F. W. Faber (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 8, 7, 265, and 265, respectively. The passages quoted from the 1913 British source are from J. Proctor, “Introduction,” in F. M. Capes, St. Rose of Lima: The Flower of the New World (London: R. & T. Washbourne, 1913), 14 and 20 (see 15–21). The quoted passages in the ﬁnal sentences are from Capes, St. Rose of Lima, 26, 27, 82, 83, and 33, respectively. 117. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Novena a la gloriosa virgen americana Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, utilissima para plantar en la tierra este´ril de nuestros corazones las mas olorosas ﬂores de virtudes (Puebla: La Imprenta del Colegio Real de San Ignacio de la Puebla, 1768), n.p. no.; an anonymous editorial commentary in Hansen, Vida admirable, 486; and Victorino Osende, Vida y novena de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Talleres de Ramı´rez Hermanos, 1914), 242. 118. Pedro Manuel Garcı´a in Comisio´n de Sen ˜ oras Encargadas de las Fiestas del Centenario, Recuerdo de las ﬁestas del tercer centenario de la muerte de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Imprenta Artista, 1917), 15–16. 119. Sta. Rosa y la familia (Lima: Comisio´n Episcopal de la Familia, 1987), 19– 20. 120. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:2. The letter of September 1, 1617, from Nicola´s Agu¨ero in support of Rose of Lima’s beatiﬁcation is an exception to the general tendency of advocating imitation: Rose’s rigorous penitence

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“seems more admirable than imitable.” Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 584. The intent is not to dissuade imitation, however, but only to marvel at the seeming impossibility. I am grateful to Martin Maynard for calling this text to my attention. 121. The passage in the ﬁrst sentence is quoted in Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 133. The second passage is from Juan de Isturisaja, quoted in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n, y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 40. 122. The quoted passage are from, respectively, Fray Andre´s Ferrer de Valdecebro, Vida maravillosa y admirable de la esclarecida y bienabenturada virgen Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Madrid: n.p., 1669), unnumbered preface (“Al Lector”); Bermu´dez, Sermo´n panegı´rico, 8; see 42; and Manuel Antonio Urrixmendi, Sermo´n panegı´rico que en honor y celebridad de la gloriosa virgen santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Patrona de Ame´rica Meridional, dixo en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Lima el dia 30 agosto de 1812 (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1812), 33; see 18. For another example see Parra, Rosa laureada, 60.

chapter 2 1. The quoted phrase is from Pierre Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic Church,” in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 195 (“All saints are more or less constructed in that, being necessarily saints for other people, they are remodelled in the collective representation which is made of them”). See Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 270, and Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 61. 2. Juan del Castillo quoted in Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 177. 3. The quoted phrase is from Gonzalo Andre´s de Meneses y Arce, Ilustracio´n de la Rosa del Peru´ (Lima: Imprenta de Juan de Quevedo, 1670), 74. See Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de la Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2: 442–447. 4. The Lorenzana testimony is quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 110. See Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 211. When the threat of attack passed the virgin seemed “serene” and “happy.” The quoted passages in parentheses are from, respectively, Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 178; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:290; and Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 77. 5. The quotations are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 125. 6. Juan de Isturisaja in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n, y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 38. See Catalina de Santa Marı´a’s testimony in

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Bruno, Rosa, 65. For an image, see Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 68–69. 7. Appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 447. The queen thus instructed the viceroy at the request of Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a. See Angel Vicente de Zea in Domingo Angulo, Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Estudio bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: n.p., 1917), 118. The medieval examples are from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:41 and 1:57. 8. The quoted phrase is from Juan de Lorenzana in Bruno, Rosa, 102. 9. See Juan del Castillo’s testimony in Bruno, Rosa, 139–142. On the rainbow vision, see also Loayza, Vida, 46–47; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 182 and 321. 10. Hansen (Vida admirable) added a bloody cross, thus strengthening the similarities to one of Catherine of Siena’s experiences. See Raimundo de Capua, Vida y milagros de la bienaventurada Sancta Catherina de Sena, trans. Antonio de la Pen ˜ a (Salamanca: Alonso de Terranova y Neyla, 1580), 35. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 181; and Bruno, Rosa, 140. 11. On the number of witnesses, see Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 44. 12. Quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 127. The ordinary process had thirty-two questions, and the apostolic process had twelve general questions supplied by the Vatican and twenty-seven more speciﬁc questions prepared by the Dominicans in Lima and then approved or revised by the Vatican. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 19 and 22. 13. Testimony appended to Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 126. For another example, see Bruno, Rosa, 10, n. 4. 14. Pere H. Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints: An Introduction to Hagiography, trans. V. M. Crawford (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), 26. Such is common in the testimony of canonization processes. For another example of “stereotyped” testimony, see Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, ed. Da´maso Chicharro (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 1987), 26: “The witnesses usually testify with excessive unanimity.” 15. Hansen, Vida admirable, 107. 16. Texeda’s quoted passages are from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:909–910. 17. An example is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 415. 18. Marı´a de Uza´tegui, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 116 and 149. 19. Hansen, Vida admirable, 12 and 14; see 307. For embellishment of the episode in a contemporary hagiography, see Walter Molina Frı´as, Nacimiento, consagracio´n, muerte y beatiﬁcacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Ediciones Populares, 1994), 14. 20. Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna, ed. E. Cartier (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 26 and 96–97, respectively; see 72. Despite the claimed miracles, Catherine learned to write “with great difﬁculty.” See Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), plate 11. 21. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 14–15. The passages by Uza´tegui and Micaela de la Maza are quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 22; Micaela’s sister Andrea testiﬁed identically (ibid.). 22. Hugh of St. Victor, quoted in Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 57; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 2, respectively. 23. The examples are from Bruno, Rosa, 10–11, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 2

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(childbirth); Hansen, Vida admirable, 3 (street); Bruno, Rosa, 44, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 108 (butterﬂy); and Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 167 (name). Parra frequently engaged in such word plays; for another example, see Rosa laureada, 81. 24. For an example in contemporary hagiography, see Sister Mary Alphonsus, St. Rose of Lima: Patroness of the Americas (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1968), 46. 25. Hansen, Vida admirable, 111. He also added a third explanation, attributed to Rose herself, that concerned humility. In a chronology published recently by the Dominicans of the Sanctuary of Rose of Lima, the palm incident is described simply as an “oversight of the Sacristan.” Santa Rosa de Lima: Cronologı´a (Lima: Bası´lica Santuario de Santa Rosa, n.d.), n.p. no. 26. The quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, 58–59. For the second error, see Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 1:178. 27. Hansen, Vida admirable, 253. For another example of the competing meanings of signs, see 199. The singing bird is on 122. 28. Loayza, Vida, 89. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 232 and 234–235; Parra, Rosa laureada, 200, 201, and 230; and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:338. On Ma´rquez, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 230–232. Ma´rquez testiﬁed only in the apostolic process. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 39. Fire imagery is discussed later in this volume in chapter 9, “The Purgatory of Love.” 29. Isabel Mejı´a, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 144. 30. Hansen, Vida admirable, 158. The testimony of Juana’s mother, Luisa Mejı´a, is quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 144. Luisa Mejı´a, presumably deceased, did not testify again in the apostolic hearing. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 38–39. 31. Francisco de Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, celebres aclamaciones, que la siempre triumphante Roma dio a la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Virgen de Lima, en su solemne beatiﬁcacio´n (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 12–16. Other miracles that seem specious to the modern sensibility—the transformation of the face into a rose, the black and white butterﬂy that revealed to Rose her Dominican calling, the Virgin Mary waking Rose to pray—were likewise represented during the Roman celebration. 32. Certeau, Writing of History, 274; see 270. See also Thomas Head, “Introduction,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), xxv. 33. Richard Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition,” in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 26. 34. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Parra, Rosa laureada, 80. The second quoted phrase is from Manuel de Ribero Leal, Oracio´n evange´lica en la beatiﬁcacio´n de la gloriosa virgen S. Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Lima: Geronimo de Contreras, 1675), n.p. no. On repetition, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 115. 35. Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 51–52. See Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 141–412; and the text and various tables in Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Dominican and Franciscan hagiographers at times “even produced a new leg-

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end to add lustre to saints whose Life had already been written some decades earlier” and “they tried to update” the image of holy people “and make them conform to their own models” (Vauchez, Sainthood, 210). 36. The ﬁrst quoted phrases are from Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 192; the last is from the title of Raquel Serur, “Santa Mariana de Quito o la santidad inducida,” in Petra Schumm, ed., Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigacio´n del barroco iberoamericano (Vervuert: Iberoamericana, 1998), 205–219. See Burke, “How to Be,” 50–51. Eurocentrism is also suggested by the miracles selected by the Vatican to ﬁnalize Rose’s canonization. Despite a proliferation of miracles in the New World, the last four were selected from the processes of Palermo, Antwerp, and Naples. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 465–468, and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 70–71. 37. On nursing, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 24–25; Bell, Holy Anorexia, 58 and 141; and Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:21. Regarding the painless birth, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 24. In Genesis 3, God cursed women, beginning with Eve, to painful childbirth, but Mary, the New Eve, was exempted. Augustine made the connection between the crime and the punishment: “She conceived without carnal pleasure and therefore gave birth without pain.” Quoted in Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 343; see 342. See also Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 33. Rose, like Christ, gave no pain during birth and then later, like Christ, took upon herself the suffering of others. 38. For examples, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 30, 33, 156; and Cristina Ruiz Martı´nez, “La moderacio´n como prototipo de santidad; una imagen de la nin ˜ ez,” in Sergio Ortega, ed., De la santidad a la perversio´n, o de por que´ no se cumplı´a la ley de Dios en la sociedad novohispana (Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1985), 59. 39. For examples, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:102 and 1:28; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 73–75 and 87–88; and “The Old Czech Life of Catherine of Alexandria,” in Head, Medieval Hagiography, 771–772. 40. For examples, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 26, 44, 60, and 182; C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Cristina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 75; and Ruiz Martı´nez, “Moderacio´n,” 60. 41. For examples, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 20 and 160; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 221; Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 15. Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Michel Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 224; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 195. 42. The quoted phrase is from Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, St. Francis de Girolamo, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. Paciﬁcus of San Severino and St. Veronica Giuliani . . . (London: C. Dolman, 1839), 258. For examples of attacks by and beatings from the devil in various forms, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:15 and 2:223; Diego de Co´rdova Salinas, Cro´nica franciscana de las provincias del Peru´, ed. Lino G. Canedo (Washinton, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1957), 707; Bell, Holy Anorexia, 128–129, 131, 138, 157; Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 237; Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: EspasaCalpe, 1963), 214, 223; Solange Alberro, Inquisicio´n y sociedad en Me´xico, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1988), 510; Luis Weckmann, La herencia medi-

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eval de Me´xico (Mexico City: Colegio de Me´xico, 1984), 1:290–291; and Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 44. See Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 136–141. The dog that attacked Rose is related to St. Dominic and Christ in Jose´ A. Rodrı´guez Garrido, “Espinoso Medrano: La recepcio´n del sermo´n barroco y la defensa de los americanos,” in Mabel Moran ˜ a, ed., Relecturas del barroco de Indias (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1994), 161–162. The dog is a primary symbol in the iconography of St. Dominic and of the Dominican order, and in a pun Dominican friars were referred to as domini canes, dogs (or hounds) of God. See Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 23. For a devilish witches-sabbath bestiary, see Pierre Duviols, Cultura andina y represio´n: Procesos y visitas de idolatrı´a y hechicerı´as, Cajatambo, siglo XVII (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Rurales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1986), lxix. An image of Rose attacked by a dog is reproduced in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 70. Texts corresponding to this image are in Hansen, Vida admirable, 168–171; and Bruno, Rosa, 111. For examples of diabolical seduction, see Talbot, Life of Cristina of Markyate, 115; Bell, Holy Anorexia, 157; Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola, 225; Hugo Lietaer and Josef Corveleyn, “Psychoanalytical Interpretation of the Demoniacal Possession and the Mystical Development of Sister Jeanne de Anges from Loudun (1605– 1665),” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 5/4 (1995), 262–263; Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 70; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:88 and 2:194; Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Pilar Herna´ndez Aparicio, La Inquisicio´n de Lima (1570–1635) (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1989), 1:307 and 1:336; and Marı´a Palacios Alcalde, “Las beatas ante la Inquisicio´n,” Hispania Sacra 40 (1988), 114–115 and 126–127. For the devil in the guise of a gentleman in sixteenth-century Peru, see Alvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados: Vol. 3, Los alumbrados de hispanoame´rica (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, Seminaro Cisneros, 1986), 132. For a secular case of sexual relations with the devil in Peru, see Marı´a Emma Mannarelli, “Inquisicio´n y mujeres: Las hechiceras en el Peru´ durante el siglo XVII,” Revista andina 3/1 (July, 1985), 146. 43. On prediction of death, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 147; and Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 165–168. 44. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 32; and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 84. Catherine of Siena was the saint most cited as a model by beatas in Lima. Other models included Angela de Foligno, St. Lutgard, St. Gertrudis, St. Ursula, and St. Teresa de Avila. See Rene´ Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad e inquisicio´n: Los procesos a las visionarias limen ˜ as,” Boletı´n de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 108–109 (2000), 294. 45. Marı´a de Uza´tegui, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 130. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:18 and 67; Bruno, Rosa, 43; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 160; Loayza, Vida, 43; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 36. 46. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Pedro de Ortega y Sotomayor, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 124; Juan de Lorenzana, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 57; Bruno, Rosa, 130 (the same mirror image is used in Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez [Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1673], 3); and a Dominican document in Jose´ Antonio

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Cata´ de Calella, Vida portentosa de la esclarecida virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Barcelona: Librerı´a y Tipografı´a Cato´lica, 1896), 337. The letter is also appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 420. During her lifetime Rose served as the caretaker of the Catherine of Siena chapel in Lima’s Dominican church, and after death her burial in that same chapel ﬁnalized a kind of fusion between the two saints’ identities. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 221 and 451. 47. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 162; Cata´ de Calella, Vida portenosa, 14 and 315; and Regla de N.G.P San Agustı´n y constituciones de las religiosas del Sagr. Orden de Predicadores, trans. P. Mro. Fr. Juan Baptista Mendez (Mexico: D. Marı´a de Rivera, n.d. [18th century]), 1. For examples of Hansen linking Rose and Catherine, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 6, 14, 24, 30, 32, 35, 38, 44, 51, 55, 70, 71, 77, 78, 80, 84, 105, 106, 135, 162,166, 173, 174, 176, 220, and 230. 48. See Richard Kieckhefer, “Holiness and the Culture of Devotion: Remarks on Some Late Medieval Male Saints,” in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 291. 49. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 31–49. For a similar haircut in texts and images of Mary Magdalen, who Catherine took as a model, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 154–156. The parents of Christina of Markyate were more insistent than Catherine’s, exposing her to opportunities for lust, attempting to get her drunk to arouse her sexuality, pressuring her into marriage, and offering to assist her husband in raping her when Christina insisted on a chaste marriage. See Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 244–245. 50. Hansen, Vida admirable, 31; see 11. The quoted brother’s words are on 10. See Bruno, Rosa, 19–20 and 29. For a Dominican sermon against women who “consume and madden with their manes,” see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 153. Blonde hair, often bleached, has a long history as a beautiful enticement conducive to romance. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 246. 51. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Loayza, Vida, 85; Loayza, quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 35; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 32. See Loayza, Vida, 5; and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 59. 52. The quoted passage on verbal abuse is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 55. The last quotation is from E. Cartier in Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna (1860), 375. See Bell, Holy Anorexia, 48. 53. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 27 (two passages) and 90; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 89. 54. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 54. For a similar practice by an Italian Dominican preceding Catherine, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 128. On the cells, crowns, beds, and pillows, see, for example, Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 53, 71, and 143; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 84. 55. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 60 and 236, respectively. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 52, 55, 111, and 150– 163. 56. All of the quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 260–261; see 157. On Catherine’s experience, see Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 146; Bynum, Holy Feast, 166 and 172; and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 25. 57. All of the Hansen passages are from Vida admirable, 162. The eminating

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lights are from Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a, 14. The incident described by Loayza (Vida) is on 87. A reverse transformation is registered in a possibly Peruvian painting that represents Catherine of Siena in the likeness of Angelino Medoro’s 1617 portrait of Rose of Lima. See Diana Fane, ed., Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 168 and 208–209. 58. Loayza, Vida, 1; Hansen, Vida admirable, 1; and Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 2. April 20 is also given in an Italian hagiography written before the publication of Hansen’s work. See Seraﬁno Bertolini, La Rosa peruana ouvero vita di Santa Rosa nativa della citta’ di Lima (Padoua [sic]: P. M. Frambotto, 1671), 1. 59. Bruno, Rosa, 6 and 10, n. 4; and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 11. For examples of the erroneous-recording argument, see Cata´ de Calella, Vida portenosa, 14; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 492, n. 2. 60. See Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima: Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 15–16, n. 3; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 491, n. 2. The quoted passage is from St. Rose of Lima, Ordinary Process for Canonization, Lilly Library, Indiana University, 4; see 1. For Hernando’s testimony, see Bruno, Rosa, 10, n. 4. The father’s record of his children’s birthdates was incomplete. See Salvador Velasco, Rosa de Lima (Villava, Pamplona, Spain: Editorial OPE, 1967), 26. 61. Hansen, Vida admirable, 450–451. For the fabricated diary entry, see Molina Frı´as, Nacimiento, 12. For the date change in Loayza, see Vida, 1. Other changes were also made; see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 196, n. 5. In the nineteenth-century edition of Hansen’s hagiography, the April 20th date is given in the text and is “corrected” to April 30 by an editorial footnote. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 1 and 491, n. 2. 62. See Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna (1860), 35. The anniversary of Catherine’s death is actually on April 29. 63. Hansen, Vida admirable, 16 and 69. See Bruno, Rosa, 117; and Loayza, Vida, 29. See Hernando’s testimony in Bruno, Rosa, 18. 64. The quoted phrase is in Luis G. Alonso Getino, La patrona de Ame´rica ante los nuevos documentos (Madrid: Imprenta E. Gime´nez, 1927), 29. See also Rose’s letter in Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 156–158; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 310. For Bartholomew in the Indies, see Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva cro´nica y buen gobierno, ed. Franklin Pease (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), 1:65–70 and 2:75–76; and Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2: 110. On the Desert Fathers, see de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 181. On Catherine’s cave experience, see Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 26. St. Anthony’s hagiography, written in the fourth century, had a great inﬂuence on asceticism and monasticism. The legendary Mary Magdalen, who repaired to a desert cave for penitential asceticism, also provided a model. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 83, 181, 220, and 225. 65. On Melgarejo as a new Teresa, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 202, n. 28. The quoted passages are from Agueda M. Rodrı´guez Cruz, “Juan de Lorenzana, universitario salmantino y catedra´tico de la Universidad de San Marcos de Lima,” in Jose´ Barrado, ed., Los dominicos y el nuevo mundo (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1990), 400 and 397. 66. Hansen, Vida admirable, 242. For Teresa’s attemped ﬂight see Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, 121.

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notes to pages 49–54

67. Juan de Luden ˜ a in Parra, Rosa laureada, 271. 68. De la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 208. See Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor, 48; and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 16. 69. Van Deusen, “Deﬁning the Sacred,” 450, 460, and 473–474. See also Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 3:794–806, and Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la Iglesia en el Peru´ (Burgos, Spain: 1960), 3:202–204. 70. Jose´ Manuel Bermu´dez, Breve noticia de la vida y virtudes de la sen˜ora Don˜a Catalina de Yturgoyen Amasa y Lisperguer, Condesa de la Vega del Ren (Lima: Imprenta del Rı´o, 1821), 41. Another imitator of Rose of Lima is named on 48. See 81 and, for familiar “very repugnant actions,” 92–93. 71. Bell, Holy Anorexia, 59–60. 72. Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 251 and 253; see 243. 73. Jacinto Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida de Santa Mariana de Jesu´s, ed. Aurelio Espinosa Polit (Quito: Imprenta Municipal, 1955), 42 (see n. 1), 60–62. The statement of the other Jesuits is on 24; see 56. See also Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 330, n. 1. 74. See the testimony of Marı´a de Paredes in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 167; the quoted passages are from 166. Mariana prescribed dried rose petals that had been on Rose’s corpse as a remedy for illness. The two documents mentioned in the text are considered the primary sources for study of Mariana. 75. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from testimony in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 167; Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida, 339 (see n. 2 on the same page and 557–558); and Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 165, respectively. The quoted passages in the last sentence are from Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida, 338. See Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 164– 165 and 169–170. 76. Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida, 339. 77. The quoted passages are from Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 304, 16, and 308, respectively; see 15. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 26–27. 78. Quoted in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 19; see 16–17 and 309. For Mariana’s childhood mortiﬁcation, see 309–310. See also 16 and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 26–27. 79. Quoted in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 214; see 22, 24, and 174. 80. The quoted phrases are from Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 282, 29, and 34, respectively; see 285 and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 53–55. For Mariana’s penitential regimen, see Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida, 181–193. For the fasts, see Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 15. See also Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 52, 111, and 150–163. 81. The quoted phrase is from testimony in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 165. The hagiographers link these experiences variously to Catherine (Mora´n de Butro´n, 387; Espinosa Polit, 165), to Teresa (Espinosa Polit, 213), and to Rose (Mora´n de Butro´n, 388). For the attempted ﬂight to the missions, see Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 20. Later hopes targeted Japan, where Jesuits had been martyred; see 310– 311. 82. On thirst, see John 19:28 and 4:7. The quoted passages are from testimony in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 31, 214, 260, and 39, respectively; see 215–216 and 247–248. 83. Quoted in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 178; see 39. 84. Quoted in ibid., 40. Mariana was beatiﬁed in 1850. 85. Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, 323. The spiritual tracts were unavailable after the Inquisition published its index of prohibited books in 1559. Mariana’s identi-

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ﬁcation with hagiography is in Serur, “Santa Mariana,” 210. See Mora´n de Butro´n, Vida, 204. 86. Quoted in Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1958), 262. 87. Both quoted passages are quoted in Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Los dominicos en la vida cultural y acade´mica del Peru´ en el siglo XVI,” in Jose´ Barrado, ed., Los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1990), 430. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 123 and 230. See also Enrique Urbano, “Cateque´tica y homile´tica dominicanas en los Andes (Siglo XVI),” in Barrado, ed., Los dominicos, 780. 88. Quotations from Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 16, 235 (see 289), and 265, respectively. In a vision of Colette of Corbie, Christ’s ﬂesh was carved up and piled in a dish due to sins. See Bynum, Holy Feast, 67. 89. Melford E. Spiro, “Some Reﬂections on Cultural Determinism and Relativism with Special Reference to Emotion and Reason,” in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 323 and 328, respectively. Also: “Cultural meaning systems are linked to personality systems through the sharing of speciﬁc items that function in both systems for particular individuals.” Roy G. D’Andrade, “Cultural Meaning Systems,” in Shweder and A. LeVine, Culture Theory, 116. 90. Loayza, Vida, 51. For another example see Bruno, Rosa, 15–16, Hansen, Vida admirable, 4–5, and the testimony of Jaime Blanco, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:31, where the discourse of one of Rose’s confessors, Alonso Vela´squez, is reiterated by the Virgin of the Rosary statue. 91. The quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:304–305, and Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 28, respectively. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 26. 92. See Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 548, and Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, 101; Bruno, Rosa, 187; and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 125 and ﬁgure 81, respectively. For possible additional inﬂuence from the Jesuit Diego Alvarez de Paz, see Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor, 66–67. 93. Quoted in Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 28 and 34, respectively. The original Spanish, “fuera de sı´,” implies being beside oneself or out of one’s senses. 94. Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 65, n. 1. The verse quoted in the previous sentence is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 15, Bruno, Rosa, 119, and Loayza, Vida, 89. During the times of Philip IV, religious lyrics were often put to music for popular uses. See Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, Vida religiosa espan˜ola, 32–33. 95. See Bruno, Rosa, 120, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 101. The lines from La Celestina that Rose adapted were based, in turn, on Spanish popular traditions. See Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina, ed. Bienvenido Morros (Barcelona: Vicens Vives, 1996), 298, n. 10. Hansen and Mele´ndez both apologize for the poor quality of Rose’s poems while lauding her “divine enthusiasm.” See Hansen, Vida admirable, 15, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:291. 96. The quoted Loyola passages are from Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises (New York: Catholic Book Publishing, 1956), 66, 68, 71, and 72. The ﬁnal quote is from Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, 138.

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notes to pages 56–58

97. The testimony concerning Ubitarte is quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 564. For a similar example from seventeenth-century Italy, see E. Ann Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” in Lucetta Scarafﬁa and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 40–41. The quoted passage on Velasco is in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde de la perfeccio´n: Rosa de Santa Marı´a y las alumbradas de Lima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73/4 (1993), 599. 98. Hansen, Vida admirable, 153; see Bruno, Rosa, 142. For similar imagery in the iconography of St. Anthony of Padua, see Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 123–132. The thirteenth-century Ida of Louvain tasted the Word as though it were ﬂesh on her tongue when she recited “Verbum caro factum est” (John 1:14). See Bynum, Holy Feast, 67. 99. Hansen, Vida admirable, 221 and 203; for the textual Catherine coming to life, see 162. 100. Quoted in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 60. 101. The quoted passages are from Brown, Immodest Acts, 47; de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan, 39; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 415, respectively. Art had a “profound effect” on the mystical experience of Catherine of Siena herself. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 250. Luisa Melgarejo’s vision of Rose in glory was reminiscent of Bernardo Bitti’s La coronacio´n de la Virgen, a painting in the Jesuit church frequented by both Rosa and Melgarejo. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 602. The painting is reproduced in Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Pedro M. Guibovich Pe´rez, “Esplendor y religiosidad en el tiempo de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 48–49. See also Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 569. 102. For examples and commentary, see McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 332; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 180; Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 249, n. 24; and Karen-Edis Barzman, “Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena De’ Pazzi,” Art History 15/2 (1992), 174. For saints appearing in visions as they are represented artistically, see Al-Issa, “Social and Cultural,” 572 and 576, and Stoichita, Visionary Experience, 198. Stigmata, too, were conditioned by meditation on speciﬁc images. See F. A. Whitlock and J. V. Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization: An Historical and Psychophysiological Enquiry,” Psychological Medicine 8 (1978), 189, 193, and 196. Artistic representations of scenes from Catherine’s life served as the model for Rose’s imitation and, in turn, for Rose of Lima iconography. For an example see Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 283. 103. The quoted phrase is from Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 11. 104. Both quoted passages are from Catalina de Jesu´s Herrera, Autobiografı´a de la Vle. Madre Sor Catalina de Jesu´s Herrera, Religiosa de Coro del Monasterio de Santa Catalina de Quito (Quito: Ecuador, 1954), 352; see 351–352. The painting is reproduced across from page 187. 105. Richard L. Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late SixteenthCentury Spain,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, eds., Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 110. God explained to Catherine of Siena that the sign of a true

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vision is “the gladness and hunger for virtue that remain in the soul after the visitation.” Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 198. 106. The quoted phrase is from Fray Facundo de Torees quoted in Carlos Puyol Buil, Inquisicio´n y polı´tica en el reinado de Felipe IV: Los procesos de Jero´nimo de Villanueva y las monjas de San Pla´cido, 1628–1660 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ﬁcas, 1993), 137. 107. The passages are quoted in Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 134. For the condemned false visionaries, see Teresa de Avila, Libro de la vida, 343, n. 29. This occurred in 1559– 1560. 108. Alonso de la Fuente quoted in Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila, 34. 109. See Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 3 and 35–36. The same honor, restricted previously to males, was also conferred on Catherine of Siena in the same year. 110. The quoted phrases are from Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 3:138. See Weber, Teresa of Avila, 146. On the devil’s uses of melancholy, see Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de las fundaciones, ed. Jose´ Marı´a Aguado (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1973), 171; Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 180; and Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 97. 111. Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 140. 112. Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 605. On Rose’s face, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 47–48, and Loayza, Vida, 10 and 82. “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disﬁgure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting.” Matthew 6:16. 113. Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 302 (ﬁrst quoted passage) and 300 (other quoted passages). 114. The quoted passage is from Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 19; see 236 and 238. Some saintly identities were simply fabrications. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, clergy took advantage of the chance discoveries of well-preserved corpses to endow them with life stories derived from hagiography. Vauchez, Sainthood, 432. 115. For an example of the alignment of Catherine’s story with prior hagiographic models, see Bynum, Holy Feast, 172–173. 116. All of the quoted passages are from Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy, 43. 117. 1 Corinthians 11:1. See Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ,” 35. Fraudulence was of course always a possibility. The beata Marı´a de Santa Marı´a, for example, confessed to faking a miracle by modeling it on a hagiographic text. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 564. 118. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 177, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:335. The Alumbrados are discussed in chapter 4, “Why Rose of Lima?” 119. Pedro de Ortega Sotomayor, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:338. 120. The quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 49. See Loayza, Vida, 33–39; Hansen, Vida admirable, 137–152; Bruno, Rosa, 133; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 167; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:302; Bell, Holy Anorexia, 21; and Kleinberg, Prophets, 20, where “skepticism was a formative part of the dynamics of sainthood.” On Lorenzana’s career, see Rodrı´guez Cruz, “Juan de Lorenzana,” 397. 121. Loayza, Vida, 37; see 40. The process of beatiﬁcation for one of Rose’s role

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notes to pages 62–64

models, Gregorio Lopez (1542–1596), was initiated in 1620 but suspended during the Mexican Inquisition’s oppression of Alumbrados. Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados, 3:505–590, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 76. 122. Juan del Castillo quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 137. See Loayza, Vida, 38. 123. For an example, see “Summary of the Proceso against Pedro Ruı´z de Alcaraz” appended to Antonio Ma´rquez, Los alumbrados: Orı´genes y ﬁlosofı´a (1525–1559) (Madrid: Taurus, 1980), 246–247. See also Weber, Teresa of Avila, 24. 124. Mystics had posed a threat to orthodoxy in this manner for centuries. When the thirteenth-century nun Gertrude the Great worried about her sins, Christ told her that he renewed in her soul “all seven sacraments in one operation more efﬁcaciously than any other priest or pontiff can do by seven separate acts.” Quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 231. 125. Loayza, Vida, 25, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:271, respectively. Dominic also provided quasi-sacerdotal spiritual direction to Columba of Rieti. See Bynum, Holy Feast, 241. 126. Hansen, Vida admirable, 100. 127. The quoted passages are from Marı´a de Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 147, and an Inquisition document quoted in Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 287 (two passages), respectively. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 174 and 61, and Bruno, Rosa, 138. Rose’s mystical marriage is discussed in chapter 9, “The Purgatory of Love.” 128. Other notable differences include the Alumbrados’ patently unorthodox theology (“there is no Hell”; “the Father was incarnated like the Son”) (268); libertine sexual mores and practices (234); and disdain for external demonstrations of the faith (269). See the indicated pages of the “Edicto de los alumbrados de Toledo” and the summaries of the processes against Pedro Ruı´z de Alcaraz and Isabel de la Cruz, all appended to Ma´rquez, Los alumbrados. 129. For a similar incident in Spain, see Geraldine McKendrick and Agnus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Perry and Cruz, Cultural Encounters, 98–99. One signiﬁcant outcome in Rose’s case was the examining commission’s determination that she had the gift of discerning divine from diabolical visions (Loayza, Vida, 66, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 173). A primary role of confessors, of the Inquisition, and of this investigating commission itself was precisely to make such distinctions. By relinquishing that responsibility in trust to Rose, the examiners granted her, in effect, a blanket endorsement that facilitated spiritual growth and exempted her visions from the detrimental or condemning judgments of others. 130. The quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 151. For an example of Rose’s prestigious confessors lending credence to her candidacy, see the testimony of Francisco de Hernal, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:660. 131. On Rose’s notebooks, see Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, 62–63, n. 1. Regarding the refusal to submit Rosa’s writings to Rome, see Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Vidas de santos y santas vidas: Hagiografı´as reales e imaginarias en Lima colonial,” Anuario de estudios americanos 51/1 (Seville: n.p., 1994), 56–57; and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 53–54. Another source cites an Inquisition manuscript to maintain that the Inquisition in Lima sent Rose’s writings to Spain, where they were subject to a “severe” review. See Wuffarden and Guibovich Pe´rez, “Esplendor y religiosidad,” 27–28. A contemporary Dominican conjectured that Juan de Lorenzana destroyed Rose’s notebooks. See Salvador Velasco, Rosa de Lima (Villava, Pamplona, Spain: Editorial OPE, 1967), 237.

