Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt
ISBN: 9780226826097
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of Chicago Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: History of Christianity;

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'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.

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 .

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