On a first approach, the religious personality of Blessed Alexandrina Maria da Costa strikes us as strange and disconcerting. An exercise in historical and anthropological comprehension, this article reduces such strangeness. It is argued that this case reflects the history of a local community with a strong religious identity, in which devotional forms of Catholicism combined with initiatives on the part of the clergy aiming to promote spiritual subjectivities. At the same time, Medicine and Psychiatry provided new interpretation frameworks regarding religious experiences. From this ensemble of heterogeneous elements eventually emerged a vernacular form of mysticism, within which the traditional liminal entities acquired new meanings. The language of vernacular mysticism constructed the interiority of an experience that, albeit singular, was always strongly socialized.
popular sainthood; mysticism; Medicine and Psychiatry; liminality; Alexandrina de Balasar.