Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt

Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt
ISBN-10
0226826090
ISBN-13
9780226826097
Category
Religion
Pages
243
Language
English
Published
2023-05-19
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Author
Sonia Velázquez

Description

A meditation on holiness and beauty through the study of Saint Mary of Egypt. Saint Mary of Egypt has fascinated theologians, poets, and artists since the seventh century. Her story is richly evocative, encompassing sin and sanctity, concupiscence and asceticism, youth and old age. In Promiscuous Grace, Sonia Velázquez thinks with Saint Mary of Egypt about the relationship between beauty and holiness. Drawing on an archive spanning Spanish medieval poetry, Baroque paintings, seventeenth-century hagiography, and Balzac’s Le chef-d’œuvre inconnu, Velázquez argues for the importance of the senses on the surface of religious texts on her way to revealing why the legend of Saint Mary of Egypt still matters today.

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