Female Mystic Spirituality and Sensorial Devotions in Italy in the Eighteenth Century

Between the end of the 17th century and the course of the following century, many areas of central Italy, including Umbria, constituted an extraordinary “laboratory” of mystical experiences characterised by marked sensory accents and sometimes unusual physical manifestations. Despite the widespread rationalist climate that permeated the 18th century, there were nevertheless many ambivalences and manifestations of religious enthusiasm that ran through the European 18th century on several occasions: the religious figures examined in this short essay, Veronica Giuliani, Chiara Isabella Fornari, and Maria Lanceata Morelli, constitute an interesting case study due to the strong physical charge of their spiritual journey, which was expressed through visible manifestations of identification with the suffering of Christ and, in the case of Chiara Isabella Fornari, through repeated, unusual, and insistent phenomena of dermographism.