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132. Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 595, n. 39. The quoted passages are from a 1624 document on 596. See Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 1:335. 133. See their entries in Manuel de Mendiburu, Diccionario histo´rico-biogra´ﬁco del Peru´ (Lima: Editorial Arica, 1933). Melgarejo and Soto previously lived out of wedlock, but due to his appointment as rector of the university they were required to marry in 1615. See Luis Miguel Glave, De Rosa y espinas: Economı´a, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 1998), 210. 134. Iwasaki, “Mujeres al borde,” 594, and Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 293, n. 3. Mystics across the centuries have performed this service; for another example, see Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 196. The Jesuits in Lima also asked Melgarejo to clarify theological nuances during her conversations with Christ and then to report back to settle their debates. Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 594. 135. Loayza, Vida, 113, 117, and 118, respectively. Melgarejo was also cited by other beatas, including the notorious Ine´s de Velasco, as a model. See Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 298. Transcription of Melgarejo’s deathbed discourse is in de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 193–200. For its ﬁrst hagiographic reference, see Loayza, Vida, 113 and 117–118. 136. The Ruiz de Montoya passage is quoted in Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la Iglesia, 3:301. On Melgarejo, see Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 594–595, and Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 1:335. 137. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 84, 95, and 177. For examples of hierarchical inversion between Catherine and her confessor, see 38, 54– 55, and 170. Teresa of Avila referred to her confessor as “son,” and some saw this as indicative of “arrogance and immodesty and uncivility and lack of humility.” See Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila, 120. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 229 and 233. 138. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 44. Raymond was apparently less than spellbound when Catherine was among them: he often fell asleep as she gave her animated harangues about God. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 54, and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 43. When Catherine reported to an earlier confessor that Christ had opened her chest and taken her heart, his disbelief was such that he laughed. The confessor dismissed her claim and explained that it was impossible to live without a heart, but Raymond recuperated the miraculous nature of the occurrence. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 165. 139. The quoted passages are from an Inquisition document quoted in Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 297; see 302. 140. Quoted in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 117 and 119.

chapter 3 1. Peter Coats, Flowers in History (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 161. See 162 and Barbara Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), 12–13. In a Gnostic account of creation, the earth was made ready for human habitation when Psyche poured her blood upon Eros and the earth, and a thornbush blossomed with a rose. A. T. Mann and Jane Lyle, Sacred Sexuality (Shaftesbury, Dorset: Element, 1995), 13. 2. Seward, Symbolic Rose, 12–13. The quoted passage is in Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Arkana/Penguin

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notes to pages 68–69

Books, 1993), 352. See Botticelli’s sensual Spring (dated 1477–1478, in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery), an allegory of the ﬂoral kingdom of Venus, which features the scantily dressed three graces and Flora who, once possessed by Ceﬁro, disperses ﬂowers throughout the world. See also Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1482; Florence, Ufﬁzi Gallery). 3. Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 82. 4. The quoted phrase is Pindar’s decription of Elysium in Seward, Symbolic Rose, 15; see 19. See also Barbara G. Walker, The Women’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 433; and Jack Goody, The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68. 5. Peter Coats, Flowers, 163. In another Latin poem, one reads: “Flower, pluck my ﬂower, because a ﬂower stands for love.” Quoted in Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 25. Titan’s Venus is in Florence’s Ufﬁzi Gallery. Sacred and Profane Love are counterposed in Titian’s painting by the same title (1515; Rome’s Galeria Borghese). 6. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 353–354; see 51–55. In a ﬁfteenth-century variation on the theme, a woman plucks phallus-fruits from a tree. See Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 109. 7. De Lorris and de Meun, Romance of the Rose, 23; see ﬁgures 58 and 64, respectively. Rose of Lima and the rose fuse in the iconographic motif in which her torso grows out of the top of the ﬂower. For examples, see Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, Mı´stica, polı´tica e iconografı´a en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica (Lima: Instituto France´s de Estudios Andinos, Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, and Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 2001), 282–283 and 336. 8. Dante, Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 365. See 352–364 and Seward, Symbolic Rose, 19. For a diagram of Dante’s rose situated between the empyrean heaven and God, see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), ﬁgure 5. 9. McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 85. For bee imagery similar to Dante’s in Rose’s hagiography, see Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 112. 10. Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 88; see 89. See also Seward, Symbolic Rose, 19, and Gertrude Grace Sill, A Handbook of Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 52. 11. Richard Leighton Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 116. “For in this rose conteynyd was / Heuen and erthe in lytyl space” (116). In another sequence, Mary is a rose bush, and “Out of her bosum a blossum sprong.” See the variations on 117–118. The quoted Dante passage is from Paradise, 273. 12. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:80. The Quito painting, attributed to Mateo Mexia, is in the Convento de San Francisco, Quito. 13. Bernabe´ Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, Biblioteca de Autores Espan˜oles (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1956), 91:411 (Book 10, Chapter 37). 14. The last quoted passage is in Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 517. The previous quoted passages are from St. John Chrysostom quoted in Goody, Culture of Flowers, 122. See E. O. James, Christian Myth and Ritual: A Historical Study (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1965), 163–165. In Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, a man trans-

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formed by lust into a beast is restored by eating roses; see Seward, Symbolic Rose, 11. For saints with rose attributes, see Helen Roeder, Saints and Their Attributes (London: Longmans, Green, 1955), 279–281. Christ gave two medieval Bavarian nuns rose garlands to reward their fervent prayer. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 75. 15. Hansen, Vida admirable, 279–280; the quoted passages are on 267–268. For an eighteenth-century painting following Hansen’s description, see Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 88. 16. The quoted phrase is from Luis de Bilbao in Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n. (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 49; see 48. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 268 and 279–281. See also Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991), 32. 17. The last quoted passage is from Bernardo Cano in Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 544. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Regla de N.G.P San Agustı´n y constituciones de las religiosas del Sagr. Orden de Predicadores, trans. P. Mro. Fr. Juan Baptista Mendez (Mexico: D. Marı´a de Rivera, n.d. [18th century]), 1. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 70–71. The quoted Mele´ndez passages are from Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:240; see 2:334. Christ’s crown of thorns was “a parody of the Roman emperor’s festal crown of roses.” George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), 49. 18. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 77. See 77–78, 362, and the September 1, 1617, letter of Nicolas de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 584. On the visions, see Bruno, Rosa, 176–177. 19. For images of Rose coronated with roses by the Christ child, Virgin, and angels, see Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte (Lima: Taller Gra´ﬁco de Sanmarti, 1967), plates 7, 11, 15, 16, and 23; and Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 246–248. The 1668 print is ﬁgure 3 in Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte. 20. Dominico Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, seu symbola, quibus virtutes, gestes, et miracula rosae de S.ta Maria exprimuntor . . . (Fermo: G. F. Bolis and Brothers, 1711), ﬁgures 2 and 3, respectively. The quoted Chrysostom passage is in Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 531. 21. The quoted passages are from Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 307, and WinstonAllen, Stories of the Rose, 10, respectively. A medieval German song to the cross includes the lament, “if only my heart were a garden.” Quoted in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 120. 22. See Coats, Flowers in History 163; and Saint Louis Mary de Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary, trans. Mary Barbour (Bay Shore, N.Y.: Montfort Publications, 1995), 13. On the altar panel, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 75 and ﬁgure 53. The tradition of making rosary beads with dried roses continues into the present. See Suzanne White, “A Rose by Another Name,” Washington Post Magazine (July 17, 1994), 9. 23. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 124, and Bruno, Rosa, 18 and 128.

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24. The quoted passage is from the Song of Songs 4:12. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 170. The trope of virginity as an untouched ﬂower in a hidden garden or distant forest was used in Greek and Latin poetry. See P. M. C. Forbes Irving, Metamorphosis in Greek Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 135–136. 25. Quoted in Salisbury, Church Fathers, 29. 26. The quoted passages are from Gregory of Nyssa quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 279; Manuel de Mendiburu, Diccionario histo´rico-biogra´ﬁco del Peru´ (Lima: Editorial Arica, 1934), 10:70; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 429, respectively. The phrase “lily among thorns” is from Song of Songs 2:2. 27. Robert Herrick quoted in Coats, Flowers in History, 165. See Seward, Symbolic Rose, 6. An eighteenth-century novena states, “Human life is a ﬂower, or Rose, that withers after it is made.” Juan de Contreras, Mysticas Rosas, que el fertilı´simo, y ameno paraı´so de Virgenes Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a dio´ . . . (Mexico: Imprenta Real de el Superior Govierno, de los Herederos de Miguel de Rivera, 1728), 1. 28. Quoted in Dante, Paradise, 369, n. 2. See Carla Gottlieb, The Window in Art: From the Window of God to the Vanity of Man (New York: Abaris Books, 1981), 116; and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 62 29. The quoted passages are from Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, trans. Terence L. Connolly (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 215; and “The Old Czech Life of Catherine of Alexandria,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000), 773, respectively. 30. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Sill, Handbook of Symbols, 52, and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, xx, respectively. The lily is also a primary attribute of St. Dominic. The last quoted passage is from Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 146; see 89. In the New American Bible translation of Song of Songs 5:13, “lilies” is replaced by “red blossoms.” In Latin the lily was know as Juno’s Rose. 31. See Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte, plate 2; Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 164 and 175; Colonial Art of Peru: A Selection of Works from the Collection of Marshall B. Coyne (Washington, D.C.: Museum of Modern Art of Latin America, 1980), plate 6; and Leopoldo Castedo, The Cuzco Circle (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1976), 20. See also Antonio de Vergara in Parra, Rosa laureada, 124. 32. Walker, Women’s Dictionary, 434. See Seward, Symbolic Rose, 22. For Parra’s discussion of Venus, see Rosa laureada, 29. 33. The quoted passages are from Saint Louis Mary de Montfort, Secret of the Rosary, 11 (ﬁrst passage), and Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 77 (other passages). See Coats, Flowers in History, 63. 34. Jean Chevalier et al., Diccionario de los sı´mbolos (Barcelona: Editorial Herder, 1986), 892. For Gilbert of Hoyland, the griddle of St. Lawrence is a garden and Lawrence’s ﬂesh ﬂowers. See Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 168–169. 35. John of Wu¨rzburg cited in George H. T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 72. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:197. See Gottlieb, Window in Art, 119. 36. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 297; and Fray Antonio do Rosa´rio quoted in Sergio Buarque de Holanda, Visio´n del paraı´so: Motivos ede´nicos en el descu-

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brimiento y colonizacio´n del Brasil (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987), 299, respectively. The subsequent quoted passages are from John A. Crow, Spain: The Root and the Flower (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 194; Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 332; and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 221, respectively. 37. The quoted passage is from Iva´n de Espinosa Medrano, La novena maravilla . . . (Rome: Joseph de Rueda, 1695), 267. For another “bloody Rose,” see Manuel de Ribero Leal, Oracio´n evange´lica en la beatiﬁcacio´n de la gloriosa virgen S. Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Lima: Gero´nimo de Contreras, 1675), n.p. no. A “rosy blush,” such as Rose had on her cheeks, is a symbol of martyrdom in The Book of Sainte Foy, trans. Pamela Sheingorn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 47. For the Spanish beata, see Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 231. Many participants in European Corpus Christi processions wore roses. Goody, Culture of Flowers, 155. 38. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from“The Old Czech Life,” 776. The subsequent quoted passages are from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:255; Hansen, Vida admirable, 88; and Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia en el Peru´ (Burgos: n.p., 1959), 2:477. On Catarina, see Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 112. 39. The quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 131. See Steven Olderr, Symbolism: A Comprehensive Dictionary (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1986), 113; and Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 315. 40. Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 82 and 9, respectively. For examples of Christian adaptations of rose symbolism, see Seward, Symbolic Rose, 56. 41. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), 51. See 51–56. See also Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 33, where the naked Venus ﬂoats above a lush garden in a mandorla, “just like that in which the Virgin Mary is usually assumed to heaven.” In the fourteenth-century German Sister Books, Christ characteristically appeared to a Dominican nun holding three red roses that symbolized the wounded love with which he had pierced her heart. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 305. See Goody, Culture of Flowers, 156, where Christ offers a garland of his blood-stained roses to one of his brides. 42. Song of Songs 2:5 and Luis G. Alonso Getino, La patrona de Ame´rica ante los nuevos documentos (Madrid: Imprenta E. Gime´nez, 1927), 43, respectively. See also Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 101. 43. The quoted passages are from Terence O’Reilly, From Ignatius of Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1995), essay XV, 9. 44. “The Spiritual Canticle” is a good example of Spanish mystical literature. See John of the Cross, Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Kieran Kavanaugh (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 213–283, particularly 224–225. The Catherine passages are from the testimony of Friar Thomas of Siena appended to Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna, ed. E. Cartier (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 327; and

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Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 116, respectively. 45. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15 and 390–391. 46. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Goody, Culture of Flowers, 3. See Seward, Symbolic Rose, 7, and Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose, 84–88. In popular usage similar imagery applies to other eroticized parts of the body, such as a young girl’s “budding” nipples. In biblical imagery, menstrual blood was the “ﬂower” that would produce the “fruit of the womb.” Walker, Women’s Dictionary, 425. 47. Mercedes Lo´pez-Baralt, “From Looking to Seeing: The Image as Text and the Author as Artist,” in Rolena Adorno et al., Guaman Poma de Ayala: The Colonial Art of an Andean Author (New York: Americas Society, 1992), 29. 48. Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 126; and Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 218 and 280; see 217 and 224. See also Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte, ﬁgure 4 and plates 4, 5, and 19. In plate 8 the Christ child appears to offer her a rose. See also Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa de Lima,” Cultura peruana 4 (1944), ﬁgures 49–51. For the medieval Italian images, see Dorothy C. Schorr, The Christ Child in Devotional Images in Italy during the XIV Century (New York: George Wittenborn, 1954), 110, and corresponding images. In a variation the Christ child reaches for a pomegranate held by the Virgin. See Schorr, Christ Child, 112, and corresponding images. 49. Museo La´zaro Galdeano, Madrid. The Correa image is in Jose´ Flores Araoz “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 218. 50. Hansen, Vida admirable, 354 and 114, respectively. 51. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Gonzalo Andre´s de Meneses y Arce, Ilustracio´n de la Rosa del Peru´ (Lima: Imprenta de Juan de Quevedo, 1670), 1–2. The quoted passages in the last sentence are from Nicolas Martı´nez in Parra, Rosa laureada, 113–114. For similar imagery, see Gonzalo Tenorio in Parra, Rosa laureada, 641. In Revelation 14:4, (male) virgins are the “ﬁrst fruits” for God. 52. The quoted passages in the ﬁrst sentence are from a 1631 letter in Hansen, Vida admirable, 423; and Parra, Rosa laureada, 478, respectively. The other quoted passages are from a letter appended to Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 133. For similar imagery, see Gonzalo Tenorio in Parra, Rosa laureada, 633; letter of Nicolas de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 584; and Pope Juan Pablo II, “Mensaje a los obispos y ﬁeles peruanos en el IV Centenario del nacimiento de Santa Rosa de Lima,” L’Osservatore Romano, special edition 19 (November 5, 1986), 1. 53. Fray Francisco Xime´nez, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala (Guatemala: Biblioteca Goathemala, 1931), 3:273. On the plants and weeds, see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 140. 54. The Sahagu´n passages are quoted in Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989), 66–67. Magdalen is quoted in Carmen Bernand and Serge Gruzinski, De la idolatrı´a: Una arqueologı´a de las ciencias religiosas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1988), 130. 55. The last quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 1. See 2, 19, 23, 84, 112, 158–159, 176, 267–268, 328, 423, 437, 445, and 457. In the previous sentence,

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the ﬁrst quoted passage is from Mele´ndez quoted in Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “Los dominicos en la vida cultural y acade´mica del Peru´ en el siglo XVI,” in Jose´ Barrado, Los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo (Salamanca: Editorial San Esteban, 1990), 407. The second and third are from Gonzalo Tenorio quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 633. The fourth is from Parra, Rosa laureada, 50. And the ﬁfth is from Vicente M. Caicedo, Sermo´n panegı´rico en honor de Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Arequipa: Imprenta de La Bolsa, 1898), 10; see 12. See also Parra, Rosa laureada, 134; Hansen, Vida admirable, 426; Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 140; and Gero´nimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesia´stica indiana (Mexico: Editorial Porru´a, 1980), 19 and 562. 56. Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 1. On the ﬁrst page of the 1617 ordinary process the metaphor is mixed: Rose emerged in the New World “where, as in a new Garden, plants are growing, raised at the breasts of the church with the milk of faith.” Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:1. 57. Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1673), 25. See Bartolome´ Martı´n in Parra, Rosa laureada, 605, where Rose is “transplanted today to the Paradise of Heaven.” The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 50 and 5, respectively. 58. Joseph de Moret quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 561. See Tercer Concilio Limense, Tercer cathecismo y exposicio´n de la doctrina cristiana, por sermones (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1585), 210. Rose’s parents were Creoles; “Spanish” here is to clarify that they were not indigenous. 59. Letter from the Lima Mercedarians to Urban VIII, quoted in Hansen, Vida admirable, 423. For the sterility, see Parra, Rosa laureada, 55. 60. The quoted passages are from Bartolome´ Martı´n quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 605; Gabriel de Cepeda quoted in ibid., 578; and Nicanor Aguilar, Tercer centenario de Santa Rosa de Lima (Cuenca, Ecuador: Alianza, 1917), 7, respectively. 61. See Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 42–44, 138, and 164–171. 62. Bernardo Cano in Parra, Rosa laureada, 544. See Graziano, Millennial New World, 162. Because she gave birth to the New Eve, Rose’s mother was spared the labor pains “with which Eve was punished for the ﬁrst sin.” Magdalena da Gloria (Leonarda Gil de Gama), Astro brillante en el Nuevo Mundo . . . , trans. Antonio del Riego (Manila: Thomas Adriano, 1755), 3. 63. Baptista de Marinis quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 134, and Gonzalo Tenorio in ibid., 633, respectively. See Parra, Rosa laureada, 53: Rose “transformed her Country into Celestial Paradise.” On the primordial curse, see Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 198. In Neolithic times, “the blood of the sacriﬁced victim that soaked into the ground was believed actually to fertilize it.” Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 161. In 1723, Rose and the Virgin of the Rosary were processed together as a remedy for sterility. Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia del culto de Marı´a en Iberoame´rica (Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1947), 511–512. 64. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:184. On roses in Eden, see Seward, Symbolic Rose, 21, and Ferguson, Signs and Symbols, 47–48. The beauty and fragrance of the rose were retained as a reminder of Paradise lost. 65. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from the Elucidation quoted in McDannell and Lang, Heaven: A History, 71–72. The passage from the novena is on the inside rear

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cover of Dı´a treinta de cada mes, consagrado en honor y culto de la gloria Virgen peruana Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Mexico: Imprenta de los Herederos del Lic. D. Joseph de Jauregui, 1794). 66. The last quoted passage is from Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 156; all of the others are from Ribero Leal, Oracio´n evange´lica, n.p. no. The role of New Eve was most commonly assigned to the Virgin Mary but was also extended to a range of others. Queen Isabel, for example, was regarded as a New Eve by some Franciscans. See Peggy K. Liss, Isabel the Queen: Life and Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 158. 67. John 20:15. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Parra, Rosa laureada, 25. Magdalen later became the patron saint of gardeners. Through garden motifs she was also regarded as a New Eve. See Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 65. In a thirteenth-century French Easter hymn, the seed is the Word of Christ. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 219. For another example of an agricultural Christ, see Rutherford H. Platt Jr., The Forgotten Books of Eden: Lost Books of the Old Testament (New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 138 (Ode of Solomon 38). 68. The quoted passages are from Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 61–62. 69. The quoted passages are from Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 218; Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, ﬁgure 13; and Parra, Rosa laureada, 16; respectively. For Catherine on showers of Christ’s blood, see Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), 1:108 and 1:110. See also Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 171. 70. This seemed to be prophetically foreshadowed. According to Bernabe´ Cobo, rose seeds were brought to Peru around 1552, and the ﬁrst rose was grown in Lima on the lot where later the Espiritu´ Santo hospital was constructed. The residence where Rose was born (in 1586) was adjacent to this lot. See Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 411 (Book 10, Chapter 37). The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 129. For Teresa on the soul as a garden, see Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, ed. Da´maso Chicharro (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 1987), 193. See 194–195 (a conceit on irrigation) and 222, 233, and 240–241. “Let each of us dig down after the root of evil that is within one, and let one pluck it out of one’s heart from the root.” Gospel of Philip in Brown, Body and Society, 117; see 124. Rose of Lima is at once the gardener and the ﬂower in Parra, Rosa laureada, 7. 71. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 103; Gonzalo Tenorio quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 640; and Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 9 (see 11), respectively. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 102–104 and 125; Bruno, Rosa, 63–65; and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:273. 72. Nicolas Martı´nez in Parra, Rosa laureada, 114. See Mircea Eliade, “The Yearning for Paradise in Primitive Tradition,” in Henry A. Murray, ed., Myth and Mythmaking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 65 and 69. 73. The quoted passages are from Geronymo Varona de Loaysa, Panegyrico a la beatiﬁcacio´n de la Sancta Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Guatemala: Joseph de Pineda Ybarra, 1670), 2 and 6. The etymology of “Gethsemane,” the name of the garden associated with Christ’s cruciﬁxion, suggests that it was an olive grove. On the rose and olive in Sirach, see Chevalier et al., Diccionario de los sı´mbolos, 892–893. See also Damasus Winzen, Symbols of Christ (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1955), 27, where the olive tree “is a symbol of consecration and blessing through the Spirit of God.” For Rose’s

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verses, see chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions” in this volume; Hansen, Vida admirable, 15; and Bruno, Rosa, 119. 74. Varona de Loaysa, Panegyrico, 6. The 1670 verses are quoted in Domingo Angulo, Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Estudio bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: Sanmarti, 1917), 49. 75. Raccamadori, Rosa limenses, ﬁgure 39. Tradition holds that the cross was made of four kinds of wood, including olivewood. See Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:278. Note also that before the cruciﬁxion Christ prayed on the Mount of Olives. 76. Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 179. For examples of the cross as the tree of life, see Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), 70–71; Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 598; and Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 103. 77. John 15:5. The image referenced in the previous sentence is The Cruciﬁxion from a Missal, French (Paris) c. 1270–1290, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 78. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 107. See Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 368–369. 79. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 14; Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 3 (see 157–161); and Origin quoted in Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 62. See Brown, Body and Society, 279. In medieval religious imagery clouds were sometimes a symbol of the Virgin carrying Christ, “the life-giving rain,” in her womb. Honorius Augustodunensis in Gottlieb, Window in Art, 116. For Christ referring to himself as a ﬂower in Rose’s hagiography, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 159. For Rose of Lima’s blossoming ﬂesh, see Jose´ Manuel Bermu´dez, Sermo´n panegı´rico de la admirable Virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1782), 7. 80. The images are in Alfonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum y historia general de la vida y hechos de Jesus Christo . . . (Valladolid, 1625) n.p. no.; and Alfonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, part 2 (Toledo, 1594), 101, respectively. The Cuzco-school painting is in Castedo, Cuzco Circle, 17. 81. Herman of Reun quoted in Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 169. See Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12–20. 82. Petrus Christus, La Virgen del arbol seco (c. 1450), in the Museo Thyssen, Madrid. 83. See Herbert Thurston, The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, ed. J. H. Crehan (London: Burnes Oates, 1952), 222, n. 1; and Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 428, n. 4. An alternate version, speciﬁc to Spain, argues conversely that the odor of sanctity was the result of a Catholic reaction to the ritual cleanliness and ablutions of Jews and Moslems. Sanctity is malodorous for Catholics who “considered physical dirt as the test of moral purity and true faith,” for nuns to whom “the very mention of a bath was an abomination,” and for their Capuchin confessors who viewed these unbathed nuns as a “pleasant garden of ﬂowers, fragrant with the good odor and reputation of sanctity.” The foul smell of the body is here a sign of heroic virtue. See Richard Ford, Gatherings from Spain (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1906), 154–155. The absence of

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bathing was also an important distinguishing factor between new Christians and Moors. For Moriscos “Bathing was presumed to be prima facie evidence of apostasy,” and Inquisition proceedings often include the phrase, “the accused was known to take baths.” See Crow, Spain, 149. For a foul smell as godly in Rose’s hagiography, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 259. Some contemporary Peruvians associate the odor of sanctity with body odor. 84. The quoted passages are from, respectively, 2 Corinthians 2:15; Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994), 52; Louth, Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition, 69; Elizabeth Robertson, “The Corporality of Female Sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret,” in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 281; and a thirteenth-century life quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 249 (see 55). Christ’s foreskin exuded the odor of sanctity. See David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 37. See also Thurston, Physical Phenomena, 223, and Vauchez, Sainthood, 428, n. 4. 85. Quoted in Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 50. Bernard of Clairvaux advised that one could be revived by “inhaling the fragrance of His sweetness.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 170 86. Hansen, Vida admirable, 106. The passages in the previous sentence are quoted in Melquiades Andre´s Martı´n, Los recogidos: Nueva vision de la mı´stica espan˜ola (1500–1700) (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1975), 404. 87. Quoted in Thurston, Physical Phenomena, 222, and Brown, Body and Society, 73, respectively. 88. Vauchez, Sainthood, 428, and Classen et al., Aroma, 53, respectively. 89. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:381. Earlier, Magdalen exuded “the perfume of the word of God” when she preached (1:377). The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Bernard Gui, “Flores Chronicorum,” in Head, Medieval Hagiography, 664. See Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 18. 90. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortiﬁcation in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 6 and 7, respectively. 91. The quoted phrase is from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:55. See KarenEdis Barzman, “Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena De’Pazzi,” Art History 15/2 (1992), 173. For another example of sweet-smelling corporal oils, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:18. 92. Pedro de Ribadeneira quoted in Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 167; see 170. See LouisVincent Thomas, El cada´ver: De la biologı´a a la antropologı´a, trans. Juan Damonte (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1989), 58. Teresa of Avila’s cause for canonization was initiated after the confessor of Philip II discovered fresh blood seeping from Teresa’s incorruptible corpse nine years after her death. See Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 148–149. The odor of sanctity was also sometimes present during a saintly person’s lifetime. For some examples, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 126; Bynum, Holy Feast, 171 and 211; and Oscar D. Ratnoff,

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“The Psychogenic Purpuras: A Review of Autoerythrocyte Sensitization, Autosensitization to DNA, ‘Hysterical’ and Factitial Bleeding, and the Religious Stigmata,” Seminars in Hematology 17/3 (1980), 208. 93. Angel Garma, “Un gesto obsceno de Santa Teresa,” Revista de psicoanalisis 50/ 1 (1993), 12. 94. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 165 and 88; Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, 12;, Brown, Body and Society, 343; and Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 167. For Eve’s “stink of pride” contrasted with sweet-smelling humility, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Song in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 162 95. From a thirteenth-century poem quoted in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 100. 96. Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 149. The quoted passages are from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:49. In a homily in the late sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great observed that “the woman previously used the ungent to perfume her ﬂesh in forbidden acts,” but, by anointing Christ’s feet, she was now offering the scents to God “in a more praiseworthy manner.” Quoted in Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 96. 97. The ﬁrst two quoted passages are from 2 Corinthians 2:16, and the third is from Catherine of Siena, Letters, 108. For an example of sin smelling like a cadaver, see Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 66. 98. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Nicanor Aguilar, Tercer centenario de Santa Rosa de Lima (Cuenca, Ecuador: Alianza, 1917), 16; and the others are in Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 117. She then vomited out the devil in the form of a toad, and when the toad was burned it emitted an “indescribably unpleasant smell.” 99. Hansen, Vida admirable, 168 and 249. 100. Vauchez, Sainthood, 513 and 437. 101. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 448. See Thomas, El cada´ver, 59–65, and Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad, 170–172. Incorruptible ﬂesh originally had the opposite interpretation—it was attributed to the devil, and a formula for excommunication read, “After death, your body will be totally incorruptible.” Thomas, El cada´ver, 59. Later the Church changed course and interpreted incorruptibility as a sign of sanctity. 102. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 252; the quoted passage is on 78. 103. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:82 and 83. 104. The quoted passage is from Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 101. See 1 Corinthians 15:42–49. 105. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Michel Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1990), 166. See 194–195: “God marked their unviolated bodies with permanent inviolability” (195). The fourth-century Cyril of Jerusalem argued that by digesting God one becomes indigestible to death. See Bynum, Resurrection, 80. 106. Hansen, Vida admirable, 335 (two passages) and 344. 107. A 1618 document included in Angulo, Santa Rosa, 8, and Nicola´s de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 584. 108. The quoted passages are from the testimony of Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis

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Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 206; and Bruno, Rosa, 181, respectively. 109. Hansen, Vida admirable, 347, 348, and 348, respectively. 110. Ibid., 352–353. Only Rose’s hands evidenced corruption, perhaps, Hansen speculated, due to the many kisses they had received during the funeral. 111. The quoted passages are from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:909–910; see 907. 112. Hansen, Vida admirable, 356 and 66, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:236, respectively. 113. The quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:215; Alexander Pope quoted in Coats, Flowers in History, 165; and Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, unnumbered preface, respectively. 114. Mogrovejo’s involvement, generally held to be historical, may be a hagiographic embellishment; see Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 14. To the dismay of some viceroys, Mogrovejo spent more than half his time as archbishop on pastoral visits to remote regions of Peru. It was during one of these that he probably baptized Rosa. See Guillermo Pons Pons, “Santo Toribio y sus acompan ˜ antes en la visita pastoral,” Missionalia hispa´nica / Hispania Sacra 43 (1991), 607–624. For a name-change crisis in the life of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, see Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (1566–1607),” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 213. I discuss the conﬂict between the mother and grandmother in chapter 7, “Spiritualized Symptoms.” Rose was baptized on the day sometimes referred to as the “Pasqua de Rosas.” See Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 2; and Cata´ de Calella, Vida, 15. In the baptismal record it is referred to as “Pasqua de Espiritu´ Santo.” 115. See Bruno, Rosa, 13. There are conﬂicting testimonies regarding Rose’s age at the time, but she appears to have been around twenty or twenty-ﬁve years old. See Bruno, Rosa, 15. 116. Hansen, Vida admirable, 4–5. See the testimony of Jaime Blanco, in Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:31. The previous quoted passage is from Alonso Vela´squez quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 15; see 15–16 117. Hansen, Vida admirable, 5; Marı´a de Oliva quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 16; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 5 (see 4–5), respectively. For similar words attributed to Rose herself, see Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:181. Rose discovered with relief that there was a previous saint, Rose of Viterbo, who had the same name. See Bruno, Rosa, 14 and 17; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 148–149; and Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia, 475. 118. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:241. See also the copy of the ordinary process in the Lilly Library, Indiana University, p. 141; and Bruno, Rosa, 12. The servant girl who ﬁrst witnessed the rose face was described as a “campesina” in the mother’s 1617 testimony and as a “negrita” in the 1631 testimony. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:241 (also Lilly Library manuscript copy, 141, and Bruno, Rosa, 12); and Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:133 and 134. 119. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:133 and 134. The mother at the time was sixty-ﬁve years old; the interview took place in the convent of Santa Catalina de Sena. Luis de Bilbao, one of Rose’s confessors, also mapped the evolution of the evolving miracle in his testimony. The Indian girl “saw her face with such unusual beauty”—nothing miraculous there—but when Bilbao registered the

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mother’s perception the face was then “a fresh and beautiful rose.” Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:232. 120. In Bruno, Rosa, 12. The father, Gaspar Flores, had little to say during the ordinary process, perhaps due to his advanced age. All of his answers were brief, and he often responded, “I don’t know.” When he was questioned regarding the rose miracle and the name change, he responded that it was as his wife had testiﬁed. Gaspar Flores was already deceased when the apostolic process occurred in the early 1630s. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:252. 121. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Catalina de Terar, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:249; Jaime Blanco, ibid., 1574:31; and Mariana de Oliva, ibid., 1574:429. Mariana was born in 1585; see Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 29 and 40. 122. The quoted passages in the last sentence are from, respectively, Walter Molina Frı´as, Nacimiento, consagracio´n, muerte y beatiﬁcacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Ediciones Populares, 1994), 13; and Edelvives, Santa Rosa de Lima (Barcelona: Editorial Luis Vives, 1933), 4 (two passages). The previous quoted passages are from, respectively, Breve relacion de la prodigiosa vida, y maravillosos milagros de la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, del Orden de Predicadores (Madrid: n.p., 1668), 1; and Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 2. 123. Elias Taxa Cuadroz, La vida de Santa Rosa (Lima: Asociacio´n Editorial Bruno, n.d.), 8. The Medoro image is in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 171. 124. The quoted passages are from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:65; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 148; and Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:5, respectively. 125. The last quoted passage is from Sister Mary Alphonsus, St. Rose of Lima: Patroness of the Americas (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1968), 47; see 46. The previous quoted passages are from, respectively, Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima, Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 2 (the book is included in Vatican 1574, pp. 568–643); Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de la Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 1:179; Sara Maynard, Rose of America (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1943), 6; and Thomas M. Schwertner, America’s Saint and Protectress, Rose of Lima: A Study and Interpretation of Her Life with a Novena to Her (New York: Rosary Press, 1917), 7. In a wayward variant image the entire body, not just the face, is miraculously transformed into a Rose. See Parra, Rosa laureada, 561. In an early-eighteenth-century Peruvian painting by an unknown artist, Rosa’s entire body seems to grow from the enormous rose on which it is situated. Gabrielle Palmer and Donna Pierce, Cambios: The Spirit of Transformation in Spanish Colonial Art (Albuquerque: Santa Barbara Museum of Art in cooperation with the University of New Mexico Press, 1992), plate 23. 126. Jose´ Antonio Cata´ de Calella, Vida portentosa de la esclarecida virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Barcelona: Librerı´a y Tipografı´a Cato´lica, 1896), 17. 127. The quoted passages are from Frances Parkinson Keyes, The Rose and the Lily (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961), 90, and Victorino Osende, Vida y novena de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Talleres de Ramı´rez Hermanos, 1914), 11, respectively. 128. The quoted passages are from Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima: Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 17, and J. M. Vargas, “Rose of Lima, St.,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 12:674. 129. Maria Wiesse, Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: n.p. [c. 1920), 20–21. 130. Luis Martı´n, Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 283; and Manuel de Mendiburu, Diccionario histo´rico-biogra´ﬁco del Peru´ (Lima: Editorial Arica, 1934), 10:63, respectively.

