Infirmity, Community, and Canonization

In this book I have analysed the varying ways physical infirmity was used to delineate and prove sanctity in canonization trials by those conducting the inquests and those testifying in them. Because the corporality of late medieval sanctity and the cultural importance of imitatio Christi emerged and developed simultaneously with the canonization procedure itself, these concepts have been at the core of my investigations into saintly candidates’ lives. Physical infirmity – be it illness or impairment causing pain, discomfort, functional restrictions, or threat of dying – was a prevalent aspect of the everyday experience of all medieval communities, but the cultural attitudes towards it were not uniform. In the testimonies of canonization inquests the veneration of saints, which was one of the key elements of late medieval lived religion, is especially entangled with cultural ideas of the beneficial sides of infirmity.

Canonization processes are juridical sources but behind them lies a lived, religious experience, which the commissioners, the cult promoters, and the witnesses interpreted in varying ways, depending on culturally internalized models, their personal preferences, and the communal memories and ways of narrating them. Temporal changes in the inquests also played some role. The first ones in the early and middle of the thirteenth century were less organized and full than the later ones, which obviously influenced the amount of detail that was recorded. Those testifying about a saint's life in detail were a specific set of people who usually belonged to the clerical or secular elite or a monastic community, and who had known the holy man or woman personally. Often they also knew each other. Therefore, their communal practices and their lived religious reality played a crucial role in the formation of the saint's fama, even if their narrations were remodelled and reshaped by the notaries of the inquest. Each of the inquests also had their own practicalities, which shaped the way sainthood was constructed. Partly these derived from geographical differences, especially in a sense that the holiness of Italian saints was usually investigated in more corporeal terms than elsewhere. Gender played a part to some extent as well, but its role was not as crucial for individual communities of devotees as sometimes proposed by modern scholars. The suffering of especially Italian female saints has been highlighted in studies concerning late medieval hagiography.