This extensive recounting of details in examining saintly bodies along with an emphasis on direct observation was a narrative technique characteristic of contemporary travel writing, legal studies, medicine, and, later, early experimental societies in order to make eyewitness testimony into a historical reality.118 Spanish pilots sailing to the New World, for example, were asked by Spanish cartographers to record extensive descriptions of what they saw so that the cartographers could be sure of its accuracy.119 Detail implied authenticity. Later in the seventeenth century, experimentalists with the Royal Society would use such elaborate detail to demonstrate that a real historical event or experiment actually had happened. Robert Boyle, for example, would engage in long descriptions of minutiae prior to and during an experiment. These details would demonstrate that no part of what had occurred was omitted and therefore the unusual event had occurred as described.120 Canonization officials thus engaged in a culture of observational empiricism so as to demonstrate the reality of miracles as they occurred in the bodies of saints.
Perhaps the clearest combination of empiricism and expertise in canonization proceedings came during the physician-led examinations of saintly bodies, which is the focus of the remainder of the book. The evaluation of Andrea Corsini’s body will serve as a preliminary example, though, which well illustrates the Church’s embrace of such techniques. In 1606 local canonization judges in Florence asked the physician, Angelo Bonello, to evaluate the state of Corsini’s corpse. Upon examining the body, Bonello “wondered at and admired the body’s preservation [which was] beyond the bounds of nature.”121 That is, Bonello considered the preservation of the body to be miraculous.122
To bolster his testimony and conclusions about the body, though, Bonello enumerated a number of features that led him to his conclusion, including the cadaver’s skin color, flexibility, and the contents of the abdomen, which he opened during his investigation.123 In Bonello’s own words: “Therefore I, Angelo Bonello, Florentine, extensively saw, touched, and smelled Corsini’s body.”124 That is, he made an empirical survey of this corpse in which he observed and tested the corpse against his theoretical and practical knowledge of human cadavers and decay. Furthermore, he demonstrated what he found in a semi-public autopsy in which seventeen other witnesses were present. These witnesses added their names to Bonello’s notarized description of the event. The signatories were men of standing, consisting of some of the most eminent contemporary Florentine citizens: a senator, a member of the Guiccardini family, the Florentine inquisitor general, a local surgeon, and many other illustrious prelates.125 The document for Corsini’s wondrous corpse thus represented a rich tapestry of evidentiary devices including empirical demonstrations, common assent, and philosophical discussion of the boundaries of nature. As this example illustrates, canonization officials relied on a number of techniques at this moment, including various forms of empirical knowledge making, to help make a miracle appear not just believable but a verifiable reality.
Physicians, therefore, represented ideal expert witnesses for the Church because they could deploy so many evidentiary devices in their testimonies about miracles. It was for this reason that canonization officials frequently asked physicians to reinterpret miracles that might have evidentiary issues. During the canonization process of Lorenzo Giustiniani, for example, Domenico Maffeo testified to Giustiniani’s miraculous healing of his son, also named Lorenzo, who was suffering from epilepsy. Maffeo was a less than optimal witness, however, having previously been accused of killing a person; in addition, his son, a few years after the miraculous cure, died.126 Thus, both the testator and the subject of the cure were not considered reliable. In evaluating this evidence, the Tribunal of the Rota turned to Paolo Zacchia, a famous Roman physician and author of a treatise entitled Medical-Legal Questions, a foundational work of forensic medicine.127 That the Rota asked Zacchia, rather than consult with one of the local surgeons who resided near Maffeo, suggests the Church’s preference for prestige and a physician rather than direct observation of an event. Zacchia was asked to reevaluate this supposed miracle and see if it could be made to meet Rome’s evidentiary standards.128 Zacchia diagnosed the boy’s illness as a specific disease, came up with a prognosis, and concluded that there was no natural way that the body could have been healed.129 Through a mix of theoretical training and experience, Zacchia was able to conclude that the boy’s healing was miraculous. Thus, Zacchia thereby turned questionable testimony produced outside Rome into evidence acceptable to the Roman Curia. Expert witnesses, and especially physicians, functioned in a role somewhere between agents of papal authority and negotiators between local and official sanctity.
As these examples show, canonization processes introduced a number of techniques whereby evidence produced at a local level in the parishes was reinterpreted and reevaluated through agents of the Roman Curia. These techniques married both the empirical methods characteristic of artisanal practitioners with the natural philosophic modes of interpretation available to physicians and theologians. In this way, ideas about sanctity generated locally were integrated into and made acceptable for the universal Church. Canonization after Trent was both an imposition of central authority and an act of negotiation between the center of the Catholic world and its peripheries.
The final act in the reform and introduction of more rigor into canonization after the Reformation was the creation of the office of promotor fidei by Pope Urban VIII in 1631. The individual holding this office was deputed to sit with the Congregation of Rites when they vetted the apostolic process. However, his job was an unusual one: his goal was to find errors with the process and potential reasons why a candidate should not be canonized, thus earning the unofficial nickname of the “Devil’s Advocate.”130 In practice, this meant that after the testimony for the miracles and the virtues of a prospective saint were summarized, the promotor fidei would attack individual elements of the argument for canonization. He might impugn the reliability of witnesses, argue that a miracle may have been invented or exaggerated, or question whether testimony about miracles stemmed more from a misunderstanding about how nature worked rather than an actual appearance of a miracle.
The evaluation of the promotor fidei carried out during the apostolic phase of the canonization of Alfonso Toribio in 1675 (can. 1712) represents nicely the way in which these agents vetted canonization processes. The promotor in this case was Prospero Bottini (1621–1712), the Archbishop of Myra. He evaluated the evidence for a number of miracles that Toribio supposedly had carried out both in life and after his death. The information produced during his evaluation was printed in a type of document called a Positio super dubio. Such works were published to demonstrate the extreme care and caution that the Church took when evaluating the lives and miracles of the saints. The Positio for Toribio contains an initial summary of the evidence for each miracle, then Bottini’s objections to it, followed by rebuttals to Bottini’s arguments either by a consistorial lawyer, Federico Caccia, or the eminent physician Paolo Manfredi. The choice of Manfredi as expert medical witness was not casual: he was at the forefront of medicine in the seventeenth century. In the years immediately prior to giving testimony in this case, he had carried out some of the earliest experiments on blood transfusion and undertaken careful anatomical research into the structure of the eye and the ear.131 He responded to Boccini’s objections in many of the medical cases, while in several cases both Caccia and Manfredi offered rebuttals.132 Thus, any miracle accepted for Toribio’s canonization had been considered by multiple experts before it was actually deemed verified.
This debate between the promotor fidei, medical practitioners, and lawyers over the miracles for Toribio demonstrates the ways in which the negotiation for sanctity had evolved in the seventeenth century. First, each of the expert witnesses involved in this case was selected by the Roman Curia and resided in Rome. In addition, their arguments focused on specific and expert pieces of knowledge that were beyond the ability of most parishioners to evaluate.133 Thus, sanctity was a matter removed from its