Staging Authority

This monograph analyses how Spanish visionary women of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries achieved far-reaching spiritual authority through their interaction with images. In doing this, Sanmartín’s study considers their trances to be a sort of mise-en-scène, drawing on both the spatial and visual turns in the humanities. This approach provides a revision and methodological update to the analysis of early Spanish visionaries by focusing on different aspects, such as the materiality of visions, the production of place, and the ventriloquism of images. Within the milieu of performance, this study deals with the fusion/division between the biblical space of sacred history represented through images and the setting where the visionaries embody their trances. Questions that this monograph addresses include how the relationship between images and women affects the evolution of the paradigm of sanctity, how the effectiveness of images depends on the staging of sanctity, how space and voice appear in revelations and empower visionary women, and how sainthood is bestowed on women who essentially become images and relics to their followers.