PROMISCUOUS GACE: IMAGINING BEAUTY AND HOLINESS WITH SAINT MARY OF EGYPT. By SoniaVelázquez. Class 200: New Studies in Religion. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. Cloth, $99.00; Paper, $27.50.

Sonia Velázquez has compiled an impressive array of sources related to the seventh-century hagiographical account known as the Life of Mary of Egypt. In Promiscuous Grace, Velázquez details the life and afterlives of this narrative about a repentant woman whose early life is marked by an excessive desire for men only to convert to Christianity and exhibit an equally excessive desire for God through her asceticism. 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. The latter theory draws on W. J. T. Mitchell in order to further theorize the material aspects of religion. Ultimately, Velázquez argues that in the hagiographical narrative of Mary of Egypt, and especially (for her analysis) the later works of art inspired by that story, the paradox of finding beauty and holiness where least expected—in the Life of a repentant, aged, withered desert ascetic—is worthy of our attention. Promiscuous Grace is a beautifully written and argued work that combines various source materials to reveal the paradoxical and concomitant ambivalence traced throughout ancient and medieval literature on Christian sainthood. As I read Promiscuous Grace, I experienced some of my own ambivalence about what this excellent book achieves. On the one hand, it is an interdisciplinary tour de force, demonstrating to its readers the best of what interdisciplinarity can offer us: new windows of interpretation that become visible only when disciplinary boundaries are muddied. Yet, as a scholar of religion reading a work published in a series dedicated to “New Studies in Religion,” I hoped for more depth in Velázquez's own analysis of religion. And perhaps depth is the price paid for the reward of interdisciplinary breadth. There are some noteworthy omissions in her research, and I wonder how some of these works would have bolstered or further nuanced Velázquez's argument. For example, Velázquez cites Patricia Cox Miller's “Is There a Harlot in This Text?” Of course, this makes sense, given that Miller reads the Life of Mary of Egypt in it. However, I wonder what Miller's subsequent work, The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, would add to this study. In the latter, Miller—also using the work of W. J. T. Mitchell (among others)—theorizes a “material turn” that seems relevant to Velázquez's argument. Virginia Burrus' The Sex Lives of Saints is cited, but Velázquez does not appear to build on or develop Burrus' argument—that in Christian hagiographies, like Mary of Egypt's, there is an “exuberant eroticism” that is often read as a sublimation of desire—which I read as important to the arguments of Promiscuous Grace. Velázquez writes: “Beauty, however, is rarely addressed in anthropological, theological, or religious studies conversations about materiality…” and then later; “With Mary of Egypt…we focus not on the relationship between the sensible and the ecstatic, but instead on the coexistence of beauty and ugliness.” The crux of her argument holds that in this story, about this saint and the many afterlives of this Life, we can see the coexistence of beauty and ugliness. In my reading of Miller and Burrus, both gesture towards this same paradox. And while only Miller names beauty as one of the paradoxical elements, one can consider desire, seduction, and eros (Burrus' argument) as part of the same matrix. In my own work on the Life of Mary of Egypt, I have also drawn on Miller and Burrus and also name beauty as a paradoxical element, alongside rupture, loss, creativity, and hope. Despite my own desire for a deeper engagement with scholars of religion, I remain enamored with Promiscuous Grace. Through Velázquez's lucid, sensitive, and beautiful prose, she models the use of a wide lens with which to, as she says, think with Mary of Egypt. The promise of an excellent book like this is that something is learned. I indeed learned quite a lot, and I am grateful Velázquez has written it