In spite of the extensive scholarship on Spain's Counter Reformation, the extraordinary career of Maria de Jesus de Agreda (1602–1665) has for centuries remained largely outside the purview of the non–Spanish-speaking world. The life of this Franciscan nun, abbess, and visionary (born María Fernandez Coronel y Arana) unfolded during the same era of religious fervor that shaped the piety of Spain's most legendary saints—including Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius of Loyola. As Marilyn H. Fedewa's illuminating biography makes clear, the spiritual genius of María of Ágreda was no less remarkable than theirs. María of Ágreda: Mystical Lady in Blue offers a long-overdue portrait of a figure venerated as a popular, though not canonized, saint by both Spanish Catholics and Hispanics in the American Southwest.

Fedewa organizes her narrative around the major episodes in María of Ágreda's life that captivated popular attention starting in her own day, and inaugurated her reputation for holiness. These include sections discussing her reported bilocations to the Jumano Indians of western Texas; the visionary accounts of the Virgin Mary recorded in the six-volume Mystical City of God; her spiritual counsel to King Philip IV of Spain; and her interrogation by the Spanish Inquisition. María of Ágreda concludes with a section documenting the nun's legacy in both official and popular Catholic culture, with mention made of the ongoing cause for her beatification; an orchestrated pilgrimage in 2002 to her incorruptible body in Ágreda; her valorization in Hispanic histories (despite the fact that María of Ágreda never set physical foot on American soil); and the role of the Mystical City of God in inspiring Mel Gibson's portrayal of Mary in The Passion of the Christ.

In the words of the author, María of Ágreda does not represent itself as a “scholarly treatise,” but rather attempts to let the “abbess speak for herself” across the centuries (xvi). As such, Fedewa's biography raises but does not answer many questions about her. Perhaps the most pressing of these relate to the legend of the mystic's bilocating doppelganger—whom the Jumano Indians referred to as the “lady in blue.” Aside from an incongruous nod in the afterword to quantum physics (which the author speculates may someday succeed in explaining such phenomena) Fedewa leaves unaddressed the thorny issues of why people say the things they do about saints, canonized or not—that is, the politics of religious memory, here in the context of Spanish colonialism. Scholars from diverse fields will find in this eminently readable and meticulously researched biography ample material to continue the study of one of Spain's most important—but, for many, the least well known—Catholic mystics of the Counter Reformation.