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131. The quoted passages are from Vela´squez in Bruno, Rosa, 79; Loayza, Vida, 10; and Mariana de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 71, respectively. Rose’s brother Hernando likewise remarked that when Rose was embarrassed or when she exercised, her cheeks were ﬂushed with a bright “rosy color” (in Bruno, Rosa, 80). 132. Juan de Vargas Machuca, La Rosa de el Peru´, Soror Isabel de Santa Marı´a (Seville: Juan Go´mez de Blas, 1659), 5 and 66. The motif of a beautiful rose face has a complement in a Spanish ballad. See “Face Like a Flower” in W. S. Merwin, ed. and trans., Some Spanish Ballads (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961), 78–79. 133. The last quoted passage is from Cristo´bal Aranda Valdivia, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:707–708. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 304– 305. According to Hansen, the girl was born with the prophesied rose sign on her cheek and after her parents’ early death she became a nun and lived (like Rose’s mother) in Lima’s Convent of Santa Catalina. The previous quoted passages are from Manuel Antonio Urrixmendi, Sermo´n panegı´rico que en honor y celebridad de la gloriosa virgen santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Patrona de Ame´rica Meridional, dixo en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Lima el dia 30 agosto de 1812 (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1812), 10, and Espinosa Medrano, Novena maravilla, 266, respectively.

chapter 4 1. The Council of Trent was theoretically a general council, but southern Europe and particularly Spain were overrepresented. Of the 270 bishops who attended, 218 were Italian or Spanish. Spain prohibited attendance by bishops from the colonies. See Reynerio Lebroc, “Proyeccio´n tridentina en Ame´rica,” Missionalia hispa´nica 26/77 (1969), 135–140; and Severo Aparicio, “Inﬂujo de Trento en los Concilios Limenses,” Missionalia hispa´nica 29/86 (1972), 217–220 and 238–239. 2. J. H. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 1469–1716 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), 293. On Philip as the Last World Emperor, see Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32–34. 3. The last two quoted passages are from Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 10; and Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 80, respectively. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Certeau, Heterologies, 84. At times the connection between the wounds of the body and social body are explicit. For an example, see Richard L. Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, eds., Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 119. 4. The quoted passages are from Certeau, Heterologies, 86. See Certeau, Mystic Fable, 14 and 19. See also Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 96. 5. The quoted phrase is from Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:276. 6. The phrase quoted parenthetically is in Melquiades Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica de la edad de oro en Espan˜a y Ame´rica (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1994), 275. On Catalina Ruiz, see Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy:

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Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 114. 7. Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica, 274. When the Inquisition moved against the Alumbrados, its intent was “to consolidate the power of a hierarchical mystery religion hermetically controlled by priests.” See Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 29. The fact that many Alumbrados were conversos (converted Jews) also complicated their fate. The quoted phrase is Jan van Ruusbroec in James A. Wiseman, “ ‘To Be God with God’: The Autotheistic Sayings of the Mystics,” Theological Studies 51 (1990), 241. 8. From a 1512 document quoted in Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y Espan˜a: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1966), 68. See Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Pilar Herna´ndez Aparicio, La Inquisicio´n de Lima (1570–1635) (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1989), 1:296–297. Mid-sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition documents record similar beliefs: one’s abandonment to God’s will was sufﬁcient for salvation without penance, good deeds, mortiﬁcation, or external demonstrations of faith (323; see 251, 268, 270); Christ was more perfectly present in the soul than in the eucharist (259); and oral prayer, including the rosary, was unnecessary (252; see 271–272). See the indicated pages of the “Edicto de los alumbrados de Toledo” and the summaries of the processes against Pedro Ruı´z de Alcaraz and against Isabel de la Cruz, all appended to Antonio Ma´rquez, Los alumbrados: Orı´genes y ﬁlosofı´a (1525–1559) (Madrid: Taurus, 1980). 9. Elliott, Imperial Spain, 237. On the Granada editions, see Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica, 303–304. See also Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 23–25. Those who popularized mysticism (including Rose’s spiritual interlocutor, Juan del Castillo) were also punished in Lima. See Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 118. 10. See Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 135, where sanctity was “achieved in ﬁfteen days” and, by one braggart, in three. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica, 303; see the censure document quoted on 304. 11. Melchor Cano quoted in Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica, 304. For Carranza’s position, see 114. The quoted phrase is from Melquiades Andre´s Martı´n, Los recogidos: Nueva visio´n de la mı´stica espan˜ola (1500–1700) (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1975), 429. 12. At the conclusion of this book, Granada advised “tempered and moderate devotion” (325); see 324–325. He also regarded asceticism and mortiﬁcation as necessary complements of contemplative prayer, thereby implicitly curtailing casual use of his handbook (333, 341). Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979). 13. Geraldine McKendrick and Agnus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Perry and Cruz, Cultural Encounters, 99–100. 14. The quoted phrase is from Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Pedro M. Guibovich Pe´rez, “Esplendor y religiosidad en el tiempo de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 7; see 4–7. In the 1614 census, Lima had 9,616 Spaniards; 10,386 blacks; 744 mulattos; and 192 mestizos; most Indians were not counted. See Felipe Barreda Laos, Vida intelectual del virreinato del Peru´ (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1964), 32.

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notes to pages 94–95

15. Nancy E. van Deusen, “Deﬁning the Sacred and the Worldly: ‘Beatas’ and ‘Recogidas’ in Late-Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 6/4 (1997), 445. Pursuant to the 1293 bull of Boniface VIII, women within the Church were to remain “altogether withdrawn from public and mundane sights.” Quoted in Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 179. On beatas, see Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 1:295–296; Andre´s Martı´n, Los recogidos, 22–23; James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 163; and Nancy E. van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). The Dominican beatas were the ﬁrst to organize into a beaterio (community for holy secular women), in 1548, when a beata donated her house to provide shelter for poor women. Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 163; and van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly, 169. 16. Quoted in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 567. Early Christian discourse on virginity promoted the idea of escaping marriage in order to free oneself for devotion to Christ. See Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 52; see 154–155. Teresa of Avila exclaimed, regarding marriage, “See what slavery you have escaped from, sisters!” Saint Teresa of Jesus, The Complete Works, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 2:107. 17. Quoted in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde de la perfeccio´n: Rosa de Santa Marı´a y las alumbradas de Lima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73/4 (1993), 610. 18. Quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 555 and 532. 19. Ibid., 557–561. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 595 n. 39. On the meeting of Rose and Melgarejo, see Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:56. On Castillo, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 136. 20. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 531; Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Vidas de santos y santas vidas: Hagiograﬁas reales e imaginarias en Lima colonial,” Anuario de estudios americanos, 51/1 (Seville, 1994), 49; and Luis Miguel Glave, De Rosa y espinas: Economı´a, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 1998), 148. 21. For other explanations of why Rose of Lima was canonized while other beatas were prosecuted by the Inquisition, see Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 18: “Perhaps it was simply a twist of fate that decided things, because it was Isabel Flores de Oliva [Rose of Lima] who died ﬁrst.” This thesis was introduced earlier by Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 608. Mujica Pinilla argued that Rose’s sense of herself as “the greatest sinner in the world” resulted in mortiﬁcations in excess of those practiced by others: “This single fact separates Saint Rose from her fragile imitators” (“El ancla,” 64). Rene´ Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad e Inquisicio´n: Los procesos a las visionarias limen ˜ as,” Boletı´n de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 108–109 (2000), 300, argued that the other beatas were false and seeking notoriety, but Rose “did not fake her sanctity.” 22. Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London: George Allen &

notes to pages 95–98

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Unwin, 1984), 45. See Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 49; and Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 151. 23. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 46; and testimony in Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 79. See Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 81 and Hansen, Vida admirable, 49. 24. Loayza, Vida, 80. 25. Ibid., 80–81; see 80–83. The Granada passage is from his Libro de oracio´n, 47–48. Humility and virginity were closely associated in Augustine’s thought; see Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991), 51. 26. The quoted passages are from Juan Castillo de Benavides, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:265, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 39, respectively. See Fray Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 103. 27. Luis G. Alonso Getino, La patrona de Ame´rica ante los nuevos documentos (Madrid: Imprenta E. Gime´nez, 1927), 28–29. 28. A 1644 Inquisition summary quoted in Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 1:334. In the thirteenth-century mystical spectacles—“a form of public theater”—were more favorably viewed and even promoted by friars. See Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 140. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Diego Pe´rez de Valdivia, Aviso a gente recogida, ed. Alvaro Huerga (Madrid: Universidad Pontiﬁcia de Salamanca and Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1977 [1585]), 471. For discussion of “spiritual arrogance,” see 471–487. For the similar concept of “spiritual self-will,” see Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 187. 29. The quoted passages are from Pe´rez de Valdivia, Aviso, 390, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 136. 30. Pe´rez de Valdivia, Aviso, 578–579 and 532, respectively., 31. Quoted in Solange Alberro, Inquisicio´n y sociedad en Mexico, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1988), 496. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 600, and Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 282. 32. Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 560. 33. Bartolome´ Lobo Guerrero and Fernando Arias de Ugarte, Sı´nodos de Lima de 1613 y 1636 (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Histo´ricos del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ﬁcas and Instituto de Historia de la Teologı´a Espan ˜ ola de la Universidad Pontiﬁcia de Salamanca, 1987), 166–167. On Teresa, see Weber, Teresa of Avila, 138. St. John of the Cross observed that “all visions, revelations and feelings coming from heaven, and any thoughts that may proceed from these, are of less worth than the least act of humility.” Quoted in Richard Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition,” in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 250. 34. All quotations are from Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad.” The passage on Ubitarte is from an Inquisition document quoted on 302. The passage on Carranza is from an Inquisition document quoted on 285.

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notes to pages 98–102

35. The quoted passages in the ﬁrst sentence are from Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 111. The quoted passage in the last sentence is from Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 204. 36. Kleinberg, Prophets, 111–112. 37. The quoted passages are from Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 170 (see 174–176), 112, and 113 (see 28). 38. Hansen, Vida admirable, 232; for another example, see 234–235. 39. Ibid., 61, 196, and 61, respectively; see 188 and 209. The ﬁnal quotes are from 325 and 317, respectively. 40. See Bruno, Rosa, 42–43 and 133, and testimony of Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 180. The Jesuits in Lima supported mysticism, while Jesuits in Rome and Spain were critical of it. See Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad,” 304. 41. Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 205. Already in the early eighth century a hagiographer observed that his recording of a saintly life would be “of great gain and value” to himself. Eddius Stephanus quoted in Thomas Head, “Introduction,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000), xiii. 42. For examples, see Bruno, Rosa, 30, 34, 59, and 92; Hansen, Vida admirable, 22; and Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:191. 43. Hansen, Vida admirable, 336 (two phrases), and Loayza, Vida, 118, respectively. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 151–152. 44. Pedro de Ortega Sotomayor, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:480. See Bruno, Rosa, 58. For examples of de la Maza’s assistance and advocacy, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 54; Bruno, Rosa, 70; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 155. On the meeting in the Jesuit church, see Bruno, Rosa, 56. 45. Hansen, Vida admirable, 140. 46. Ibid., 219. 47. De la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 207–208. See Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 2. Verdugo served from 1601 to 1623. See Bruno, Rosa, 179, for involvement of the viceroy, his wife, and other elites. 48. The last quoted passage is from Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 47; see 25–43. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 208; see Hansen, Vida admirable, 349. 49. Political aspects of mysticism are discussed at length in Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 50. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 159, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 336. “To a good life, a good death; and to a good death, assured salvation.” See Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 164. 51. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 143. As discussed in chapter 5, “Mysticism as Dissent,” mysticism was nevertheless subversive of sacerdotal privileges.

notes to pages 102–105

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52. All quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,” 583. 53. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, “Los testigos de Santa Rosa,” El Comercio (August 31, 1994), and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 110 and 116; see 115–116. See Bernard Lavalle´, Las promesas ambiguas: Ensayos sobre el criollismo colonial en los Andes (Lima: Instituto Riva-Agu¨ero, 1993), 173–185. 54. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 177; and Luis Miguel Glave, “Santa Rosa y sus espinas,” in Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano: Vol. 1, Espiritualidad barroca colonial: Santos y demonios en Ame´rica (Mexico: Condumex, 1993), 61–62. 55. Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 170. See Lavalle´, Promesas ambiguas, 15–21. 56. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 177; and Comisio´n de Sen ˜ oras encargadas de las Fiestas del Centenario, Recuerdo de las Fiestas del Tercer Centenario de la Muerte de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Imprenta Artista, 1917), 53. Nationalist sentiments could also be transcendentalized: Rose left her homeland for “the celestial Fatherland [patria].” Hansen, Vida admirable, 310; repeated on 311. 57. Thomas Polvorosa Lo´pez, “La canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima a trave´s del Bullarium Ordinis FF. Praedicatorum,” in Actas del 1 congreso internacional sobre los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1988), 626. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 61. For Rose’s canonization as a “show of Dominican inﬂuence in the Vatican,” see Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 531. On the orders as pressure groups, see Stephen Wilson, “Introduction,” in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 5–6. 58. An anonymous Compendio or Vida de Santa Rosa was published in 1665 and may also have been read by Clement IX. This hagiography, like Hansen’s, went through several editions. 59. Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 79. On Clement IX’s will and briefs, see Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima, Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 122 and 123, n. 1. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 452 and 541, n. 1. 60. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 434, 445, 481, and 471. The same message was carried by the caption of a painting displayed in Rome at the time of Rose’s beatiﬁcation. See Francisco de Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, celebres aclamaciones, que la siempre triumphante Roma dio a la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Virgen de Lima, en su solemne beatiﬁcacio´n (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 16. 61. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Iva´n de Espinosa Medrano, La novena maravilla . . . (Rome: Joseph de Rueda, 1695), 267. The others are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 48 and 5, respectively. See Michael Goodich, “The Politics of Canonization in the Thirteenth Century: Lay and Mendicant Saints,” in Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults, 182–183. 62. Parra, Rosa laureada, 47 and 53. Rose “promises the Church a more abundant harvest” of Indians (53). Other friars made similar statements; see Hansen, Vida admirable, 375. 63. Joseph Antonio de San Alberto, Carta que el illustrisimo Sen˜or D. Fr. Joseph Antonio De San Alberto, Arzobispo de La Plata, Escribio´ a los Indios inﬁeles Chirihuanos (Buenos Aires: Real Imprenta de los Nin ˜ os Expositos, 1788), 24. I am grateful to Da-

274

notes to pages 105–108

vid Weber for calling this document to my attention. The previous quoted phrase is from Nicolas Martı´nez quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 124. 64. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, Informe a N. Rmo P.M. general de el Orden de Prediccadores (Matriti, Spain: Gregorius Forstman faciebat, 1659), 212; Bull of canonization appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 485. For the reference to Luke 8, see Antonio de Vergara in Parra, Rosa laureada, 124. 65. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 274, 297–301, 371–380, and 451. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from a 1634 letter from the Cabildo of Lima to the pope, appended to Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 133 66. Appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 447. See 446. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:485. One of the earliest brides of Christ, Catherine of Alexandria, was associated with orthodoxy due to her success in converting the ﬁfty pagan philosophers sent to persuade her to apostasize. See “The Old Czech Life of Catherine of Alexandria,” in Head, Medieval Hagiography, 766 and 775. 67. Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 57; see 61–62. The king advocated Rose’s cause as early as 1624. For the text of this and the other mentioned letters from Philip IV, see Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, Informe, 211–215. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is quoted in Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia del Peru´ (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1954), 2:188. See Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, Ce´dulas del an ˜ o 1619 (Signatura Mss. 2989), 956, for the April 1618 letter. 68. The quoted passages are in Hansen, Vida admirable, 437 and 483, respectively. 69. The quoted passages are from Carlos Fisas, Historias de las reinas de Espan˜a (Madrid: Editorial Planeta, 1996), 134, 139, and 146. The paraphrase in the last sentence is also from 146. The cited paintings of Mariana are in the Prado Museum, the El Greco Museum, and El Escorial, respectively. 70. Julia´n Juderı´as, Espan˜a en tiempo de Carlos II, El Hechizado (Madrid: Revista de Archivos, Bibliotecas y Museos, 1912), 235, n. 1. 71. Jose´ Calvo Poyato, Carlos II el Hechizado y su e´poca (Madrid: Editorial Planeta, 1991), 48. 72. Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, “En torno a la canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” El Comercio, Web version (May 5, 1998), 21:55. The other saints were the Jesuit San Francisco de Borja (1510–1572) and the Dominican San Luis Beltra´n (1526–1581), both from Valencia. 73. Bartolome´ Garcı´a in Parra, Rosa laureada, 169. Rose’s mother was also named Marı´a. The cryptogram with “Carlos” is on 167. 74. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Fray Diego Barriga, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:258; Loayza, Vida, 126; and Bruno, Rosa, 179. See Loayza, Vida, 121. 75. The quoted passages are from, respectively, the September 1, 1617, letter of Nicolas de Agu¨ero, Apostolic Process, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, 585; Juan del Tineo Almanza quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 179; and Luisa de Santa Marı´a, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:165. For other examples, see 195; ibid., 1570:83; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 204. 76. Antonio Rodrı´guez quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 174. See Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima,” 629 and 638–639. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 419. 77. Hansen, Vida admirable, 259 and 297. See Weinstein and Bell, Saints and

notes to pages 108–113

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Society, 157, where extraordinary dedication to disenfranchised people results in devotion even in the absence of miracles. For transfer of Rose’s curative power, see Noemı´ Quezada, “The Inquisiton’s Repression of Curanderos,” in Perry and Cruz, Cultural Encounters, 49. 78. See Bruno, Rosa, 108, 157–158, and 181; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 301–302, 305–307, and 336. The mother approved of Rose’s move to the de la Maza residence in part to stop the ﬂow of sick people who came seeking cure by Rose. See Bruno, Rosa, 105. 79. This example and the quoted passage in the previous sentence are from Manuel M. Marzal, Los caminos religiosos de los inmigrantes en la gran Lima: El caso de El Agustino (Lima: Pontiﬁcia Universidad Cato´lica del Peru´, 1988), 84 and 123, respectively. A certain Fray Juan cast a net in Rose’s name and received in return a mixed blessing: “He caught so many ﬁsh that his net was torn to pieces.” Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:433. A 1698 sermon in Mexico beseeched Rose’s intercession to eradicate the natives’ fondness for pulque. Joseph Sarmiento Sotomayor, Patrocinio aplaudido, y coronado celebridad, de Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, en la santa Iglesia Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Me´xico, corte de esta Nueva Espan˜a (Mexico: Juan Joseph Guillena, 1698), 23. “There are many reasons for this devotion to saints,” Salimbene de Adam recognized already in 1283; “the sick crave health, the curious are looking for novelties, the clerics are motivated by their envy toward the modern religious, and the bishops and canons are motivated by greed.” Quoted in Kleinberg, Prophets, 19.

chapter 5 1. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 121; and the second is from Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 338. 2. The quoted passages are from Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 179 (two passages), and Hansen, Vida admirable, 342, respectively. See Bruno, Rosa, 178, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 341 on the carrying of the corpse. The dismemberment of sacred bodies for relics was common. For examples, see Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 430–431; and Jo Ann McNamara, “The Need to Give: Suffering and Female Sanctity in the Middle Ages,” in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 209. 3. The quoted passages are from Juan Costilla de Benavides quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 178. 4. The quoted phrase is in Bruno, Rosa, 179. See Loayza, Vida, 124. 5. The quoted passages are in Hansen, Vida admirable, 345 (see 344), and Bruno, Rosa, 179, respectively. 6. A rumor later alleged that the Dominicans had stolen Rose’s body and sent it to Spain. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 357–358. 7. The quoted passages are from Diego de la Torre quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 180; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 344, 345, and 346. 8. The quoted passages are from Juan del Tineo Almanza quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 180, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 345, respectively. See Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 206.

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notes to pages 113–115

9. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 345–346; Juan del Tineo Almanza quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 181; and Diego de la Torre, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:283. See Loayza, Vida, 123, and Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesiastico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 351. Some sources indicate that a toe, rather than a ﬁnger, was cut off. See Bruno, Rosa, 181. At the time of Rose’s beatiﬁcation the archbishop of Lima sent a letter to the pope requesting excommunication for those who profaned and mutilated Rose’s remains. See Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 540. After canonization a bronze plaque warned that anyone who stole Rose’s bones would be excommunicated. See Domingo Angulo, Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Estudio bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: n.p., 1917), 31–32. 10. Hansen, Vida admirable, 348–349 and 357. 11. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 350, and Marı´a de Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 181, respectively. 12. Angel Lo´pez Cantos, Juegos, ﬁestas y diversiones en la Ame´rica espan˜ola (Madrid: Editorial Mapfre, 1992), 113. See Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 179. 13. Hansen, Vida admirable, 352. See Bruno, Rosa, 185. Hampe Martı´nez gives the date of the transfer as May 18. Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 52. On Lobo Guerrero, see Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado, “Don Bartolome´ Lobo Guerrero, tercer Arzobispo de Lima,” Anuario de estudios americanos 33 (1976), 58–59. 14. In the note accompanying her collages, Rose mentioned spiritual notebooks in which she had written on “several occasions.” See Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 62–63, n. 1. Regarding the denial to submit Rose’s writings to Rome, see Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Vidas de santos y santas vidas: Hagiografı´as reales e imaginarias en Lima colonial,” Anuario de estudios americanos 51/1 (Seville: n.p., 1994), 56–57; Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 53–54; and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Pedro M. Guibovich Pe´rez, “Esplendor y religiosidad en el tiempo de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 27–28. 15. Quoted in Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Pilar Herna´ndez Aparicio, La Inquisicio´n de Lima (1570–1635) (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1989), 1:334. 16. The quoted passages are from Pedro Ramı´rez de Balde´z in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 63. 17. The quoted passage is in Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima: Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 118, n. 1. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 52, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 177. Note that Gaita´n had an inimical relation with Archbishop Lobo Guerrero, who actively supported devotion to Rose. Gaita´n also dominated and had poor relations with his co-Inquisitor, Francisco Verdugo. Verdugo, who expressed devotion to Rose during her funeral, would perhaps have been less inclined to repress her cult. See Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 1:12. 18. See Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:436–437; Hansen, Vida admirable, 357; and Gonzalo

notes to pages 115–118

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Andre´s de Meneses y Arce, Ilustracio´n de la Rosa del Peru´ (Lima: Imprenta de Juan de Quevedo, 1670), 73; see 77. The quoted passage is from testimony in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 177. There appears to be some confusion and disagreement regarding the whereabouts of Rose’s remains. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 63; Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 56; Vargas Ugarte, Flor de Lima, 138; Hansen, Vida admirable, 357 (note the typographical error; the 1649 date should read 1639); see 540, n. 3; Iwasaki Cauti, “Vidas de santos y santas vidas,” 56–57; and Jose´ Antonio Cata´ de Calella, Vida portentosa de la esclarecida virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Barcelona: Librerı´a y Tipografı´a Cato´lica, 1896), 314. 19. Hansen, Vida admirable, 355. 20. Ibid., 356. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 52; Vargas Ugarte, Flor de Lima, 118; and Bruno, Rosa, 185–186. 21. Quoted in Peter Burke, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 46; see 46–47. There were only six canonizations in the sixteenth century, as opposed to twenty-four in the seventeenth and twenty-nine in the eighteenth. 22. Eric Waldram Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church (New York: AMS Press, 1980), 145. See Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 141–142. 23. Hansen, Vida admirable, 357–358 (see 540), and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:437. Mele´ndez has 1640 as the removal date. 24. The last quoted passage is from Gonzalo Andre´s de Meneses y Arce, Ilustracio´n, 81; see 80. The other quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 357–358. 25. Precocious iconography contributed to this effort. Approved devotional images of Rose, printed in Rome, were already appearing in Lima in 1631 (Hansen, Vida admirable, 382–383 and 412). One of the standard iconographic motifs, that of Rose holding an anchor in one hand and a ring of ﬂowers with the Christ child in the other, was engraved in Europe as early as 1649. See Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Santa Rosa de Lima en el Grabado, Siglo XVII,” Cultura Peruana 7/30–31 (1947), ﬁgure 1. 26. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 19. A brief prepared by Dominicans is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 420 27. Urban VIII’s Coelestis Hierusalem was released on July 5, 1634; see Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 58. Excerpts from the mentioned letters are in Hansen, Vida admirable, 420–426. 28. All quoted passages are from the document included in Hansen, Vida admirable, 430–431. 29. A marble statue of Rose by Melchor Caffa´ (dated 1665) was exhibited at the beatiﬁcation and later sent to Lima; it was therefore commissioned by Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a at least three years before Rose’s beatiﬁcation. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 156, and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 79–81. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 432. Alexander VII is quoted from Thomas Polvorosa Lo´pez, “La canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima a trave´s del Bullarium Ordinis FF. Praedicatorum,” in Actas del 1 congreso internacional sobre los Dominicos y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1988), 623. 30. The quoted passage is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 446. See 432 and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 65. 31. The quoted passage is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 438. Devotion to Rose was restricted to the Archbishopric of Lima and the Dominican order, but papal dispensa-

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tions conceded to royal petitions and eventually permitted devotion throughout the Spanish empire. Clement IX also permitted a mass and offered a plenary indulgence in England. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 435, 439, 453, and 455. For the text of Clement’s 1668 briefs, see Parra, Rosa laureada, 87–88. See also Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 635. 32. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 462; Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, Informe, 211; and Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 113–114. The title “saint” was also precociously applied to Rose in formal contexts (and, far more so, in popular usage). The ﬁrst hagiography of Rose, written in 1619 and integrated into the 1631–1632 apostolic process, made reference to “Saint Rose” (Loayza, Vida, 21). Such usage was prohibited by Urban VIII in 1634, but it nevertheless continued in authorized print sources. For an example, see Parra, Rosa Laureada, 605. 33. The last quoted passages are in Hansen, Vida admirable, 460–461. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are in Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 636. 34. The last quoted passage is from the bull quoted in Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 637. The viceroy was informed of this by the queen on March 11, 1669. Lima formally ratiﬁed the patronage on August 16, 1669. See Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad, 113–114. The quoted passages in the previous sentences are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 461. Text of the document is in Parra, Rosa laureada, 89–90. See Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 636–637. 35. Hansen, Vida admirable, 470; Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 637. 36. The quoted passages are from Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 185. See 161–162. 37. The quoted passages are from Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 1, 2, 12 (see 9), and 8, respectively. I am paraphrasing Ozment throughout this paragraph. See Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 31–32. The medieval Church silenced women, “but the language and behavior of the female spirituality that emerged during the early sixteenth century circumvented this silence, and some women seized the opportunity.” Geraldine McKendrick and Agnus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Perry and Cruz, Cultural Encounters, 100. Women thus “used sanctity as an alternative avenue to power.” McNamara, “Need to Give,” 199. See Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 1, where mysticism provided a basis for the “the latent revolutionary possibilities of the Christian religion.” Following Ozment, Certeau wrote, “Haunted by the certainty of extinction,” mystics “vacillated between ecstasy and revolt—mysticism and dissent” because “they had nothing left but present exile.” Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 85. See Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 63–65 and 135. 38. On the Helfta nuns, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 205. See also 202, 222–223, and 236–237. Such visions indicate “a precarious balance between support of and (totally unintentional) threat to ecclesiastical hierarchy” (224). The nuns of Helfta had “visions of themselves as priests” which “enabled them to serve as counselors, mediators, and channels to the sacraments” even while ostensibly

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remaining subordinate and upholding clerical prerogative (184). For Bynum’s conclusions, see 258–262. “Mysticism was always subversive of the ecclesiastical hierarchy even when it was most supportive of the sacraments of the church.” McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 351. On the Dominicans, see Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 145. On Foligno, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 111. On de’Pazzi, see Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (1566–1607),” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 214. On Alacoque, see Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 23–24. For discussion of mystics circumventing clerical authority, see John Coakley, “Friars as Conﬁdants of Holy Women In Medieval Dominican Hagiography,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, Images of Sainthood, 222–246. See also Bell, Holy Anorexia, 160. In Lima, the Virgin Mary informed the beata Ine´s Velasco that her son would be a “reformer of religion.” Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde de la perfeccio´n: Rosa de Santa Marı´a y las alumbradas de Lima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73/4 (1993), 600. 39. The quoted passage is from Certeau, Heterologies, 92. When the uses of mysticism were openly political, the repressive response of Church and state was more severe. For examples, see Richard L. Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, eds., Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 106 and 118–119; and Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Herna´ndez Aparicio, Inquisicio´n de Lima, 297–312. 40. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, 9 (two passages); and Antonio de Vega Loayza, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:146. As God explained to Catherine of Siena, “it is far better to walk by the spiritual counsel of a humble and unschooled person with a holy and upright conscience than by that of a well-read but proud scholar with great knowledge.” Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 157. 41. Hansen, Vida admirable, 220 and 246. Disdain for theological pondering was another factor that likened Rose of Lima’s mysticism to that of the Alumbrados, some of whom believed that “in order to know God, the study of letters is not necessary” and “learning killed the spirit.” For these and other observations on “anti-intellectual and affective thought,” see McKendrick and MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality,” 98. 42. The Clement passage is quoted in Polvorosa Lo´pez, “Canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa,” 638. 43. Hansen, Vida admirable, 18. See Loayza, Vida, 6. For a later, hyperbolic version, see Juan de Isturisaja in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n, y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: 1671), 49. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Alonso Vela´squez quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 84. 44. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:189. 45. The ﬁrst quoted passages is from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 152; see Bruno, Rosa, 33. On blind obedience see Cata´ de Calella, Vida portentosa, 27, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:188. A contemporary booklet depicts a servile Rose obeying her mother’s orders, with the caption, “she was always meek and respectful.” Santa

