and canonical law as well as in theology from the University of Valencia. King Philip II of Spain introduced Peña to the papal court during the reign of Pope Pius IV (1566–1572). Despite this introduction, which might have prompted feelings of loyalty to the Spanish monarch, Peña immediately embarked on a number of projects that served to expand papal power and jurisdiction. These ventures included the censoring of works that criticized papal power, a revision of the standard manual on inquisition procedure, and the publishing of a number of hagiographies.22 Although these tasks might seem disparate, the proclamation of saints and the actions of the Roman Inquisition both increasingly came under papal purview and eventually were considered expressions of papal authority during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.23
According to Peña’s personal testimony, the task to which he most seriously applied himself was the canonization of the saints. As he asserted in his vita of Carlo Borromeo (canonized 1610), canonization was the “most important and most arduous thing that the Holy See controls.”24 In stating this, as first auditor and then deacon of the Tribunal of the Rota from 1588 until his death in 1612, Peña perhaps indulged in slight self-aggrandizement; this assignment of preeminence made him a central figure in the Curia since the Rota was the highest court in the Church and was charged with weighing the evidence in canonization trials to ensure that it was sufficient and sufficiently accurate before a process went forward. Peña thus had a major role in determining who was a saint during the very years in which sainthood was first being articulated after the long hiatus of the sixteenth century. In particular, Peña was deeply involved in the canonization proceedings of Hyancinth of Poland, Raymond of Penafort, Francesca Romana, Carlo Borromeo, Filippo Neri, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth of Portugal, and Andrea Corsini.25 Additionally, as he oversaw the Rota during the early proceedings for Isidore the Laborer, Francis Xavier, and Ignatius of Loyola, Peña likely exercised a strong influence over these canonizations. During these proceedings, which stretched over thirty-five years, from 1594 (Hyancinth) to 1629 (Andrea Corsini), the medical examination of the corpses of prospective saints became regular. Peña was, at least in part, responsible for this new emphasis on the body as is documented in many of his writings.
Revealingly, an early sign of the importance that Peña attached to the holy body emerges from the vita he wrote for Diego of Alcalá. Like other hagiographers, Peña commented on the failure of Diego’s cadaver to rot and on its sweet smell despite having spent nearly a century in the ground. However, unlike hagiographers before him, Peña used a full eight pages to provide details about the corpse and its appearance.26 In this section of this vita, he suggested various methods to establish an incorrupt corpse, including a detailed description of its level of preservation, the evaluation of firsthand witness reports, and the listing of similar, medieval cases in which this miracle was approved.27 In short, Peña deployed a mix of empirical evidence and historical precedent to document how Diego’s body had miraculously resisted rot. Clearly, Peña was preoccupied with the ways in which the miracle of an incorrupt body, in particular, could be established.
Peña’s emphasis on the importance of the incorrupt body as a sign of sanctity is a repeated theme in his printed works. In his vita of Saint Raymond Penafort, for example, Peña argues that “the sweet odors that issue from the tombs of the dead are miraculous” and furthermore are “the sign that within them resides the Author of life [God].”28 In his vita for Francesca Romana, Peña states that there is only space to discuss her most important miracles, “among which was the sweet odor that issued from her body, with which Divine Mercy well demonstrates the holiness of his servant.”29 Additionally, he concludes, “it was a wondrous thing that her body had not spoiled or rotted, but remained soft, flexible, and tractable, as if it were alive.”30 Although the incorrupt body was clearly an important miracle for Peña, in none of his printed saintly vita does he explicitly state that expert witnesses—e.g., physicians—should be used to confirm such miraculous phenomena. Only in an inquisition manual did Peña advise judges to use experts from other fields, including medical practitioners, to help in vetting the potentially holy.31 Nevertheless, in his official and private canonization documents, Peña routinely began to call upon medical professionals to confirm the miraculous incorruption of saints’ bodies.
As deacon of the Rota, Peña oversaw the composition of the letters that opened the apostolic phase of a canonization.32 These letters specified how the proceedings should be conducted, including what sort of questions should be asked and which miracles and virtues were to be verified. Beginning early in the seventeenth century, in several cases directed by Francisco Peña, these letters included a clause ordering that the tomb of the purportedly holy individual be surveyed and the body unearthed. This clause apparently meant that medical professionals should conduct a postmortem survey of the corpse, since in these cases a medical investigation immediately followed the visitation of the body.33 Later letters explicitly required medical intervention. Those opening the apostolic phase of canonization for Peter Alcantara in 1618, for example, specified that his body must be examined by “one or two physicians and one surgeon or other experts with the skills for inspecting the body, the bones, and remains of the servant of God, Peter of Alcantara.”34 In this way, by the early seventeenth century, postmortem examination of a holy body became part of the Rome-directed apostolic process of canonization. This new reliance on expertise represented an extension of centralized papal authority into local communities and a new requirement for canonization. Peña, who already addressed the problem of demonstrating the incorruption of a corpse, was a major figure behind the creation of the new standard. With this innovation, however, he both exploited an old alliance between medicine and religion and benefitted from the newly recognized power of anatomy to make sense of the human body.
THE CHURCH AND MEDICINE
The Church’s alliance with medicine was long standing, and as early as the thirteenth century medical professionals testified to healing miracles in canonization proceedings.35 Medical professionals were asked to take part in these proceedings because they could authenticate the testimonies of “simple people” that might have otherwise been dubious. Local physicians in particular were important as they could rule out possible natural explanations for a healing.36 Joseph Ziegler, however, has observed that such testimony was not a requirement in canonization proceedings and was based on local availability of medical practitioners.37 Medical testimony about healing miracles in late medieval canonization proceedings was therefore ad hoc and represented a nice addition to other witness testimony rather than a replacement of it.
Historians of early modern Europe, including Fernando Vidal and David Gentilcore, note that after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) verification of healing miracles in canonization proceedings changed in two significant ways. First, testimonies became more technical, with medical witnesses relying both on experience and philosophical training to rule out natural explanations for a miraculous cure. Second, medical verification of a healing miracle became regular in this period and, eventually, a specific requirement.38
Despite this recent detailed research on the role of medical professionals in confirming healing miracles, little has been written about their role in the posthumous examination of the corpses of deceased holy men and women. Although Katharine Park has studied examinations of holy bodies in the medieval period, those works that have touched on the early modern period tend to focus on the most famous, printed cases of autopsies, such as those of Filippo Neri, Carlo Borromeo, and Ignatius Loyola.39 The postmortems on prospective saints, however, form an important part of the interaction between Catholicism and medicine in the early modern period both because they were so widespread—nearly every canonized saint and many other holy individuals were subjected to a posthumous examination—and because they demonstrate that the Church valued new medical practices and ways of making knowledge.
Confirming a healing miracle as opposed to judging a body to be miraculously irregular required a different set of skills and implied a different relationship between medicine and religion. In order to confirm a healing miracle, a medical professional was forced to admit that he
