“In this luminous, revelatory, and sensitive book, at once wide-ranging and full of hidden depths, Velázquez lovingly follows the afterlives of Saint Mary of Egypt across words and images as well as spaces, places, and stages from Egypt to Spain. Velázquez’s beautiful prose and gorgeous readings express a deep care for her subject, leading us on a journey that touches the soul as well as the mind.”

“In this superbly crafted meditation on religion and materiality, Velázquez interweaves the poems, art, and drama dedicated to Mary of Egypt in premodern Spanish Catholicism and its contemporary traces elsewhere. Her work on the creativity inspired by this saint evocatively reimagines the philosophical concept of beauty around the aging, holy female body and the Christian concept of grace around the profane. While grounded in thirteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, this study fruitfully reimagines the peninsular Mary of Egypt as ‘good to think with’ for historians of European Christianity, art, and theater more broadly.”
 

"Velázquez’s illuminating study of early modern representations of St. Mary of Egypt in Promiscuous Grace convincingly demonstrates the subversive potential of this underexamined figure whose life, the artists who depicted her understood, overturns the traditional Christian hierarchy subordinating the material to the spiritual and, by extension, women to men. . . . an essential intervention in ongoing examinations of the tension between material and spiritual, body and soul, earth and heaven, in religious art and literature."

"Holding the paradox of the sensual saint delicately, Velázquez engages artifacts representing and interpreting Mary’s life to unfold the way her promiscuity becomes an image of grace, illustrating how grace itself has a promiscuous character, like a beautiful body freely given. . . . In her detailed research and elegant prose, she shows us the textured reflection that is possible when we resist assimilating Mary of Egypt to well-worn paradigms of womanly beauty and learn instead to appreciate, through artifacts about her life, the interrelatedness of beauty and holiness, the theological and the aesthetic, unmerited favor and promiscuous grace. Promiscuous Grace is a book that handsomely rewards the reader for attention paid—or freely given."

"Velázquez skillfully weaves together her analysis of an anonymous thirteenth-century poem (Vida de Santa María Egipciaca), the artwork depicting Mary of Egypt created by the seventeenth-century
painter Jusepe de Ribera, and Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s play, La gitana de Menfis also from the seventeenth-century. What results is an expansive interdisciplinary study of this late-ancient text, its receptions, and inspirations, as well as the articulation of nuanced theories of religion, beauty, and holiness. Notably, Velázquez also articulates an image theory—one that suggests the story of Mary’s conversion in her Life intimates the power of images as a site of contemplation—is exhibited through the very images (literary and otherwise) of the desert saint herself."