LITMIR.BIZ

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Various trends have been identified by modern scholars that demonstrate the ways in which religious authorities alternately collaborated with philosophers in studying the natural world, viewed natural philosophy as a separate sphere of knowledge, or, indeed, even opposed certain investigations into nature.¹⁵ The collaboration thesis has been subject to a great deal of scholarship in recent years as studies by John Heilbron, Sachiko Kusukawa, Marcus Hellyer, Rivka Feldhay, and others have provided convincing evidence that religion and natural philosophy frequently cooperated across a range of fields that were occupied with understanding nature.¹⁶ In medicine in particular, Maria Pia Donato describes the relationship between religion and medicine as involving a complex set of interactions characterized by “collaboration, competition, and conflict.”¹⁷ In short, knowledge of the natural world frequently consisted of a negotiation between various ways of understanding the interactions between man, nature, and the divine. In this respect, the attempt to locate the holy in human cadavers conforms to what is currently accepted about science and religion in the early modern period: medical professionals, theologians, and canon lawyers frequently worked together, and occasionally at odds, in defining what could be considered the miraculous in the human body.

      Nevertheless, the Catholic Church’s extensive use of anatomy to verify the bodies of prospective saints also provides a distinctly new perspective on the interaction between the Church and medicine in the early modern period. On the one hand, such extensive use of medical expertise should alter how scholars understand the reassertion of Catholic identity after the Reformation. Medicine and anatomy acted as a buttress to Catholic claims about the saints. Indeed, the examination of the bodies of a wide variety of holy people—ranging from popes down to local mystics (some of whom were denounced as heretics)—became fundamental for the definition of Catholic identity in the early modern world.¹⁸ Through their corpses these individuals could offer confirmation of their connection with the divine or, conversely, reveal themselves as traitors to the faith. Anatomy, interpreted by skilled medical practitioners, was the key to knowing the true nature of an individual, physically and spiritually.¹⁹ Anatomy defended Catholicism. Indeed, the importance of anatomy to Catholic identity suggests that rather than the body becoming desacralized—as one recent scholar has argued—through the early modern expansion of anatomical studies, the opposite seems to have occurred.²⁰ Anatomical understanding harnessed to a Counter-Reformation agenda could invest the body with greater religious significance.

      On the other hand, the extensive involvement of medical professionals in canonization proceedings in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should also alter how we understand the ways in which the medical profession came to be defined. Church patronage of anatomical study helped sanction ongoing trends in the medical field related to who was allowed to make knowledge about the natural world and how that knowledge was made. The Church, for example, appears to have endorsed the position that university-trained physicians sought to claim for themselves: placing them at the top of the evolving medical pyramid. As many scholars have noted and various chapters of this book explore, the healing professions in early modern Europe encompassed a broad range of practitioners that included household healers, apothecaries, midwives, noblewomen, empirics, barber-surgeons, and physicians, to name only a few of the vast array of healers in this period.²¹ Physicians, who were defined by their university training, sought at various points to assert their preeminent role at the top of this hierarchy.²² Such preeminence, however, was not always necessarily apparent to patients who might seek the expertise of a variety of practitioners or, indeed, even have preferred other types of healers to physicians.²³ Yet canonization officials were clear in their preference for physicians in verifying bodily miracles. The evidence about Francis Xavier’s incorrupt corpse, for example, which was initially established by a medicus in a colonial outpost, required reinterpretation by an eminent Roman physician, Angelo Vittori, before it could be considered for his canonization.²⁴ Teresa of Avila’s holy body was examined three times, but only the last examination—undertaken by a university professor—seems to have counted in her final canonization process.²⁵ During the canonization of Giacoma della Marca, a physician’s testimony was used to invalidate a surgeon’s testimony.²⁶ Numerous other examples attest to this preference for university training in the Church’s expert witnesses. The reason for this predilection is clear: such education distinguished the physician as more able to discuss philosophical and theological issues related to a miracle.²⁷ The Church’s marked preference for physicians in this way gave religious sanction to a professional divide, which further enhanced a distinction that was already becoming more pronounced at this moment in history.

      Church-organized anatomical investigation of prospective saints also helped promote and endorse a new way in which medical professionals produced knowledge in the early modern period: through empirical evidence. Firsthand experience, which had largely been considered at best a low form of knowledge or at worst not knowledge at all, began to be deployed with greater frequency in this period. Recent scholarship has shown that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries individuals in a number of fields, including astronomy, alchemy, metallurgy, geography, and law, began to rely on experience as a guide to knowledge making.²⁸ However, medicine—considered both an art and a science—clearly and early on began to deploy new empirical evidence as both useful and problematic for the articulation of its discipline. Chiara Crisciani, Katharine Park, and Michael McVaugh have shown that as early as the fourteenth century, some elite medical practitioners had begun already to draw new conclusions based on their own clinical experience.²⁹ By the sixteenth century, Gianna Pomata has recently argued, clinical observation had become important enough for medicine that a new style of writing arose to meet this need. Medical practitioners created a new genre, loosely inspired by Hippocrates, to respond to a new way of making knowledge—through individual experience. This new style, generally denoted with a publication including the title of Observationes, constituted, according to Pomata, an “epistemic genre.” The Observationes format allowed medical practitioners to circulate knowledge among themselves that they deemed useful but was outside the accepted epistemologies of medical faculties.³⁰ Thus, by the sixteenth century many different ways of making knowledge from experience—“diverse, overlapping ‘empiricisms,’” in Alisha Rankin’s phrase—were emerging on the stage of European learning even before Francis Bacon articulated an accompanying epistemological program.³¹

      Catholic officials lent their authority to these new empiricisms in medicine. In their attempt to demonstrate that a singular event—a miracle—had occurred in a human body, canonization officials relied on a number of techniques of making knowledge, including various empirical methods. A variety of medical practitioners, for example, examined Teresa of Avila’s corpse on multiple occasions and in various weather conditions. Their goal in these repeated examinations was to test the corpse for incorruption.³² The bodies of Isabel of Portugal, Francis Xavier, Giacomo della Marca, Luis Bertran, and numerous others were manipulated, prodded, and tested in various ways to demonstrate their holy nature.³³ The demonstration of Andrea Corsini’s incorruption by a Florentine physician was notarized and then signed by seventeen witnesses.³⁴ When the cadaver of Thomas of Villanova in 1611 (can. 1658) was unearthed, notaries recorded in thorough, firsthand detail their exact experience at the tomb and during the medical examination, a literary attempt to make the visit as real as possible.³⁵ All these techniques—repetition, testing, multiple witnessing, new narrative styles—have been seen as characteristic of the empirical programs of the later seventeenth-century experimental societies.³⁶ Although Catholic investigation of holy corpses was still a long way from systematic Baconian experimentalism, this was a moment in which religious authority sanctioned new ways of making knowledge about the natural world. Although there is no conclusive evidence, it is tempting to speculate that this support from such a powerful authority as the Catholic Church might have been partly why empiricism became a recognized way to make knowledge during the seventeenth century.

      Through its collaboration with medicine, then, the Catholic Church should be seen as a major contributor in early modern attempts to understand the natural world. Church officials helped articulate who should investigate nature, what sort of evidence should be used in this investigation, and even to some extent what potential subjects of study were, since they funded

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