Website review: LRB · Hilary Mantel: Some girls wa...
Millerbull discovered this in Catholic
•7 reviews since Mar 8, 2004
catholic
•lrb.co.uk/v26/n05/mant01_.html
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Reviews of this website
pansapiens rated 10 months ago- Some interesting novels about women's lives in christianity. From the page: "Some girls want out Hilary Mantel The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint by Rudolph Bell and Cristina Mazzoni · Chicago, 320 pp, £21.00 Saint Thérèse of Lisieux by Kathryn Harrison · Weidenfeld, 160 pp, £14.99 The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty by Helen King · Routledge, 196 pp, £50.00 A Wonderful Little Girl: The True Story of Sarah Jacob, the Welsh Fasting Girl by Siân Busby · Short Books, 157 pp, £5.99"
- eyevariety rated 11 months ago
- From the page: "What did her ecstasies look like? They were not like the ecstasy of Teresa of Avila, sculpted by Bernini: that most passionate, fluid artefact, art's most convincing orgasm. Gemma lived in the era of photography, and her spiritual advisers provided her household with a camera. She looks demure, her hands clasped. Her eyes are raised to heaven, but she isn't doing anything dramatic, like rolling her pupils up into her lids. Jotted down, her words are broken, repetitive, a string of conventional pieties. Yet she returns from these states of self-hypnosis riven with supernatural pleasure and shot through with natural pain."
- Villanell2 rated 11 months ago
- From my klassy girlThe agony and the ecstasy--looks like a good read
- nadimchaudry rated 13 months ago
- From the page: "St Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi lay naked on thorns. Saint Catherine of Siena drank pus from a cancerous sore. One confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue; when she swallowed the spiders and their webs, even he thought it was going too far. Scourges, chains and hair shirts were the must-have accessories in these women's lives. Eustochia of Messina stretched her arms on a DIY rack she had constructed. St Margaret of Cortona bought herself a razor and was narrowly dissuaded from slicing through her nostrils and upper lip. St Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of a leper. And what St Francesca Romana did, I find I am not able to write down." Fascinating trivia read. May i be a sinner all my life. Thanks to uber K (http://klassy.stumbleupon.com/) - "a genre unto herself" lol
- Klassy rated 13 months ago
- The agony and the ecstasy.
- SollaSollew rated 51 months ago
- From the page: "You have to look the saints in the face; say how the facts of their lives revolt and frighten you, but when you have got over being satirical and atheistical, and saying how silly it all is, the only productive way is the one the psychologist Pierre Janet recommended, early in the 20th century: first, you must respect the beliefs that underlie the phenomena. Both Gemma and Thérèse believed suffering had an effect that was not limited in time or space. They could, just for a while, share the pain of crucifixion. They could offer up their pain to buy time out for the souls suffering in purgatory. Their suffering could be an expiation for the sins of others, it could be a restitution, a substitution. Margaret of Cortona said: 'I want to die of starvation to satiate the poor.' Behind the ecstasy is a ferocious moral drive, a purpose - and no doubt a sexual drive, too. Simone Weil believed that 'sexual energy constitutes the physiological foundation' of mystical experience. Why must this be true? Because, Weil said, 'we haven't anything else with which to love.'"
