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Podcast: Bone and Sickle
Episode: Ghastly Saint Stories
Description: Our collection of ghastly stories of saints highlights notions of extreme self-mortification as a spiritual practice along with a preoccupation with the saintly body  after death.
While these aspects of Catholicism are anathema to secular outsiders and jarring to many contemporary adherents, they’ve been embraced by the Gothic.  We begin with an illustrative clip from John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s  Southern Gothic classic Wise Blood.
The case of 15th-century Florentine Maria Magdalena de’Pazzi provides an example in terms of extreme mortification from an early age. Wilkinson reads some passages noting her ing...