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notes to pages 123–126

Rosa de Lima: Historia ilustrada (Lima: Editorial Inkarrı´, n.d.), 5. For examples of disobedience and deception, see Loayza, Vida, 5; Bruno, Rosa, 21, 27, and 91; Hansen, Vida admirable, 59, 80–81, and 96; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 160. For related thoughts of Teresa of Avila on obedience, see Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de las fundaciones, ed. Jose´ Marı´a Aguado (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1973), 95–96 and 141–145. 46. The formula “permitted afﬁrmation of the Crown’s jurisdiction without the obligation to implement orders.” Colin M. MacLachlan, Spain’s Empire in the New World: The Role of Ideas in Institutional and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 22. See Kenneth J. Andrien, “Spaniards, Andeans, and the Early Colonial State in Peru,” in Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno, eds., Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 128. 47. Hansen, Vida admirable, 20. If one dismisses the miracle as contrived, the actual cause for the burnt hands reopens the question of obedience. On other occasions Rose had burned her hands with lime. 48. The quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 45. For other examples, see Loayza, Vida, 100, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 255. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 22–23, and Bruno, Rosa, 26. 49. Hansen, Vida admirable, 85–86. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:251–253. For another example, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 255–256. 50. For another example, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 22–23, and Bruno, Rosa, 26. 51. Hansen, Vida admirable, 62–66. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 150 and 200– 201. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Catalina de Jesu´s quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 89. 52. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:193. 53. Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 263. See ix and 268. In the second-century Gospel of Thomas, Christ says in reference to Mary Magdalen, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male.” See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 43. On mortiﬁcation and gender, see also Elm, Virgins of God, 377, and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 63. 54. The quoted passages are in Elizabeth Robertson, “The Corporality of Female Sanctity in The Life of Saint Margaret,” in Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, Images of Sainthood, 271. 55. The quoted passages are in Elm, Virgins of God, 266 and 269. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 332; and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 28–29 and 62–64. 56. For Teresa of Avila as a mujer varonil, see Weber, Teresa of Avila, 17–18. For another Spanish example see Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 196–198. 57. The quoted passages are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 4 and 2, respectively. See 81. Rose is referred to as a mujer varonil in Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1673), 7. She is commended for her manly deeds on the inside rear cover of Dı´a treinta de cada mes, consagrado en honor y culto de la gloria Virgen peruana Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Mexico: Imprenta de los Herederos del Lic. D. Joseph de Tauregui, 1794). 58. Hansen, Vida admirable, 271, 366, 236, and 132, respectively. See 237. For examples, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 271–272; see also the related miracle on 393–

notes to pages 126–129

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394. In similar contexts Mele´ndez made reference to the “natural cowardice” of women (Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:370). 59. Here manhood is desired in order to do missionary work. See the comparison with Catherine of Siena in Hansen, Vida admirable, 204. See also Loayza, Vida, 93. The quoted passages in the previous sentences are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 110. 60. The quoted phrase is from E. Allison Peers, The Mystics of Spain (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951), 35. 61. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Nicolas Martı´nez quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 122; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 326, 67 (see 144), and vii (the anonymous prologue). Granada quoted San Buenaventura on the point: “I will take arms against myself, and I will be for myself the most cruel and most rigorous [enemy] of all.” Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 16. 62. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Parra, Rosa laureada, 79; Juan Gil, Mitos del descubrimiento, vol 3, El Dorado (Madrid: Alianza, 1989), 233; Hansen, Vida admirable, 241 and 169; and a song in Nicolas Martı´nez, Oracio´n panegirica de la B. Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Dijola en la solemne ﬁesta que a su beatiﬁcacio´n hizo la Nacio´n Espan˜ola en su Yglesia de apostol Santiago de Roma (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 194. 63. Hansen, Vida admirable, 241. 64. The quoted passages are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 48. 65. The quoted passages are from Lo´pez Cantos, Juegos, 113, and Angulo, Santa Rosa, 45, respectively. 66. The quoted passages are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 475, and Vicente M. Caicedo, Sermo´n Panegı´rico en honor de santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Arequipa: Imprenta de La Bolsa, 1898), 7 and 9, respectively. 67. Freya Schiwy, “Santa Rosa, the Contested Saint: An Early Attempt at Constructing National Hegemony in Peru,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 8/1 (1999), 54. 68. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Arkana/Penguin Books, 1993), 550. 69. Rose also prayed to the Virgin of Remedies in the Jesuit church. See Bruno, Rosa, 129. 70. Fray Diego de Co´rdova y Salinas, Cro´nica franciscana de las provincias del Peru´, ed. Lino G. Canedo (Washington, D.C: American Academy of Franciscan History, 1957), 40. Regarding the slaves, see John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1970), 193. 71. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Felipe Guama´n Poma de Ayala, Nueva Cro´nica y buen gobierno, ed. Franklin Pease (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1980), 1:294 (his illustration of the Virgin’s intervention is on 1:293); and Co´rdova Salinas, Cro´nica franciscana, 45. 72. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia del culto de Marı´a en Iberoame´rica (Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1947), 498; and a 1689 document in Angulo, Santa Rosa, 20. For another example of the Virgin of the Rosary as warrior, see Pedro de Toledo y Leyba, Relacio´n de gran solemnidad que instituyo en el insigne convento de Nuestra Sen˜ora del Rosario de Lima . . . al dulcı´ssimo nombre de Marı´a (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1643), 5. 73. See Angelico Chavez, Our Lady of the Conquest (Santa Fe: Historical Society

282

notes to pages 129–131

of New Mexico, 1948), 18. The quoted passages from Hansen, Vida admirable, are on 206. 74. Vargas Ugarte, Historia del culto de Marı´a, 506–509 and 511. See Angulo, Santa Rosa, 29–30. Rose of Lima is also patron of the police in Peru. On Lepanto, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 308. For related images and discussion, see Andre´ Chastel, Art of the Italian Renaissance, trans. Linda and Peter Murray (New York: Arch Cape Press, 1988), 208. 75. Josephe and Francisco Mugaburu, Chronicle of Lima, 1640–1697, trans. and ed. Robert Ryal Miller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 285. 76. The quoted passages are from Parra, Rosa laureada, 6, and Meneses y Arce, Ilustracio´n, 69, respectively. 77. The quoted passages are from Cristo´bal de Miralles in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 144. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 273. For images of Rose defending the eucharist, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” ﬁgures 50 and 53. When Rose’s beatiﬁcation was celebrated in Rome, the paintings illustrating her life and miracles were accompanied by one of Charles II bringing the New World to the obedience of the Church. See Francisco de Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, celebres aclamaciones, que la siempre triumphante Roma dio a la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Virgen de Lima, en su solemne beatiﬁcacio´n (Rome: Nicolas Angel Tinas, 1668), 16. For the image of Rose and Guadalupe, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” ﬁgures 76–77. 78. For an example of anti-independence use of Rose, see Manuel Antonio Urrixmendi, Sermo´n panegı´rico que en honor y celebridad de la gloriosa virgen santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, patrona de Ame´rica Meridional, dixo en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Lima el dı´a 30 agosto de 1812 (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1812), 32. 79. Juan Ernesto Montenegro, La Capilla de Santa Rosa de Lima: Fragua de la universidad y de la libertad (Caracas: Consejo Municipal de Distrito Federal, 1977), 150. See 9, 41, 43, 14, and 149. On Tucuma´n, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 192. Carlos Lo´pez Rocha, Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1944), 8, offers devotional poetry on Rose’s relation to independence. 80. Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 188. See Millones, Partecita del cielo, 128; and Luis Miguel Glave, De Rosa y espinas: Economı´a, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 1998), 195–196. On Santos Atahualpa, see Mario Castro Arenas, La rebelio´n de Juan Santos (Lima: Carlos Milla Batres, 1973), 92 81. The Cabo passage is quoted in Castro Arenas, Rebelio´n de Juan Santos, 144. The subsequent quotations are from Jan Szeminski, “Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectional Ideology in the 18th Century,” in Steve J. Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 182. See 179–180. 82. Alberto Flores Galindo, “In Search of an Inca,” in Stern, Resistance, 203. On Velasco, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 188–189. For an example of postindependence use of St. Rose as a unifying national icon, see Schiwy, “Santa Rosa, the Contested Saint,” 49–62. On the Peruvian uprisings, see Jorge Hidalgo, “Amarus y Cataris,” Chungara 10 (March 1983), 120–121; Millones, Partecita del cielo, 128–130; and Graziano, Millennial New World, 95–109 (particularly 101–102). 83. Victoria Reiﬂer Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 260. See 119–125, 260–286, and 317–323. 84. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Thomas M. Schwertner, Amer-

notes to pages 131–134

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ica’s Saint and Protectress, Rose of Lima: A Study and Interpretation of Her Life with a Novena to Her (New York: Rosary Press, 1917), 31, and Rafael Belaunde y Diez Canseco, Por la unidad de Ame´rica: Recopilacio´n de discursos y proyectos, 1931–1941 (Lima: Talleres Gra´ﬁcos de la Editorial Lumen, 1944), 34; see 33–35. 85. Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 138–139. For the Cuzco-school painting and other representations of indigenous adoration of Rose, see 140, 142–143, 178–179, 182, and ﬁgure 54. 86. Comisio´n de Sen ˜ oras, Recuerdo de las Fiestas, 175 and 173. On Carhuamayo, see Luis Millones, Actores de altura: Ensayos sobre el teatro popular andino (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1992), 78. See also Millones, Partecita del cielo, 29.

chapter 6 1. Juan Eusebio Nieremberg quoted in Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 132; see 132–140. See also Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), 90. For sin as the cause of Rose of Lima’s illnesses, see Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 42; see also 317. 2. Pedro de On ˜ a, Temblor de Lima, an˜o 1609 (Lima: Francisco del Canto, 1609), 12. 3. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Parra, Rosa laureada, 55; Diego de Co´rdoba y Salinas, Cro´nica franciscana de las provincias del Peru´ (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1957), 141; and Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 49 (two passages). 4. The anonymous, eighteenth-century painting, Dulce Nombre de Dios, is in the Convento de Santo Domingo, Quito. Native insolence was again redoubled by the common seventeenth-century belief that the Indies had been evangelized by St. Thomas (or, in variant versions, St. Bartholomew) centuries before the Spaniards arrived to reconvert the apostates. See Frank Graziano, The Millennial New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 184–187. 5. The quoted passage is from Angel Melco´n, Espiritualidad dominicana (Mexico: Cuadernos Dominicanos, n.d.), 9. See Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 34. For other examples of the recurring motif of religious women disguised as men, see Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:161–164, 2:165, and 2:233. 6. See Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 93; Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 106 and 141; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 204. Because, as a woman, Rose could not join the missionary effort, she hoped to adopt an orphan as her son, instill in him the desire to become a friar, and through him satisfy her missionary aspirations vicariously. See Bruno, Rosa, 106, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 247. 7. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 243–244; see 246.

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8. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:46, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 242; see 244. 9. See Romans 8:13 and Colossians 3:5. See also Dario Sabbatucci, “Mortiﬁcation,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 10:113; and Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 160. On suffering unjustly and joyously, see Matthew 5:10–12 and 10:22; John 15:19–21; James 1.2; 1 Peter 4: 13–19; 2 Corinthians 4:9–11; Philippians 1:29; and 2 Timothy 2:9–12. For Cyprian in the third century, “to ‘follow Christ’ was nothing less than a daily martyrdom.” Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 195. 10. Brigitte Cazelles, introduction to Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 16. On self-martyrdom, see Stephen Wilson, “Introduction,” in Stephen Wilson, ed., Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 3; Thomas Head, “Introduction,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000), xv and xx; and Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 22. Rose wished she had been born in Roman times, when “persecution by tyrants bathed the streets, plazas, and amphitheaters in blood.” Hansen, Vida admirable, 242. 11. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Jose´ Manuel Bermu´dez, Sermo´n panegı´rico de la admirable Virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1782), 20; and Vicente M. Caicedo, Sermo´n panegı´rico en honor de Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Arequipa: Imprenta de La Bolsa, 1898), 7. Even abstinence, generosity in poverty, and chastity constitute an “unbloody martyrdom.” See Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:276. 12. The last quoted phrases are from Gonzalo Tenorio and Antonio de Vergara quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 638 and 127, respectively; see 32. In the previous sentence, the ﬁrst two quoted passages are from a 1689 document in Domingo Angulo, Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Estudio bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: n.p., 1917), and the third is from Parra, Rosa laureada, 40. See Rose’s bull or beatiﬁcation, appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 485. 13. See Graziano, Millennial New World, 22–36 and 157–171. 14. Bartolome´ Martı´n in Parra, Rosa laureada, 608–609. Related tropes are found in Ezekiel 28:13, where the virginal bodies of paradise are clothed in jewels, and in Revelation 21:18–21, where the New Jerusalem and its jewels are closely associated with the bride of Christ. A 1670 French hagiography derived ﬂoral imagery from the afterbirth detail: Rose “came into the world differently from other children, wrapped up in a double cuticle, like a rose, whose bud is surrounded by leaves as soon as it begins to appear.” Jean Baptist Feuillet, The Life of St. Rose, ed. F. W. Faber (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 21–22. The quoted tricentennial sermon is from Nicanor Aguilar, Tercer centenario de Santa Rosa de Lima (Cuenca, Ecuador: Alianza, 1917), 7. See the similar argument in Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Historia de la iglesia en el Peru´ (Lima: Imprenta Santa Marı´a, 1953), 2:474. 15. Hansen, Vida admirable, 1, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 1:177. 16. Hansen, Vida admirable, 421. See Parra, Rosa laureada, 629; Dante, Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 369, n. 2; and Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la pa-

notes to pages 136–138

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trona de Ame´rica,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz, Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 207, n. 50. 17. The quoted passages in the last sentence are from a song in Nicolas Martı´nez, Oracio´n panegirı´ca de la B. Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Dijola en la solemne ﬁesta que a su beatiﬁcacio´n hizo la Nacio´n Espan˜ola en su Yglesia de apostol Santiago de Roma (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 199; and Carlos Lo´pez Rocha, Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1944), 46. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from, respectively (as separated by the semicolons) Hansen, Vida admirable, 328 and 352; Angulo, Santa Rosa, 46–47 (see Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, title page); Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, 10; Bartolome´ Martı´n quoted in in Parra, Rosa laureada, 605; and a poem by Herminio Ricaldi quoted in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 142. 18. Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, 59. Peru is also Ophir in Parra, Rosa laureada, 51 and 64–66. The emblem-book image is in Dominico Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, seu symbola, quibus virtutes, gestes, et miracula rosae de S.ta Maria exprimuntor . . . (Fermo: G. F. Bolis and Brothers, 1711), ﬁgure 27. 19. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 307; Hansen, Vida admirable, 119; and Loayza, Vida, 38. Variations on the trope go back, at least, to Polycarp martyred by burning in the second century: his “holy ﬂesh” was “like gold and silver being puriﬁed in a smelting furnace.” Quoted in Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 73. For “most perfect purity as iron comes out puriﬁed from the furnace,” see Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), 1:108. 20. Parra, Rosa laureada, 49. The quoted passages in the previous sentences are from Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:227. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 60–62, and Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Caldero´n, 1673), 19. 21. Loayza, Vida, 91. Loayza is following the testimony of Gonzalo de la Maza; see the relevant passage in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 188. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 61. 22. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Parra, Rosa laureada, 33, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 247; see 192. See also Joseph Sarmiento Sotomayor, Patrocinio aplaudido, y coronado celebridad, de Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, en la santa Iglesia Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Me´xico, corte de esta Nueva Espan˜a (Mexico: Juan Joseph Guillena, 1698), 11. 23. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:381. 24. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 71 (two passages); Andre´s E. Bejas et al., Santoral dominicano en Ame´rica Latina: Laudes y vı´speras (Quito: Oﬁcina de Coordinacio´n de la Familia Dominicana en Ame´rica Latina, 1992), 56; Caicedo, Sermo´n panegı´rico, 15 (on 6 and 5, respectively, Christ is the “Great Victim of Love” and Rose is the “ﬁrst victim of love that America offered to Heaven”); and Felix Cipriano C. Zegarra, Santa Rosa de Lima: Estudio Bibliogra´ﬁco (Lima: Imprenta de Torres Mercaderes, 1886), 62. 25. Hansen, Vida admirable, 61. 26. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Sarmiento Sotomayor, Patrocinio aplaudido, 9; Gonzalo Tenorio quoted in Parra, Rosa laureada, 629; and Mele´ndez,

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notes to pages 138–139

Tesoros, 2:207. Tenorio added: “Rose is the pure holocaust who sacriﬁced herself on the altar of love for her Divine Owner” (638). The canonized Rose later assumed something of a penal role. In the Peruvian Amazon, strong winds that often come at the end of August (Rose’s feast day is August 30th) are known as the “the winds of St. Rose” and are believed to be a punishment for sin. Jaime Regan, Hacia la tierra sin mal (Iquitos: CETA, 1983), 1:226–227. In northern Argentina, Rose is similarly associated with the storms that come at the end of August. 27. On Bona of Pisa, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 122; on Alacoque, see Jesu´s Solano, El culto al Sagrado Corazo´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1978), 30; and on Veronica, see Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, St. Francis de Girolamo, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. paciﬁcus of San Severino and St. Veronica Giuliani . . . (London: C. Dolman, 1839), 260. See also Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sexuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 23, where mysticism is an extension of “the universal experience of religious sacriﬁce.” 28. Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 25–26. See 14. 29. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 38; and Co´rdova y Salinas, Cro´nica franciscana, 962. “God is very angry at us because of our sins,” explained Mariana herself, “and I alone must pay for the republic” (313). See Alonso de Rojas’s testimony in Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 313. 30. The quoted passages are from, respectively, an Inquisition document quoted in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 210, n. 70; and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:534. 31. The ﬁrst quoted passages are in Teodoro Hampe Martı´nez, Santidad e identidad criolla: Estudio del proceso de canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolome´ de Las Casas, 1998), 133–134. The last quoted passage is appended to Hansen, Vida admirable, 485. 32. The quoted passages are from Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 307. See 2 Timothy 2:10. For examples of close identiﬁcation with Christ, see Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 20 and 285–286. “Always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” 2 Corinthians 4:10. 33. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Gonzalo Tenorio in Parra, Rosa laureada, 646–647 (three passages); Loayza, Vida, 112; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 313. 34. Hansen, Vida admirable, 318. See 317 and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:410. 35. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 312 (see 323); and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:418. See also the testimony of Juan del Castillo, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:16; and John 19:28. For other transformation into the likeness of God, see Rutherford H. Platt Jr., The Forgotten Books of Eden: Lost Books of the Old Testament (New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 127; Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 59; and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 77. 36. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 92. Nietzsche referred to the cruciﬁxion as that “paradoxical and horrifying expedient that afforded temporary relief for tormented humanity” (92). In Mark 10:45, Christ came “to give his life as a ransom for many.” 37. Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:281.

notes to pages 140–142

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38. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 194; and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 52 (three phrases). See Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 171, and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 47. 39. The quoted phrases are from Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 518 and 207, respectively. On vicarious atonement as a common function of local saints in the Middle Ages, see Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 211–212. For other examples and commentary on collective penance, see Alvar W. Carlson, The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico’s Rı´o Arriba (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 142–158; Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, Vida religiosa espan˜ola, 161; and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 127–128. 40. The quoted passages are from Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, Vida religiosa espan˜ola, 24 (quoting Gregorio Maran ˜ o´n) and 38. See Carlos Fisas, Historias de las reinas de Espan˜a (Madrid: Editorial Planeta, 1996), 134–136. Philip must have forgotten Tertullian’s advice: “By continence you will buy up a great stock of sanctity, by making savings on the ﬂesh, you will be able to invest in the Spirit.” Quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 77. 41. Hansen, Vida admirable, 321; see 181–182; Loayza, Vida, 46–47; and Bruno, Rosa, 141. On the moribund friar, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 252. The letter by Rose to Ayala is in Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 156. The letter is also appended to Angulo, Santa Rosa, 236. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 192 and 245. Rose kept careful tally of the number of lashes permitted by her confessors for a given period, and if she were bedridden and incapable of mortiﬁcation she later distributed in daily allotments any unadministered lashes that had accrued. Hansen, Vida admirable, 63. 42. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:371. See Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 139–140. 43. The quoted phrase is from the preface to Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), viii. See Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 144–145: “wonder-working in whatever form was power” (144). 44. See Rene´ Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 1; Rene´ Girard, To Double Business Bound (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 144; Rene´ Girard, “Generative Scapegoating” in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, ed., Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, Rene´ Girard and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War” (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 215–221. 45. The quoted passage is from Nicola´s de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 585. For examples of Rose’s self-reference, see the letters appended to Angulo, Santa Rosa, 235–238.

288

notes to pages 142–146

46. Cazelles, introduction to Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Szell, eds., Images of Sainthood, 17. 47. The quoted phrase is from Matthew 8:17; see Isaiah 53:4. 48. Hansen, Vida admirable, 345 and 343, respectively. For examples of miracles, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 261–262, 273–274, 293, 361, and 381–418; and Bruno, Rosa, 151. In a typology derived from medieval processes of canonization, 90.2% of miracles were related to cures between 1201 and 1300, and 79.3% between 1301 and 1417. Andre´ Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 468. 49. The sermon passages are quoted in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 190. The broadside passages are from Hermandad de Santa Rosa de Lima, “Quando en la Europa padesen . . .” (Lima: n.p., 1805). 50. Appended to Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine of Sienna, ed. E. Cartier (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 402–403. 51. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 459 (see 339) and 350. 52. The quoted words are from Juan de Isturisaja in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n, y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 56. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 363. 53. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 62. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:228–229. The last quoted passages are from Bruno, Rosa, 85; see 100. 54. See Loayza, Vida, 13, for his comment on the prophecy. 55. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:370. The following quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 240, and Marı´a de Uza´tegui in Bruno, Rosa, 109, respectively. Such defensive use of the eucharist was common. For another example, see Pedro de Toledo y Leyba, Relacio´n de gran solemnidad que instituyo en el insigne convento de Nuestra Sen˜ora del Rosario de Lima . . . al dulcı´ssimo nombre de Marı´a (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1643), 3. 56. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 240. See Loayza, Vida, 59; Bruno, Rosa, 110; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 172. 57. The quoted passages are from Bruno, Rosa, 109 (two passages) and 110, respectively. 58. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:372. 59. For a reference to the attack as a divine scourge, see Juan de Lorenzana in Bruno, Rosa, 110. 60. Hansen, Vida admirable, 241. In Cuzco-school images, Rose and the king of Spain together defend the eucharist from enemies of the faith. See Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” plates 50 and 51. 61. Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Santa Rosa de Lima en el grabado, siglo XVII,” Cultura Peruana 7/30–31 (1947), ﬁgure 1. See also Hector H. Schenone, Iconografı´a del arte colonial, Los Santos (Buenos Aires: Fundacio´n Tarea, 1992), 2:680; and Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 256–259. Rose was represented in this manner by the ﬁrst sculpture of her exhibited in Lima in 1669, upon announcement of her beatiﬁcation (Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 180). For an overview of the iconography of Rose of Lima with examples of the various motifs, see Schenone, Iconografı´a, 2:679–699. 62. For images of variations on this popular iconographic motif, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 65, 181, and 191; and Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 254, 255, 257, and 258. 63. On anchor symbolism, see Flores Araoz, “Santa Rosa de Lima en el grabado,”

notes to pages 146–147

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n.p. no, and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 125–129 and 142. The anchor is one of the earliest Christian symbols. For second-century examples, see Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 236–237. The anchor appeared, along with ﬁsh associated with baptism and symbolizing Christ, on a tombstone in the catacomb of St. Domitilla, early fourth century. See Henry Chatwick, “The Early Christian Community,” in John McManners, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 35. Note that the hospital Espiritu´ Santo, with which Rose was associated by virtue of its proximity to her home, was for sailors and others who worked at sea. See Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado, “Don Bartolome´ Lobo Guerrero, tercer Arzobispo de Lima,” Anuario de estudios americanos 33 (1976), 39, and Franciso Alayza Escardo´, Historia de la cirugı´a en el Peru´ (Lima: Editorial Monterrico, 1992), 82. 64. See the image in Dominique Rigaux, “Women, Faith, and Image in the Late Middle Ages,” in Lucetta Scarafﬁa and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), ﬁgure 10; see 77. See also Chiara Frugoni, “The Imagined Woman,” in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed., A History of Women in the West, part 2, Silences of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 420– 422. For a male protector in similar pose, see the detail from Meo di Guido of Siena’s painting of St. Ercolano in Philippe Arie`s and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private Life: Vol. 2, Revelations of the Medieval World (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1988), in an unnumbered color portfolio between pages 254 and 255. 65. This Christ child with globe and cross is also reminiscent of the child in Roque de Balduque’s sixteenth-century statue of the Virgin of the Rosary, to which Rose prayed regularly in Lima’s Dominican church. 66. Parra, Rosa laureada, 19. 67. Josephe and Francisco Mugaburu, Chronicle of Lima, 1640–1697, trans. and ed. Robert Ryal Miller (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975), 258–259. 68. Comisio´n de Sen ˜ oras Encargadas de las Fiestas del Centenario, Recuerdo de las ﬁestas del tercer centenario de la muerte de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Imprenta Artista, 1917), 154. See 147–154. 69. Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima, Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 144. 70. The quoted passage is from the Canons of Athanasius quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 264. See Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 216. 71. Glenn M. Andres et al., The Art of Florence (New York: Artabras, 1994), 849. The Misericordia altarpiece is reproduced in Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), 270. 72. Alejo Ferna´ndez, Virgin of the Navigators, painted for the chapel of the Casa de Contratacio´n in Seville and now in Seville’s Alca´zar. See Diana Fane, ed., Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America (New York: Brooklyn Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 30. 73. Fane, Converging Cultures, 37. Roses litter the foreground. The same cloak was opened for refuge of Dominican friars in a painting in the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome, where Rose was beatiﬁed. For other examples of the Virgin protecting her realm, see Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 304. 74. Felipe Cossio Del Pomar, Peruvian Colonial Art, trans. Genaro Arbaiza (New York: Wittenborn, 1964), 8. For images of the Madonna of Mercy from the New World, see Leopoldo Castedo, The Cuzco Circle (New York: Center for Inter-American

290

notes to pages 147–150

Relations, 1976), plate 11; and Virgin Mercedaria de la Misericordia from the Quito School, eighteenth century, in Quito’s Museo de la Casa de Cultura. For an example from Arequipa, see Fredrick B. Pike, “Latin America,” in McManners, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, 422. 75. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a Case of Schizophrenia, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 208. The following quoted passage is from Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), 73. For examples, see Isaiah 47:1; Jeremiah 50:12; Galatians 4:25–26; and Isaiah 66:11. 76. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 104. On gendered biblical cities, see Isaiah 54:5–8; Hosea 1–3; Revelation 21:1–4 and 21:9–12; and Collins, Combat Myth, 230. In a sixthcentury Syriac “Canticle,” the city of Edessa is personiﬁed as a prostitute who seeks reform by surrender to her “beloved bridegroom.” See Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 60–61. 77. See, for example, John F. Mofﬁtt and Santiago Sebastia´n, O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 126–133; and Hugh Honour, The European Vision of America (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976), plates 85–95. Some colonial texts used the metaphor of idolatrous Peru as an ugly daughter redeemed only by the dowry of her rich mines. See Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 264 78. Francisco de Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, celebres aclamaciones, que la siempre triumphante Roma dio a la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Virgen de Lima, en su solemne beatiﬁcacio´n (Rome: Imprenta Nicolas Angel Tinas, 1668), 16. 79. See Triumph of Christ the King with the Four Continents in Fane, Converging Cultures, 234–235. The quoted passage is from Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, 46.

chapter 7 1. “Judaism had been a religion of the father; Christianity became a religion of the son” and in the process the father God was “dethroned.” Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 23:88. Note that God the Father has no wife. 2. For an example, see Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 40. For examples of paternal insignificance, see Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 23 and 46. For exceptions, see Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 57. Both passages quoted from the father are from Gaspar Flores in Bruno, Rosa, 33. 3. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Gilles Deleuze, Masochism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 134 and 93, respectively. The last quoted phrase is from Jack Novick and Kerry Kelly Novick, “Some Comments on Masochism and the Delusion of Omnipotence from a Developmental Perspective,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39 (1991), 315. See Shirley Panken, The Joy of Suffering (New York: Ja-

notes to pages 150–153

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son Aronson, 1973), 42 and 86. One result of inconsistency is “an intense longing” for the occasionally glimpsed loving mother (reminiscent of Rose’s glimpses of and longing for the often-absent Bridegroom) who is lost in the distance behind the cruel one. See Cheryl Glickauf-Hughes and Marolyn Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality: An Interactional-Object Relations Approach to Psychotherapy (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1995), 61 and 74. 4. The quoted phrases are from Joyce Kraus Aronson, Insights in Dynamic Psychotherapy of Anorexia and Bulimia: An Introduction to the Literature (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993), xiii. See Armando R. Favazza, with Barbara Favazza, Bodies under Siege: Self-Mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 202. 5. On the struggle over marriage, see Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 17–22. The mother was more concerned with “how her daughter was going to seem to the world, and not how she must seem to God.” Ivan de Isturisaja quoted in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n, y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 45. Almost all marriages in early colonial Lima were arranged. See James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 155. 6. Bruno, Rosa, 92–93. On the penitential handbook, see Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 28, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 169. The quoted passage on the mother’s love is from Hernando Flores de Herrera quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 80. 7. Hansen, Vida admirable, 6–7. See Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:182. See the mother’s testimony in Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:133. 8. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 94, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:264, respectively. See Loayza, Vida, 73–74. 9. Marı´a de Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 32. 10. The quoted passages are from Isturisaja quoted in Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, 45, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:268, respectively. For examples of the mother’s resignation, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 80 and 96. 11. Antonio Rodrı´guez quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 79. For “the erasure of all signs of asceticism” in iconography, see Karen-Edis Barzman, “Sacred Imagery and the Religious Lives of Women, 1650–1850,” in Lucetta Scarafﬁa and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 239. “Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.” 2 Corinthians 4:16. 12. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Pedro de Loayza quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 172. The Hansen passages are from Vida admirable, 28–29. 13. Hansen, Vida admirable, 417. On the mother’s new name, see 286. A letter in support of Rose’s patronage observed that Lima “wants to have as mother the very daughter that it procreated.” Quoted on 423. 14. The quoted passages are from Bruno, Rosa, 13, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 176, respectively. 15. Hansen, Vida admirable, 4. The superior impulse may have been Rose’s mother. Gonzalo de la Maza testiﬁed that, according to Rose, the name was changed at conﬁrmation “to please her mother.” Testimony of Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo

292

notes to pages 153–155

de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 148. For a dissenting view on the name change, see Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 14. 16. The quoted passages are from Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor de Lima, Santa Rosa (Lima: Ediciones Paulinas, 1986), 103 (two passages), and Hansen, Vida admirable, 161 (see 160), respectively. 17. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:67. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 201 and 451. For another example of spiritual surrogate motherhood, see Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 42. 18. De la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 163. Rose once fainted due to her excessive work and mortiﬁcation, and her mother suggested that she move to the de la Maza residence to convalesce (Bruno, Rosa, 56; see 63). In the previous sentence the ﬁrst and third quoted phrases are from the testimony of Marı´a de Uza´tegui, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:63; and the second is from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 155. 19. Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, ed. Da´maso Chicharro (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 1987), 122. See Chicharro’s introduction, 23. The previous quoted passage is from Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 39. Christ referred to Catherine as “daughter”; see Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 79 and 95. 20. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romance,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1956), 9:237–241. 21. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Michel Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1990), 181; and Honorius quoted in E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Song in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 158. See 176–181 and Bynum, Holy Feast, 265. In another perspective, it was precisely a mother that Christ lacked, because he was begotten solely of God the Father (“born of the Father before all ages”). 22. The abundant lactation of the Virgin nourished other saints and the souls in purgatory. For examples, see Pedro Machuca, La Virgen y las Animas del Purgatorio, and Alonso Cano, San Bernardo y la Virgen. Both paintings are in the Museum of El Prado in Madrid. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 270 and plates 17, 18, 19, and 23. On saintly breast refusal, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 24–25. 23. The quoted passages are from M. S. Palazzoli summarized in Aronson, Insights, xviii, and John Sours quoted in Aronson, Insights, 39; see xix. On God as a maternal construct, see Mary Lou Randour and Julie Bondanza, “The Concept of God in the Psychological Formation of Females,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 4 (1987), 302 (see also 304, 308, and 312); and Deleuze, Masochism, 63. 24. Teresa of Avila, Libro de la vida, 252. The quoted passage regarding Catherine is from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 79. See 77, where Catherine’s face is transformed into that of God the Father. The phrase attributed to Christ is reminiscent of Exodus 3:14 (“I am who I am”); see John 8:58. 25. See also 1 Corinthians 6:19, where “you are not your own.” For examples of women who believed they were Christ, see Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, “Medieval Visions and Contemporary Hallucinations,” Psychological Medicine 12 (1982), 714; see also 719. 26. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:418. For ﬁgurative reference to Rose as Christ, see

notes to pages 155–156

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Loayza, Vida, 51. “Behold! the Lord is our mirror: open the eyes and see them in Him: and learn the manner of your face.” First-century “Odes of Solomon” (Ode 13) quoted in Rutherford H. Platt Jr., The Forgotten Books of Eden: Lost Books of the Old Testament (New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 127. Christ served as a mirror for Catarina de San Juan; see Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 59. 27. The quoted passage is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:307–8. See the similar passage in Hansen, Vida admirable, 147. See also Melquiades Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica de la edad de oro en Espan˜a y Ame´rica (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1994), 413. 28. See Arnold M. Cooper, “Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Masochism,” Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 2/1 (1993), 55. The quoted passage on annihilation is from Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi,” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 220–221. 29. The ﬁrst quoted passage is in Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 137; the second is borrowed from an anorexic in Aronson, Insights, 42. 30. See Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 87. For an example, see Bruno, Rosa, 143. For examples of the Bridegroom’s jealousy elsewhere, see Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 214 and 305. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from John Sours summarized in Aronson, Insights, xix. 31. See Esther Menaker, “Masochism: A Defense Reaction of the Ego,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 22 (1953), 219–220. “The ritual of expiation, or propitiation” is universal in the masochistic process. Leon Salzman, “Masochism: A Review of Theory and Therapy,” in Jules H. Masserman, ed., Individual and Family Dynamics (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959), 18. The Alacoque passages are quoted in Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 18. Christ gave this same message to Rose when he uprooted her ﬂowers. See the discussion in chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions.” 32. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:188. During conﬂicts between mother and grandmother, Rose tended to side with the grandmother. See Bruno, Rosa, 13, and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 164. Rose’s general tendency toward overliteralness, which in modern psychological testing can indicate psychosis, was also recorded. For examples, see Loayza, Vida, 4; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 151; Bruno, Rosa, 26; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 22–23. 33. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Juan de Lorenzana quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 126; and Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 40. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 175. In iconography the setting is sometimes transposed to heaven. For an example, see the anonymous eighteenth-century painting, La Visio´n del Paraı´so in Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 15. See also Millones, Partecita del cielo, 61–66, where the setting of the dream is related to Rose’s experience in Quives. Related testimony of Marı´a de Oliva is in Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:138, and Bruno, Rosa, 53. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 31. 34. Hansen, Vida admirable, 109. The dream is narrated on 108–110.

