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” of the holy body.
One of the most important and contested miracles counting for Diego’s canonization was his postmortem healing in 1562 of Don Carlos, the seventeen-year-old son of King Philip II of Spain. Given the prominence of Don Carlos’s family, this healing miracle gained for Diego almost overnight broad support for his canonization and an enthusiastic patron in the person of Philip himself. The tale of the miracle begins with Don Carlos stumbling down several stairs while chasing a “comely wench.” He then smashed his head against the closed door at the bottom of the staircase with enough force to open a large gash. Although not initially considered life threatening, the wound became badly infected. At the prompting of King Philip II, a team of ten of the most eminent medical practitioners in all of Europe—including Andreas Vesalius—was called upon to attend the prince. Despite their efforts, these medical practitioners feared their young patient would not survive.9
That Don Carlos’s wound did heal was attributed to Diego’s intercession. The holy man’s long-dead body was exhumed and brought to the ailing prince’s bedside. According to numerous witnesses, the prince recovered only after his body made contact with Diego’s corpse. Witnesses also noted that the corpse was strangely sweet-smelling and lifelike, despite having spent nearly one hundred years in the ground.10 On the strength of this miracle and the wave of support that it engendered, Diego was canonized. This act was at least as much a political as a religious move. Pope Sixtus V used this canonization both to reward King Philip for his efforts in defending Catholicism and to encourage him in his planned invasion of England, which took place later that same year.11 Thus, the papacy and the king of Spain desired this canonization.
Even with papal and royal support for Diego, medical opinion surrounding this healing of Don Carlos had been far from unanimous. Don Carlos’s personal physician, Diego Olivares, declared that he did not believe the healing to be unusual in any way: “In my opinion it [the healing] was not [miraculous] because the prince was cured with natural and ordinary remedies, with which one usually cures others with the same injury or worse.”12 Olivares conceded that Don Carlos had likely been helped by God or his servants, but he cautioned that a miraculous healing must “exceed all natural forces” and this one had not done that.13
Another physician, Christobal de Vega, contradicted Olivares and specifically attributed Don Carlos’s healing to the intercession of Diego’s miraculous body. Indeed, de Vega argued that those medical practitioners who did not agree with this account of the cure were acting out of pride and they dissimulated in order to give the impression that the healing was caused “more by their own efforts than by the miracle.”14 De Vega’s opinion carried the day, presumably because his discrediting of the other medical practitioners was entirely plausible—these men undoubtedly wanted to salvage their prestigious careers after Don Carlos’s near death at their hands.
Almost completely unmentioned in these medical narratives was the miraculous instrument of the cure: the body of San Diego.15 However, according to several nonmedical witnesses, Diego’s century-old corpse had rotted so little that it appeared to be almost alive. As one witness noted with obvious astonishment, the corpse still “had its entire nose,” which was normally one of the first parts of a body to decay.16
Despite the failure of the medical team to describe Diego’s corpse, his hagiographers eagerly recounted its degree of preservation. Pietro Galesini, for example, who produced an official vita for the saint during his canonization, stressed the miraculous state of Diego’s corpse during Don Carlos’s healing.17 Similarly, another biographer, Francesco Bracciolini, recounted in detail the wondrous preservation of Diego’s body upon exhumation.18
The prominence of Diego’s incorrupt corpse in hagiography but its absence from the medical accounts suggests that postmortem analysis of holy bodies was not yet valued as part of canonization proceedings. Despite this medical disinterest, lay believers eagerly sought signs of the holy in the cadavers of the deceased and publicized their own interpretations of what they found. For them, Diego’s incorrupt body was an obvious demonstration of his sanctity.19 In the context of the Counter-Reformation, such enthusiasm was both useful and problematic: the Church wanted passionate believers, but sought to avoid accusations that miracles were merely the inventions of overly enthusiastic disciples. How, then, were Church reformers to make such classical signs of holiness rigorous and also controllable?
At this juncture, the eminent Spanish canon lawyer Francisco Peña, spurred by the canonization of San Diego, in which he took part, realized the usefulness of medicine in both justifying and controlling the interpretation of bodily evidence of the holy. In his role as a member of the Tribunal of the Rota, the highest ecclesiastical court, which judged evidence in canonization proceedings, Peña helped make the medically verified holy body a key miracle for any potential saint.20 In so doing, Peña removed a key aspect of local piety from the bishops’ authority and thereby contributed to the overall strength of the papacy in the early modern period.21
Francisco Peña was well suited and ideologically motivated to make a significant change to the understanding of sanctity in the early modern Catholic world. Born in Villaroya de los Pinares, near Saragossa,
