Content area
Full Text
Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi: Selected Revelations. Edited by Armando Maggi. The Classics of Western Spirituality Series. New York: Paulist Press, 2000. ix + 368 pp. $39.95 (paper).
Once again Paulist Press has made available an extraordinary primary text in the series, The Classics of Western Spirituality. The Selected Revelations of Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi represents a unique form of women's mystical writing from the seventeenth century. As the editor Armando Maggi points out, these texts are not from the pen of Renaissance mystic Maria Maddalena herself, but are transcriptions by the nuns of Maddalena's community of her orality during episodes of mystical union. As such they represent a community writing effort. Maria Maddalena (1566-1607), a nun in a strictly observant enclosed community in Florence, Italy, far from writing her own revelations, strongly disapproved of the nuns' records of her prayer and was apt to destroy them if she discovered them. However, the nuns, recognizing something of the significance of her experiences and of the unique intimacy of...