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notes to pages 156–159

35. All of the quoted passages are from Uza´tegui in Bruno, Rosa, 40. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 175. Stone is elevated to marble in Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:276. Rose’s dream is reminiscent of Matthew 25:1–12. 36. Juan de Lorenzana quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 126. 37. Three days before her death Rose asked St. Dominic to care for her mother. Hansen, Vida admirable, 314. On miraculous assistance from God, see 273–275. 38. The quoted passages are from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:133 (two passages), and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:334, respectively. Hansen, Vida admirable, 175, has the age at nine months. 39. Marı´a de Oliva quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 23–24. 40. Hansen, Vida admirable, 7. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:135. 41. The quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros. 2:184, and Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 24, respectively. See the additional examples on the same page in Bruno. 42. Hansen, Vida admirable, 8. 43. Ibid., and Marı´a de Oliva, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:136, respectively. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 509, n. 7. 44. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 25; and Marı´a de Oliva, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:136 and 137. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 8–9. 45. Franciso Alayza Escardo´, Historia de la cirugı´a en el Peru´ (Lima: Editorial Monterrico, 1992), 83. 46. Hansen, Vida admirable, 22. On the climate, see Millones, Partecita del cielo, 58. On the cold water, see de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 157. Rose suffered a similar afﬂiction in her last three years of life; see Hansen, Vida admirable, 178. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 26. 47. The quoted passages are from Marı´a de Oliva, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:138, and Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 27, respectively. See Bruno, Rosa, 26. For insensitivity to pain in response to extraordinary sufferings, see Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 14; and Denys A. deCatanzaro, “Self-Injurious Behavior,” Motivation and Emotion 2/1 (1978), 51–52. For dissociative anesthesia induced by self-starvation, see Aronson, Insights, 167. 48. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:137 and 1570:253, respectively. Sickliness is common among penitential mystics. Teresa of Avila, for example, suffered from fainting spells, violent headaches, nausea and vomiting, paralysis, extreme nervous tension, convulsions, and a cataleptic seizure during which she was pronounced dead. 49. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 68; the others are from 178–179. The last two quoted passages are from Loayza, Vida, 84. See Bruno, Rosa, 75; Marı´a de Uza´tegui, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:82; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 200–201. 50. Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 28. See the testimony of Mariana de Oliva on same page, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 20 and 176. On the father’s discovery of the crown of thorns, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 74. 51. The last quoted phrase is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:334; see 2:200. Loayza’s testimony and the quoted phrase are in Bruno, Rosa, 9. For an eighteenth-century painting of the mother beating Rose, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 80.

notes to pages 159–161

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52. The quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:334, and Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 28, respectively. According to Hansen, Vida admirable, 176, the entire family was abusive. 53. The quoted phrases are from Joseph Manuel Bermu´dez, Sermo´n panegı´rico de la admirable virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1782), 16 and 34; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:334; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 9, respectively. See Bruno, Rosa, 68. 54. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 3; Vargas Ugarte, La ﬂor, 107 (two passages); and Hansen, Vida admirable, 200. “It was as though she were born predestined to suffering.” Salvador Velasco, Rosa de Lima (Villava, Pamplona, Spain: Editorial OPE, 1967), 103. Hansen concluded that Rose was “born to suffer.” Hansen, Vida admirable, 9. 55. Bruno, Rosa, 39, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 89; see 118. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is found in both Hansen, Vida admirable, 69, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:239. “The masochist aims not to mitigate the law but on the contrary to emphasize its extreme severity.” Deleuze, Masochism, 91. 56. On Rose’s asceticism and mortiﬁcation, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 81–82, 84–87, 89–91, and Bruno, Rosa, 82–83 and 90. One hagiographer observed that “selflove invented the bed in order to rest,” but Rose’s bed “was the invention of self-hate in order to suffer.” Nicolas Martı´nez, Oracio´n panegı´rica de la B. Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Dijola en la solemne ﬁesta que a su beatiﬁcacio´n hizo la Nacio´n Espan˜ola en su Yglesia de apostol Santiago de Roma (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 31. 57. The quoted passages are from Loayza, Vida, 12, and Luisa Hurtado de Bustamante in Bruno, Rosa, 79, respectively. 58. The examples and quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 67–68. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:238. On the crown of thorns, see Loayza, Vida, 19, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 71–73 and 76. 59. The second quoted phrase is from David Rampling, “Ascetic Ideals and Anorexia Nervosa,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 19 (1985), 90. 60. For masochism as a weapon of the weak, see Rudolph M. Loewenstein, “A Contribution to the Psychoanalytic Theory of Masochism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 5 (1957), 230. I borrow the phrase “traumatic reliving,” here and in the section title, from Rudolph Binion, “Traumatic Reliving in History,” Annual of Psychoanalysis, vol. 31 (2003; in press), and Rudolph Binion, Soundings: Psychohistorical and Psycholiterary (New York: Psychohistory Press, 1981), 1. On submission as deﬁance, see Stuart Charme, “Religion and the Theory of Masochism,” Journal of Religion and Health 22/3 (1983), 228. 61. The quoted passages are from Robert J. Stoller, “Sexual Excitement,” Archives of General Psychiatry 3/1 (1976), 904, and Robert J. Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Delta, 1975), 78. For a succinct overview of psychoanalytic theory on repetition compulsion, see Sylvia L. Teitelbaum, “The Curative Aspects of Repetition Compulsion,” Contemporary Psychotherapy Review 9/1 (1994), 71–74. At least one of the speciﬁc childhood accidents—crushing of the thumb—was repeated by Rose as a form of self-injury. See Bruno, Rosa, 23, and Vatican Secret Achives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:256. 62. The quoted passages are from Anthony Wilden and Jacques Lacan, The Language of the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 31, and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:239, respectively. For an example of accidents as a means of self-injurious behavior, see Larry H. Dizmang and Claudia Cheatham, “The Lesch-Nyham Syndrome,” American Journal of Psychiatry 127/5 (November, 1977), 673. If humility and

296

notes to pages 161–162

self-deprecation became cornerstones of Rose’s religiosity, the roots might be found in “an excess of shame and experiences of humiliation” during her formative years. See Cooper, “Psychotherapeutic Approaches,” 54. On Rose’s link between moribund ailments and childhood traumas, see Loayza, Vida, 99, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 321. 63. See editor’s note to Don R. Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations of Self-Mutilation,” in Frederic Flach, ed., The Schizophrenias (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 151. The highest rate of chronic self-mutilation is found in borderline, antisocial, histrionic, and depersonalization disorders. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 202. 64. David Spiegel, “Trauma, Dissociation, and Hypnosis,” in Richard P. Kluft, Incest-Related Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990), 258. See Frank W. Putnam, “Disturbances of ‘Self ’ in Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse,” in Richard P. Kluft, Incest-Related Syndromes of Adult Psychopathology (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1990), 118. See also Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 202, and Dizmang and Cheatham, “Lesch-Nyham Syndrome,” 676. 65. Arthur H. Green, “Self-Destructive Behavior in Physically Abused Schizophrenic Children,” Archives of General Psychiatry 19 (1968), 173–176 and 235. The quoted passage is on 173. 66. Craig Johnson quoted in Aronson, Insights, 69. In the previous sentence, the ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Novick and Novick, “Some Comments on Masochism,” 312; and the others are from Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 61; see 74. 67. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Beth S. Brodsky, Marylene Cloitre, and Rebecca A. Dulit, “Relationship of Dissociation to Self-Mutilation and Childhood Abuse in Borderline Personality Disorder,” American Journal of Psychiatry 152/12 (1995), 1790; Favazza, Bodies under Siege, xviii; and Robert J. Stoller, “The Term Perversion,” in Gerald I. Fogel and Wayne A. Myers, eds., Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical Practice: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 49. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 18:17 and 35; and Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:75. 68. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Kerry Kelly Novick and Jack Novick, “The Essence of Masochism,” in Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 42 (1987), 360; the second is from Bernhard Berliner, “On Some Psychodynamics of Masochism,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 16 (1947), 468. See Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 15. 69. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Freud, “Preliminary Communication,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 2:6 (two phrases); and Binion, Soundings, 44 and 130. See Rudolph Binion, Hitler among the Germans (New York: Elsevier, 1976), xii. See Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 207. On masochism as a defense, see Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 15; and Robert A. Glick and Donald I. Meyers, “Introduction,” in Robert A. Glick and Donald I. Meyers, eds., Masochism: Current Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Hillside, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1988), 11. 70. Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Stra-

notes to pages 162–163

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chey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 12:150. “The greater the resistance, the more extensively will acting out (repetition) replace remembering.” See Sigmund Freud, “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 11:27, where the symptom is a “substitute for the repressed idea” and “we can trace in it the remains of some kind of indirect resemblance to the idea that was originally repressed.” See also Stoller, “Sexual Excitement,” 905–908. 71. See Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 98–99. The quoted phrase is from Serge Viderman, “The Subject-Object Relation and the Problem of Desire,” in Serge Lebrovici and Daniel Widlo¨cher, eds., Psychoanalysis in France (New York: International Universities Press, 1980), 203. 72. Rampling, “Ascetic Ideals,” 90. See “the pursuit of suffering” in Glick and Meyers, “Introduction,” 1. For “the defensive capacity to alter the meaning of painful experience so that it is experienced as egosyntonic,” see Arnold M. Cooper, “The Narcissistic-Masochistic Character,” in Glick and Meyers, Masochism, 123. See also Charme, “Religion,” 226 (“victory through defeat”); Bell, Holy Anorexia, 56; Ann C. Greif, “Introduction: Historical Synthesis,” in Jill D. Montgomery and Ann C. Greif, eds., Masochism: The Treatment of Self-Inﬂicted Suffering (Madison, Ct.: International Universities Press, 1989), 4 (“a mocking transformation of passivity into something deadly”); Novick and Novick, “Some Comments on Masochism,” 315 and 324; and Novick and Novick, “Essence of Masochism,” 375. 73. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 16:383. See Favazza, Bodies under Siege, xii. Psychoanalysts argue that “the essence of hysteria is played out in the traumatic relation to the maternal.” Monique David-Me´nard, Hysteria from Freud to Lacan: Body and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 66. 74. The quoted passages are from Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 199 and 232. The gender of this patient was not speciﬁed; the broader context suggests a female. 75. The quoted passages in the ﬁrst sentence are from Salzman, “Masochism,” 3 (see 18). The last quoted passage is from Otto F. Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions of Masochism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 36 (1988), 1021 (see 1012). 76. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 86; and the other two are from Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 215. “Underlying the self-destructive tendencies involved in moral masochism, one can see at work in it the desperate attempt to seduce the aggressor, the harsh conscience, to appease the gods or fate by suffering” (230). 77. The quoted passages are from, respectively, L. Eidelberg summarized in Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 199–200 (two passages); and Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 197. On the lesser evil, see Irving Bieber in “Panel Discussion” in Jules H. Masserman, ed., Individual and Family Dynamics (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959), 59. See also Jack Sandler, “Masochism: An Empirical Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin 62/3 (1964), 201; and Ludwig Eidelberg, “Humiliation in Masochism,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 7 (1959), 276. 78. The quoted passages are from Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions,” 1025–1026, and Deleuze, Masochism, 126, respectively. For “internalization of and identiﬁcation with the hostile caretakers of childhood,” see Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 46.

298

notes to pages 163–165

79. The quoted passage is from Hilde Bruch, “Falsiﬁcation of Bodily Needs and Body Concept in Schizophrenia,” Archives of General Psychiatry 6 (1962), 39. The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28. See American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 539–545. 80. David Krueger quoted in Aronson, Insights, 44. The rejection of food may also imply a broader rejection: “I don’t need you or anything you give me” (44). See Melitta Sperling quoted in Aronson, Insights, 158. There is a “desire for complete subservience of the mother and the world,” which is “internally represented by desire for control over the self and one’s body.” Cecil Mushatt quoted in Aronson, Insights, 58. Anorexics “experience no real satisfaction, no pleasure, without remorse or guilt feelings. Everything has to be reversed. The bites taken must be spit out.” Helmut Thoma¨ quoted in Aronson, Insights, 52 81. Bell, Holy Anorexia, 8, and Bynum, Holy Feast, 189. 82. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Aronson, Insights, 168; and Hilde Bruch, The Golden Cage: The Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 90 and 81. 83. Hilde Bruch quoted in Aronson, Insights, 53. 84. See Marjorie P. Sprince quoted in Aronson, Insights, 67, for “the need to achieve the lack of need” and “the almost religious fervor in the anorexic’s need to develop a body so strong and self-sufﬁcient that it can do without nurture.” The quoted passages in the previous sentence are from Brumberg, Fasting Girls, 29; and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 56, respectively. “The mystic will torture her ﬂesh to have the right to claim it.” Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 675. 85. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Neil Joughin et al., “Religious Belief and Anorexia Nervosa,” International Journal of Eating Disorders 12/4 (1992), 398; and Naomi Wolf quoted in Joyce Kraus Aronson, Insights, 215. See Bell, Holy Anorexia, 11. 86. The last two quoted passages are from Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 242 and 243. The others are from John W. Cook, “Christian Iconography,” Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 7:58–59. 87. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 3 and 17. See Romans 7:18 and 1 Corinthians 6:15. 88. The quoted phrases are from Alejo Venegas quoted in Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 59 (see 16), and attributed to Hugh of Saint-Victor on 44 (two phrases), respectively. 89. The quoted passages are from Diego Pe´rez de Valdivia, Aviso a gente recogida, ed. Alvaro Huerga (Madrid: Universidad Pontiﬁcia de Salamanca and Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1977), 812 and 239. “The enemies who ﬁght against us are three: devil, world, and ﬂesh” (190). 90. Ibid., 246, 242, and 240, respectively. 91. The third quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 43. The others are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:210. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 328. 92. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 184. The others are from Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen, 5. For examples of the “devaluation of the self ” in other saints, see Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 304–305. 93. The quoted passages in the ﬁrst sentence are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 43–44. The last quoted phrase is from Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of

notes to pages 165–167

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Rites, 1570:191. See Bruno, Rosa, 161, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 42–45, 107, 209, and 325. 94. Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, biografı´a de Juana de Ontan ˜ on (Mexico: Editorial Porru´a, 1966), 75. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 329. For another example of a saint who regarded his minimal sinfulness as extreme, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 26. “An obsessive neurotic may be weighed down by a sense of guilt that would be appropriate in a mass-murderer, while in fact, from his childhood onwards, he has behaved to his fellow-men as the most considerate and scrupulous member of society.” Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 13:87. See also Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 51, and Deleuze, Masochism, 101. 95. 2 Corinthians 12:10. See 2 Corinthians 11:24–5; Mathew 5:11–12; and 1 Peter 5:5–6. Mortiﬁcation is encouraged in Mathew 16:24–26 (also in Mark 8:34–36 and Luke 9:23–25). See Colossians 3:5. 96. Philippians 1:29. See Matthew 5:10–12. In John 15:20, followers of Jesus are advised to expect persecution. In 2 Corinthians 4:10, we are “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” According to 1 Peter 4:13, you should “rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.” See also Romans 6:5 and 8:17, and 2 Corinthians 1:5. 97. Matthew 11:18–19 98. John of Marienwerder quoted in Vauchez, Sainthood, 410. See Bell, Holy Anorexia, 118. 99. Hansen, Vida admirable, 127, and Luis G. Alonso Getino, La patrona de Ame´rica ante los nuevos documentos (Madrid: Imprenta E. Gime´nez, 1927), 47. 100. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 33; Catherine quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 178; and Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 46 (two passages). 101. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Divinity, trans. Christiane Mesch Galvani, ed. Susan Clark (New York: Garland, 1991), 95; Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 232; Jesu´s Solano, El culto al Sagrado Corazo´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1978), 29; Unamuno in Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 33; and Teresa of Avila, Libro de la vida, 279. On love and suffering, see also Bell, Holy Anorexia, 60. 102. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Juan del Castillo quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 141 (see 140–141 and Hansen, Vida admirable, 182); and Hansen, Vida admirable, 321 (see Loayza, Vida, 46–47). 103. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:337. See 2:319 and Hansen, Vida admirable,180. 104. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Juan Costilla de Benavides quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 168; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 191. See Loayza, Vida, 84 and 98, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 313 and 315–323. 105. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is attributed to St. Augustine in Alan Dundes, “The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus,” in [no editor], In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 205–206; the second is St. Ambrose as quoted in Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 51. 106. Quoted in Petersson, Art of Ecstasy, 21. See Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and

300

notes to pages 167–168

the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 114. For another example, see Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 250 and 257. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 143. 107. Jonas, France, 18. The quoted passage is from Raimundo de Capua, Vida y milagros de la bienaventurada Sancta Catherina de Sena, trans. Antonio de la Pen ˜ a (Salamanca: Alonso de Terranova y Neyla, 1580), 35. 108. Hansen, Vida admirable, 178. See the reprimand attributed to Christ in Loayza, Vida, 74. Medieval Dominican nuns “cruelly and ﬁercely lacerated their bodies until the blood ﬂowed” and the sound of their ﬂagellation ascended to Christ as the “sweetest of songs” because “such humility and devotion pleased him greatly.” See McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 324. The “bed of ﬂowers” is from Alonso Vela´zquez in Bruno, Rosa, 91; see n. 3. Hansen compared Rose’s bed to “the bed of the Cross.” Hansen, Vida admirable, 83. 109. Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 180 and 183. The quoted phrase is from Karen Horney quoted in Panken, The Joy of Suffering, 34. See Charme, “Religion,” 221. 110. Hansen, Vida admirable, 43. Note that this ideation reversed the public opinion that Rose warded off (rather than caused) tragedies. 111. O. Fenichel quoted in Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations,” 156; see 157. The quoted phrase on Rose’s yearnings is from Loayza, Vida, 84–85. 112. For masochism as “a variant of narcissistic personality disorder,” see Cooper, “Psychotherapeutic Approaches,” 54. For masochism as “narcissistic mortiﬁcation,” see Panken, Joy of Suffering, 52. See also Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions of Masochism,” 1023, where “masochistic surrender provides narcissistic gratiﬁcation.” “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 81. Mortiﬁcation to ward off cataclysm is discussed in chapter 6, “Vicarious Atonement.” On narcissistic fantasies in traumatic situations as protection against helplessness, see Le´on Wurmser, “Trauma, Inner Conﬂict, and the Vicious Cycles of Repetition,” Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 19 (1996), 35. 113. The ﬁrst two quoted passages are from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 184, and the third is from Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 103. See Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions of Masochism,” 1015. See Viderman, “Subject-Object Relation,” 201. See also H. Newton Malony and Bernard Spilka, Religion in Psychodynamic Perspective: The Contributions of Paul W. Pruyser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69 and 126–127. 114. “A sense of modesty, it is true, protests,” wrote Bernard of Clairvaux, “but love conquers.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, trans. Terence L. Connolly (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 82. See Bell, Holy Anorexia, 20; Salzman, “Masochism,” 9 and 18; and Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 32. 115. See Salzman, “Masochism,” 19. On cultural support, see 17. On “culturally learned role behavior” generally, see Roy G. D’Andrade, “Cultural Meaning Systems,” in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 92. “One of the major psychological uses of Christianity has been to overcome the essential loneliness and privacy of pain.” David Bakan, Disease, Pain, and Sacriﬁce: Toward a Psychology of Suffering (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 67.

notes to pages 168–170

301

116. See Solange Alberro, Inquisicio´n y sociedad en Me´xico, 1571–1700 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1988), 527. The quoted phrase is from Kroll and Bachrach, “Medieval Visions,” 718. The expression of mystical visions in stereotypes “make them no less real as psychological phenomena,” just as delusions and hallucinations today borrow from collective symbols (the CIA, for example) to express intensely personal psychological realities. Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, “Visions and Psychopathology in the Middle Ages,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 170/1 (1982), 45. 117. The quoted phrase is from Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 8. See Berliner, “On Some Psychodynamics,” 461, and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 57, 118. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 87. See Berliner, “On Some Psychodynamics,” 461; Charme, “Religion,” 225; and Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 12. 119. See Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 17, 33, and 187, and Charme, “Religion,” 223. In most general terms, “masochism means loving a person who gives hate and ill-treatment.” Berliner, “On Some Psychodynamics,” 460. 120. John A. Bachman, “Self-Injurious Behavior: A Behavioral Analysis,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 80/3 (1972), 222. 121. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bachman, “Self-Injurious Behavior,” 221 (see Sandler, “Masochism,” 202, and Dizmang and Cheatham, “LeschNyham Syndrome,” 674); and B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1953), 367 (see 366). Such is suggested, for example, by the devil that in various forms beat the isolated Rose mercilessly. See Bruno, Rosa, 11, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 168–169 and 171. 122. Sandor Rado in “Panel Discussion” in Masserman, Individual and Family Dynamics, 55. See Kerryn L. Brain, Janet Haines, and Christopher L. Williams, “The Psychophysiology of Self-Mutilation: Evidence of Tension Reduction,” Archives of Suicide Research 4 (1998), 238; and Cooper, “Narcissistic-Masochistic Character,” 127. Collective beliefs and demands also contribute to repetitive self-injury. For an example, see Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), 163. 123. Cooper, “Psychotherapeutic Approaches,” 53. On pain as a narcotic, see Harold Kelman, “Masochism and Self Realization,” in Masserman, Individual and Family Dynamics, 22. On pain dependency, see Panken, Joy of Suffering, 132. The previous quoted passages are from Green, “Self-Destructive Behavior,” 177–178. 124. See A. Lara-Lemus et al., “Effects of REM Sleep Deprivation on the dAmphetamine-Induced Self-Mutilating Behavior,” Brain Research 770/1–2 (1997), 64; and deCatanzaro, “Self-Injurious Behavior,” 55. 125. Brumberg, Fasting Girls, 31 and 40; see 39. 126. The quoted passages are from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 160 and 39, respectively. See 52 and 162. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 168–169. For another example of God-sent inedia, now a blessing, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 144. Catherine introduced twigs into her throat to induce vomiting, as did Teresa of Avila. See Bell, Holy Anorexia, 18 and 28. For some examples of inedia, see Thurston, Physical Phenomena of Mysticism, 341. 127. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Pedro de Loayza and Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 125 and 72. See 69. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 53–54 and 57, and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 155. According to Hansen (Vida admirable), 235, the eucharist “made her stomach incapable” of receiving other foods.

302

notes to pages 171–172

128. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 52; and Luis de Bilbao in Bruno, Rosa, 72. The same was said of Catherine. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 51. 129. The quoted passages in the ﬁrst sentence are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 52–53 (see 54). The other quoted passages are from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:230. 130. Hamdy F. Moselhy, A. McKnight, and J. Fiona MacMillan, “The Challenge of Self-Mutilation: A Case Report and Review of the Literature.” European Journal of Psychiatry 9/3 (1995), 163. See Robert H. Dworkin, “Pain Insensitivity in Schizophrenia: A Neglected Phenomenon and Some Implications,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 20/2 (1994), 235–248. See also Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions of Masochism,” 1012; Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations,” 156; Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 201; and Alec Roy, “Self-Mutilation,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 51/ 2 (1978), 201–203. 131. Edward Goldenberg and Lindbergh S. Sata, “Religious Delusions and SelfMutilation,” Current Concepts in Psychiatry 4 (1978), 3–4. Two days before the incident this man had decided to become a monk. 132. Editor’s note to Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations,” 150; see 152. See also Favazza, Bodies under Siege, xi–xiii, 23. The release of pressure is particularly apparent in Favazza’s chapters on the head (61–105) and the skin (123–144). On the children see Green, “Self-Mutilation in Schizophrenic Children,” 234. For a case in which no pain was experienced, see 240. 133. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 57 and 219. See also 8–9, where self-injurious behavior is distinguished from sexual masochism. See Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations,” 157, and Panken, Joy of Suffering, 133. 134. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 196. Bell wrote of Catherine: “In the end she had committed the sin of vainglory and had starved herself to death. It had been her will, not His, that had triumphed all these years and that now lay vanquished.” Bell, Holy Anorexia, 53. 135. The quoted phrases are from Salzman, “Masochism,” 3; and Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 226, respectively. See Panken, Joy of Suffering, 133; and Glick and Meyers, “Introduction,” 1. See also Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), 16, where Teresa of Avila describes moribund agonies as the greatest pleasure imaginable. Freud identiﬁed two basic types of masochism, one a sexual perversion and the other, “moral masochism,” which is the primarily concern of this discussion, a nonsexual character trait. Moral masochism can be bound to love objects, however, as exempliﬁed by Rose’s suffering as an expression of love for God. See Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 230. 136. Master Thietmar quoted in F. E. Peters, Jerusalem: The Holy City in the Eyes of Chroniclers, Visitors, Pilgrims, and Prophets from the Days of Abraham to the Beginnings of Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 348. 137. Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 81 and 86; see 81–82. 138. Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 307. See Frank Graziano, Divine Violence: Spectacle, Psychosexuality, and Radical Christianity in the Argentine “Dirty War” (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 148–149; and Frank Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus Books, 1979), 103–104. 139. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Loayza, Vida, 4; the others are from Alonso Vela´zquez in Bruno, Rosa, 85. Hansen, Vida admirable, 141, makes passing reference to Rose’s rapid defeat of sinful “passions” and “distractions of the imagination.”

notes to pages 172–175

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140. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:333. See the similar account in Hansen, Vida admirable, 172. 141. The quoted phrase is from Freud in Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 12. See Loewenstein, “A Contribution,” 213. 142. See Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 34; Bynum, “Female Body,” 162; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 143. 143. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites: respectively, Marı´a de Oliva, 1574:156 and 138; Pedro de Loayza, 1570:190; and Micaela de la Maza, 1574:496. 144. Uza´tegui in Bruno, Rosa, 58. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 181. To judge by the number of Rose’s friends and acquaintances, the social isolation may have been overstated. See Bruno, Rosa, 45–46, 51, and 54; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 76, 103–104, 222–223. The Loayza passages are in Vida on 51 and 72, respectively. 145. The quoted passages are from Hernando Flores and Alonso Vela´zquez, both quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 17 and 19, respectively. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:138, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 93. Mele´ndez argued that Rose would not play with dolls because they resembled indigenous idols. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:260. 146. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:138. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 31, and Bruno, Rosa, 53. Hansen, Vida admirable, 271, seems to refer to another outing. The passages quoted from Hansen are on 95. 147. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Uza´tegui in Bruno, Rosa, 54; Francisco Nieto in ibid., 58 (see 59); and Uza´tegui in ibid., 61. As a child, Mariana of Quito recruited a servant to scourge her, and this also occurred “in her parents bedroom.” Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana, 16–17. 148. Loayza, Vida, 3. See 26 and 28 for other examples. The quoted Mele´ndez passage is from Tesoros, 2:261. 149. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:286; the others are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 118; see 121–122 and 124. See also Bruno, Rosa, 121– 122. Mesmerizing manual labor, during which Rose prayed, may also have contributed to withdrawal. See McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 78 and 323. 150. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 110–111. The quoted prayer is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 188; see 117. 151. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 638; see 641. The quote from Catherine is in Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 43. 152. Hansen, Vida admirable, 163. 153. Oxford English Dictionary, web version (www.dictionary.oed.com). On the rape victims, see Spiegel, “Trauma,” 251. 154. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 9 (see 69); Marı´a de Oliva in Bruno, Rosa, 25 (see 24); and Hansen, Vida admirable, 200. See Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:82. 155. The quoted phrase is from Alfred Flarsheim in Aronson, Insights, 33. On Rose’s paralysis, see Loayza, Vida, 98, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 321–322. Selfinjurious patients describe “the great tenderness and care they give to the wound,” and “at times the descriptions of their wounds sound very much like the words of a mother describing her child.” Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 199. An adult schizophrenic man who had partially castrated himself also felt no pain and was “paradoxically more anxiety-free than the [emergency room] staff who at-

304

notes to pages 175–177

tended him.” Lipsitt, “Psychodynamic and Psychotherapeutic Considerations,” 152. Martyrs in ecstasy are described as insensitive to pain during torture. For an example, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 73. 156. For religion as “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity,” see Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21: 43. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:85, where “religion succeeds in sparing many people an individual neurosis.” 157. See Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 202, where not only pathology but “all psychic life and all subsequent experiences are organized in terms of an exclusive or predominant structure, under the catalytic action of the initial myth.” 158. Allie Light, director, Dialogues with Madwomen (produced by Irving Saraf and Allie Light; distributed by Women Make Movies, 1993). Many contemporary women who became nuns (and, in these cases, returned to secular life) are clearly from pathogenic families. See Gerelyn Hollingsworth, Ex-Nuns: Women Who Have Left the Convent (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985), 1–11. 159. The quoted passages are from, respectively, E. M. Podvoll in Favazza, Bodies under Siege, xxvi; and ibid., 43. 160. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 27; see xi and 76–89. 161. All quoted passages in this paragraph are from George McLean and Brian M. Robertson, “Self-Enucleation and Psychosis: Report of Two Cases and Discussion,” Archives of General Psychiatry 33 (February, 1976), 243–249. 162. Ibid. 163. The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia that correspond to Rose of Lima’s proﬁle include delusions (grandiose and religious delusions in paranoid schizophrenia), hallucinations, and social dysfunction. See American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 285 and 287. 164. The quoted phrases in the ﬁrst sentence are from, respectively, Freud, Totem and Taboo, 85–86 (Freud borrowed the phrase from his patient known as the “Rat Man”), and Peter Buckley, “Mystical Experience and Schizophrenia,” Schizophrenia Bulletin 7 (1981), 516–521. The subsequent quotations are from Buckley, “Mystical Experience and Schizophrenia,” 516 and 518, respectively. For self-mutilators who claim to be deities or to have special relations with God, see Favazza, Bodies under Siege, xxvi. One of the most notorious psychotics of psychoanalytic literature, Daniel Paul Schreber, believed he was God’s wife. See Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 12:3–84. See also Daniel Paul Schreber, Memory of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Schreber’s encounters with God were characterized by what he called “spiritual voluptuousness.” See Freud, “Psycho-analytic Notes,” 31, n. 2. 165. Barbara J. Freedman, “The Subjective Experience of Perceptual and Cognitive Disturbances in Schizophrenia,” Archive of General Psychiatry 30 (March, 1974), 334 and 338, respectively. 166. Paul C. Hornton, “The Mystical Experience: Substance of an Illusion,” Jour-

notes to pages 177–180

305

nal of American Psychoanalytic Association 22 (1974), 368; see 366–376. This schizophrenic’s description of the experience as “a mental orgasm” is suggestive in the context of mystical eroticism (368). 167. Arthur J. Deikman, “Implications of Experimentally Induced Contemplative Meditation,” in Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 142/2 (February, 1966), 104– 105. 168. Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 184. The conﬂict of this “violence” is illustrated by a seventeen-year-old girl who jumped out of a ﬁfth-story window after having disobeyed an auditory hallucination. See Kroll and Bachrach, “Medieval Visions,” 714. On mind control, see Freedman, “Subjective Experience,” 336. 169. Favazza, Bodies under Siege, 24. On religious surrender, see Anton Boisen et al., “Schizophrenic Ideation as Striving toward the Solution of Conﬂict,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 10 (1954), 389–391. 170. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Jaime Blanco, Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:31; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:354; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 210 (see 209). See also Loayza, Vida, 57, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 111 and 178. For an image of the statue, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 144. 171. Juan del Castillo in Bruno, Rosa, 148. The same words verbatim are in Loayza, Vida, 42–43; see 48–49. 172. Juan del Castillo in Bruno, Rosa, 141–142. The Mele´ndez quote is from Tesoros, 2:354. 173. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 33; and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 164. See Loayza, Vida, 23; Hansen, Vida admirable, 32–33; Bruno, Rosa, 46–48; and Nancy E. van Deusen, “Instituciones religiosas y seglares para mujeres en el siglo XVII en Lima,” in Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano (2nd corrected ed.) (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1997), 223. The cofounder of Santa Clara, along with Mogrovejo, is cited as Francisco de Saldan ˜ a in Nancy van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonia Lima (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 170. 174. The quoted passage is from Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 47. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 165 and Bruno, Roses, 48. 175. The quoted passages are from Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 47. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 164. 176. Loayza, Vida, 23. On arrival she found her mother and grandmother in tears: “the grandmother because of what she knew and the loneliness that she felt, and the mother because she [the grandmother] was crying without wanting to tell her the cause.” Uza´tegui in Bruno, Rosa, 48. See de la Maza in Bruno, Rosa, 164. Leaving without informing the mother might imply Rose’s unconscious recognition that she would not see the plan through to fruition. After she returned, Rose lived at home “as though she were in a convent.” Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:204. 177. Hansen, Vida admirable, 32–33; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 163; and Loayza, Vida, 23. 178. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 33. The Loayza passage is from Vida, 43. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 163. 179. Hansen, Vida admirable, 210. 180. See Nicole F. Kirman, “The Repetition Compulsion Revisited,” Issues in Psychoanalytic Psychology 18/1 (1996), 43, where “the child seeks out the mother whether the relationship entails pleasure or pain.”

