Thinking with the saint: the miracle of Saint Januarius of Naples and science in early modern Europe.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the way in which early modem science questioned and indirectly influenced (while being in its turn influenced by) the conceptualization of the liquefaction of the blood of Saint Januarius, a phenomenon that has been taking place at regular intervals in Naples since the late Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, a debate arose that divided Europe between supporters of a theory of divine intervention and believers in the occult properties of the blood. These two theoretical options reflected two different perspectives on the relationship between the natural and the supernatural. While in the seventeenth century, the emphasis was placed on the predictable periodicity of the miraculous event of liquefaction as a manifestation of God in his role as a divine regulator, in the eighteenth century the event came to be described as capricious and unpredictable, in an attempt to differentiate miracles from the workings of nature, which were deemed to be normative. The miracle of the blood of Saint Januarius thus provides a window through which we can catch a glimpse of how the natural order was perceived in early modern Europe at a time when the Continent was culturally fragmented into north and south, Protestantism and Catholicism, learned and ignorant.