Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley
contested miracles counting for Diego’s canonization was his postmortem healing in 1562 of Don Carlos, the seventeen-year-old son of King Philip II of Spain. Given the prominence of Don Carlos’s family, this healing miracle gained for Diego almost overnight broad support for his canonization and an enthusiastic patron in the person of Philip himself. The tale of the miracle begins with Don Carlos stumbling down several stairs while chasing a “comely wench.” He then smashed his head against the closed door at the bottom of the staircase with enough force to open a large gash. Although not initially considered life threatening, the wound became badly infected. At the prompting of King Philip II, a team of ten of the most eminent medical practitioners in all of Europe—including Andreas Vesalius—was called upon to attend the prince. Despite their efforts, these medical practitioners feared their young patient would not survive.9
That Don Carlos’s wound did heal was attributed to Diego’s intercession. The holy man’s long-dead body was exhumed and brought to the ailing prince’s bedside. According to numerous witnesses, the prince recovered only after his body made contact with Diego’s corpse. Witnesses also noted that the corpse was strangely sweet-smelling and lifelike, despite having spent nearly one hundred years in the ground.10 On the strength of this miracle and the wave of support that it engendered, Diego was canonized. This act was at least as much a political as a religious move. Pope Sixtus V used this canonization both to reward King Philip for his efforts in defending Catholicism and to encourage him in his planned invasion of England, which took place later that same year.11 Thus, the papacy and the king of Spain desired this canonization.
Even with papal and royal support for Diego, medical opinion surrounding this healing of Don Carlos had been far from unanimous. Don Carlos’s personal physician, Diego Olivares, declared that he did not believe the healing to be unusual in any way: “In my opinion it [the healing] was not [miraculous] because the prince was cured with natural and ordinary remedies, with which one usually cures others with the same injury or worse.”12 Olivares conceded that Don Carlos had likely been helped by God or his servants, but he cautioned that a miraculous healing must “exceed all natural forces” and this one had not done that.13
Another physician, Christobal de Vega, contradicted Olivares and specifically attributed Don Carlos’s healing to the intercession of Diego’s miraculous body. Indeed, de Vega argued that those medical practitioners who did not agree with this account of the cure were acting out of pride and they dissimulated in order to give the impression that the healing was caused “more by their own efforts than by the miracle.”14 De Vega’s opinion carried the day, presumably because his discrediting of the other medical practitioners was entirely plausible—these men undoubtedly wanted to salvage their prestigious careers after Don Carlos’s near death at their hands.
Almost completely unmentioned in these medical narratives was the miraculous instrument of the cure: the body of San Diego.15 However, according to several nonmedical witnesses, Diego’s century-old corpse had rotted so little that it appeared to be almost alive. As one witness noted with obvious astonishment, the corpse still “had its entire nose,” which was normally one of the first parts of a body to decay.16
Despite the failure of the medical team to describe Diego’s corpse, his hagiographers eagerly recounted its degree of preservation. Pietro Galesini, for example, who produced an official vita for the saint during his canonization, stressed the miraculous state of Diego’s corpse during Don Carlos’s healing.17 Similarly, another biographer, Francesco Bracciolini, recounted in detail the wondrous preservation of Diego’s body upon exhumation.18
The prominence of Diego’s incorrupt corpse in hagiography but its absence from the medical accounts suggests that postmortem analysis of holy bodies was not yet valued as part of canonization proceedings. Despite this medical disinterest, lay believers eagerly sought signs of the holy in the cadavers of the deceased and publicized their own interpretations of what they found. For them, Diego’s incorrupt body was an obvious demonstration of his sanctity.19 In the context of the Counter-Reformation, such enthusiasm was both useful and problematic: the Church wanted passionate believers, but sought to avoid accusations that miracles were merely the inventions of overly enthusiastic disciples. How, then, were Church reformers to make such classical signs of holiness rigorous and also controllable?
At this juncture, the eminent Spanish canon lawyer Francisco Peña, spurred by the canonization of San Diego, in which he took part, realized the usefulness of medicine in both justifying and controlling the interpretation of bodily evidence of the holy. In his role as a member of the Tribunal of the Rota, the highest ecclesiastical court, which judged evidence in canonization proceedings, Peña helped make the medically verified holy body a key miracle for any potential saint.20 In so doing, Peña removed a key aspect of local piety from the bishops’ authority and thereby contributed to the overall strength of the papacy in the early modern period.21
Francisco Peña was well suited and ideologically motivated to make a significant change to the understanding of sanctity in the early modern Catholic world. Born in Villaroya de los Pinares, near Saragossa, Spain, he was a highly learned individual, holding doctorates in Roman and canonical law as well as in theology from the University of Valencia. King Philip II of Spain introduced Peña to the papal court during the reign of Pope Pius IV (1566–1572). Despite this introduction, which might have prompted feelings of loyalty to the Spanish monarch, Peña immediately embarked on a number of projects that served to expand papal power and jurisdiction. These ventures included the censoring of works that criticized papal power, a revision of the standard manual on inquisition procedure, and the publishing of a number of hagiographies.22 Although these tasks might seem disparate, the proclamation of saints and the actions of the Roman Inquisition both increasingly came under papal purview and eventually were considered expressions of papal authority during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.23
According to Peña’s personal testimony, the task to which he most seriously applied himself was the canonization of the saints. As he asserted in his vita of Carlo Borromeo (canonized 1610), canonization was the “most important and most arduous thing that the Holy See controls.”24 In stating this, as first auditor and then deacon of the Tribunal of the Rota from 1588 until his death in 1612, Peña perhaps indulged in slight self-aggrandizement; this assignment of preeminence made him a central figure in the Curia since the Rota was the highest court in the Church and was charged with weighing the evidence in canonization trials to ensure that it was sufficient and sufficiently accurate before a process went forward. Peña thus had a major role in determining who was a saint during the very years in which sainthood was first being articulated after the long hiatus of the sixteenth century. In particular, Peña was deeply involved in the canonization proceedings of Hyancinth of Poland, Raymond of Penafort, Francesca Romana, Carlo Borromeo, Filippo Neri, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth of Portugal, and Andrea Corsini.25 Additionally, as he oversaw the Rota during the early proceedings for Isidore the Laborer, Francis Xavier, and Ignatius of Loyola, Peña likely exercised a strong influence over these canonizations. During these proceedings, which stretched over thirty-five years, from 1594 (Hyancinth) to 1629 (Andrea Corsini), the medical examination of the corpses of prospective saints became regular. Peña was, at least in part, responsible for this new emphasis on the body as is documented in many of his writings.
Revealingly, an early sign of the importance that Peña attached to the holy body emerges from the vita he wrote for Diego of Alcalá. Like other hagiographers, Peña commented on the failure of Diego’s cadaver to rot and on its sweet smell despite having spent nearly a century in the ground. However, unlike hagiographers before him, Peña used a full eight pages to provide details about the corpse and its appearance.26 In this section of this vita, he suggested various methods to establish an incorrupt corpse, including a detailed description of its level of preservation, the evaluation of firsthand witness reports, and the listing of similar, medieval cases in which this miracle was approved.27 In short, Peña deployed a mix of empirical evidence and historical precedent to document how Diego’s body had miraculously resisted rot. Clearly, Peña was preoccupied with the ways in which the miracle of an incorrupt body, in particular, could be established.
Peña’s