306

notes to pages 180–184

181. The quoted phrase is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 32. 182. September 1, 1617, letter of Nicolas de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 586. See chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions,” where another example from Bruno, Rosa, 110, is discussed. 183. Hansen, Vida admirable, 97–98. The quoted passage is on 38. 184. The quoted phrase is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 111. The projection of one’s emotional needs onto an otherwordly construct is in some cases more apparent. For an example, see Antonio Rubial Garcı´a, “Los santos milagreros y malogrados de la Nueva Espan ˜ a,” in Garcı´a Ayluardo and Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas, 76, where the Mexican nun Marı´a de Jesu´s Tomellı´n is convinced that Christ, smitten with love, cannot live without her. In the same essay, Catalina de San Juan projected sexual indiscretions onto the naked Christ who visited her, then reprimanded him (85). 185. S. Louis Mogul, “Asceticism in Adolescence and Anorexia Nervosa,” Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 35 (1980), 161. 186. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 452–453. 187. The ﬁrst two quoted phrases are from Hugo Lietaer and Josef Corveleyn, “Psychoanalytical Interpretation of the Demoniacal Possession and the Mystical Development of Sister Jeanne de Anges from Loudun (1605–1665),” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 5/4 (1995), 267; the third is from Thomas Sydenham quoted in Phillip R. Slavney, Perspectives on “Hysteria” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 73. 188. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 449. The quoted phrase is from Luis Miguel Glave, De Rosa y espinas: Economı´a, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos and Fondo Editorial, Banco Central de Reserva del Peru´, 1998), 194. 189. See Slavney, Perspectives on “Hysteria,” 93–96. The quoted phrase is from American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, xxi. 190. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 276. 191. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Blas Martı´nez in Bruno, Rosa, 124; the others are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 236. The marble trope is also in Bruno, Rosa, 124. This trance-like immobility was typical of mystical rapture. For an example of the ecstatic Catherine of Siena catatonically locked in position, oblivious to her environment, see Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 164. 192. Hansen, Vida admirable, 119. See Loayza, Vida, 67. 193. Hansen, Vida admirable, 58. For the three days “she was always immobile” and was unable to stand up, “not even to open the door of the chapel if somebody knocked on it” (Hansen, Vida admirable, 120). The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 165–166. 194. The title of this section, “Desolate unto Bliss,” is borrowed from Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 196. On Burton, see Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 305–306. For an overview of melancholy, see 168–185. 195. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 18:109. 196. God’s discourse to Catherine is from Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 298. The ﬁnal quoted passage is from Brown, Body and Society, 238. 197. Loayza, Vida, 74 (two passages) and Hansen, Vida admirable, 132, 132, and 131, respectively. See Bruno, Rosa, 136. On Rose’s crying, see Hansen, Vida admi-

notes to pages 184–186

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rable, 26 and 44; de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 172; and Loayza, Vida, 57. 198. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 131, 134, and 131, respectively. Angela of Foligno’s experience of the dark night of the soul included, in addition to torments of body and soul, demonic temptations and revival of carnal vices. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 147. For some borderline patients, “separation is terrifying because it results in profound emptiness, feelings of abandonment, and ego fragmentation.” Craig Johnson quoted in Aronson, Insights, 69. 199. Recall Rose’s verses: “The clock has struck twelve / My Jesus doesn’t come / Who is the lucky one / who detains Him?” (Loayza, Vida, 89); see the discussion in chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions.” The biblical Jesus was ambiguously surrounded by women; see Luke 8:2–3. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 154. Rose sometimes sent her guardian angel (another imaginary companion) to hasten the return of her Bridegroom. 200. Transgressions, even when imposed, generated unbearable guilt. Sickness unto death resulted when Rose was forced to eat a piece of chicken breast, not as much from the physical discomfort as from “a scolding that Our Lord gave her” for taking nourishment other than his body. When she was forced to eat on another occasion, she took “revenge on herself ” by eating nothing for ten days. Her self-starvation was perpetuated by a punishing internal representation of Christ that demanded she live without food. See Bruno, Rosa, 70. 201. Viderman, “Subject-Object Relation,” 185. The Freud passages are from his Group Psychology, 113 and 114, respectively. 202. Viderman, “Subject-Object Relation,” 185. 203. The last quoted passages are from Karen Horney in Charme, “Religion,” 222. See Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 202. The previous quoted passages are from J. Reid Meloy, Violent Attachments (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1997), 32. See Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions,” 1014–1015, and Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 202. 204. The quoted phrases are from Glickauf-Hughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 34 and 203, respectively. The more Christ distanced himself from Rose, Hansen wrote, “the more distant she was from herself ” (Vida admirable, 129). “How can I leave You without leaving myself?” wondered Fray Luis de Granada (Libro de oracio´n, 273). 205. See Cooper, “Narcissistic-Masochistic Character,” 129. See also GlickaufHughes and Wells, Treatment of the Masochistic Personality, 201; Kernberg, “Clinical Dimensions,” 1016; and Lietaer and Corveleyn, “Psychoanalytical Interpretation,” 268, where “just as the love for the other is in fact narcissistic self-love, the hatred and the accusations against the other are also related to their own imperfection and impurity.” 206. American Psychiatric Association, DSM-IV, 297. In Delusional Disorder, as currently deﬁned, the essential feature is “the presence of one or more nonbizarre delusions that persist for at least one month” (296). See 301. 207. The quoted passages are from Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 139, and Lietaer and Corveleyn, “Psychoanalytical Interpretation,” 269, respectively. 208. Deleuze, Masochism, 93. The Gregory of Nyssa passages are quoted in Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 89; see 71. For a succinct summary on the searching

308

notes to pages 186–188

bride, see Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 68–69. 209. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sexuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 242. The bride “glories in her wound, for the point of this spiritual yearning has pierced to the depths of her heart.” Gregory of Nyssa quoted in Louth, Origins, 96–97. Much of the art, like much of the life, of religious women depends on “the element of anticipation, or deferral of union,” suspending the female mystic in “a perpetual state of longing.” Karen-Edis Barzman, “Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena De’ Pazzi,” Art History 15/2 (1992), 172 210. Alexandre Koje`ve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969), 29. See Wilden and Lacan, Language of the Self, 193. For Augustine on desire and concealment, see Tzvetan Todorov, Theories of the Symbol, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 76–77. The Bernard of Clairvaux passage is quoted in Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 101. See Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 196. The quoted phrases from Rose are in Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 47.

chapter 8 1. Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 21. The Akiba passage is quoted in E. Ann Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” in Lucetta Scarafﬁa and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 31. 2. See Murphy, Song of Songs, 46. For explicit eroticism in Sumerian sacredmarriage poems, see Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Arkana/Penguin Books, 1993), 212–215. 3. The quoted phrase is from Bartolome´ Lobo Guerrero and Fernando Arias de Ugarte, Sı´nodos de Lima de 1613 y 1636 (Madrid and Salamanca: Centro de Estudios Histo´ricos del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ﬁcas and Instituto de Historia de la Teologı´a Espan ˜ ola de la Universidad Pontiﬁcia de Salamanca, 1987), 5. For an earlier example, see Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 221. On Hippolytus, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 55. That interpretation was probably indebted to the rabbinic tradition equating Bridegroom and bride with God and Israel, respectively. 4. Origen quoted in Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 91. 5. E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 59. The Origen quotation on the Bridegroom is from 28. See Murphy, Song of Songs, 15; and Louth, Origins, 55. 6. Rupert quoted in Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 160. Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129) was the ﬁrst to equate the bride exclusively with Mary. See Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 43. On ancient mothergoddesses, see Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 597–603. See also Haskins,

notes to pages 188–189

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Mary Magdalen, 45, and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 208. 7. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 2:91 (see 2:82), and Marı´a de Agreda de Jesu´s quoted in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 231. 8. Alejandro Ortiz Rescaniere, De Adaneva a Inkarrı´: Una visio´n indı´gena del Peru´ (Lima: Ediciones Retablo de Paper, 1973), 24. 9. Jose´ Chichizola Debernardi, El manierismo en Lima (Lima: Pontiﬁcia Universidad Cato´lica del Peru´, 1983), plate 102. For another example of the chin chuck, see Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 103. The Dutch-school painting is in the collection of Monsignor Arthur Connolly, Boston. The hand on the groin is similarly suggestive in the ﬁfteenth-century Avignon Pieta`, attributed to Enguerrand Quarton; see J. R. Porter, Jesus Christ: The Jesus of History, the Christ of Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 217. For other examples of this motif, see Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 96–103 and 203–206. On Mary as the Bride, see Baring and Cashford, Myth of the Goddess, 604; Alan Dundes, “The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus,” in [no editor], In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 202–205 and 604–607; and Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 122. 10. The quoted passages are from Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 5. See 110–118. For a good example, see 39–40. See Dorothy C. Shorr, The Christ Child in Devotional Images in Italy during the XIV Century (New York: George Wittenborn, 1954), 116 ff. Among the early representations of Christ is one modeled on Amor, “whose love affair with Psyche is interpreted as God’s love for the human soul.” Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 26. 11. For an example, see Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 134–135. Also suggestive is imagery of Christ as a unicorn poking his headgear into Mary’s lap. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, ﬁgure 29. According to Honorius of Autun, to catch a unicorn, “a virgin is put in a ﬁeld; the animal then comes to her and is caught, because it lies down on her lap. Christ is represented by this animal, and his invincible strength by its horn.” Quoted in Robert Hughes, Heaven and Hell in Western Art (New York: Stein & Day, 1968), 56 12. The last quoted passage is from Julia Kristeva, “Sabat Mater,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 105. The Dante passage is from his Paradise, trans. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 390. 13. Granada, Libro de la oracio´n, 300. On the commissioned painting, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 272, and Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 162. 14. See Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 99–100. See 79 and 95. On 97, Catherine

310

notes to pages 189–191

“could hardly reach the end of an ‘Our Father’ without going into ecstasy.” For similar relations concerning Rose of Lima, see Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 49. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Nicanor Aguilar, Tercer centenario de Santa Rosa de Lima (Cuenca, Ecuador: Alianza, 1917), 13. 15. The last quoted passage is in Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31. The examples in the previous sentence are from Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 180, and Matter, “Mystical Marriage,” 36, respectively. 16. Stephen Benko, The Virgin Goddess: Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), 205. See 233 and 245. 17. Matter, Voice of My Beloved, plate 5. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Hermas quoted in Stephen Benko, Virgin Goddess, 231; the others are from Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994), 199. 18. Augustine’s argument is in Catholic Church, Catechism, 210–211. 19. Gregory quoted in Murphy, Song of Songs, 23. 20. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, trans. Terence L. Connolly (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 78; see 77. See also Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 98; and Jean Leclercq, Monks and Love in Twelfth-Century France: PsychoHistorical Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 101. 21. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 169; and Bernard quoted in Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 128– 129. 22. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 74–76. See the caution on 128. For an erotic image of Christ the Bridegroom kissing the bride on the mouth, see Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 23. Such images were in “most twelfthcentury bibles” (22). 23. The quoted passage is in Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Love in Christian and Jewish Mysticism,” in Steven T. Katz, ed. Mysticism and Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 203. For Origen on the Bridegroom’s kiss, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 174. 24. Gertrud the Great of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, trans. and intro. Gertrud Jaron and Jack Lewis (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1989), 79. 25. Ibid., 80. 26. Quoted in McGinn, “The Language of Love,” 203. See Astell, Song of Songs, 67. 27. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Brown, Body and Society, 274; Mary Jane Klimisch, The One Bride: The Church and Consecrated Virginity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 134; and McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 106. 28. Quoted in Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 216. See McDannell and Lang, Heaven, 106. 29. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 541. The quoted passages are from Adelheid in Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 316–317. See Song of Songs 4:11 and 2:16.

notes to pages 191–193

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30. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 153. 31. The ﬁrst quoted passage is in Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 101. The Teresa passages are from Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Libro de la vida, ed. Da´maso Chicharro (Madrid: Ediciones Ca´tedra, 1987), 180 and 201, respectively. The last quoted passage is from Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (1566– 1607),” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 227. 32. Origen quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 276. 33. The Martı´n de Co´rdoba passage is quoted in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 541. Isidore is quoted in Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991), 23. On the sin in Eden, see Genesis 3:1–19 and 2:25. See also Brown, Body and Society, 93–94, 220, and 336, and Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 68–70. According to Ambrose, the moral debility of concupiscence was punishment for this sin. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 76–77. 34. Luke 7:47. The ﬁrst quoted phrase is from the New Revised Standard Version; the second is in the King James, Rheims, Ampliﬁed Bible, and New International Version translations. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 225. 35. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 16–19. See Luke 23:56–24:1. 36. Luke 8:2. 37. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 14–16, 38, and 96. Mary of Bethany was conﬂated in a threesome with Magdalen and the sinner. The Church sorted the identities of the three women and eliminated Magdalen’s epithets as “great sinner” and “penitent” in the twentieth century. See Haskins. Mary Magdalen, 388. See also see Luke 7:36–7:39; Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 226–228; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:374–376; and “Mary of Magdala,” in Ronald Brownrigg, Who’s Who: The New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 170–173. 38. Sara F. Matthews Grieco, “Models of Female Sanctity in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy,” in Scarafﬁa and Zarri, Women and Faith, 167. See ﬁgure 8. See also Karen-Edis Barzman, “Sacred Imagery and the Religious Lives of Women, 1650–1850,” in Scarafﬁa and Zarri, eds., Women and Faith, 237–238. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 268–269. 39. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 236. 40. Ibid., 239–240. “Venus in sackcloth” is from Mario Praz quoted on 261; see 236. 41. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 265 (for examples and discussion, see 264–265), and Rudolph Binion, Love beyond Death: The Anatomy of a Myth in the Arts (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 76 (see 99, 100, 104, 105, and—for the Rodin statue—ﬁgure 65). Sacred art was more generally prone to enhancing or introducing eroticism. For an example, see Antonio Nasini, The Mystical Marriage of Teresa de Avila (c. 1690), reproduced in Karen-Edis Barzman, “Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena De’Pazzi,” Art History 15/2 (1992), 182 (plate 25). 42. This and subsequent imagery established Magdalen in roles competing with the Virgin’s identity as Bride of Christ and symbol of the Church. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 63–67. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315–386), similarly pursued Song of Song motifs to describe Magdalen as a bride of Christ. See Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 99

312

notes to pages 193–195

43. The quoted phrase is from Genesis 2:24. See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 41. 44. Gospel of Philip quoted in Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 40. See Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 26. In the Gospel of Philip, the Greek word describes Magdalen in relation to Christ as a “companion,” “partner,” or “consort,” “a woman with whom a man has had sexual intercourse.” Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 40. 45. Leclercq, Monks and Love, 8–23, particularly 14–15. The quoted passage on Bernard is on 22. On Richard of St. Victor, see McGinn, “Language of Love,” 214. The quoted Augustine passage is from Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. and intro. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 145. 46. McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 56 and 223, respectively. 47. The last quoted passages are from, respectively, Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sexuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986), 247, and Louis Beirnaert quoted in Bataille, Eroticism, 247. The quoted passages on the Mexican nun are from Francisco Pardo in Antonio Rubial Garcı´a, “Los santos milagreros y malogrados de la Nueva Espan ˜ a,” in Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano (2nd corrected ed.) (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1997). For a study of convent sexuality, see Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 48. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:74. He cites Master John Beleth as his source. Regarding “the slow transformation of the religious setting into an amorous one, or of faith into eroticism,” see Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5. The passages regarding Spain are from a manuscript quoted in Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), 27 and 28, respectively. 49. Morel Fatio quoted in Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, Vida religiosa espan˜ola, 165. See 162– 166. 50. Robert J. Stoller, “The Term Perversion,” in Gerald I. Fogel and Wayne A. Myers, Perversions and Near-Perversions in Clinical Practice: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). On the man aroused during mass, see John Money, “Paraphilias: Phenomenology and Classiﬁcation,” American Journal of Psychotherapy 38/2 (1984), 175. On sexual abuse of boys, see, for example, Johanna McGeary, “Catholicism in Crisis,” Time, April 1, 2002, 28–40, and Melinda Hanneberger, “Cardinals Agree on Ousting Priests for Sexual Abuse,” New York Times, April 25, 2002, A1 and A25. There were similar front-page stories in the New York Times and other major newspapers throughout the month of April 2002. 51. Inquisition documents quoted in Paulino Castan ˜ eda Delgado and Pilar Herna´ndez Aparicio, La Inquisicio´n de Lima (1570–1635) (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1989), 1:399. 52. Summary of the process against Pedro Ruı´z de Alcaraz appended to Antonio Ma´rquez, Los alumbrados: Orı´genes y ﬁlosofı´a (1525–1559) (Madrid: Taurus, 1980), 259. The same assertion is in the “Edicto de los alumbrados de Toledo” (234). The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Melquiades Andre´s, Historia de la mı´stica de la edad de oro en Espan˜a y Ame´rica (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1994), 278. The referenced broadside is “Nos los inquisidores aposto´licos,” Mendel Collec-

notes to pages 195–196

313

tion, Lilly Library, Indiana University. For a study of sexual solicitation by confessors, see Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 53. Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 387. The Catherine quotation is from Raimundo de Capua, Vida y milagros de la bienaventurada Sancta Catherina de Sena, trans. Antonio de la Pen ˜ a (Salamanca: Alonso de Terranova y Neyla, 1580), 34. Catherine’s reclusion was full of devils “rousing so many vile thoughts in her mind,” and she tried to escape “those abominable monsters and obscene visions.” Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 93. 54. See Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:333. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 173 and 172. See Alonso Vela´zquez quoted in Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 85. For another example of the devil in the guise of a gentleman in Peru, see Alvaro Huerga, Historia de los alumbrados: Vol. 3, Los alumbrados de hispanoame´rica (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, Seminaro Cisneros, 1986), 132. For the devil as a woman tempting the Desert Fathers, see Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 258. 55. These examples and the quoted passage are from Aviad M. Kleinberg, Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 89–90. On the Spanish beatas, see Marı´a Palacios Alcalde, “Las beatas ante la Inquisicio´n,” Hispania Sacra 40 (1988), 114–115. See also 126–127. The quoted passage on Ubitarte is from Inquisition testimony quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 570. For a laywoman’s sexual relations with the devil, see Marı´a Emma Mannarelli, “Inquisicio´n y mujeres: Las hechiceras en el Peru´ durante el siglo XVII,” Revista andina 3/1 (July 1985), 146. 56. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Michel Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 168. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Romans 8:3. 57. The quoted passage is from Bynum, Holy Feast, 247. See Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 109. On Christ’s command to Angela, see Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 134. On the “spiritual value of undressing” and “following the naked Christ naked,” see Mario Perniola, “Between Clothing and Nudity,” in Michel Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 2 (New York: Zone, 1989), 245. See also Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 33. 58. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Kathleen Myers, “Testimony for Canonization or Proof of Blasphemy? The New Spanish Inquisition and the Hagiographic Biography of Catarina de San Juan,” in Mary E. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 281; and Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 94. 59. Jacqueline Holler, “ ‘More Sins than the Queen of England’: Marina de San

314

notes to pages 196–197

Miguel before the Mexican Inquisition,” in Giles, Women in the Inquisition, 223. See 224–225 for more examples. 60. The ﬁrst and last quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 99. The original Spanish, ta´lamo, can also denote the marriage bed. The quoted passage from Rose is in Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 73. See Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:269, and Bruno, Rosa, 60. 61. For examples see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 87 and 164; and “Iconografı´a de la santa en piedra de Huamanga,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 320. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 217. According to Hansen, Rose also gave “very tender kisses” to the cross when she was alone in church. Hansen, Vida admirable, 218. 62. Diego Lozano in Parra, Rosa laureada, 200–201. On the virtue-breasts, see Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:281. 63. See Dundes, “Hero Pattern,” 206. In the previous sentence Margery Kempe is quoted from Rebecca J. Lester, “Embodied Voices: Women’s Food Asceticism and the Negotiation of Identity,” Ethos 23/2 (1995), 212. See Bynum, Holy Feast, 247. 64. Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 238. See McGinn, “Language of Love,” 216. The Spanish Venerable Isabel de Jesu´s, born the same year as Rosa de Lima, “conquered her aversion toward her husband by imagining that she was making love to Joseph, the husband of Mary.” See Electa Arenal, “The Convent as Catalyst for Autonomy: Two Hispanic Nuns of the Seventeenth Century,” in Beth Miller, ed., Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 154. 65. Quoted in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde de la perfeccio´n: Rosa de Santa Marı´a y las alumbradas de Lima,” Hispanic American Historical Review 73/4 (1993), 605–606. 66. 1 John 3:9. The Inquisition passage on Ubitarte is quoted in Iwasaki Cauti, “Mujeres al borde,”606. 67. The last quoted phrases are from Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 134; McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 284; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 155, respectively. The 1708 passage is from the unpaginated preface by Fray Isidro Alphonso Castaneyra to Andre´s de Borda, Pra´ctica de confessores de monjas (Mexico: Francisco de Ribera Caldero´n, 1708). 68. Jacques Nouet quoted in Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 71. 69. For other examples of mystical and visionary sexual encounters, see Brown, Immodest Acts, 54, 61–63, and 117–127; Geraldine McKendrick and Agnus MacKay, “Visionaries and Affective Spirituality during the First Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 93–104; Bynum, “Female Body,” 168–169; Elliott, Spiritual Marriage, 230 and 232; McGinn, “Language of Love,” 212–214; Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y Espan˜a: Estudios sobre la historia espiritual del siglo XVI (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1966), 177; Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 569; Carlos Puyol Buil, Inquisicio´n y polı´tica en el reinado de Felipe IV: Los procesos de Jero´nimo de Villanueva y las monjas de San Pla´cido, 1628–1660 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ﬁcas, 1993), 115; Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 116 and 120; Rene´ Millar Carvacho, “Falsa santidad e Inquis-

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icio´n: Los procesos a las visionarias limen ˜ as,” Boletı´n de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 108–109 (2000), 284; and Mannarelli, “Inquisicio´n y mujeres,” 146. 70. The Teresa passage, from her Libro de la vida, is from Saint Teresa of Jesus, The Complete Works, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 2:193. The other quoted passages are in Louth, Origins, 96. The Greek words agape and eros, and the Latin dilectio or caritas and amor, all translate to “love” in English and amor in Spanish, clouding their differentiation. 71. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 78. For discussion of these ideas, see Louth, Origins, 67 and 89. “Bernard distinguishes four ways of loving: to love the ﬂesh for the ﬂesh, the spirit for the ﬂesh, the ﬂesh for the spirit, and the spirit for itself.” Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:305 72. The quoted passages are from Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 23, 23, and 37, respectively. 73. The Medoro image is in Luis Eduardo Wuffarden and Pedro Guibovich Pe´rez, “Esplendor y religiosidad en el tiempo de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 47. The Zoboli image is in Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 227. 74. From a seventeenth-century hagiography quoted in Barzman, “Sacred Imagery,” 231. On Agnes, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 132. 75. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bynum, Holy Feast, 28 (two passages), and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 329; see 522. For an overview of the relations between medieval female mystics and identities of Christ, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131. 76. For examples of the Christ child in the circle of ﬂowers, see Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 223, 232, 234, and 235. See also Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte (Lima: Taller Gra´ﬁco de Sanmarti, 1967), plates 2 and 17. For examples of the maternal Rose, see Raffaele Moro R., “Las torpes imagenes americanas: Devociones locales entre los alpes y los andes a trave´s de las estampas Remondini,” Revista andina 12/2 (1994), 513–516, and 521; and Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 103. 77. C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Cristina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 119. For Margaret Ebner’s experience, see McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 311. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 270. An occasional monk breast fed the Christ child. See 25 and 317, n. 56. 78. The passage quoted from Rose is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 126. On Martina de los Angeles y Arilla, see Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157–158 and 202–203. 79. Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 123. See 121–129. 80. The quoted passages are from ibid., 10 and 78, respectively. 81. For examples, see Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 237 and 282; and He´ctor H. Schenone, Iconografı´a del arte colonial, Los Santos (Buenos Aires: Fundacio´n Tarea, 1992), 2:691. The quoted passages are from Juan del Castillo in Bruno, Rosa, 139, and Loayza, Vida, 42, respectively. Hansen, Vida admirable, 148, adds the adult Christ to Rose’s visions. 82. See the image in Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 237. 83. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Herbert Thurston quoted in F. A. Whitlock and J. V. Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization: An Historical and Psychophysiological En-

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quiry,” Psychological Medicine 8 (1978), 199–200; and the others are from Juan del Castillo in Bruno, Rosa, 139. 84. The last quoted passage is from the hagiographer of Mary of Oignies in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 119. Hugh of St. Victor described God in the soul “as a Bridegroom in a wedding chamber.” Quoted in Astell, Song of Songs, 81. Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 15, uses “the little bed of her heart.” The quoted Teresa passage is from Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, biografı´a de Juana de Ontan ˜ on (Mexico: Editorial Porru´a, 1966), 50. See Weber, Teresa of Avila, 112. The quoted passage from Rose’s hagiographer is from Jean Baptist Feuillet, The Life of St. Rose, ed. F. W. Faber (Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham, 1860), 84. The Bernard of Clairvaux passages are quoted in Astell, Song of Songs, 96. Louis Beirnaert, a priest, underscored “the aptness of sexual union to symbolize a higher union” in Bataille, Eroticism, 223. In Phaedo, Plato uses language of the body to speak of the soul. See Nicole Lorauz, “Therefore, Socrates Is Immortal,” in Feher et al., Fragments for a History of the Human Body 2:13–45, particularly 38– 39. 85. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their Pathological Derivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 165. The quoted passage in the following sentence is Bernard of Clairvaux in Frank Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lepus Books, 1979), 114. See Leclercq, Monks and Love, 9. The last quoted passage is from Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 113. 86. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Augustine in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 5, n. 2 (see 26); and Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 232. Christ assumed the ﬂesh “as an Infant Spouse, from his bridal chamber, that is, from the womb of a virgin.” See Columba Marmion, Sponsa Verbi: The Virgin Consecrated to Christ, trans. Francis Izard (London: Sands, 1925), 25. 87. The quoted passage in the ﬁrst sentence is from Brown, Body and Society, 351. The other quoted passages are Origen quoted on 175. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 215. 88. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 72; and Terence O’Reilly, From Ignatius of Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Aldershot, England: Variorum, 1995), essay XV, 9. 89. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Dundes, “Hero Pattern,” 205– 206; Marguerite of Oingt quoted in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 97; and Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963), 105. See Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 135. 90. All quoted passages in this paragraph are from Catherine of Siena, The Letters of Catherine of Siena, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988), 1:110. 91. Ibid., 108. “Drown yourself,” God told Catherine of Siena, “in the blood of Christ cruciﬁed” (169). On another occasion Catherine felt a rain of blood mixed with ﬁre falling on her soul. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 171. Death as marriage to Christ may have become something of a commonplace. A poor French prostitute succumbing religiously to the plague in 1633 was viewed by her admirers as “a Wise Virgin setting out to receive her Bridegroom.” One exclaimed, “She goes to her death as if to a wedding.” Claudine Herzlich and Janine Pierret, Illness and Self in Society, trans. Elborg Forster (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 146.

notes to pages 202–206

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92. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 336 (three passages), 310, and 326. 93. The quoted phrase is from St. Jerome in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 18.

chapter 9 1. The title of this chapter is borrowed from Veronica Giuliani, The Purgatory of Love (Citta` di Castello: Centro Stuid Veronichiana, 1983). For the wound as a womb, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 152; as a warehouse, see Raymond of Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1960), 124, and Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, St. Francis de Girolamo, St. John Joseph of the Cross, St. Paciﬁcus of San Severino and St. Veronica Giuliani . . . (London: C. Dolman, 1839), 254–255; and as a well, see John 7:37–38 and 4:7. On the shower of blood, see Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 210, and the image Faith Cleansing the Hearts of Men in the Blood of Christ in Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, 2nd. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 367. A catechism used for conversion of natives in Peru described Christ’s blood as medicine for the soul. Tercer Concilio Limense, Tercer cathecismo y exposicio´n de la doctrina cristiana, por sermones (Lima: Antonio Ricardo, 1585), 18 and 26. Regarding the New Adam, a second-century text links Christ’s side wound to the rib extracted from Adam in the creation of Eve. Eve is advised to “enter through the rib whence you came and hide yourself from the beasts.” Quoted in Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 114. For Rose as a New Eve born from the rib of Christ as the New Adam, see Manuel de Ribero Leal, Oracio´n evange´lica en la beatiﬁcacio´n de la gloriosa virgen S. Rosa de Santa Marı´a . . . (Lima: Gero´nimo de Contreras, 1675), n.p. no. On the wound as culmination of an incremental sacriﬁce, see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 102: “The dead Christ touching his groin is visualized in the totality of a promise fulﬁlled. His Passion completed, he points back to its beginning,” meaning the ﬁrst blood shed in circumcision. Similarly, on the same page, a “blood hyphen” links the last wound (the side gash) with the ﬁrst (circumcision). 2. The last quoted phrases are from Guerric, abbot of Igny, and Aelred of Rievaulx, both in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 121 and 123, respectively. Bernard is quoted in the previous sentence from E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Song in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 137. See Song of Songs 2:14. The quoted Granada passage is from Fray Luis de Granada, Libro de la oracio´n y meditacio´n (Madrid: Ediciones Palabra, 1979), 296–297. The refuge in Christ’s side was often multiplied by adding other wounds. For Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, “Jesus-Love has made His body into a ladder,” so that the soul might “enter into His ﬁve wounds which He made like ﬁve shelters.” Quoted in Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (1566–1607),” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds., Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 226–227. 3. The quoted passage is in Karen Scott, “St. Catherine of Siena, ‘Apostola,’ ” Church History 61 (March 1992), 37. Regarding Angela, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 129.

