Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley

      INTRODUCTION

      On March 26, 1612, the Bishop of Coimbra exhumed the body of Queen Isabel of Portugal (1271–1336), which had been buried for 275 years. Isabel’s body, according to witnesses, exuded a sweet odor and appeared not to have rotted despite almost three centuries in the ground.¹ These phenomena, which seem unusual to the modern reader, were standard elements of sanctity that dated back to medieval traditions.² But how could one tell if a body’s sweet smell and failure to rot were signs of a miracle and not just unusual, but natural phenomena?

      For the Counter-Reformation Church, which was seeking to reassert both its identity and the validity of the cult of the saints, traditional signs of holiness had to be rigorously validated and defensible both to the faithful layman and to canonization officials.³ It was for this reason that the letters opening Isabel’s canonization process deputed two physicians and one surgeon to examine her body.⁴ In their thorough investigation of the corpse, these experts found that Isabel’s face was still “covered by white flesh,” her head was “full of hair,” which seemed as if it had been “just washed,” her “eye sockets, ears, and nose were whole,” and her breasts were “similarly totally white and dry” and, upon probing, “remained solid and firm.”⁵ Judging what they found against their experience with other bodies, the medical men ruled that what had occurred to Isabel’s corpse was “beyond nature.”⁶ In the lexicon of early modern natural philosophy, “beyond nature” was not a vague term at all; rather, it delimited a specific realm of phenomena created by God.⁷ These medical professionals were saying that, in their medical opinion, a miracle had occurred in the body of Queen Isabel.

      Isabel’s case was not unusual, however, and, in fact, Catholic officials ordered the posthumous examination of nearly every prospective saint in the first hundred years after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). During these examinations, medical professionals found a variety of abnormalities in saintly cadavers including miraculous incorruption, evidence of extreme asceticism, and wondrously unusual anatomy. In many of these cases, the evidence of the body, interpreted by medical experts, became part of the demonstration of the individual’s sanctity. In a period of crisis, the Church looked to experts on the natural world—medical practitioners—to help them demonstrate the existence of supernatural realities such as miracles and saints.⁸

      This book provides a comprehensive study of the role played by anatomical evidence in the creation of saints. Although several studies have explored the ecclesiastical interest in medicine by examining the role of medical professionals in canonization proceedings, few have discussed the numerous postmortems performed on prospective holy men and women.⁹ The studies that have looked at postmortem examination, which include works by Katharine Park, Nancy Siraisi, Gianna Pomata, and Elisa Andretta, have focused either on an earlier period or on only a select few of the most famous cases.¹⁰ Archival evidence demonstrates, however, that such examinations became especially widespread in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From 1550 until about 1700, corpses of nearly every pope, prospective saint, and many other esteemed individuals underwent postmortem examinations, sometimes including a full autopsy, as part of the search for the holy.¹¹ Indeed, at least one prospective saint, Isidore the Laborer, was exhumed after 500 years so that medical practitioners could assess his body against the new standards of sanctity.¹² Francis Xavier’s corpse was examined in faraway Goa and then reevaluated in Rome by other, better known and more prestigious medical practitioners.¹³ The Catholic Church, it would seem, cared deeply about the anatomy of prospective holy men and women and went to great lengths to ensure that medical criteria were used in evaluating the unusual qualities of saintly cadavers.

      The Church’s alliance with anatomical studies invites a reassessment of the relationship between Catholicism and medicine in the early modern period. Certainly, the narratives that once cast the Church, and religion more generally,