Yet even in this case, the importance of local belief and the role of patrons is evident. All the testimony came from Lima, Peru, where Toribio had died, and the experts in Rome took it at face value—that is, they evaluated and accepted Toribio’s holiness according to the testimony of those residing in the New World. Furthermore, patronage is everywhere evident. Not only had all this testimony been sent from Peru to Italy, but it had also been translated into Latin and circulated in print form. All this would have cost time and money. Finally, the current Archbishop of Lima was present for some of the miracles that had occurred, implying some sort of involvement by this local patron who was perhaps looking for miracles enacted by the prospective saint.134 He was acting, as Baronio had for Loyola, as a promoter who sought to encourage veneration for his deceased predecessor.
CONCLUSION
The long history of saints in the Catholic Church might appear to be a struggle between central authority and local belief. Yet in many ways, this is more appearance than reality. Prior to the sixteenth century, attempts to regulate local veneration were either non-existent or only very unevenly applied. Then, even after a number of institutional changes altered significantly the bodies associated with saintmaking in the sixteenth century, local veneration continued along older models.
The real changes came in the early seventeenth century, when repression of local cults was unified with increasing standardization of the techniques whereby parochial veneration turned into universal canonization. Such an act of canonization required enthusiastic support both at home and in the form of eminent patrons. These patrons translated the local enthusiasm into a dossier of evidence that brought the saint’s case to Rome, where a process of negotiation began. This meant the potential holy individual was subject to an increasingly rigorous evaluation. The Church employed a variety of methods to ascertain the truth of an individual’s sanctity, including verification of witness probity, the use of multiple witnesses for an event, and the deployment of new narrative techniques designed to validate miracles. Many of these techniques mirrored the empirical methods employed by artisanal practitioners in a number of fields. The Church’s use of such techniques very likely contributed to the legitimation and eventual appropriation of such empirical methods by those who studied the natural world.135
In addition to these techniques, the Church also came to rely heavily on experts in their attempt to demonstrate the reality of miracles. Lawyers, craftsmen, and a variety of medical practitioners began to make regular appearances at the meetings of the Tribunal of the Rota and the Congregation of Rites. Although medieval churchmen had used experts during canonization, the early modern Church relied extensively on expert testimony to help it verify the most important miracles. Through reliance on such testimony, canonization became less a matter of popular acclaim and more an exercise in expertise.
The remaining chapters of this book focus on one set of experts—medical professionals—and their attempts to turn popular ideas about bodily signs of holiness into evidence that demonstrated the reality of a saint’s miracles. The next chapter charts the rise to prominence of the expert medical witness and the increasingly important role anatomy played in this evolution.
CHAPTER 2
A New Criterion for Sanctity
On March 12, 1622, Pope Gregory XV (1621–1623) forcefully reasserted the validity of the cult of the saints when he simultaneously canonized five individuals: Isidore the Laborer (d. 1130), Francis Xavier (d. 1552), Ignatius Loyola (d. 1556), Teresa of Avila (d. 1582), and Filippo Neri (d. 1595). With the exception of Isidore, each of these saints lived after the Reformation and had been active in encouraging new piety and devotion to the Church. Although several canonizations had taken place following the long break after the Reformation, such a large “group canonization” of early modern saints clearly proclaimed the renewed strength of the faith and the confidence of Church leaders in their ability to discern saints.1
In addition to reasserting the validity of the cult of the saints, this group canonization also introduced a new standard that would henceforth be used in vetting the potentially holy: the corpses of prospective saints would undergo medical examination. Each of the saints canonized in 1622 and most of those considered for canonization during the remainder of the seventeenth century were subjected to posthumous medical evaluations, frequently including full autopsies.2 This new standard formed part of the process of centralizing canonization, which was described in the last chapter. The medical expert became an agent of papal authority who turned local, particular ideas about holiness into universal, Catholic ones.
Nevertheless, the advent of the medical witness as the verifier of bodily sanctity was not simply a top-down imposition from Rome; rather, it represented the eventual adoption by canonization officials of new ways of making knowledge about the natural world. As this chapter argues, the initial push to introduce medical postmortems into canonization proceedings came from the promoters of a saint’s cult. The body and the remains of the saint were central to the elaboration of his or her cult locally.3 In the wake of the Reformation, however, undue veneration of noncanonized individuals could be considered suspect.4 In an effort to justify such enthusiasm for the remains of local holy people, promoters of sanctity turned to the burgeoning field of anatomy.
The study of anatomy itself was undergoing profound changes during this period. In particular, the number of printed anatomical case studies exploded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and represented part of a transition in the methods that were acceptable for making knowledge about the natural world.5 Indeed, Gianna Pomata has argued that a new epistemic genre, the Observationes, arose in medicine at this point as a means to present firsthand observations as a guide for practice in order to gain knowledge about the body. This emphasis on experience and practical training, in turn, contributed to the rising prestige of anatomy.6 By the end of this period, many believed physician-anatomists were uniquely able to read recondite signs found in the human cadaver and thereby say something about the deceased’s life and death and possibly his or her interaction with the divine.7 The postmortem investigation could provide a window into an individual’s most private moments and therefore was of great use to canonization officials who wanted to know as much as they could about a prospective saint.
Canonization officials were, however, slow to recognize the utility of anatomical studies for verifying sanctity. The first saint canonized after Trent, Diego of Alcalá, was widely reported to have a miraculously incorrupt corpse, yet medical testimony never confirmed it. When promoters of the canonizations of Carlo Borromeo and Ignatius Loyola attempted to use anatomical details as part of the demonstration of these candidates’ holiness, Roman authorities failed to recognize the validity of the evidence submitted. Yet over the course of succeeding decades, Roman officials—especially under the guidance of the important deacon of the Rota, Francisco Peña (1540–1612)—began to recognize and then require postmortem examination of prospective saints. Through its eventual adoption of the empirical methods that had been deployed to make knowledge in the field of anatomy, the Church began to change how it made saints. The medical practitioner transformed wondrous signs found in the human body into a miracle for the whole faith. By cooperating in this way, medical and religious understanding of the body were removed from their local context and made into universal knowledge. From tentative beginnings, anatomy became a recognized mode of demonstrating extraordinary human holiness that was central to the Church’s reestablishment of canonization after the Reformation.
SAINT DIEGO’S WONDER-WORKING CORPSE
In 1588 Pope Sixtus V proclaimed Diego of Alcalá a saint, making him the first person canonized in sixty-five years. Diego had, in fact, long been considered a holy man by his local community, and following his death in 1463 a number of miracles were attributed to him. However, in the wake of the Reformation, many of his wondrous acts were contested.8 In the subsequent debate, an unusually large number of physicians testified either for or against Diego. The prominence of medicine in this first canonization after Trent set the stage for the increased use of experts in canonization and what can be thought of as the “medicalization”