The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint.

The Voices of Gemma Galgani: The Life and Afterlife of a Modern Saint Rudolph M. Bell and Cristina Mazzoni The University of Chicago Press, $30, 320 pp.

The scope of Colonial Saints spans the period from 1500 to 1800, with studies of a large number of saints. In contrast, Bell and Mazzoni focus on one young Italian lay person, Gemma Galgani (1878-1903), who was canonized in 1940. It would be easy to stereotype her as what is known among the Italians, often pejoratively, as una zitella--an overly pious young maid, clad in a black dress, given to exuberant piety, priest-ridden, and conspicuously virginal. Neither Bell nor Mazzoni is so reductionistic. They mine original sources and secondary literature to attempt the construction of a phenomenological and cultural study of this young woman, her significance at a certain moment in history, and how she became a canonized saint.

After locating Gemma in her historical milieu, Bell provides a translation of all her extant works, with an introduction to each genre of writing. Gemma wrote an autobiography at the insistence of her confessor (we have numerous examples of this kind of writing--most conspicuously, Teresa of Avila's Mi Vida). We have a diary she kept in the summer of 1900, some letters, and, from the hands of observers, records of her words while in ecstasy. All of these writings are full of pious banalities, but read closely and sympathetically they provide material for the final, most interesting, part of this study.

First, Bell traces the process leading to Gemma's canonization. Gemma's biographer and spiritual director, a Passionist priest named Father Germano, a self-professed saint maker who bragged that he could get Garibaldi canonized, was the guide. He faced a formidable task. A physician who examined her thought that her claimed stigmata was the result of self-inflicted wounds; a long-time confessor (and a bishop to boot) doubted that her ecstasies were genuine; more than one critic found her somewhat unhinged, with some of her ecstasies deriving less from piety than from a vivid imagination. None of this deterred Germano, a key player in the canonization of the Passionist lay brother, Gabriel Possenti. His plan was simple: use counter-arguments, or more drastic means, like keeping scientists and medical personnel away from the dossier (judging them all to be anticlerical positivists).

Bell's account of the canonization process is an excellent study of the truth that canonizations are political. One need only think of recent canonizations (for example, the indecently speeded-up process for the founder of Opus Dei) to see that the work of saint making has its own sociological logic. When the final decree was published by Rome, however, the more extravagant claims made about Gemma (her stigmata; her casual conversations with her guardian angel) were bracketed, with consideration given only to her heroic virtue. She fit a type easily recognized in the annals of hagiography, and it was on that basis that claims for sainthood were made. She is now listed in the canon of the saints. However, contrary to Bell's assertion, that listing is not an exercise of papal infallibility.

Mazzoni's final words are done in a kind of postmodern style; she creates an abecedarium of words (autobiography, body, clothes, etc.) under which she offers a number of reflections, largely inspired by feminist theory--Cixous, Kristeva, Irigaray, and other French intellectual fashionistas are put in the company of Christian feminists in order to "read" Gemma Galgani. Some of these reflections are risibly a la mode, but I very much sympathize with Mazzoni's basic intention. She wants Gemma to be taken seriously not because she was "constructed" by a superior force (in the person of, among others, the zealous Germano), but on her own terms.

How did a poor, provincial woman absorb a certain kind of religious language and practice? How did she understand herself in relation to God (let us not be reductionist and claim it was all a psychological response to her social and mental situation), and how did she express that relation with her body, in her behavior, and in the way she looked at the world and others? Because she was blocked from entering a convent, was she consciously struggling to develop a way of life reminiscent of the Beguines, or is her life solely to be understood as a drive to become a nun? In other words, borrowing a line from Virginia Woolf, was her life a struggle to find an existential room of her own?

One place to look would be the testimonies of women from similar backgrounds. The authors do that with some modern types but only in passing. What, for example, was the character of her visions? Were they pictures in her imagination? Interior locutions? Here a look at the medieval visionary Julian of Norwich would have been useful. Was Gemma's claim of the stigmata inspired in part by the rather lurid emphasis on the suffering Christ, characteristic of Passionist piety? The point is that before one seeks the exterior scaffolding of literary theory one would do better to look into the sources that shaped Gemma Galgani and others like her. Those sources are deeply rooted in the traditional forms of sanctity, which would have been the natural vocabulary of a Father Germano and of Gemma herself. Despite these minor reservations, I found this book a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the saints.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.