Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe by Bradford A. Bouley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe by Bradford A. Bouley Fernando Vidal Bradford A. Bouley. Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. viii + 214 pp. Ill. (978–0–8122–4957–6). Pious Postmortems provides what its author describes as “a comprehensive study of the role played by anatomical evidence in the creation of saints” (p. 2). Bouley [End Page 698] notes that research into the role of medical professionals in canonization has paid relatively little attention to the autopsy of prospective saints. The abnormal features of these persons’ corpses, among which Bouley emphasizes incorruption, helped bolster claims for sanctity. By documenting how “anatomy defended Catholicism,” Pious Postmortems “provides a distinctive new perspective on the interaction between the Church and medicine in the early modern period” and should “alter how we understand the ways in which the medical profession came to be defined” (pp. 3, 4). In making such claims, Bouley overstates his originality. This was unnecessary, for Pious Postmortems is an interesting and solidly documented addition to a rich body of historical research and interpretation, which Bouley himself obviously knows well. Scholarship has not ignored the postmortems (when performed) of the most important Counter-Reformation prospective saints, but Bouley demonstrates that they were more common than may have seemed. That is in itself a valuable contribution, but it could have been noted that the practice of autopsy has been relatively little studied because the overwhelming majority of medical testimonies concerned unusual recovery from physical or mental illness. Canonization decrees, which had to mention selected recognized miracles, definitely favored healings. The thirty-five postmortems (four on the same two persons) that Bouley finds in over 250 years are meager in contrast to the hundreds of therapeutic miracles recorded in the same period.1 Pious Postmortems is organized in five chapters. Chapter 1, “Expertise and Early Modern Sanctity,” uses well-chosen examples to chart the early-modern saint-making procedure and its transformation in the seventeenth century. Chapter 2, “A New Criterion for Sanctity,” examines the rise of medical expertise as a means to discern sanctity. Chapter 3, “Negotiating Incorruption,” perceptively reconstructs the political, institutional, epistemic, and scientific complexities involved in ascertaining incorruption—whose overall importance is, nonetheless, again exaggerated. Chapter 4, “Medicine and Authority,” deals with the role of asceticism and the marks it leaves on the body as evidence of holiness, and introduces gender into the narrative. Chapter 5, “Engendering Sanctity,” argues that, insofar as they reasserted the feminine and sexual nature of women’s bodies, postmortems reestablished gender boundaries and hierarchies. Although Bouley reconstructs this in novel and fascinating detail, he does not really demonstrate that postmortems “diminished the authority holy women had exercised in life” (p. 131). The short conclusion reiterates the book’s main claims. A final epilogue gives room to Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, and his authoritative De servorum Dei beatificationis et beatorum canonizatione [End Page 699] (1734–38). Lambertini explained that the imagination could have pathogenic and healing effects. That is why, according to Bouley, incorruption was “the one type of bodily miracle” Lambertini “did not question, and that he thought could still benefit from postmortem confirmation” (p. 133). In view of the massive attention Lambertini devoted to healings and their examination, this is a surprising claim. Lambertini admitted the possibility of many potentially miraculous bodily cures, excluding from the range of possible therapeutic miracles only the conditions, which we might call psychiatric or psychosomatic, related to the powers of the imagination.2 A more nuanced explanation of the mechanism of miracles might have helped give a more precise view of Lambertini’s position. Bouley writes, for example, “The medical practitioner transformed wondrous signs found in the human body into a miracle for the whole faith” (p. 41); the incorruption of Teresa of Avila’s body was one “of the miracles attributed to her” (p. 57); physicians “increasingly defined standards for bodily holiness” (p. 69). For sure, doctors acting as expert witnesses would sometimes say that a cure was (or was not) a miracle. Officially, however, their task was limited to ascertaining if...