Promiscuous Grace

Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt

Sonia Velázquez

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
22 May 2023

Religious subjects depicted in art; Literature: history & criticism; History of religion; Christianity; Christian aspects of sexuality, gender & relationships

Series: Class 200: New Studies in Religion

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. With an archive spanning Spanish medieval poetry, Baroque paintings, seventeenth-century hagiography, and Balzac’s Le chef-d’oeuvre 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.

By: Sonia Velázquez
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 399g
ISBN: 9780226826080
ISBN 10: 0226826082
Series: Class 200: New Studies in Religion
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 22 May 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Sonia Velázquez is assistant professor of religious studies and comparative literature at Indiana University Bloomington. She is coeditor of Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-inscribed.

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

In this luminous, revelatory, and sensitive book, at once wide-ranging and full of hidden depths, Velazquez lovingly follows the afterlives of Saint Mary of Egypt across words and images as well as spaces, places, and stages from Egypt to Spain. Velazquez's beautiful prose and gorgeous readings express a deep care for her subject, leading us on a journey that touches the soul as well as the mind. -- Julia R. Lupton, University of California, Irvine In this superbly crafted meditation on religion and materiality, Velazquez interweaves the poems, art, and drama dedicated to Mary of Egypt in premodern Spanish Catholicism and its contemporary traces elsewhere. Her work on the creativity inspired by this saint evocatively reimagines the philosophical concept of beauty around the aging, holy female body and the Christian concept of grace around the profane. While grounded in thirteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, this study fruitfully reimagines the peninsular Mary of Egypt as 'good to think with' for historians of European Christianity, art, and theater more broadly. -- Jessica A. Boon, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill