This book explores these posthumous examinations of saintly cadavers across five chapters. As the central issue behind these medical examinations was the Church’s concern over its ability to correctly judge saintliness, Chapter 1 begins by discussing broadly the changes to canonization in the period after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Saints have been a focus of a great deal of scholarship in recent years, and extensive studies by André Vauchez, Michael Goodich, Donald Weinstein, and Rudolph Bell, among others, have analyzed saints statistically in an attempt to gain a general overview of the qualities that defined holiness.37 However, such monographs tend to either focus on the Middle Ages or downplay the differences between the early modern and medieval periods. This is problematic, because the medical examination of saints’ bodies was only one of several major changes affecting the making of saints in the early modern period. Chapter 1, therefore, looks at a number of specific cases to examine what had changed in the practice of canonization.
Chapter 2 then looks specifically at the advent of anatomical expertise as a means to discern sanctity. It follows the growing trend whereby holy bodies became no longer matters decided by popular acclaim, but medical subjects understood by experts. The impetus to create a medical context for the holy came, however, not from the Church authorities, but from the medical practitioners, who had become interested in unusual case studies. That is, reports on unusual anatomies of holy individuals began to appear in the epistemic genre of observationes, discussed by Pomata.38 Shortly after medical practitioners began writing about unusual saintly anatomy, promoters of various prospective saints’ canonization attempted to use these medical case studies to defend claims of bodily sanctity. Such interest in anatomy by ecclesiastical officials grew out of existing practices of autopsy both within medical and in religious settings. Officials in Rome first ignored these attempts by local officials. However, by the early seventeenth century such case studies began to feature prominently in canonization proceedings. This chapter charts the eventual acceptance of new types of medical evidence by canonization officials.
Chapter 3 looks at one specific type of bodily wondrousness: miraculous incorruption after death. Incorruption was the most common sign of holiness, and medical professionals examined nearly every saint canonized during this period to confirm his or her failure to rot. Decomposition, however, was still a relative, subjectively viewed quality. Understanding whether a body was incorrupt relied on a number of ambiguous medical and theological signs.39 Therefore, when medical practitioners testified about the bodies of incorrupt saints, they were also engaging in a negotiation between members of their community, their profession, and the Church hierarchy over the meaning of the corpse in question. Holiness, like other knowledge created in early modern Europe, was a profoundly local and contextual phenomenon.40
The fourth chapter explores the role of asceticism as evidence of saintliness. Like incorruption, the perception of bodily asceticism was influenced by a number of cultural factors, including, in particular, social rank and gender. Medical professionals opened the bodies of far more men than women to confirm wondrous feats of asceticism during life. In this way, medicine and anatomy bolstered preexisting notions of sanctity, which connected asceticism to male ecclesiastical authority. Medical evaluation of women, on the other hand, tended to provide an outlet for preexisting skepticism over female sanctity.
The final chapter turns to a more thorough analysis of the ways that gender was fundamental, both to early modern categories of sainthood and the establishment of medical expertise. Despite the rise to prominence of several early modern female saints—such as Teresa of Avila, Rose of Lima, and Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi—early modern sanctity based itself on the rearticulation of clear gender hierarchies. Ecclesiastical authority defined and articulated itself after the Reformation as being in opposition to feminine weakness.41 Holy women who had a public role, therefore, had to act masculinely in life to the point of even becoming physiologically like men. Such a stance was in itself threatening to hierarchies, and so after death the posthumous medical examination reasserted the feminine and sexual nature of women’s bodies, thereby subordinating them to ecclesiastical authority. Male bodies, in contrast, were completely stripped of their sexuality and made both asexual and hypermasculine after death. In assigning gender in this way, though, the medical practitioners involved in these cases also strongly reasserted their own masculinity. Indeed, this chapter argues that the act of performing a postmortem, especially an autopsy, on a prospective saint of either sex established gender roles for all involved—physicians, surgeons, bishops, and the bodies under the knife—and therefore reinforced the correct ordering of Catholic society. The practice of autopsy was a gendered and gendering activity.
In sum, the fact that canonization officials ordered medical examinations of almost every canonized saint and many more holy people who did not achieve canonization deeply affects how we understand a number of issues related to religion and medicine in the early modern period. It should encourage further reevaluation of the Church’s interaction with science, its reaction to the Protestant Reformation, the development of the early modern medical profession, and the interrelated way in which gender, sanctity, and nature were understood.
SOURCES AND METHODS
The overwhelming majority of the sources used for this book come from the processes of canonization conducted by the Congregation of Rites and housed in the Vatican Secret Archives. These are the official records of the canonization trials that were used by the Rota Tribunal, the Congregation of Rites, and the pope in deciding whether to confer sainthood. They are, therefore, ideal pieces of evidence for understanding what qualities the Church sought among those whom it canonized. In the course of this research, I examined records for all the saints canonized from 1588 until 1700, with the expectation that these successful cases would most clearly indicate what was required for canonization. In addition to successful cases, I also reviewed a number of failed canonization attempts, which fizzled either before any rank was achieved or after the blessed status was conferred. In choosing which, among many, failed cases to review, I based my decision on whether bodily holiness formed part of the saint’s cult. To supplement the rites processes, I have also examimed printed hagiography (vitae), letters, pamphlets, papal bulls, and inquisition trial dossiers. The Inquisition trial dossiers on which I focused were the cases of false or affected sanctity in the archives of the Roman Inquisition, which are now housed in the Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede. As only a few volumes, representing several dozen cases, survive, I examined all the records from the seventeenth century that exist in this archive.
These sorts of documents have many virtues but are not without pitfalls. As Dyan Elliott has observed, a canonization process is a trial that unfolds very much the same way a case before the Inquisition would.42 Canonization officials, usually including a notary and several religious authorities such as a bishop and a few members of his entourage, interviewed witnesses at a central location. The notary would record the questions asked in Latin, but the witnesses’ words were supposed to be recorded verbatim in the vernacular. Thus, as in the case of Inquisition trials, canonization proceedings might seem to allow a rare opportunity to hear a range of ordinary, “non-elite” people speak in their own voices.43
In contrast to this view, several scholars have argued that such sources should be seen as at best a mix of official and local voices composed through multiple authorship, rather than an unmediated report of what a witness thought. Carlo Ginzburg has suggested that the distance between an educated churchman’s view of a supernatural phenomenon and that of an uneducated peasant was so great that in recording the latter’s words, the former almost certainly distorted somewhat his intended testimony.44 Similarly, in both Inquisition and canonization proceedings, the interviewers at times asked leading questions. Indeed, for all early modern canonizations the interviewers