Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley
of the incorrupt body as a sign of sanctity is a repeated theme in his printed works. In his vita of Saint Raymond Penafort, for example, Peña argues that “the sweet odors that issue from the tombs of the dead are miraculous” and furthermore are “the sign that within them resides the Author of life [God].”28 In his vita for Francesca Romana, Peña states that there is only space to discuss her most important miracles, “among which was the sweet odor that issued from her body, with which Divine Mercy well demonstrates the holiness of his servant.”29 Additionally, he concludes, “it was a wondrous thing that her body had not spoiled or rotted, but remained soft, flexible, and tractable, as if it were alive.”30 Although the incorrupt body was clearly an important miracle for Peña, in none of his printed saintly vita does he explicitly state that expert witnesses—e.g., physicians—should be used to confirm such miraculous phenomena. Only in an inquisition manual did Peña advise judges to use experts from other fields, including medical practitioners, to help in vetting the potentially holy.31 Nevertheless, in his official and private canonization documents, Peña routinely began to call upon medical professionals to confirm the miraculous incorruption of saints’ bodies.
As deacon of the Rota, Peña oversaw the composition of the letters that opened the apostolic phase of a canonization.32 These letters specified how the proceedings should be conducted, including what sort of questions should be asked and which miracles and virtues were to be verified. Beginning early in the seventeenth century, in several cases directed by Francisco Peña, these letters included a clause ordering that the tomb of the purportedly holy individual be surveyed and the body unearthed. This clause apparently meant that medical professionals should conduct a postmortem survey of the corpse, since in these cases a medical investigation immediately followed the visitation of the body.33 Later letters explicitly required medical intervention. Those opening the apostolic phase of canonization for Peter Alcantara in 1618, for example, specified that his body must be examined by “one or two physicians and one surgeon or other experts with the skills for inspecting the body, the bones, and remains of the servant of God, Peter of Alcantara.”34 In this way, by the early seventeenth century, postmortem examination of a holy body became part of the Rome-directed apostolic process of canonization. This new reliance on expertise represented an extension of centralized papal authority into local communities and a new requirement for canonization. Peña, who already addressed the problem of demonstrating the incorruption of a corpse, was a major figure behind the creation of the new standard. With this innovation, however, he both exploited an old alliance between medicine and religion and benefitted from the newly recognized power of anatomy to make sense of the human body.
THE CHURCH AND MEDICINE
The Church’s alliance with medicine was long standing, and as early as the thirteenth century medical professionals testified to healing miracles in canonization proceedings.35 Medical professionals were asked to take part in these proceedings because they could authenticate the testimonies of “simple people” that might have otherwise been dubious. Local physicians in particular were important as they could rule out possible natural explanations for a healing.36 Joseph Ziegler, however, has observed that such testimony was not a requirement in canonization proceedings and was based on local availability of medical practitioners.37 Medical testimony about healing miracles in late medieval canonization proceedings was therefore ad hoc and represented a nice addition to other witness testimony rather than a replacement of it.
Historians of early modern Europe, including Fernando Vidal and David Gentilcore, note that after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) verification of healing miracles in canonization proceedings changed in two significant ways. First, testimonies became more technical, with medical witnesses relying both on experience and philosophical training to rule out natural explanations for a miraculous cure. Second, medical verification of a healing miracle became regular in this period and, eventually, a specific requirement.38
Despite this recent detailed research on the role of medical professionals in confirming healing miracles, little has been written about their role in the posthumous examination of the corpses of deceased holy men and women. Although Katharine Park has studied examinations of holy bodies in the medieval period, those works that have touched on the early modern period tend to focus on the most famous, printed cases of autopsies, such as those of Filippo Neri, Carlo Borromeo, and Ignatius Loyola.39 The postmortems on prospective saints, however, form an important part of the interaction between Catholicism and medicine in the early modern period both because they were so widespread—nearly every canonized saint and many other holy individuals were subjected to a posthumous examination—and because they demonstrate that the Church valued new medical practices and ways of making knowledge.
Confirming a healing miracle as opposed to judging a body to be miraculously irregular required a different set of skills and implied a different relationship between medicine and religion. In order to confirm a healing miracle, a medical professional was forced to admit that he was unable to explain how the healing occurred and that, to his knowledge, the recovery that had happened was impossible. The success of healing miracles requires the failure of medicine. In contrast, to judge a body holy a physician employed experience, knowledge of modern and classic medical writers and philosophers, and surgical skill to isolate and explain unusual anatomical features.40 Therefore, the postmortems on saints were a judgment by the Church of the positive contribution that medical professionals could make in defining the boundaries of the natural rather than, in the case of healing miracles, forcing such practitioners to admit the inadequacy of their skills.
The Church had good reason to view the medical profession, and especially anatomy, positively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practice of opening human bodies was of long standing by the sixteenth century and had begun in the late medieval period for a number of reasons: (1) to embalm the elite for as part of burial practices, (2) to determine the cause of death, (3) to investigate murders, and (4) to check physical signs of a saint’s holiness.41 From at least the twelfth century, an additional reason why medical practitioners engaged in anatomical investigations was to support the knowledge they gleaned from classical sources. The medical school in Salerno carried out animal dissection even at this early date. The first recorded use of a dissection to explain conclusions in a medical treatise appeared in a work by Mondino dei Liuzzi in 1316. Nevertheless, these dissections were to serve a didactic function, not an exploratory purpose.42 That is, they were meant to illustrate the principles observed in the canonical treatises of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, not challenge them. It was for this purpose that the Universities of Bologna and Padua established yearly, public anatomical dissections. The practice of public dissection was commonplace by the time they appear in the 1405 university statutes of Bologna and in the 1465 statutes of Padua.43
Therefore, when canonization officials turned to anatomy to help establish bodily miracles, they drew on a number of long-standing autopsy practices in Europe. The initial and ostensible reason that many saintly bodies were opened was to embalm the corpse for display. However, forensic motivations also inspired the dissectors, who sought anatomical explanation of either unusual ailments or behavior in prospective saints. Finally, since these medical men were testifying in a legal context, the established practice of using medical professionals as expert witnesses in criminal proceedings likely also inspired canonization officials. In short, that Peña and other canonization officials turned to anatomy to help demonstrate sanctity was in some ways a logical step, since the opening of human bodies had been commonplace in a number of related legal, funerary, and medical contexts. Indeed, Katharine Park has argued that it was a similar mix of motivations that led to the opening of female saintly bodies in the fourteenth century.44
Yet there were also new practices in medicine and anatomy that altered both who was involved with the postmortems on prospective saints and how the evidence found in the body was interpreted. In the medieval examinations of holy women, a physician generally was not present when the body was opened, whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church required specifically that physicians undertake the examination.45 This represents not just a change in personnel but also in what a physician’s duties and knowledge areas were supposed to be. The physicians were expected both to find unusual details