Carlos Eire seems to have three main objectives in this enjoyable, readable work of early modern history.First, to introduce his readers to the miracles associated with three monastics-familiar in varying degrees to present-day readers-and to relate such miraculous occurrences to claims of fraud and demonic activity.Second, to highlight the strange simultaneity between this seventeenth-century explosion of accounts of impossible phenomena and the early flowering of the "scientific revolution" and the "age of reason."And third, to identify a problem of historical method with the epistemological fissure between premodernity and our own times, even while questioning the existence of this break.Eire achieves these objectives through a tripartite organizational structure.He first offers a brief history of levitation and then investigates the miraculous experiences of Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) and Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603Cupertino ( -1663)).A key theme appears in this part and is reprised elsewhere in the book: their levitations enabled the Church to demonstrate God's favor in the context of the struggle against Protestantism, but they also created problems for Church authorities.Such problems were sometimes practical: local superiors had to manage the swarms of visitors drawn to the spectacular, which (in the case of St. Joseph) took the form of disruptive shrieking followed by levitation during Mass on an almost daily basis.But Joseph's flights also complicated the Church's efforts to prove its authenticity to a European audience increasingly oriented toward an empirical and rational worldview.Part two introduces the miracle of bilocation, using as its case study the Spanish Franciscan abbess Sister Mara de greda (1602-1665).Sister Mara also levitated but was better known for her bilocations in northern New Spain, where she met with and taught the native Jumano Indians and encouraged them to seek out baptism and catechesis.Sister Mara also engaged in "automatic writing," recording an autobiography of the Blessed Virgin who appeared to her and dictated the text.She shared this text with King Philip IV (for whom she had become a confidante and adviser) before being told to destroy it, then to rewrite it, then to destroy it again, and then to rewrite a third time (it was eventually published as The Mystical City).As was the case with Saint Teresa and Saint Joseph, Sister Mara's claims were investigated; the query halted, sputtered, and restarted.She was suspected of fraud but cleared of those charges and later declared ven-
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