Mystical or hysterical?
Is she mad, or is she right? ask the authors of the mystical revelations of St. Gemma Galgani, the first woman canonized in the 20th century. Although they leave this question unanswered, the historically detailed and very personal material they provide by and about Galgani affords an intriguingly mixed conclusion. Rudolph Bell, a historian at Rutgers, and Christina Mazzoni, a professor of romance languages at the University of Vermont, have produced an interesting combination of historical analysis, feminist hermeneutics and primary source translation of Galgani's autobiography, diary entries and ecstatic utterances transcribed by her family. These seemingly divergent lenses refract pieces of Galgani which, when combined by the reader, construct a picture of a young woman whose intense physical ravages were either psychosomatic creations or sufferings given by God as channels of mutual communication and erotic relationality.
Galgani was startlingly other-worldly. The interior world she inhabited is the world of fetid, overwrought, medieval Italian Catholicism. One of the themes this book raises is the transhistorical reality of a mystical modern. Galgani was born in the small village of Lucca, Italy, in 1878, died there in 1903, and remained determinedly nonmodern throughout her young life. Her viscerally pietistic religiosity stands against the scientific rationalism of her time. In the presence of "worldly" dinner-table conversations Galgani gazes instead at a cross to focus her attentions on the beyond. She resists modernity's primary characteristic, cynicism, for the childlike innocence of an alternate age. In Galgani's diaries as in her behavior, there is a strong perception that she senses the threat that modernity and reality pose for her religious posture.
Bell and Mazzoni also evoke the tension between mysticism and hysteria. To a 21st-century reader, the catalogue of Galgani's somatic suffering can seem shocking: back abscesses, free flowing bleeding, a foot so diseased doctors urge amputation and, her greatest blessing, the stigmatic wounds of Christ. With each symptom Galgani rejoices and offers ecstatic paeans of praise to her "lover and bridegroom." She is tortured by diabolical visitations and visual distortions, all of which in medieval times would have been catalogued as signs of mystical grace and favor. But as she is a modern in dialogue with a world in which Freud has recently published his work on hysteria, she is constrained by the diagnoses of her physicians. They consistently conclude that she is a hysteric whose physical symptoms reflect internal psychological tensions. But this medical framing of her condition disallows the conclusion that perhaps Galgani is both "mad and right," that her body's language expresses intimacy with the divine.
