Stubborn, Determined, and Dying

In a , the late writer considered the story of Gemma Galgani, a 19th-century Italian mystic who refused food, bore wounds on her hands and feet that she claimed were stigmata—a doctor declared them to be self-inflicted with a sewing needle—and believed that enduring periods of intense physical suffering could expiate all the sins ever committed by priests. There is something unnervingly timeless, Mantel writes, about young women who “starve and purge themselves, and … pierce and slash their flesh,” even if we no longer endorse such behavior as spiritual devotion. Galgani was canonized as a saint in 1940.