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 original, locally constructed beginnings. In some sense, the introduction of the promotor fidei could be seen as the final act of centralization of canonization under the papacy.
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
