ABSTRACT
Even casual perusal of the descriptions of ferocious self-injurious behaviors and ecstatic states of altered consciousness found in some of the saints’ vitae cannot help but raise questions to the modern reader of the mental stability and perhaps sanity of these medieval holy persons. How culturally relativistic do we have to be to say that a Henry Suso or a Christina Mirabilis is not pathological in his or her basic personality structure, or to say that what appear as manifestly gross excesses to observers in our culture make sense and are not abnormal given the context of another culture, such as Western Europe in late medieval times?
