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This is a remarkable book for so young an author—or indeed an author of any age. Cristina Mazzoni, who at the time of its publication was assistant professor of Romance Languages at the University of Vermont, writes with elegance, breadth, and daring. Complex, subtle, nuanced, this difficult book should be of interest to students of comparative literature, Freud and Lacan (or their detractors), feminist theory, and mysticism. Mazzoni examines religious, literary, medical, and psychoanalytic works that deal with the woman in pain or jouissance (ecstasy), focusing mainly on French and Italian stories and novels of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, referring to the mystics of the Middle Ages, Saint Teresa of the 17th century, and exploring the possible connections between mysticism and hysteria in the modern world.
These are fascinating topics that necessitate the author's interdisciplinary approach; nevertheless, there are some problems. There is too much summary here for any specialist who is already familiar with the literary texts, and insufficient justification for including all these works for the nonspecialist. One might keep this as a reference book, however, to be dipped into according to need and inclination. It is rich enough for that. Some minor quibbles: arresting though the author's tide is, “saints and hysterics” would perhaps better capture her intent since she usually distinguishes between the two categories unlike some critics. And since much of what Mazzoni has to say is theoretically of interest to