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notes to pages 206–207

4. The medieval English text, Ancrene Wisse, is quoted in Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 96. The subsequent quoted passages are from, respectively, Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortiﬁcation in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 58; and Bernard quoted in Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 138. Regarding Bonaventura, see Ewa Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth: History, Symbolism, and Structure of a “True” Image (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 191. The Virgin Mary’s heart was also metaphorically pierced by the lance. 5. Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 135. On the image, see 116 and ﬁgure 67. See also Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 374. The “joys of heaven” is from Julian of Norwich quoted in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 377. See Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1998), 280–281. 6. The ﬁrst two quoted passages are from Leonardo Hansen, Vida admirable de Santa Rosa de Lima, trans. Jacinto Parra and ed. El Zuavo Pontiﬁcio Sevilla (Vergara: El Santı´simo Rosario and Lima: Centro Cato´lico, 1895), 157. The others are from Pedro de Loayza, Vida de Santa Rosa de Lima (Lima: Santuario de Santa Rosa, 1985), 70, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 157, respectively. This spiritual food did not break Rose’s fast; she was able to take communion the next morning. Aelred of Rievaulx saw “the breasts of his consolation” as a kind of appetizer: “when they have been torn from the milk, they will be dinner guests at the banquet of the coming of his glory.” Quoted in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 16. For examples of the wound as breast, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 110, 113, 115, and 282, and Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 249 and plates 25, 28, 29, 30. 7. Francisco de Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, celebres aclamaciones, que la siempre triumphante Roma dio a la bienaventurada Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Virgen de Lima, en su solemne beatiﬁcacion (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 16. Some images of the Christ child in Rose of Lima iconography (as elsewhere) have engorged breasts. For examples, see Ramo´n Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla de Rosa de Lima: Mı´stica y polı´tica en torno a la patrona de Ame´rica,” in Jose´ Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo (Lima: Coleccio´n Arte y Tesoros del Peru´, 1995), 77; and Raffaele Moro R., “Las torpes imagenes americanas: Devociones locales entre los alpes y los andes a trave´s de las estampas Remondini,” Revista andina 12/2 (1994), 518. 8. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Juan de Isturisaja in Juan Mele´ndez, Festiva pompa, culto religioso, veneracio´n reverente, ﬁesta, aclamacio´n y aplauso, a la feliz beatiﬁcacio´n de la bienaventurada virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a (Lima: n.p., 1671), 54; and Co´rdoba y Castro, Festivos cultos, 40. 9. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from Nicolas Martı´nez, in Parra, Rosa laureada, 121. The Jesuit sermon quotations are from Nicolas Martı´nez, Oracio´n panegı´rica de la B. Rosa de Santa Marı´a: Dijola en la solemne ﬁesta que a su beatiﬁcacio´n hizo la Nacio´n Espan˜ola en su Yglesia de apostol Santiago de Roma (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1668), 25. The last quoted passage is in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 119. 10. Catherine is quoted from Rebecca J. Lester, “Embodied Voices: Women’s Food Asceticism and the Negotiation of Identity,” Ethos 23/2 (1995), 221. Teresa is quoted from Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 111 and 113. See Nelson Pike, Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 73. For

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additional examples of nursing at the wound, see Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 306 and 308; Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 129 and 132; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 152; and McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 279– 280, 312, and 316. 11. The passages quoted from Alacoque are in Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 19. The Margaret passage is from Bynum, Holy Feast, 249. 12. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Jonas, France, 19; and Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 152. 13. See Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 379, n. 22; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 132–133; and Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Michel Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 182. The image of Christ squirting blood is in Rube´n Vargas Ugarte, Santa Rosa en el arte (Lima: Taller Gra´ﬁco de Sanmarti, 1967), plate 10. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 28 and 62. For images of God’s blood collected in a chalice, often by a female, see Bynum, Holy Feast, plates 12, 26, and 27; and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 111. 14. The last quoted passages are from, respectively, “The Old Czech Life of Catherine of Alexandria,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000), 778; and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:387 and 1:185. See Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:339. On the living waters, see John 7:37–38. When Christ’s side was pierced by the lance, “blood and water came out” (John 19:34), fulﬁlling the prophecy in Zechariah 12:10. See Zechariah 13:1. 15. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Pike, Mystic Union, 73–74; and the twelfth-century Guerric, quoted in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 122. Aspects of Christ as mother are discussed in chapter 7, “Spiritualized Symptoms.” 16. Quoted in Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 197. See Granada, Libro de la oracio´n, 222. This motherly Christ was referenced in a range of early Christian sources. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 110–169, particularly 114–118. 17. For some examples, see Brown, Body and Society, 92; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 118; Melquiades Andre´s Martı´n, Los recogidos: Nueva vision de la mı´stica espan˜ola (1500– 1700) (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1975), 341; Roland E. Murphy, The Song of Songs: A Commentary on the Book of Canticles or the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 15; Santa Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, biografı´a de Juana de Ontan ˜ on (Mexico: Editorial Porru´a, 1966), 36; and Bynum, Holy Feast, plate 17. 18. The quoted Ode 8 is in Platt, Forgotten Books of Eden, 124. Rutherford H. Platt Jr., The Forgotten Books of Eden: Lost Books of the Old Testament (New York: Gramercy Books, 1980), 130. See also 136 (Ode 35) and 138 (Ode 40). In the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, “Jesus saw children being suckled. He said to his disciples, ‘These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom.’ ” Quoted in Alan Dundes, “The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus,” in [no editor], In Quest of the Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 200. See Isaiah 66:10–13. For examples of Yahweh as mother, see Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 125. An Egyptian male diety, Hapi, was represented with breasts. See Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 12–13. 19. The quoted passages are all in Antonio Riccardi, “The Mystic Humanism of Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (1566–1607),” in E. Ann Matter and John Coakley, eds.,

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notes to pages 208–210

Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 223–224. See Karen-Edis Barzman, “Devotion and Desire: The Reliquary Chapel of Maria Maddalena De’ Pazzi,” Art History 15/2 (1992), 187–188. 20. This rose imagery is discussed in chapter 3, “Miracle of the Rose.” For examples of the wound as vulva, see Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 191, and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 278. The quoted passage is from John of the Cross, Selected Writings, ed. and intro. Kieran Kavanaugh (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 225. 21. Bynum, Holy Feast, 167. See Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 22–23. Bonaventura had earlier starved herself to coerce a reform in the wayward behavior of her husband 22. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 173. “The glorious Mother of God herself ” also ﬁlled Catherine “with ineffable sweetness with milk from her most holy breast” (179). For examples of the many nursing tropes in Catherine’s writing, see Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, trans. and intro. Suzanne Noff ke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 328 and 340. According to Freud, “sucking at the mother’s breast is the starting-point of the whole sexual life, the unmatched prototype of every later sexual satisfaction, to which phantasy often enough recurs in times of need.” Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1963), 16:314. 23. Catherine quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 173. See 176. See also Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 30 and 33. God explained to Catherine that the soul receives a spiritual calm, “an emotional union with my gentle divine nature in which she tastes milk, just as an infant when quieted rests on its mother’s breast, takes her nipple, and drinks her milk through her ﬂesh. This is how the soul who has reached this ﬁnal stage rests on the breast of my divine charity and takes into the mouth of her holy desire the ﬂesh of Christ cruciﬁed.” Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 179; see 323. 24. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 146–147. See Bynum, Holy Feast, 166. God explained to Catherine that “Adam’s sin oozed with a deadly pus” until Christ came “drinking himself the bitter medicine you could not swallow.” Christ sucked the pus from Adam’s wound like “the wet nurse who herself drinks the medicine the baby needs” because the wet nurse can tolerate medicine that the infant cannot. “My son was your wet nurse,” God added. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 52; see also 132, 134 25. The quoted passages are from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 147–149 and 156. See 152, 157, and the repetition of this breast feeding on 170. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 235. 26. Granada, Libro de oracio´n, 220. For another example of the eucharist compared to drinking from Christ’s side, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 233. 27. The last quoted phrase is from Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 132. See Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45. On rose drinking blood, see Hansen, Vida admirable, 260–261 (the quoted passage is on 261). See also Dominico Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, seu symbola, quibus virtutes, gestes, et miracula rosae de S.ta Maria exprimuntor . . . (Fermo: G. F. Bolis and Brothers, 1711), ﬁgure 16. 28. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 311 (on Margaret); and Antoine Vergote, Guilt and Desire: Religious Attitudes and Their

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Pathological Derivatives, trans. M. H. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 166. On Francis, see Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 155. On Catherine, see Bynum, Holy Feast, 182; see also 165. A medieval mystic who was repulsed by the male body was visited by Christ “with a disgusting sickness and demanding that she touch his chest.” Bynum, Holy Feast, 213. Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi licked the sores of a lepers, and Angela of Foligno drank the water in which lepers were bathed. St. Paula “licked with her tongue the place where the Lord’s body had lain.” Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:121. 29. Antonio Rubial Garcı´a, “Los santos milagreros y malogrados de la Nueva Espan ˜ a,” in Clara Garcı´a Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, eds., Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano (2nd corrected ed.) (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1997), 84. See Francisco de la Maza, Catarina de San Juan: Princesa de la India y visionaria de Puebla (Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1990), 63 and 100–101. For other examples, see Delumeau, Sin and Fear, 306 and 308; Bynum, “Female Body,” 163; and Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, 55– 56. 30. The Jerome passages are quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 375–376. See also Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, ﬁgure 11; see ﬁgures 32 and 37. Modern expressions also carry these meanings: heat of passion, old ﬂame, hot women, hearts set on ﬁre. The quoted passages on Ubitate are from Inquisition testimony quoted in Fernando Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados: Santa Rosa y el imaginario limen ˜ o del siglo XVII,” in Actas del III Congreso Internacional sobre Los Dominicos en el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid: Editorial Deimos, 1991), 570. 31. The ﬁrst two quoted passages are from Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 164. The quoted passages in the last sentence are from Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 261. See 60–61. All of the other quoted passages are from Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:375–376. 32. The Teresa passage is quoted in Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 254. Magdalen’s heat could be considered a trope of sin processed by penance: “Within the crucible of a burning breast [she] melts them all down, as it were, over the ﬁre of repentance.” Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, trans. Terence L. Connolly (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1951), 87. The quoted passage on Catherine is from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 114. See 167 and Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 81. In Deuteronomy 4:24, Yahweh is “a devouring ﬁre, a jealous God.” See Pike, Mystic Union, 9. 33. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:72, 2:240, and 2:73. St. Agnes was unscathed by the ﬂames of martyrdom. See 1:103. 34. Sermo´n que el muy reverendo Padre Fray Pedro Gutie´rrez Florez . . . predico´ en el Auto general de la santa Inqusicio´n en la ciudad de los Reyes a 13 de marzo de 1605 (Lima: Antonio Ricardo 1605), 20. 35. On the ﬂames of love, see J. Aumann, “Mystical Phenomena,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 10:173. The quoted passage is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 12. See Geronymo Varona de Loaysa, Panegyrico a la beatiﬁcacio´n de la Sancta Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Guatemala: Joseph de Pineda Ybarra, 1670), 10. 36. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1570:238. See Loayza, Vida, 90, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 187. On the gloves, see Loayza, Vida, 86. 37. Hansen, Vida admirable, 136 and 186, respectively. See Loayza, Vida, 34.

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38. Hansen, Vida admirable, 39. See Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, ﬁgure 4. On Rose’s emitting ﬂames, see Juan Mele´ndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias (Rome: Imprenta de Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681), 2:289; Loayza, Vida, 53; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 185. Teresa of Avila also had a “continual glow about her face” when she prayed, and afterward there was a “celestial beauty”: “Sometimes it shone like crystal, and at other times it seemed to emit rays.” Quoted in Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 160– 161. 39. The quoted passages are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 230–232. See 234; Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:338 and 365; Loayza, Vida, 69; and Iva´n de Espinosa Medrano, La novena maravilla . . . (Rome: Joseph de Rueda, 1695), 267. When a priest’s hands elevated the eucharist, it seemed to Catarina de San Juan “like the sun, a ﬁre, or a star.” De la Maza, Catarina de San Juan, 67. Hansen, Vida admirable, 325, has “the eucharistic sun.” When Catherine of Siena took communion her face was “as though on ﬁre.” Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 172. 40. The quoted phrase is from Loayza, Vida, 89. This event is discussed in chapter 2, “Conditioned Perceptions.” See Diego Lozano in Jacinto de Parra, Rosa laureada entre los santos: Epitalamios sacros de la corte, aclamaciones de Espan˜a, aplausos de Roma . . . (Madrid: Impresor del Estado Eclesia´stico de la Real Corona de Castilla, 1670), 200 (Rose “breathed ﬁre”). For other examples, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 149. The Franciscan friar Andre´s de Olmos was preaching about the Virgin Mary when suddenly from between his legs “rose a very large ﬂame of ﬁre.” Luis Weckmann, La herencia medieval de Me´xico (Mexico: Colegio de Me´xico, 1984), 1:296. 41. The quoted phrases are from, respectively, Parra, Rosa laureada, 478; and Joseph Sarmiento Sotomayor, Patrocinio aplaudido, y coronado celebridad, de Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, en la santa Iglesia Metropolitana de la Ciudad de Me´xico, corte de esta Nueva Espan˜a (Mexico: Juan Joseph Guillena, 1698), 10. See Granada, Libro de la oracio´n, 218. See also Hansen, Vida admirable, 232 (God “came to the world in order to plant ﬁre in our hearts”) and 196, where Rose, in ecstatic love, beseeched an image of Christ (painted by Angelino Medoro) to set all hearts on ﬁre. The painting began to sweat in response. Hansen, Vida admirable, 199. St. Dominic is closely associated with ﬁre; see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:22–25. 42. The last quoted phrase is from Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:314. See Loayza, Vida, 42. In the previous sentence, the ﬁrst quoted phrase is from Juan del Castillo in Cayetano Bruno, Rosa de Santa Marı´a: La sin igual historia de Santa Rosa de Lima, narrada por los testigos oculares del proceso de su beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n (Quito: Librerı´a Espiritual, 1992), 139; the others are from the same source, 137. See Loayza, Vida, 40. 43. Hansen, Vida admirable, 181. The words attributed to Rose in the previous sentence are from Juan del Castillo in Bruno, Rosa, 140. See Loayza, Vida, 46. 44. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Loayza, Vida, 89; and Mele´ndez, Tesoros 2:339. Other burning images are on 338, 365, and 366. For “the volcano of divine love that burned in Rose’s breast,” see Hansen, Vida admirable, 185. 45. Hansen, Vida admirable, 112–113. See Michael Camille, The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), 39, where a God of Love shoots arrows into the hearts of lovers. In ﬁrst-century “Odes of Solomon,” God’s will descends from heaven “like an arrow which is violently shot from the bow” (Ode 23). Platt, Forgotten Books of Eden, 131. The Spanish word saeta is usually translated as arrow or dart. It also refers to Andalusian religious songs, sung during Holy Week processions, that express remorse for sin and fear of divine punishment.

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46. The ﬁrst two quoted phrases are from Antonio Sobrino quoted in Melquiades Andre´s Martı´n, Los recogidos: Nueva visio´n de la mı´stica espan˜ola (1500–1700) (Madrid: Fundacio´n Universitaria Espan ˜ ola, 1975), 340; and the third is from Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, 57. 47. The quoted passages on Catherine are from Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 191; see 191–193. The subsequent quoted passages are from, respectively, Sister Violante do Ce´u quoted in Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 227; and Robert Crashaw quoted in Robert T. Petersson, The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 110. 48. The quoted passages are from Teresa de Avila, Libro de la vida, 353. Similarly erotic are Bernini’s Ecstasy of Beata Ludovica Albertoni (1674), in the Altieri Chapel of San Francesco a Ripa, in Trastevere, Rome, and Melchiorre Caffa´’s derivative Santa Rosa yacente. See the Caffa´ statue reproduced in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 157 (detail), and Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa de Lima,” in Flores Araoz et al., Santa Rosa de Lima y su tiempo, 220–221. 49. The quoted phrases are from Philippe Arie`s, The Hour of Our Death trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 373; and Pedro de Ribadeneira quoted in Fernando Martı´nez Gil, Muerte y sociedad en la Espan˜a de las Austrias (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1993), respectively. On the convention of referring to orgasm as “dying” or the “little death,” see Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 197–198. See Sigmund Freud, “Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 12:30. 50. Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 261. Veronica later received the stigmata (262). 51. Hansen, Vida admirable, 203 (two passages), 213, and 154, respectively. 52. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:279; and Parra, Rosa laureada, 27. Similar imagery is in Hansen, Vida admirable, 113. Cristina Markyate carried a red-hot iron in her bare hands to prove her resolve to remain a virgin. C. H. Talbot, ed. and trans., The Life of Cristina of Markyate: A Twelfth Century Recluse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 63. 53. The quoted passages are from Gonzalo de la Maza and Marı´a de Oliva, both quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 162 and 164. See Loayza, Vida, 97, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 316–318. 54. The quoted Mele´ndez passages are from Tesoros, 2:410. The last quoted passage is from Catholic Church, Vida de la Virgen Rosa de S. Marı´a de la tercera orden de S. Domingo . . . , trans. Francisco Sa´nchez (Mexico: Viuda de Bernardo Calderon, 1673), 24. 55. Luis G. Alonso Getino, La patrona de Ame´rica ante los nuevos documentos (Madrid: Imprenta E. Gime´nez, 1927), 23–24. My numbering to reference the images follows this source. See also Luis G. Alonso Getino, Santa Rosa de Lima, patrona de Ame´rica: Su retrato corporal y su talla intelectual, segu´n los nuevos documentos (Madrid: M. Aguilar, 1943), 79–111. The text accompanying Rose’s graphics is also in Bruno, Rosa, 187–188. 56. Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 25–26. In Rose’s seventh image the cruciﬁed Christ appears inside her heart, and her hand holds the cruciﬁx at its base (37–38). A dove—the holy spirit—is inside the heart in the ﬁrst image of the mystical scale series (34). 57. Ibid., 26–27. Rose also noted that it had been ﬁve years since she had received the Mercedes that she now depicted “by inspiration of the Lord and experience in my own heart, although unworthy.”

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notes to pages 214–216

58. Ibid., 36–45. For the ﬁfth image, see 35–36. 59. Ibid., 39–40 and 47. Image nine is on 41. 60. Ibid., 39–40. Recibir en arras refers to a husband’s counter-dowry, known formally as the “donation propter nuptias.” 61. Ibid., 48–49. For images ten and eleven, see 42–43. The caption of the tenth image echoes in Latin love sickness from the Song of Songs (42–43). Corporal relations with an incarnate God are enhanced by the interchangeability of heart and soul. The caption of seventh image, adapted from the Song of Songs, reads, “I found him who loved my soul; I have him and I will not leave him” (37–38). 62. Getino, Patrona de Ame´rica, 48. The linking is more apparent in the color reproduction in Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 105. 63. Brown, Body and Society, 139. Clement is quoted on 85; see 66–67. For ancient precedents of attitudes toward sexuality, chastity, virginity, and continence, see 8– 10, 17–18, 32, 38, and 61–62. In the Roman empire purposeful virginity was illegal, and women who refused to marry were sentenced to rape or to hard time in a brothel. Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 32. 64. Antonio Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, Informe a N. Rmo. P. M. General de el Orden de Prediccadores (Matriti: Gregorius Forstman faciebat, 1659), 213. The letter was written in 1633. See Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 154. 65. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Brown, Body and Society, 274 (two passages), and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 44 (see 53 and 94–95). Modern nuns describe leaving the convent as “a divorce” or “a trauma comparable to the death of a spouse.” Gerelyn Hollingsworth, Ex-Nuns: Women Who Have Left the Convent (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1985), 56 and 55, respectively. 66. E. O. James, Christian Myth and Ritual: A Historical Study (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1965), 166. In fourth-century Italy, the veiling of consecrated virgins was a solemn public ritual modeled on nuptial veiling. See Brown, Body and Society, 356. 67. Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins (London: Verso, 1991), 33. In the fourth century, the Council of Elvira in Spain required women to make a public “pact of virginity”(32). After the marriage feast in ancient Greece and in the Old Testament, the bride was led to the nuptial chamber. James, Christian Myth and Ritual, 171; see 173 68. McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 149. The twelfth-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen dressed her nuns as brides even when they received communion. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 134. See Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 107. 69. Eve Arnold, The Unretouched Woman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 137; see 138–145. On the rites in Puebla, see Regla y constituciones para las religiosas recoletas Dominicanas del sagrado monasterio de la gloriosa y esclarecida virgen Santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a (Puebla, Mexico: Real Seminario Palafoxiano, 1789), 169. For a 1636 image of a professing nun dressed as a bride, see Jose´ Deleito y Pin ˜ uela, La vida religiosa espan˜ola bajo el cuarto Felipe: Santos y pecadores (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1963), unnumbered page across from page 208. Rose’s Bridegroom tended to be literalized as though he were an actual, this-worldly husband even outside of matrimonial contexts. See Hansen Vida admirable, 238, 270; Bruno, Rosa, 63, 112; and Loayza, Vida, 68, 74– 75. 70. Mary Jane Klimisch, The One Bride: The Church and Consecrated Virginity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1965), 181–182 and 191. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites

notes to pages 216–218

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of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 98–100. 71. Murphy, Song of Songs, 104. The quoted phrase in the previous sentence is from Hosea 2:16. See Hosea 2:19, Ezekiel 16, and Jeremiah, 3:7–11. In Isaiah 54:5, “Your Creator is your husband.” In the ﬁfth century b.c., Jews in exile venerated Canaanite goddesses as spouses of Yahweh. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 46–47. In the Wisdom of Solomon, written in the ﬁrst century a.d., Sophia (wisdom) is spouse of the Lord. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 48. 72. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from 2 Corinthians 11:2. See 1 Corinthians 6:17 and Ephesians 5:23–32. The Revelation passages are from 19:7–9 and 21:2, respectively. See Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 124. In reference to the Bridegroom, see Matthew 9:15, Mark 2.18, and Luke 5:33. See also John 3:29. Regarding the wedding feast, see Matthew 22:2–14 and 25:1–13. 73. Hansen, Vida admirable, 10–11. In the 1630 testimony of Marı´a de Uza´tegui “garbage” is thrown instead of mud. Vatican Secret Archives, Congregation of Rites, 1574:71. Such a youthful vow was not uncommon. See Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 73. Long, loose female hair has long been associated with sexuality. Upon Magdalen’s conversion, “her hair—symbol of her sexual sin—became the emblem of her penitence.” Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 131–132. In a late-sixteenth-century poem, Magdalen’s nakedness is covered only by her “long mane” as angels lift her to heaven to be united with “her lover.” Quoted in Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 270–271; see 120. For another example of hair used to cover nudity, see Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:103. See also 1 Peter 3:3–5. 74. Hansen, Vida admirable, 31 and 17, respectively. At the age of 12 Rose again cut off “very blonde” hair that her mother had been tending to beautify her. See Gonzalo de la Maza in Luis Millones, Una partecita del cielo: La vida de Santa Rosa de Lima narrada por Don Gonzalo de la Maza, a quien ella llamaba padre (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1993), 157. Some men similarly rejected earthly women for the Virgin. For an example, see Julia Kristeva, “Sabat Mater,” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 107. 75. The quoted phrase is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 32. 76. Hansen, Vida admirable, 46, and Loayza, Vida, 3, respectively. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 157. For other similar examples, see McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 99, and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 159. 77. Hansen, Vida admirable, 22. The quoted passages are from Loayza, Vida, 17. Beauty in hagiography tends to be exaggerated, so that its undoing will be all the more dramatic and saintly. Note also the absence of the miraculous healthy facade that is stressed elsewhere. 78. The ﬁrst quoted passages are from James Lockhart, Spanish Peru, 1532–1560: A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 155 and 156, respectively. The unidentiﬁed hagiographic passage is quoted in Hansen, Vida admirable, 509, n. 9. See 31–32 and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:191 and 2:199. 79. The quoted passages are from, respectively, the unidentiﬁed hagiography quoted in Hansen, Vida admirable, 509, n. 9; and Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:200. 80. The quoted passages are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 20, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 31, respectively. For examples of conﬂicts related to courtship among other saintly women, see Jo Ann Kay McNamara and John E. Halborg, with E. Gordon Whatley, eds. and trans., Sainted Women of the Dark Ages (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 239, n. 13; Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 89; and J. Hub-

326

notes to pages 218–220

ert Lacey, “Anorexia Nervosa and a Bearded Female Saint,” British Medical Journal 285 (1982), 1816–1817. 81. De la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 173. See Bruno, Rosa, 145, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 111. 82. For an early-nineteenth-century example, see Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 249; see also 252–255. Rose was given both palm and garland during her funeral. See the September 1, 1617, letter of Nicolas de Agu¨ero, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Expediente de beatiﬁcacio´n y canonizacio´n de Santa Rosa de Lima, 584. See also Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 2:80 and 2:89. 83. The quoted phrases are from Bruno, Rosa, 177, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 361, respectively. See Loayza, Vida, 118. The Serrano vision is in Bruno, Rosa, 176, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 359. The palm later becomes an iconographic motif. See Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 252. 84. The quoted passages are from Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 146. See Loayza, Vida, 62, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 112. 85. The quoted phrases are from Hansen, Vida admirable, 112; Uza´tegui quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 146; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 113, respectively. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 173. 86. “The Old Czech Life of Catherine of Alexandria,” in Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (New York: Garland, 2000), 775. The ring is put in her hand, not placed on her ﬁnger. For the German image, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, plate 7. 87. See Dominique Rigaux, “Women, Faith, and Image in the Late Middle Ages,” in Lucetta Scarafﬁa and Gabriella Zarri, eds., Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 80. See also Bynum, Holy Feast, 174. For sixteenth-century examples, see Luca Longhi da Forlı`, The Mystical Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (Forlı`: Pinoteca), and the paintings of the same title by Girolamo Romanino in the Brooks Memorial Gallery, Memphis; by Paolo Veronese, in Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979), color plate 84; and by Lorenzo Lotto, in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, ﬁgure 134. For a Cuzco-school image, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 78. 88. The 1511 painting is in the Louvre, Paris. For Catherine’s wedding, see Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 99–100. Ine´s de Ubitarte was also married to Christ in the company of the Virgin and saints. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 569. 89. Hansen, Vida admirable, 106. On Colomba, see Bell, Holy Anorexia, 158. On Veronica, see Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 254–255. Wounded love like Veronica’s is suggested by the fourth-century Macrina, who wore a ring supposedly containing a fragment from the cross as her symbol of betrothal to Christ. Brown, Body and Society, 272. Some mystics developed “espousal rings” (red marks around the wedding ring ﬁnger) representing mystical marriage. Bynum, Holy Feast, 201. 90. The quoted passages are from Luisa de Santa Marı´a and Juan de Villalobos, both quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 147 and 146, respectively. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 114. 91. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:280. See Bruno, Rosa, 147, and Hansen, Vida admirable, 115. 92. The quoted passages are from Luisa de Santa Marı´a quoted in Bruno, Rosa, 147, and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 173 and 174, respectively.

notes to pages 220–223

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93. The quoted passages are from Loayza, Vida, 63, and de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 174. 94. De la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 174; see Millones, Partecita del cielo, 61. 95. Bruno, Rosa, 147. The quoted passages are from the same source. See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 74, and Loayza, Vida, 63. Ine´s Velasco, who moved within the same mystical circle as Rose, was given a ring by her husband to celebrate her marriage to Christ. See Iwasaki Cauti, “Santos y alumbrados,” 569. 96. Mele´ndez, Tesoros, 2:280. See Hansen, Vida admirable, 116. 97. For the original image and commentary, see Jose´ Flores Araoz, “Santa Rosa de Lima en el grabado, siglo XVII,” Cultura Peruana, 7/30–31 (October–December, 1947): n.p. no. See also Flores Araoz, “Iconografı´a de Santa Rosa,” 264 and 278. For other examples, see Mujica Pinilla, “El ancla,” 112, 116, and 121; and Bruno, Rosa, 192. 98. The quoted phrase is from J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973), 241. See 241–242 and 153–154. Phrases such as “erotic unity” are therefore redundant; I use them for want of alternatives. 99. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hansen, Vida admirable, 232 (see the similar wording on 142); and Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 111. Regarding two in one ﬂesh, see Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint Bernard on the Love of God, 202. 100. Jose´ Manuel Bermu´dez, Breve notica de la vida y virtudes de la sen˜ora Don˜a Catalina de Yturgoyen Amasa y Lisperguer, Condesa de la Vega del Ren (Lima: Imprenta del Rı´o, 1821), 63. The eucharist often bled or turned into a tiny Christ during consecration. See Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Michel Feher et al., eds., Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part 1 (New York: Zone, 1989), 220–237. 101. Klimisch, One Bride, 128, with the exception of the last quoted passage, which is from 140. She qualiﬁed in a note that “sublimation” was used “in the sense of a real transposition, not a mere camouﬂage” (131, n. 18). Early association of the eucharist and virginity was suggested following the Council of Elvira in 306, when Iberian bishops declared that virgins who broke their vow of virginity could not be given communion, “not even on their death-bed.” Susanna Elm, “Virgins of God”: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 26; see 28– 29. 102. The quoted phrases are from Cesarius of Heisterbach quoted in Piero Camporesi, “Consecrated Host,” 222, and Bynum, Holy Feast, 213, respectively. Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 197, has a “feast at the table of holy desire.” 103. The Catherine of Genoa passages are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 185; see 215. Angela is quoted in Bynum, “Female Body,” 164. 104. The ﬁrst two quoted phrases are from Petersson, Art of Ecstasy, 89; and the third is from Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi quoted in Riccardi, “Mystic Humanism,” 216. See the image in Bell, Holy Anorexia, plate 13. Catherine of Siena wrote that Christ is “food, table, and servant.” Quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 180. 105. The quoted examples are from, respectively, McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 46; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 144–145; and Brother Ivo quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 66. Anna Vorchtlin (like modern mothers) said to the infant Christ, “I would eat you up, I love you so much.” Quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 250.

