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This study of the politics of canonization begins with discussion of the changing policies toward beata mysticism that affected Rose of Lima’s cause for canonization. The chapter further explores how intimate relation with Christ through mysticism created an alternative, extra-institutional channel to deity that was implicitly subversive to Catholic hierarchy and bureaucracy. The concluding sections treat Rose of Lima’s tacit and sometimes excessive obedience as a strategy to subvert authority and her identity as a mujer varonil or Virgin warrior that was later adapted for diverse military purposes.

The expansion of Hildegard’s world and influence is the subject of this chapter. It describes the numerous preaching tours she undertook and her close relationship with Trier, with special attention given to her so-called hymn Mathias sanctus, written for the monastery of St. Eucharius. Also discussed are Hildegard’s connection to Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, her theological treatise Liber vite meritorum, her connection with the community at Eibingen, her Explanation of the Athanasian Creed, and the numerous exorcisms she performed. The vitae she wrote for St. Disibod and St. Rupert, and the music composed in their honor (especially the sequence O ierusalem, the antiphon O beata infantia, and the responsory O felix anima), are treated as well.

Chapter 1 examines the hagiography of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús who migrated to Guatemala’s capital in the late seventeenth century. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. And although Church decrees clearly required actively religious laywomen to live in cloistered communities, Anna became an independent beata (laywoman who took informal vows) and Jesuit tertiary. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mysticism and devotional networks, and her alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety.

This chapter examines Seneca’s views on the collective practice of philosophy, through his representations of the philosophical school. Seneca believes that the Stoic school uniquely combines intellectual coherence with latitude for individual inquiry. He demonstrates these features of the Stoic intellectual community by contrast with Epicureanism. The Epicurean school also receives more sympathetic treatment, though, as Seneca uses it to illustrate how philosophy’s vulnerability to public misunderstanding and caricature. The chapter highlights the fundamentally social character of the philosophical way of life in Seneca’s writings, expressed through the often transtemporal and virtual model of community offered by the philosophical school.

This chapter reads Ovid’s erotodidactic poems, the Ars amatoria and Remedia amoris, as philosophical texts, arguing, first, that these poems are very much like philosophy, in that they are influenced by philosophical doctrines and discourses popular in Ovid’s time; and second and more controversially, that they are philosophical in their own right, putting forth and promoting their own theories of anthropology, psychology, and ethics. While ancient philosophy promotes an “art of life” that enables its practitioners to beate uiuere, Ovid lays out an art of love whose goal is sapienter amare. In doing so, he employs “techniques of the self” similar to those found in philosophical texts, stressing the importance of rational control of the emotions and suggesting forms of behavioral conditioning to achieve the envisaged goal. The erodidatic corpus thus presents a solution to the problem of romantic love, as Ovid combats and deconstructs the dreary elegiac worldview of love as passive suffering, substituting his own cheerful vision of love as rational mastery. For all his rationality, however, he does not follow philosophers in their neurotic fear of the passions, which leads them either to sideline love entirely or to replace it with mechanical sexual gratification. Like the philosophical uita beata, which must be perfect in all its aspects and ideally last a lifetime, Ovid’s envisages amatory flourishing as a holistic concept, in which art is brought to bear on every detail.

This chapter opens by reflecting on the prayer with which Augustine opens his incomplete Soliloquia. In this work, Augustine introduces the reflexivity of prayer: prayer is a desire to know God and himself, to know God through himself and to know himself through God. In De magistro this reflexivity is expanded to account for a spoken yet essentially silent form of prayer. In these two works that bookend his experiment with the genre of philosophical dialogue, prayer emerges as an activity that is bound up with Augustine’s lifelong pursuit of wisdom, which, in turn, is closely related to the practice of prayer in non-Christian schools of philosophy of this period (388–91 CE).