Patrons therefore acted as brokers for a saint’s cult in a number of ways. First, they translated the veneration that was occurring locally into a dossier, vouched for by their good name, that might be acceptable to Rome. Then, throughout the process the patron kept the canonization moving forward through a combination of financial incentives and political displays. In many ways, the patron helped, in the words of Simon Ditchfield, to “universalize the particular.”92 That is, the patron tried to ensure that local patterns of belief became part of the overall tapestry of Catholic faith. Canonization officials in Rome, though, had their own apparatus whereby they evaluated evidence that came from the parishes and sought to determine whether or not it was in accordance with the belief system of the universal Church.
VERIFYING SANCTITY
The Church’s increasingly rigorous attempt to demonstrate beyond all doubt that an individual should be recognized as a saint really began with the opening of the apostolic process of canonization.93 Although certainly the ordinary phase of the process sought to establish that a person lived a holy life and worked miracles, especially in the seventeenth century, the apostolic phase represented a much more rigorous and centrally directed procedure. The pope opened the apostolic phase by issuing remissorial and compulsorial letters, which designated three local officials to oversee the canonization process in each locale and that specified which questions should be asked.94 The letters required that a notary be present for all testimony to provide the stamp of law to the proceedings.95
The questions asked during the apostolic phase were carefully designed to establish whether certain criteria for holiness were met as well as to evaluate witness probity. The questions asked in the 1650 apostolic process in Valencia for Francisco de Borja are typical.96 At the outset, witnesses for Borgia were first warned that it is a grave sin to commit perjury.97 Following this initial admonition, the first round of questions sought to affirm the identity of the witness. Investigators asked witnesses for their first and last name, who their parents were, where they were from, how wealthy they were, and how they made their money.98 Next the officials sought to assess the witness’s probity: each was asked about his or her spiritual state, when and where they last confessed, if they received communion, and if they had ever been excommunicated. They also asked witnesses whether they had ever been convicted of a crime.99 Finally, the judges asked if the witness’s testimony had been coached in any way.100
Following the inquiry into the character of the witness, the judges then turned to questions about the saint. Frequently, these questions were open-ended. In the case of Borja, the judges asked a series of questions about his life that might lead to a range of answers, including whether the witness knew if Borja had a reputation for being a saint, what miracles he might have worked, and how the witness knew that what had occurred was actually a miracle.101 Again, this set of questions appears to have been standard and was routinely asked in apostolic phases of canonization.102 The motives behind such questioning were threefold: to ascertain whether the witness in fact knew the prospective saint, judged him to be holy, and understood what criteria were required to establish that an individual was a saint. Such distinctions were crucial since a witness’s reliability was predicated on his ability to effectively understand what was happening when a miracle occurred.103
Following these initial questions, the Rota judges then sought specific details about the saint. The letters regularly supplied lists of miracles and virtues that witnesses could potentially confirm. Rota judges drew this list from testimony given in the ordinary process or the in genere phase of the apostolic process. Officials did not require witnesses to speak about each point on a list, but to select the items which they knew something about. In the case of Maria Magdalene de’ Pazzi, this list for the Florentine phase of her apostolic process consisted of twenty items. The first group posited some basic facts about de’ Pazzi—for example, that she was born legitimately, the identity of her parents, the date of her baptism, and how she was educated.104 The next sections consisted of statements about her virtues. Testators were asked to affirm, for example, that “she had the greatest charity for her neighbor[s], longing for their salvation, and she cared for weak nuns, both looking after some novices, and instructing other nuns.”105 Finally, the investigators turned to miracles, including specific ones to be certified. For de’ Pazzi, they asked, for example, if “a fluid, similar to oil, emanated from her corpse and if a sweet odor came forth from her tomb.”106 Other topics, such as whether the deponent had witnessed many people attending the tomb of de’ Pazzi, also appeared in the list.107
The questions and then the list of virtues and miracles were part of the apparatus whereby canonization officials attempted to demonstrate that the prospective saint merited canonization. The idea here is that proof is cumulative in nature and that the weight of many reliable witnesses to an event provided the most effective demonstration of its reality.108 Thus, when the Rota compiled the apostolic process, for each miracle to be considered, a short summary would be created where each witness’s account of what happened is produced in extract form.109 The weight of the testimony for each miracle was thereby clearly laid out for readers to see.
In addition to soliciting testimony from witnesses who knew about the miracles of the prospective saint, the judges in an apostolic process sought testimony from experts in a wide variety of disciplines. In one case, an inquisitor who was investigating the veracity of a saint’s relics called upon a woodworker as an expert. He asked the woodworker to use his knowledge to determine how much of the original relics survived in a wooden casing for a long dead saint. The inquisitor was prepared to quash the veneration if there was not enough of the saint left for devotion still to be shown toward the reliquary.110 In another case, when the survival of a woman through a difficult childbirth was declared a miracle, midwives from the city of Rome were asked to evaluate whether it did in fact exceed the realm of the natural.111
In judging these cases, both the woodworker and the midwives relied on their own experience and on specific observations to respond to the canonization judges’ questions. That is, the Church employed artisanal experts using empirical techniques to create knowledge about the holy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This matches what Pamela Long and Pamela Smith, among others, have uncovered, namely, that artisanal techniques of hands-on manipulation and direct observation began to enjoy status as viable methods of making knowledge during this period.112
In addition to using artisans as expert witnesses, Church officials employed techniques characteristic of various trades, those accustomed to using experience as a guide to practice, when it came to assessing the holy body. When canonization judges and medical professionals unearthed the body of Thomas of Villanova in 1611 (can. 1658), they recorded in thorough, firsthand detail their experience at the tomb. They visited his sepulcher on October 13 at the third hour of night.113 The notary recounted in minute detail the appearance of the church and of Thomas’s tomb, noting the exact dimensions of the room in which it sat as well as the number of votive tablets, candles, and other instruments of worship that believers had placed on the sepulcher.114 When it came time to reveal Thomas’s corpse, the notary stated that his actual tomb was “four and a half palms in length, two in width, and another two in depth covered