Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley
asked.45 In answering them, witnesses unwittingly followed the questioner’s logic, rather than speaking according to his or her own ideas about the individual in question. The intimidating nature of the setting—normally in a church before prelates who were generally of much higher rank than the witness—might also predispose the witness to follow the questioner’s logic. Thus, an argument could be made that a canonization process only narrowly tells us about what the judges understood holiness to be and not about what the believers or even medical professionals more broadly thought about the saint or the saint’s body.
Still, pieces of evidence point to the fact that testators frequently saw a canonization process as an opportunity to voice their opinion about the holiness—or lack thereof—of someone from their community. For example, in giving evidence for the canonization of their sister Caterina Ricci, two nuns dictated statements that lasted for more than twenty manuscript pages.46 When Andrea Castaldi testified for the founder of his order, Gaetano dei Conti di Tiene, his testimony took up thirty-six pages.47 Testifying for a saint was a rare opportunity to talk to the elite, and many seized upon it.48 The length of their testimony implies that much of their personal opinion about the person in question, and therefore the definition of holiness in general, entered into the deposition. It also would seem to imply that many of these witnesses saw the testimony before these elite churchmen as something of a performance, which they may have rehearsed multiple times before telling it to the notary. In this way, then, such testimony might tell us more about what people in a given area thought sainthood should be rather than about the deeds of the individual in question.
On a similar note, witnesses occasionally expressed hostility toward canonization judges and testified in a way that was clearly against the intention of the question. When asked about the miracles carried out by Fra Felice of Cantalice—a Capuchin put forward for canonization in the sixteenth century, but only elevated to the rank of saint in 1712—his fellow Capuchin, Fra Giovanni da Bergamo, stated in what were less than glowing terms that “this was a great miracle from the life of Fra Felice. He studied in these three things, that is: the disregard of himself, obedience, and prayer.”49 A knowledgeable listener would have recognized da Bergamo’s explicit denial that Felice had carried out any miraculous works. In a similar vein, medical witnesses did not invariably tell the canonization judges exactly what was expected.
What can be concluded is that the record of a canonization trial was a negotiated piece of evidence in which the voices of the believers blended with those of the ecclesiastical authorities who were attempting to turn local holiness into universal Catholic sainthood. It is those negotiations, especially as they pertain to the body of the saint, that this book examines. From a thorough review of extant sources, it emerges that the meaning of the saintly body, whether interpreted by laymen, medical practitioners, or theologians, itself had no single, fixed, or absolute meaning. Rather, the holy body was defined by local context and circumstances. This study documents the Church’s attempt to make local belief and local knowledge into universal Catholic truth.
CHAPTER 1
Expertise and Early Modern Sanctity
On November 25, 1602, Pope Clement VIII (r. 1592–1605) convened a group of eminent cardinals, jurists, and theologians to discuss what he saw as a central problem facing the Catholic Church: the veneration of saints.1 Although Clement supported the cult of the saints, he told the assembly that he was deeply concerned about a number of dubious practices that had become commonplace. His list of more than twenty items included the printing of vitae, the selling of images, and the distribution of relics from those who had not yet been recognized as saints.2 In short, Clement was worried that enthusiasts were pushing forward individuals as saints who in reality had no right to be recognized as holy.
Clement’s concerns encapsulate the issues surrounding saints following the Reformation. Saints were one of the most popular aspects of Catholicism and one of the most effective ways to evangelize the masses.3 The Church needed saints. The enthusiasm that saints inspired, however, could lead believers into error and had put the Church under attack. Believers might, for example, venerate individuals who were not truly holy or even those who had been condemned by the Church. Veneration of Girolamo Savonarola, the condemned heretical Dominican, for example, flourished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while in the medieval period many venerated as a saint a greyhound who had saved an infant boy.4 Such practices went decidedly against the reform aims of the Catholic Church following the Reformation.
Along with such veneration of unworthy or unapproved individuals, other believers might popularize miracles that had little evidence to support them and that seemed little related to the faith. Such dubious miracles provided easy fodder for Protestant reformers, who saw in the cult of the saints an emblem of everything that was wrong with Catholicism.5 Veneration of the saints could thus act as both powerful propaganda in favor of Catholicism as well as damning criticism against it. In reaction, the Catholic Church halted official canonization for much of the sixteenth century. After this long hiatus, when papal canonization resumed in 1588, according to Peter Burke, “the distinction between sacred and profane was made sharper than it had been, while recruitment procedures for the saints were made uniform and formal.”6
The ways in which this new rigor was applied in practice and how it differed from earlier procedure for medieval saint-making has, in some ways, been difficult to define. In theory, medieval canonizations already were subjected to a degree of central control and involved a number of legal devices designed to separate the holy from the mundane.7 Recent scholars have attempted to identify the changes to canonization in the sixteenth century by focusing either on the numerous institutional changes to the Church in the early modern period or by looking at specific case studies.8 The present chapter differs from and yet draws on these previous strands of scholarship: the goal here is to examine the practical methods whereby canonization officials verified the miracles and the lives of the saints. The papacy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries drew on medieval precedent, but also created new legalistic and bureaucratic devices to evaluate the holiness of those proclaimed saints including, in particular, an increased role for various outside experts and new methods of assessing evidence. In looking at these new procedures, this chapter provides a broader background for the specific innovation, medical verification of bodily sanctity, which is detailed in later chapters.
Despite the fact that the authorities in Rome introduced more and increasingly lengthy procedures to the canonization process, it never became simply a matter of central authority dictating how veneration should be practiced. Rather, the veneration of a holy individual began with a groundswell of popular support in his or her local community. This popular belief in a person’s sanctity turned into canonization through the actions of a number of patrons, who can be considered negotiators or lobbyists between the Curia and the localities. In fact, even the numerous techniques of verification used by the Holy See were, in many ways, part of that negotiation which turned local ideas about holiness into ones accepted by Rome and therefore suitable for veneration by the universal Church.9
In explaining how early modern negotiations of sanctity unfolded, two central themes need to be examined. First, as even the definition of what it meant to be a saint has changed across the long history of the Catholic Church, this chapter begins with the evolving classification of saints in the Church leading up to the period after the Reformation. The focus then turns to the actual process of canonization, from the importance of establishing sanctity at a local level to the role of patronage, and finally, the application of a variety of methods to verify both the holiness of the individual’s life and the truth behind his or her miracles. This last section ends with a survey of the increased role of a variety of experts, including legal professionals, artisans in a range of specialties, and medical professionals, in demonstrating a prospective saint’s miracles. These experts used techniques based on practices in their own fields, drawing on a number of different empirical practices when it came to vetting the potentially holy.
THE EVOLVING MEANING OF SAINTHOOD
The history of saints in the Tridentine period can be characterized as a struggle between established local belief practices and