ANDREW W. KEITT. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. (The Medieval and Early Modern Iberian World.) Boston: Brill. 2005. Pp. viii, 229. $142

Abstract

In Madrid during the 1630s and 1640s, the Inquisition prosecuted a number of men and women for pretending to be holy persons. Those who were prosecuted typically claimed to receive divine visions and to live ascetically. They led informal prayer groups and religious processions, and served as spiritual advisers to people around them. In this engaging and elegantly written book, Andrew W. Keitt examines the uncomfortable social, theological, and legal tensions that the Inquisition's prosecutions stirred up, tensions that were general to early modern Europe. Behind the Inquisition's determination to prosecute feigned sanctity lay the events of the Protestant Reformation and the reforms instituted at the Council of Trent. Trent reaffirmed the importance of outward piety and ritual, of saints, and of the miraculous against Protestant skepticism. Because sacred ritual and the supernatural were deemed so essential to Catholic identity, the church became preoccupied with defining and regulating them. Holiness increasingly required official certification. In deciding who was a legitimate holy person and who was not, inquisitors were forced to address questions, often with deep roots in the Middle Ages, that took on particular urgency in the period of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. What, for example, was the relationship between outer manifestations of sanctity and inner piety? How could one tell if a vision was from God or from the devil, or if it was a hallucination caused by illness?