Paperback: Maria Maddalena De'Pazzi: Selected Revelations (2000) is translated and introduced by Armando Maggi.
Saint Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi (1566-1606) was one of the most important mystics of the Renaissance. Her mystical works are a fascinating meditation on the nature and purpose of language.
Born in Florence in 1566, Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi joined the Carmelite convent Santa Maria degli Angeli in August 1582, when she was sixteen. She took the veil the following year and soon after, began having daily visions. During these raptures, she conversed with Christ, whom she generally refers to as the Word.
Maria Maddalena believed that the Word wanted her to summon his being through her voice. Her visions, therefore, have a distinctly oral character, and the convent sisters who transcribed them carefully attempted to reproduce the mystic's oral style.
Maria Maddalena's long monologues were, in fact, repeated attempts to embody the Word through oral language, and her daily raptures bore similarities to solo mystical plays, which focused on Christ's passion and death.
The manuscripts containing the mystic's visions were edited in seven volumes from 1960 to 1966. Available here for the first time in English are a selection of de' Pazzi's most powerful and disturbing visions.
About the translator: Armando Maggi PhD is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and a member of the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago. A specialist of Renaissance culture, he has published several essays on female mysticism, Renaissance theories on visuality, Neoplatonic treatises on love, seventeenth-century books on demonology, and Portuguese literature. He is the author of several books, including Satan's Rhetoric, a Study of Renaissance Demonology and The Resurrection of the Body: Pier Paolo Pasolini from Sade to Saint Paul, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
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