Female Visionary Saints: an alternative Interpretation. Female sanctity, Visionaryism and Hysteria in the Medieval and Modern Age

It is well known that in the complex ‘alphabet of the female saints’, to borrow the happy phrase of Giovanni Pozzi , visions constellate ad abundantiam the mystical experience of women: they are much more frequent than other mystical phenomena, especially in the case of holy women living in the medieval and modern age. In this text I will seek to demonstrate that female ‘visionary’ mystics are in fact subjects affected by behavioural and personality disturbances disorders, which today are unfortunately impossible to identify exactly, given that the only possible diagnosis would be one in absentia. For convenience I shall use the old-fashioned (and sexist) term ‘hysteria’, meaning what from the time of Charcot and Freud, has signified a pathological disturbance associated with mental illness. I have decided to divide my paper into three parts: in the first part I shall illustrate the similarites between visionaries and hysterics; in the second I shall show how stigmatisations – often explicable as mechanisms of hysterical conversion – frequently took place in the course of the visions; and in the final part I shall illustrate how visionaryism systematically accompanied the process of sublimation of maternity, especially among female mystics, whose ‘earthly’ motherhood was denied, as is documented in the sources.