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 in a purple veil propped up by gold pedestals and studded with gilded bolts [but] not properly closed or locked.” He further gave the name of the woodworker, Simon, who opened the coffin.115 Upon opening, the notary recorded what the medical team said and wrote down every bone that they found.116 This level of detail appears to have been normal in canonization proceedings and also occurs, for example, in the visitation of Lorenzo Giustiniani’s tomb in Venice.117
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
