Abstract
Reviewed by: Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, University of Bari, Italy
‘From 1550 until about 1700, corpses of nearly every pope, prospective saint, and many other esteemed individuals underwent postmortem examinations, sometimes including a full autopsy, as part of the search for the holy’ (2). Bradford A. Bouley starts from this observation to draw a vivid fresco of the role played by anatomical evidence in the creation of new saints in the early modern age. His points of reference are, obviously, the important studies of the period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries published in recent decades by scholars such as Katharine Park, Nancy Siraisi, Gianna Pomata and Elisa Andretta. He seems to be in a constant dialogue with them, generating research that is essentially based on the processes of canonization conducted by the Congregation of Rites and which is housed in the Vatican Secret Archive. The basic idea at the heart of the book is that the relationship between science and religion, in the case of Catholicism, was very complex in the early modern age, therefore irreducible to what the previous historiography saw as a form of contraposition. On the contrary, as the studies of Maria Pia Donato, for example, have recently pointed out, in many cases the Catholic Church made a real alliance with medicine. The body, rather than being desacralized, continued to constitute an important element in the identity of the subject. And this is why anatomy was authorized to provide material evidence that the Church believed made it possible for it to scientifically form its own judgements. It was a beneficial relationship for both, because anatomy, then, drew visibility and prestige precisely due to this familiarity with ecclesiastical institutions and the sacred.
As is known, in ascertaining the miraculousness of an event, recourse to the expert testimony of medical practitioners can be found, albeit in a non-continuous way, since the late Middle Ages. Subsequently, the interest demonstrated by physicians in heteroclite anatomies and unusual cases gave birth to a real genre, whose rhetoric of truth was expressed in the abundance of details. And it is in this context that medical experts paused to write about the peculiar anatomy of the bodies of the saints, indirectly contributing to the creation of a collective imagination in which the holy body had to present distinctive and unequivocal signs.
This does not mean that the word of physicians immediately had great weight in the processes of canonization. In 1588, for example, Pope Sixtus V declared Diego of Alcalà a saint, making him the first person to be canonized in 65 years. This was the first process with positive results after the Council of Trent and it set the stage for experts and for what can be considered the ‘medicalization’ of the holy body. The importance of the incorruption of the remains of Diego often occurs in the literary tradition; however, its absence in the medical accounts would suggest that it was not yet fully assessed during the process. Similarly, the bodies of Ignatius of Loyola and Carlo Borromeo were examined for reasons related to the desire to embalm them, not to provide clues or evidence useful for processual purposes. In particular, in the case of Ignatius, Realdo Colombo, who carried out the autopsy, hastened to say that the anomalies found could be explained in purely natural terms. Nevertheless, many Jesuits tended to interpret them, if only for rhetorical purposes, as signs of moral excellence. It should be noted, however, that neither in the case of Ignatius nor in that of Carlo did such evidence have procedural consequences.
The incorruption of the body had almost always been recognized by the Church as an indicium sanctitatis. However, before the seventeenth century, an appeal to the judgement of physicians was not expressly contemplated. It became increasingly important after the Reformation, in part as a defence against the criticism of Protestants. Incorruption was, as the Jesuit Théophile Raynaud emphasized, a promise of resurrection. For this reason, he took the time to describe the body of Martin Luther, which decomposed despite the efforts to embalm it. As it was, in the assessment of the incorruption, and generally in the affirmation of medical expertise in the processes of canonization, Bouley identifies a watershed in the case of Saint Theresa of Avila. During the process, numerous medical professionals were asked to make judgements about the state of her body. These examinations, which included at least a partial autopsy, provided evidence of its incorruption, which was formally considered miraculous. In the aftermath of this case – and the one, shortly thereafter, carried out by Filippo Neri – the anatomical investigations ordered by Rome became the most common method to verify bodily sanctity, so much so that in the following years, physicians and natural philosophers had to work to find standards to express theoretically unanimous opinions.
However, it was mainly men who underwent postmortem examinations. Bouley, attentive to gender perspectives, wonders why the autopsy practice, which in the Middle Ages had also involved women, only occasionally concerned them later. The answer is that these medical examinations functioned as a means to relegate women to a second tier of sanctity. Far fewer women than men were inspected for anatomical signs of holiness. Even when a medical examination might affirm that a woman’s body was miraculously incorrupt, it also highlighted her feminine, and therefore sexual, nature. This feature alone marked women as being less perfect than the sexless men who attained the ranks of sainthood in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (127)