Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics

Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy

Janine Larmon Peterson

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781501742361
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority.

Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources—including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes—Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

PART ONE

How

CHAPTER 1

Tolerated Saints

It was tough being a saint, but the “afterlife” of a new saint was even tougher. It was extremely difficult for someone to be officially recognized for holiness in the later Middle Ages. Although there were a large number of local saints during this period, popes did not sanction many of these cults. Out of the hundreds of venerated individuals that emerged between 1198 and 1431, popes canonized just thirty-five. Every one of these saints, except for two, were of royal birth or members of the clergy.¹ The saints whom popes approved were not necessarily saints that members of the laity preferred; for instance, the papal canonization of the assassinated inquisitor St. Peter Martyr (d. 1252) was largely greeted with apathy.² This led to many unauthorized cults, such as that of Anthony Peregrinus (d. 1267). His hagiographer maintained that Peregrinus “was famous … [though] the Roman Church did not permit him to be received into the catalog of the saints. Nevertheless he was held in the greatest veneration from that time in Padua … and it was established by municipal decree, that a day was solemnly fixed in his memory for solemn supplication, [which is] observed in all the shops of the city … not otherwise than if it had been mandated by the supreme pontiff.”³ The idea that someone could be canonized in the people’s eyes if not the pope’s caused some institutional concern. The Franciscan chronicler Salimbene de Adam criticized what he perceived to be the credulity of Italian communities, claiming, “For no man’s relics are supposed to be held in reverence unless he is first approved of by the Church and written in the catalogue of saints … [;] thus it is that a sinner or an infirm man goes badly astray by casting aside true saints and by praying to one who cannot intercede for him.”⁴ The only “true” saints for Salimbene were those whom popes canonized in accordance with new thirteenth-century directives. Outside observers, such as the English chronicler Matthew Paris, claimed that citizens of Italian towns were “semi-Christians” (semi-Christiani) for their veneration of unauthorized saints and seeming dismissal of institutional regulations about pious behavior.⁵

The many saints’ cults in the later Middle Ages that failed to achieve official recognition resulted from changes in the canonization process rather than from the types of individuals that Italian communities chose to venerate or what traditional signs communities identified as holy. The papal bureaucracy expanded in the thirteenth century and instituted regulations on how the Christian laity should behave, outlined criteria to assess holiness, and decreed that popes had the ultimate say in assigning sainthood. Changes to the canonization process coincided with urban growth in Italy and the spread of the vita apostolica. This reform movement encouraged individual expressions of piety that were harder to regulate but captured the attention of members of the laity and some clergy. People embraced new saintly contenders, many from the male lay population, whom papal representatives viewed as unworthy due to their profession, activities, or ideology about how to live a virtuous life. The papacy’s and the people’s standards for sainthood no longer coincided. Popes nominally tolerated new local cults because there was not enough evidence for outright discouragement. This very veneration, however, was a challenge to papal authority through an indifference to papal authorization. It also constituted a conscious self-assertion in the prerogative of citizens and their local clerical representatives—bishops—to create saints.

Miracles and the Bureaucratization of Sanctity

André Vauchez’s seminal Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, the essays in the recent collection edited by Gábor Klaniczay, Medieval Canonization Processes, and Robert Bartlett’s new sweeping study, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things?, all describe thirteenth-century changes to the canonization process and facets of Christian devotion.⁶ The following brief overview is the foundation for the argument that these bureaucratic changes helped to produce a number of unauthorized saints, that in Italy many of these cults were for charitably minded laymen, and that these tolerated cults functioned to unify citizens without concerns about papal approval, which had repercussions for more controversial cults. In short, circa 1200 the papacy sought to establish itself as the sole authority for canonizing saints, divesting bishops of a role they had formerly possessed. Before the twelfth century, when a local community achieved a majority consensus that an individual was worthy of veneration, the bishop would investigate and, if he determined the person’s holiness was genuine, would confer the title of saint with the ritualized translation of the new saint’s relics. Diocesan canonizations were standard and usually based on the vox popoli, the voice of the people.⁷ While popes in this early period ratified cults, the first formal pontifical canonization of a saint did not occur until 993, for Ulric of Augsburg. According to André Vauchez, the verb canonizare was not used until 1016 and then only infrequently until the middle of the twelfth century.⁸ Papal canonization was not the only or even the primary route to official sanctity in the first millennium of Christianity.

