When it comes to religious figures in Latin America of any time period, one can hardly think of a more widely venerated person than Saint Rose of Lima (1586–1617). For Catholics, she is the first canonized saint from the Americas and was later named patron saint of Lima, Latin America, and the Philippines. She has been a favorite subject of religious scholars, who have produced numerous biographies over the centuries frequently hagiographic in nature, based as they were on the documents surrounding her beatification and canonization. Scholars of Christian mysticism and women's spirituality have studied the many descriptions of her ecstatic experiences in order to chart the early expansion of Spanish mysticism across the Atlantic and beyond. Rose of Lima has also received intense interest from historians of colonial Latin America, since she is seen as a key figure in the development of a criollo identity that first sought parity...
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