Sacred madness: Women, religion, and folly in postwar Italian cinema

My dissertation is the first study (1) to identify the character type of the female holy fool in postwar Italian cinema, (2) to delineate its phenomenological grammar until 1968 in works by Rossellini, Fellini, and Pasolini, and (3) to analyze its significance. It draws on feminist studies of female mysticism and on the affective spirituality of the late Middle Ages to argue that these heretical, scandalous, and anti-dogmatic figures are a means to re-negotiate questions of national identity and to promote positive Franciscan and feminine values that counter the desacralization of postwar Europe's modernization and industrialization.