This process changed in the latter half of the twelfth century as the papacy centralized its administration and established itself as the sole authority for canonizing saints. Pope Alexander III decreed in 1173 that people could venerate only saints whom the church recognized, even if others seemed to perform miracles. In 1200 Pope Innocent III confirmed this decision in a papal bull.⁹ The new emphasis on papal canonizations required the implementation of a new evaluative procedure. In the wake of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) the papacy adopted the inquisitorial procedure from Roman law, the inquisitio, to adjudicate canonization and inquisitorial inquiries (discussed in chapter 2). Its purpose was to discern between the holy and the ordinary, the ordinary and the heretical, and the holy and the heretical.¹⁰ This investigatory technique mandated more exacting criteria and rigorous judicial guidelines, requiring skilled investigators to question witnesses. Miracles were still a crucial component for determining sanctity, although there were now stricter standards. Popes required evidence of posthumous miracles to ensure that they came from divine power rather than human sleight of hand, sensory misjudgment, or diabolical agency. From the reign of Pope Innocent III forward, a saint also had to exhibit virtus morum—or the “heroic virtues” of faith, hope, charity, prudence, temperance, and justice—to help substantiate the evidence of miracles.¹¹

Other new requirements for sainthood made papal authorization harder to achieve. The existence of a local cult was no longer enough. The prospective saint’s reputation, or fama, had to be widespread, with devotees that transcended the geographic bounds of one region. The odds were de jure stacked against a local saint obtaining papal recognition, and de facto it was even more difficult, since the new regulations and procedures made the canonization process very expensive and time consuming. The procedure required that communities gather necessary documentation and hire a procurator to initiate a canonization inquiry, which took time, money, and resources many communities in war-torn late medieval Italy did not have at their disposal.¹² Representatives had to travel to the papal seat, a difficult undertaking particularly in the fourteenth century when popes resided in Avignon. Moreover, if a new pope was elected during this process, as often occurred in the late thirteenth century, the petition had to begin anew. Many saints therefore failed to achieve official endorsement because the process faltered on account of the prohibitive cost, demanding criteria, and time and effort it took to complete. In other cases, communities voluntarily neglected to pursue a canonization process because of these same considerations or because they still relied on their own judgment rather than on the new interrogatory methods that led to papal recognition. Saints’ cults were also at the mercy of the larger political scene, as the following factors (addressed in detail in later chapters) demonstrate. Frequent wars meant frequent promotion of different, new saintly contenders as towns searched for the most effective holy protector. A proliferation of requests from a single town could suggest an undiscerning approach and lessen the overall chances for canonization for any candidate. In addition, if the cult was in a town that had rebelled against the forces of the papacy or a pope perceived its government to be an opponent of his authority, the saint could become tainted by association and the continued existence of his or her previously tolerated cult put in jeopardy.

Many regional saints consequently failed to achieve official authorization. This fact did not deter towns from deciding an individual merited veneration and promoting a cult of an uncanonized saint. Citizens did not scrutinize sanctity in the same way as the papacy. saint placed great value on their own personal knowledge of the saint and experience of his or her powers. A consensus on a prospective saint’s merits had previously galvanized episcopal canonizations. Communities thus viewed the new pontifical canonization process, in the words of André Vauchez, “as … largely superfluous procedures, since, in their eyes, the result was known in advance.”¹³ From citizens’ perspective, a papal canonization merely confirmed the community’s assessment of who was worthy of veneration. The power to evaluate and designate sainthood remained in the control of those who knew the saint best: those who had observed his or her virtues in life and experienced his or her miracles.

Miracles were an essential factor for the obstinacy that communities showed in their devotion to a local but unauthorized cult. Peter Brown argued that during the twelfth century medieval society’s relations with the supernatural wo...

Table of contents

• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: How
• Part Two: Why
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index