328

notes to pages 223–225 106. Brown, Body and Society, 93. The quoted Tertullian passage is on 78. See

182. 107. The quoted passages are from Bynum, Holy Feast, 38, 37, and 216; see 82. As explained by a modern anorexic, “I never thought about sex at all, and didn’t even masturbate: starvation reduces libido.” Quoted in Joyce Kraus Aronson, Insights in Dynamic Psychotherapy of Anorexia and Bulimia: An Introduction to the Literature (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1993), 169. The medieval association of Mary Magdalen and fasting, derived from the legendary Magdalen’s asceticism in the desert, also implied a metaphorical link between fasting as penance and the sexual sins that it purged. 108. Bynum, Holy Feast, 3 and 257. See 245. See Lester, “Embodied Voices,” 210. For some images of Christ as food, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131; Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:73; Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 144; Catherine of Siena, Dialogue, 145; Teresa de Jesu´s, Las Moradas y Libro de la vida, 94–95; and Bell, Holy Anorexia, 149. 109. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Granada, Libro de oracio´n, 222 (ﬁrst two passages); and Alessandro Diotallevi quoted in Piero Camporesi, “Consecrated Host,” 227. Christ’s bride “is incorporated into him through eating his body.” Honorius quoted in Matter, Voice of My Beloved, 61. 110. The quoted phrase is from Manuel Antonio Urrixmendi, Sermo´n panegirico que en honor y celebridad de la gloriosa virgen santa Rosa de Santa Marı´a, Patrona de Ame´rica Meridional, dixo en la Santa Iglesia Catedral de Lima el dia 30 agosto de 1812 (Lima: Imprenta de los Hue´rfanos, 1812), 8. “Host” translates hostia, meaning host as eucharist, but both meanings of the English word apply in this context. 111. The quoted passages are from, respectively, Loayza, Vida, 9 (see 11); Alonso Vela´zquez in Bruno, Rosa, 70; and Loayza, Vida, 8 (two passages). See de la Maza in Millones, Partecita del cielo, 154 and 18; and Hansen, Vida admirable, 235. 112. John 6:51. On the word made ﬂesh, see John 1:14. Catherine of Siena referred to eating “at the table of the cross” and to the eucharistic lamb “roasted not boiled” on the “spit of the cross.” Quoted in Bynum, Holy Feast, 176–177. 113. Saint Teresa of Jesus, The Complete Works, trans. and ed. E. Allison Peers (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 2:384. Translation modiﬁed. The passage is from Teresa’s “Conceptions of the Love of God,” sometimes referred to as her “Meditations on the Song of Songs.” 114. See Pike, Mystic Union, 76–78. 115. A medieval mystic referred to a rejected suitor as “thou food of death” and later nursed at the breast of her Bridegroom. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 129. 116. Bynum, Holy Feast, 54 and 67, respectively. See 212, 246, and 256. See also Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 131 and 145; and Kuryluk, Veronica and Her Cloth, 138. 117. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Richard Kieckhefer, “Imitators of Christ: Sainthood in the Christian Tradition,” in Richard Kieckhefer and George D. Bond, eds., Sainthood: Its Manifestations in World Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 11. The other quoted passage is John of Ruysbroeck in Bernard McGinn, “Love, Knowledge, and Mystical Union in Western Christianity: Twelfth to Sixteenth Centuries,” Church History 56 (1987), 19. 118. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 123. The quoted passage is from Galatians 6:17; see 2:20. For want of miraculous stigmata a fourteenth-century Dominican nun pressed a large cruciﬁx against her body, resulting in “death spots” bruised into her

notes to pages 225–228

329

ﬂesh. Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism (1200–1350) (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1998), 311. 119. Genesis 17:13. 120. The sixteenth-century painting is in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The passage quoted from Catherine is in Bell, Holy Anorexia, 22. 121. F. A. Whitlock and J. V. Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization: An Historical and Psychophysiological Enquiry,” Psychological Medicine 8 (1978), 195–196. Similar variations occur regarding wounds in the hands and feet. 122. The examples on Charles and Veronica are from Whitlock and Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization,” 188. 123. Camporesi, Incorruptible Flesh, 4–6. See 6–9 for the trinitarian interpretation given the three stones discovered in Sister Chiara’s gall bladder. See also Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend,1:143, and Katharine Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Quarterly 44/1 (1994), 1–33. 124. On Alacoque, see Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 166; on Jean of Valois, see Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 90; and on Veronica, see Lives of St. Alphonsus Ligurori, 260. See also Whitlock and Hynes, “Religious Stigmatization,” 186, and McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 521. Christ is depicted as an engraver in Raccamadori, Rosa Limensis, ﬁgure 18. 125. On the German woodcut, see Camille, The Medieval Art of Love, 117. One of the hearts is burned. In this image the woman is in command, and the inscriptions make reference to the power of women over men’s hearts. On the Dominican image, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 106. 126. The quoted passage is from Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 117. On the image of Charity, see 121 and ﬁgure 79. The fourteenth-century image is in Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 38–39. 127. The quoted passages are from McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 270–271; see 280–281. See also McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 342. Alacoque’s drawing of the sacred heart is in Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 364. 128. Jonas, France, 21. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 192. 129. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 165. The quoted Gertrude and Catherine passages are from McGinn, Flowering of Mysticism, 274 and 276, respectively. See McNamara, Sisters in Arms, 343. 130. Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine of Siena (1960), 170. Afterward she felt transformed into another person. The heart was the primary attribute of the ﬁrst statue (ﬁfteenth-century) made of Catherine of Siena. See Rigaux, “Women, Faith, and Image,” 80. For an example of heart exchange with clear erotic content, see Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 54 and 61–63. 131. On de’Pazzi, see Riccardi, “Mystic Humanism,” 213. The quoted passage on Rose is from Hansen, Vida admirable, 108. See Bruno, Rosa, 44. As noted above, Christ referred to her as “Rose of my heart” during the espousals, and Rose had a stone heart inlaid in the wedding ring. For equation of the heart and a rose with allusions to devotional purity, see Blas de Acosta, Relacio´n de la gran solemnidad, que instituyo en el insigne convento de Nuestra Senora del Rosario de Lima, del Orden de Predicadores (Lima: Luis de Lyra, 1643), 12. 132. Gabriella Zarri, “From Prophecy to Discipline, 1450–1650,” in Scarafﬁa and Zarri, Women and Faith, 111. 133. Camille, Medieval Art of Love, 111; see 28. Images of heart offerings in pro-

330

notes to pages 228–230

fane love are on 29 and 113. See 112 for an image of the God of Love locking the heart in the lover’s chest. For an example of offering the heart to Christ, see Rigaux, “Women, Faith, and Image,” 80. Catarina de San Juan had a vision in which Christ, the Virgin, and God the father ate her heart. Rubial Garcı´a, “Santos milagreros,” 84. Modern Spanish speakers refer to the beloved as mi corazo´n (my heart). Note also that “hearts” are still exchanged on Valentine’s Day. 134. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from Exodus 4:26, and the second is from Genesis 17:11. See Genesis 17:17, where uncircumcised men are ostracized for having broken the covenant, and Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 136. See also David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 7, where the wife symbolically circumcised Moses by touching the baby’s foreskin to his penis. 135. William E. Phipps, The Sexuality of Jesus: Theological and Literary Perspectives (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 39, and Gollaher, Circumcision, 7, respectively. In later Judaism, circumcision became a neonatal ritual, performed on the eighth day after birth. See Gollaher, Circumcision, 12–13. 136. The quoted passages are from, respectively, David Mace quoted in Phipps, Sexuality of Jesus, 40; and Genesis 17:6. See Gollaher, Circumcision, 9. 137. Philo and others, including Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century, argued, for example, that circumcision dulled sensual pleasure, so that intercourse would be less disruptive of spiritual pursuits. See Gollaher, Circumcision, 13 and 21. 138. The last quoted phrase is from Colossians 2:11. See 1 Corinthians 7:18 and, on Christ’s circumcision, Luke 2:21. The quoted passage in the previous sentence is from Jeremiah 4:4. Figurative uses of circumcision are common. For other examples, see Deuteronomy 10:16; Gollaher, Circumcision, 10–11; and Certeau, Mystic Fable, 137. 139. The quoted phrases are from Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 51 (see 49–64), and 168 (see 58–59, 101–102, and 168–171). On Jesus’ circumcision, see Luke 2:21. 140. Gollaher, Circumcision, 17–18; see 42–43. The Crawshaw passage is quoted in Steinberg, Sexuality of Christ, 59. See Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 1:74 141. Gollaher, Circumcision, 36–37, and Armando R. Favazza, with Barbara Favazza, Bodies under Siege: Self-Mutilation in Culture and Psychiatry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1987), 158. 142. The quoted passage on Agnes is from Gollaher, Circumcision, 37. See Vergote, Guilt and Desire, 164, and Bynum, “Female Body,” 164. “Afterward, she claimed to have been able to recapture this orgasmic sensation simply by touching her ﬁnger to her tongue.” Gollaher, Circumcision, 37. On Mariana, see Aurelio Espinosa Polit, Santa Mariana de Jesu´s: Hija de la Compan˜´ıa de Jesu´s (Quito: La Prensa Cato´lica, 1956), 281. On the German image, see Hamburger, Nuns as Artists, 125 and ﬁgure 82. 143. Bynum, Holy Feast, 175. 144. The ﬁrst quoted passage is from N. Lohkamp, “Mystical Union,” New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), 10:174; and the last two are from Origen quoted in Louth, Origins, 73.

Index

Abraham, 228 Adonis, 67 Agatha, Saint, 27 Agnes Blannbekin, 229 Agnes of Montepulciano, 198 Aguilar, Gabriel, 130 Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie, 12, 120, 138, 155, 166, 167, 207, 210, 227, 228, 239 n. 67 Alan of Lille, 73 Alba de Tormes, 81 Albertus Magnus, 71, 72 Alcocer, Catalina de, 52 Alexander VI, Pope, 71 Alexander VII, Pope, 117–118, 119 Alumbrados, 5, 59, 62, 91, 92, 93, 94, 114, 195, 253 n. 121, 254 n. 128 Amazons, 127 Ambrose, Saint, 80 American Psychiatric Association, 18 Amma Sarah, 126 Angela of Foligno, 12, 43, 93, 120, 196, 205, 206, 210, 222, 307 n. 198 Angelino Medoro: Jesus of Humility and Patience, 198 anorexia nervosa, 163–164, 182, 298 n. 80 and female mystics, 14–15, 16, 238 n. 51

Anthony, Saint, 135, 249 n. 64 Antonia, Marı´a, 100 Aphrodite, 67, 68 Aquinas, Thomas, 26 Aristotle, 26, 207 Armada, 90 Atahualpa, Santos, 130 death of, 131 Augustine, 193, 201 Augustinians, 95, 226 Ayala, Bartolome´ de, Fray, 140 Babylon, 148 Balta´zar Carlos, Prince, 113 Ban ˜ ez, Domingo, 48, 61. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, confessors of; Bilbao, Luis de, Fray; Martı´nez, Diego; Sebastia´n Parra, Juan; Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray Barbe, Juan Bautista, 221 Bartholomew, Saint, 48, 140 Bartolommeo, Fra: Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine with Eight Saints, 219 Basil of Caesarea, 215 Bautista Martı´nez de Mago, Juan, 106 beatas, 10, 56, 59–60, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 93, 96, 99, 165, 179 attitude toward suffering, 27–28 Italian, 219

332

index

beatas (continued ) Mexican, 196 Peruvian, 93–94, 97, 114, 270 n. 15 and sexual encounters, 195 Spanish, 72, 195 Beaterio de las Rosas, 49 Beauvoir, Simone de, 13 Bede (wrote treatise on Song of Songs), 189 Beguines, 43, 211, 229 Bell, Rudolph M., 14, 16, 42, 43, 119 Holy Anorexia, 16, 164 Beltra´n, Luis, Saint, 107, 119 Benedetta Carlini, 57 Benvenuta Bojani, 195 Bernard of Clairvaux, 77, 81, 186, 190, 194, 201, 205, 206, 207, 208, 241 n. 103 writings of, 200 Bernedo, Vicente, 95 Bernini, Gianlorenzo: Ecstasy of St. Teresa, 212, 223 Bilbao, Luis de, Fray, 83, 101, 115 266 n. 119. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, confessors of; Ban ˜ ez, Domingo; Martı´nez, Diego; Sebastia´n Parra, Juan; Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray Bion, 67 Bitti, Bernardo Holy Family of the Pear, 188 Virgin of the Rose, 69 Bolı´var, Simo´n, 127 Bona of Pisa, 138 Bonaventura (sister of Catherine of Siena), 45, 209 Bonaventure, Saint, 194, 206 Borja, Francisco de, Saint, 107, 119 Brides of Christ, 81, 167, 188, 189, 197, 215–216, 284 n. 14 Brotherhood of St. Rose of Lima, 143 bulimia: and female mystics, 15 Burke, Peter, 43 Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy, 183 Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 29 Bynum, Carolyn Walker, 10, 11, 14–15, 164 Cabildo of Lima, 31, 75, 118, 138, 158 Cabo, Antonio, 130 Caffa´, Melchor, 70, 277 n. 29 Cano, Melchor, 92 Carhuamayo, 131

Carmelites, 59, 81 Carranza, Angela, 65–66, 97 Carranza, Bartolome´ de, 92 Carren ˜ o de Miranda, Juan, 106 Cassian, John, 223 Castillo, Juan del, 34, 36–37, 44, 48, 54, 55, 62, 63, 66, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 178, 218 Cata´ de Calella, Jose Antonio, 86 Catarina de San Juan, 57, 73, 196, 210, 234 n. 7, 306 n. 184 Catherine of Alexandria, 60, 73, 207, 219, 221 Catherine of Genoa, 210, 222 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 3, 4, 10, 39, 43, 44–48, 50, 56, 57, 65, 70, 74, 77, 93, 96, 100, 102, 103, 115, 117, 134, 139, 140, 143, 154, 167, 168, 174, 178, 183, 189, 195, 199, 202, 205, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212, 221, 228, 320 nn. 23– 24 and anorexia nervosa, 15, 302 n. 134 attitude toward suffering, 27 as Bride of Christ, 153, 155 and fasting, 46, 170–171 feast day of, 47–48 hagiography of, 230, 255 n. 138 inﬂuence on Rose of Lima, Saint, 44, 61, 166, 179, 180, 181 and Mariana of Jesus, Saint, 51–53 and mother, 25 mystical marriage of, 10–11, 219, 222, 229–230 and penance, 46, 139, 209 relations with Christ as Bridegroom, 45 stigmata of, 98, 225–226 virginity of, 44 Catholic Church, 22, 29, 84, 119, 120, 121, 122, 159, 188, 189. See also Inquisition; Vatican Great Schism, 102 identiﬁcation of saints, 35–36 in Lima, 6 Cecilia, Saint, 69 Certeau, Michel de, 90 Charles of Sezze, Blessed, 226 Charles II, King of Spain, 90, 106, 107, 118 Charles V, King, 6, 128 Chiapas, Chamulan rebellion, 130 Chiara of Montefalco, 226

index Children of God movement, 195 Chiriguanos, 105 Christ, 29, 79, 81, 82, 120, 134–135, 145, 147, 149, 188 as Bridegroom, 4, 10, 12, 13, 14, 29, 43, 52, 56–57, 189, 199, 201, 203, 206, 209, 210, 216, 218, 222, 226 as child and female mystics, 198–199 circumcision of, 228, 229 and crown of thorns, 70 as gardener, 77 and iconography as child, 197–198 and iconography of Eucharist, 197 sexuality of, 10, 11, 12 side wound of, 46, 205–208, 224 Christina, Saint, 207 Christina of Hane, 197 Christina of Markyate, 198, 248 n. 49 Christina of Stommeln, 195 Christine of Christ, 72 circumcision, 228–229 Cisneros, Xime´nez de, Cardinal, 93 Cistercians, 28, 43, 139, 223, 227 Clare of Assisi, Saint, 189 Clement VIII, Pope, 116 Clement IX, Pope, 104, 117, 118, 119, 122 Clement X, Pope, 119 Clement of Alexandria, 207 Cobo, Bernabe´, 69 Coello, Claudio, 106 Colegiata of Cervatos, 194 Colomba da Rieti, 219 Columbus, Christopher, 127, 147 Conde de Lemos, 35, 118 Condesa de la Vega del Ren, 49 Congregation of Rites, 21, 42, 60, 71, 108, 115, 117, 118 Congress of Venezuela, 130 Contreras, Francisco de, 65 Convent of Santa Clara, 178, 180 Conversion Disorder, 18 Co´rdova y Salinas, Diego de, 128 Correa, Nicola´s de: Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima, 74 Corregio, 192 Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine [of Alexandria], with St. Sebastian, 226 Council of Trent, 57, 89, 93, 102, 115, 119 Count of Lemos, Viceroy, 7 Counter-Reformation, 6, 42, 89, 90, 95, 106, 119, 145, 188 Crashaw, Richard, 54, 229

333

Cruciﬁxion, 286 n. 36 as symbol of marriage, 201 history of iconography, 164–165 cultural psychology, 19 Dante: Divine Comedy, 68, 189 David (prophet), 219 de Co´rdoba, Martı´n, Fray?, 191 de la Cruz, Isabel, 91 de la Fuente, Alonso, 59 de la Maza, Gonzalo, 34, 38, 39, 44, 48, 49, 62, 63, 64, 65, 83, 86, 94, 99, 101, 102, 107, 111, 123–124, 149, 151, 153, 156, 160, 165, 179, 181, 183, 214, 220 de la Maza, Micaela, 220 Dejados, 59 Della Francesca, Piero, 147 Delusional Disorder, 18 Desert Fathers, 48, 121, 126, 135, 183 Diego, Juan, 69 Dionysius, Saint, 211 Dios Orcoguaranca, Juan de, 130 Dominic, Saint, 46, 62, 63, 71, 73, 81, 134, 145, 148, 146, 219. See also Dominicans Dominicans, 4, 5, 23, 24, 25, 40, 41, 43, 49, 58, 59, 70, 73, 75, 84, 92, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104–106, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 125, 128, 134, 138, 189, 190, 207, 215. See also Dominic, Saint Donadie, Berengario, 227 Donne, John, 28 Dormition: iconography of, 189 Dorothea of Montau, 196 El Greco: Assumption, 69 Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 196 Eros, 68 eroticism, in mysticism, 196 erotomania, 185 Espinosa Polit, Aurelio, 50, 138 Eucharist, 225 devotion of, 43, 222, 224 iconography of, 197. See also Christ Euphrosyne, Saint, 134 Euripedes, 68 Faber, F. W., 30. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, hagiographers of; Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray; Hansen,

334

index

Faber, F. W. (continued ) Leonard; Loayza, Pedro de; Mele´ndez, Juan fasting, 223 Felipe Velasco Tu´pac Inca Yupanqui, 130 Ferna´ndez, Alejo: Virgin of the Navigators, 147 Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray, 31. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, hagiographers of; Faber, F. W.; Hansen, Leonard; Loayza, Pedro de; Mele´ndez, Juan Fina, Saint, 146, 147 Flores, Gaspar, 149–150, 267 n. 120 Flos Sanctorum, 79 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 22, 73, 210 stigmata, 225 Franciscans, 43, 91, 95, 102, 128, 178, 216 Freud, Sigmund, 163, 184, 320 n. 22 Civilization and Its Discontents, 14 on masochism, 302 n. 134 on melancholia, 183 on self-injury, 163 and sublimation, 14, 237 n. 47 Gaita´n, Andre´s Juan, 114, 115 Gerson, Jean, 58 Gertrude of Helfta, 61 Gertrude van Oosten, 190, 198, 227, 228 Getino, Luis, 214 Ghirlandaio, Domenico: Madonna of Mercy, 147 Giovanna (sister of Catherine of Siena), 209 Glave, Luis Miguel, 103 Gnostic Gospel of Philip, 193 Golden Legend, 72, 77, 81, 139, 165, 188, 211, 218, 234 n. 10 Go´mez Da´vila, Antonio Pedro, 107 Go´ngora, 72 Gonza´lez de Acun ˜ a, Antonio, 104, 106, 117, 118, 130, 277 n. 29 Granada, Luis de, Fray, 54, 55, 56, 57, 80, 92, 96, 189, 205 Book of Prayer and Meditation, 54, 92– 93 Gregory of Nyssa, 185, 223 Gregory the Great, Pope, 190, 192, 197, 265 n. 96 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 74 Hadewijch, 196 hagiography, viii, 27, 42, 76

Hampe Martı´nez, Teodoro, 103 Hansen, Leonard, viii, 4, 35, 38, 39–40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 61, 69, 74, 76, 80, 83, 102, 104, 105, 108, 111, 112, 115, 122, 125, 126, 128, 136, 137, 145, 152, 158, 159, 160, 166, 173, 183, 196, 202, 212, 218, 219, 220, 222. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, hagiographers of; Faber, F. W.; Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray; Loayza, Pedro de; Mele´ndez, Juan heaven, 28–29 Herrera, Isabel de, 152 Hippolytus of Rome, Bishop, 187, 193 Honorius Augustodunensis, 154, 188 Honorius of Autun, 201, 309 n. 11 Ignacio Loyola, Saint, 57, 92 Spiritual Exercises, 56 Illuminists. See Alumbrados Immaculate Conception, 128. See also Virgin Mary Incas, 128, 130, 131 Inquisition, 5, 21, 23, 60, 63, 64, 66, 91, 92, 94, 95, 119, 179, 269 n. 8. See also Catholic Church; Vatican autos-da-fe´, 59, 61–62, 97, 114 “Interrogatory for the Examination of Revelations, Visions, and Dreams,” 58 in Mexico, 195, 253 n. 121 in Peru, 56, 58, 97, 195 Isabel Flores y Oliva. See Rose of Lima, Saint Isidor, Saint, 81 Isidore of Seville, 191 Iwasaki Cauti, Fernando, 60 Jacobus de Voragine, 72, 194 James the Apostle, Saint, 128 Jerome, Saint, 216, 223 Jerusalem, 148 Jesuits, 23, 48, 65, 94, 95, 99, 102, 107, 120, 138, 206 Jesu´s Agreda, Marı´a de, 102 Jesu´s Herrera, Catalina de, 58 Joan of Arc, Saint, 59 John Chrysostom, Saint, 70 John of the Cross, Saint, 92, 208, 271 n. 33 John the Evangelist, Saint, 128, 219 Jose´ Quispe Tupa Inca, 130

index Joseph, Saint, 149 Juana, 41 Julian of Norwich, 155, 208 Julitta, Saint, 27 Julius II, Pope, 6 Jupiter, 67 Kieckhefer, Richard, 16 Koje`ve, Alexandre, 186 Lapa (mother of Catherine of Siena), 25, 44–45, 209 Laplanche, J., 13 Lawrence, Saint, 211 Leo´n, Luis de, Fray, 48 Lily of Quito. See Mariana of Quito, Saint lily, symbolism of, 71–72 Limaylla, Jero´nimo Lorenzo, 130 Loayza, Pedro de, viii, 24, 34, 41, 45, 46, 51, 65, 86, 87, 94, 100, 107–108, 144, 159, 173, 174, 179, 183. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, hagiographers of; Faber, F. W.; Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray; Hansen, Leonard; Mele´ndez, Juan Lobo Guerrero, Bartolome´, Archbishop, 112, 114, 117, 276 n. 17 Lo´pez, Gregorio, 48, 253 n. 121 Lorenzana, Juan de, 34, 44, 48, 62, 63, 101, 125, 150, 160, 220, 221 Lucilla, 223 Luisa de Santa Maria, 3 Lutgard, Saint, 12, 56 Macı´as, Juan, Saint, 95, 119 Madonna of Mercy, 147 “manly woman.” See mujer varonil Margaret Ebner, 198 Margaret of Cortona, 29 Margaret of Oingt, 12, 207 Margaret of the Holy Sacrament, 210 Margaret of Ypres, 12 Margery Kempe, 189, 196, 198 Marı´a de Jesu´s Tomellı´n, 194, 306 n. 184 Marı´a de Mesta, 37 Marı´a de Quin ˜ ones, 178 Maria de Santa Maria. See Oliva, Marı´a de Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi, 81, 120, 155, 191, 198, 208, 223, 228 Mariana of Austria, Queen, 6, 35, 104, 106–107, 118–119, 140

335

Mariana of Jesus, Saint. See Mariana of Quito, Saint Mariana of Quito, Saint, 50–53, 61, 73, 138, 142, 195, 229, 250 n. 74 and Catherine of Siena, Saint, 51 and Teresa of Avila, Saint, 51 Ma´rquez, Bernardo, 41 Martina de los Angeles y Arilla, 199 Martı´nez, Diego, 65, 94, 101. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, confessors of; Ban ˜ ez, Domingo; Bilbao, Luis de; Sebastia´n Parra, Juan; Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray Mary Magdalen, 17, 29, 75–76, 81, 173, 192, 211, 229, 249 n. 64, 328 n. 107 iconography of, 192–193, 325 n. 73 masochism, 240 n. 83 McGinn, Bernard, 13, 20 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 190, 197, 201, 227 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 166, 190, 197 Medoro, Angelino, 85 Mejı´a, Isabel, 41 Mele´ndez, Juan, 24, 34, 40, 61, 70, 76, 84, 86, 125, 136, 137, 141, 145, 151, 157, 159, 172, 174, 178, 196, 212, 213, 218, 220, 221. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, hagiographers of; Faber, F. W.; Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray; Hansen, Leonard; Loayza, Pedro de Melgarejo, Luisa, 48, 60, 64, 94, 97–98, 100, 114 Mercedarians, 95 Michael the Archangel, Saint, 128, 130 Mogrovejo, Toribio de, Saint, 84, 95, 119, 153, 178, 266 n. 114 Molina, Luis de, 38 Monasterio de las Rosas (Santa Rosa de las Monjas), 49 Mora´n de Butro´n, Jacinto, 50, 51 Moses, 228 Mrs. H., 22 mujer varonil, 126–127 Mujica Pinilla, Ramo´n, 103 Mun ˜ oz, Juan, 65 Murillo, Bartolome´ Estaban: Santa Rosa de Lima, 74 mysticism, 120 in colonial Lima, 93 delusions of, 175 and eroticism, 11–12, 15–16, 28–29, 187, 197, 222

336

index

mysticism (continued ) evaluation of, 58–59 and fasting, 15, 23, 223 female, 13, 26, 53, 90, 126, 187, 198, 278 n. 37 and ﬂames of love, 211 and mortiﬁcation, 30–31, 227 nuptial, 43, 197, 198, 201, 210, 218, 222, 230 and odor, 80 and penance, 210 psychological interpretation of, 15–20 and psychopathology, 20–27 and relationship with Christ as Bridegroom, 185 and schizophrenia, 177–178 and sexuality, 203 and sublimation, 13–14 virginal, 200 and visualization, 56 vs. insanity, 21, 22 New Catholic Encyclopedia, 87 Nithard, Juan Everard, 107 Odes of Solomon, 208, 322 n. 45 odor of sanctity, 80–84, 263 n. 83, 264 n. 92 Oliva, Marı´a de, 45, 62, 78, 86, 100, 122, 123, 125, 145, 150, 152, 173. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, and mother Oliva, Mariana de, 85 Order of Preachers. See Dominicans Origen, 80, 188, 190, 191, 193 Ormaza, Isabel de, 94 Orthodox Church, 189 Ozment, Steven, 120 Palladius, 126 Parra, Jacinto de, 72, 104, 105, 126, 127, 137, 212, 213 Paul, Saint, 27, 80, 219 Paul V, Pope, 116 Paul VI, Pope, 59 Pedro Nolasco, Saint, 147 Pe´rez, Ana Marı´a, 95, 138 Pe´rez de Valdivia, Diego, 96, 165 Pe´rez de Zumeta, Juan, 157 Peru, Independence Congress of Tucuma´n, 130 Peter Martyr, Saint, 73 Peter the Chanter, 223

Philip II, King of Spain, 89, 92 Philip III, King of Spain, 90 Philip IV, King of Spain, 6, 89, 90, 102, 105, 106, 107, 117, 118, 140, 215 Philo Judaeus, 229 Pistoya, Cathedral of, 104 Pius V, Pope, 71, 129 Pius XII, Pope, 53 Pizarro, Francisco, 76, 128, 147 Pliny, 76 Polish Catholics, 22 Polycarp, Saint, 80 Pontalis, J.-B., 13 Porres, Martı´n de, Saint, 95, 119 Protestant Reformation, 89, 115 Rabbi Akiba, 187 Raymond of Capua, 39, 44, 46, 65, 170, 174, 230 Ribera, Francisco de, 61 Richard of St. Victor, 194 Rospigliosi, Giulio. See Clement IX, Pope Rodin, Auguste: Christ and the Magdalen, 193 Rojas, Alonso de, 50, 138 Rojas, Fernando, de: La Celestina, 56 Romance of the Rose, 68, 73 rosary, 70–71 rose imagery of, 69, 73, 74 meaning in Christian culture, 68–71, 76, 259 n. 41 meaning in pre-Christian culture, 67– 68 Rose of Lima, Saint, 94, 95, 98–99, 121– 126, 129–130, 141–142, 144–145, 146 ajı´ incident, 151 asceticism of, 46, 95 attitude toward suffering, 27, 43 baptism of, 84–88 as beata, 61, 142, 217, 276 n. 9 birthdate of, 47–48 as Bride of Christ, 143, 189 canonization of, 7, 33–34, 38, 42, 44, 60, 61, 104, 117–119, 270 n. 21 and Catherine of Siena, Saint, 44–48, 57, 100, 254 n. 129 confessors of, 25, 26, 38, 55, 59, 102, 151, 183. See also Ban ˜ ez, Domingo; Bilbao, Luis de, Fray; Martı´nez, Diego; Sebastia´n Parra, Juan; Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray

index and conversion disorder, 182 and Creole identity, 103–104 and crown of thorns/crown of roses, 70, 160, 165 in cultural context, 7, 8, 19–20, 54–55 death and funeral of, 111–114, 142–143 devotion to, 101–102, 107–109, 113, 114– 115, 116, 130, 143, 234 n. 11, 276 n. 17 and Dominicans, 181 early life of, 157, 161–162, 169, 173, 174– 175, 295 n. 62 and fasting. See Rose of Lima, Saint, mortiﬁcation of and father. See Flores, Gaspar and ﬁre of love, 211–212, 213, 322 n. 41 hagiographers of, 25, 39, 43. See also Faber, F. W.; Ferrer de Valdecebro, Andre´s, Fray; Hansen, Leonard; Loayza, Pedro de; Mele´ndez, Juan hagiography of, 9, 23, 33–34, 38–39, 43, 65, 84, 85–87, 103, 105–106, 145, 149 and Hernando (brother), 26, 47 iconography of, 6, 70, 74, 88, 146, 147, 198, 221 ideological formation of, 54 imitation of, 29–31, 49, 61, 242 n. 120 inﬂuence on, 44–49 interpretation of, 9–10 intervention of, 108–109, 147 and Mariana of Austria, Queen, 106– 107 and Mariana of Jesus, Saint, 50–53 and masochism, 168, 184–185 and Melgarejo, Luisa, 64–65 Mercedes, 96,214–215, 226, 323 n. 57 mortiﬁcation of, 3–4, 8, 29–30, 46, 95– 96, 98–99, 151, 159, 172, 183, 292 n. 18 and mother, 25, 26, 38, 43, 44, 45, 123, 154–155, 156, 180. See also Oliva, Marı´a de as musician, 39 mystical marriage of, 43, 70, 63, 157, 219–221 and odor, 30, 82, 83–84 and palms, 218–219 as patron of Peru, 118–119, 130, 146 and penance, 5, 46, 95–96, 133, 134, 139, 307 n. 200 primary sources on, vii

337

prophecy of, 130 psychological interpretation of, 19–20, 23–24, 168, 170, 171, 182–183 relations with Christ as Bridegroom, 4, 43, 56–57, 120, 122, 127, 137, 139, 151, 154, 156, 163, 173, 174, 184, 196, 202, 206, 211–212, 214 representation of, 5–6, 136 and roses, 69, 86–87, 262 n. 70, 284 n. 14 self-abuse of, 135, 217 and somatization disorder, 182 as symbol of the New World, 75, 76, 78, 118, 130, 148 symbolism of name, 39, 40, 67, 88, 152 temptations of, 195 and Teresa of Avila, Saint, 48–49, 100 testimonies for, 36–39, 41, 64–65 and Veronica Giuliani, Saint, 49–50 as “Virgin Warrior,” 127–128 virginity of, 3, 44, 45, 218–219 as a vision, 58 writings of, 55, 199, 254 n. 131, 276 n. 14 Rose of Viterbo, Saint, 69, 73, 113 Ruiz, Catalina, 91 Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio, 65 Rupert of Deutz, 188, 190 Sacred Heart: devotion of, 227–228 Sahagu´n, Bernardino de: Psalmodia christiana, 75 San Gimignano, 146 San Martı´n, Jose´, General, 130 San Sebastian, Church of, 84 Sanctuary of Rose of Lima, 48 Santa Catalina, 152 Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (Rome, Italy), 131 Santiago de Compostela, 194 Santo Domingo, Marı´a de, 66, 94, 95 Sebastia´n Parra, Juan, 94. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, confessors of; Ban ˜ ez, Domingo; Bilbao, Luis de, Fray; Martı´nez, Diego; Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray self-abuse, psychology of, 175–176 Serrano, Alfonsa, 218 Siglo de Oro, 89 Skinner, B. F., 170 Solano, Francisco, Saint, 95, 113, 119, 144

338

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Song of Songs, 4, 55, 71, 72, 73, 175, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 193, 197, 201, 202, 203, 205, 215, 324 n. 61 “kiss on the mouth,” 190 Soto, Juan de, 64 Sprenger, Jakob: Malleus maleﬁcarum, 58 Steinberg, Leo, 11 sublimation, 13–14, 237 n. 47 Teresa, Mother, 23 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 13, 26, 43, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 78, 81, 92, 93, 97, 100, 142, 153, 155, 165, 166, 167, 191, 207, 212, 224, 240 n. 96, 264 n. 92, 294 n. 48 inﬂuence on Rose of Lima, Saint, 48–49 and Mariana of Jesus, Saint, 51–53 transverberation of, 197, 213, 225, 228 writings of, 200, 211 Teresa of Jesus, Saint. See Teresa of Avila, Saint Tertullian, 69, 190, 215, 223 Texeda, Juan de, 38 Thomas, Saint, 48 Thurston, Herbert, 23 Titian, 192 The Venus of Urbino, 68 Titu Cusi, 128 Torres, Diego de, 65 transubstantiation, 231 transverberation, 197, 213, 225, 228 Tu´pac Amaru II, 130 Tyche, 148 Ubalde, Juan Manuel, 130 Ubitarte, Ine´s de, 56, 97, 195, 197, 210 University of Salamanca, 48 University of San Marcos, 64 Urban VIII, Pope, 44, 48, 75, 117, 118, 119, 120 Caelestis Hierusalem Cive, 116 Uza´tegui, Marı´a de, 38–39, 44, 62, 64, 86, 94–95, 99, 101, 113, 102, 151, 153, 156, 179, 181, 220, 221 Valencia, Pedro de, 113 Vargas, Diego de, 129 Vargas Ugarte, Rube´n, 87 Vatican, 37, 42, 44. See also Catholic Church Vauchez, Andre´, 42

Vega, Lope de, 56 Velasco, Ine´s de, 56, 66, 94, 95, 97, 196– 197, 327 n. 95 Vela´zquez, Alonso, Fray, 63, 84, 87, 101, 220, 221, 235 n. 18. See also Rose of Lima, Saint, confessors of; Ban ˜ ez, Domingo; Bilbao, Luis de, Fray; Martı´nez, Diego; Sebastia´n Parra, Juan Venus, 67, 68 Vercial, Sa´nchez de, 58 Verdugo, Francisco, 101, 276 n. 17 Vergara, Jose´, 207 Vergote, Antoine, 19, 22 Verona, Stefano de: Virgin of the Rose Garden, 69 Veronica Giuliani, Saint, 49–50, 57, 61, 138, 166, 205, 219, 226 transverberation of, 213 Virgin Mary, 18, 22, 37, 50, 60, 71, 81, 146, 147, 148, 149, 188, 219, 229. See also Immaculate Conception Assumption of, 82 and roses, 69 as Virgin of Guadalupe, 69, 129 as Virgin of Quito, 128 as Virgin of Remedies, 128 as Virgin of the Pillar, 128 as Virgin of the Rosary, 128–129, 142, 146, 178, 179, 180, 181 virginity, 215–216, 218, 222, 309 n. 11, 324 n. 63, 324 n. 66 and mortiﬁcation, 225 and mysticism, 203 Visitationists, 207 War of the Paciﬁc (1879–1883), 147 Washington, George, 127 Weinstein, Donald, 16, 42, 43, 119 William of St. Thierry, 206 Yahweh, 148, 228 Yturgoyen Amasa, Catalina de. See Condesa de la Vega del Ren Zipporah, 228 Zoboli, Jacobo: Mystical Rapture of Saint Rose, 198 Zubara´n, Francisco de: Virgin of the Carthusians, 147 Zubiaga Bernales de Gamarra, Francisca, 127–128