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CHAPTER 2

A New Criterion for Sanctity

On March 12, 1622, Pope Gregory XV (1621–1623) forcefully reasserted the validity of the cult of the saints when he simultaneously canonized five individuals: Isidore the Laborer (d. 1130), Francis Xavier (d. 1552), Ignatius Loyola (d. 1556), Teresa of Avila (d. 1582), and Filippo Neri (d. 1595). With the exception of Isidore, each of these saints lived after the Reformation and had been active in encouraging new piety and devotion to the Church. Although several canonizations had taken place following the long break after the Reformation, such a large “group canonization” of early modern saints clearly proclaimed the renewed strength of the faith and the confidence of Church leaders in their ability to discern saints.¹

In addition to reasserting the validity of the cult of the saints, this group canonization also introduced a new standard that would henceforth be used in vetting the potentially holy: the corpses of prospective saints would undergo medical examination. Each of the saints canonized in 1622 and most of those considered for canonization during the remainder of the seventeenth century were subjected to posthumous medical evaluations, frequently including full autopsies.² This new standard formed part of the process of centralizing canonization, which was described in the last chapter. The medical expert became an agent of papal authority who turned local, particular ideas about holiness into universal, Catholic ones.

Nevertheless, the advent of the medical witness as the verifier of bodily sanctity was not simply a top-down imposition from Rome; rather, it represented the eventual adoption by canonization officials of new ways of making knowledge about the natural world. As this chapter argues, the initial push to introduce medical postmortems into canonization proceedings came from the promoters of a saint’s cult. The body and the remains of the saint were central to the elaboration of his or her cult locally.³ In the wake of the Reformation, however, undue veneration of noncanonized individuals could be considered suspect.⁴ In an effort to justify such enthusiasm for the remains of local holy people, promoters of sanctity turned to the burgeoning field of anatomy.

The study of anatomy itself was undergoing profound changes during this period. In particular, the number of printed anatomical case studies exploded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and represented part of a transition in the methods that were acceptable for making knowledge about the natural world.⁵ Indeed, Gianna Pomata has argued that a new epistemic genre, the Observationes, arose in medicine at this point as a means to present firsthand observations as a guide for practice in order to gain knowledge about the body. This emphasis on experience and practical training, in turn, contributed to the rising prestige of anatomy.⁶ By the end of this period, many believed physician-anatomists were uniquely able to read recondite signs found in the human cadaver and thereby say something about the deceased’s life and death and possibly his or her interaction with the divine.⁷ The postmortem investigation could provide a window into an individual’s most private moments and therefore was of great use to canonization officials who wanted to know as much as they could about a prospective saint.

Canonization officials were, however, slow to recognize the utility of anatomical studies for verifying sanctity. The first saint canonized after Trent, Diego of Alcalá, was widely reported to have a miraculously incorrupt corpse, yet medical testimony never confirmed it. When promoters of the canonizations of Carlo Borromeo and Ignatius Loyola attempted to use anatomical details as part of the demonstration of these candidates’ holiness, Roman authorities failed to recognize the validity of the evidence submitted. Yet over the course of succeeding decades, Roman officials—especially under the guidance of the important deacon of the Rota, Francisco Peña (1540–1612)—began to recognize and then require postmortem examination of prospective saints. Through its eventual adoption of the empirical methods that had been deployed to make knowledge in the field of anatomy, the Church began to change how it made saints. The medical practitioner transformed wondrous signs found in the human body into a miracle for the whole faith. By cooperating in this way, medical and religious understanding of the body were removed from their local context and made into universal knowledge. From tentative beginnings, anatomy became a recognized mode of demonstrating extraordinary human holiness that was central to the Church’s reestablishment of canonization after the Reformation.

SAINT DIEGO’S WONDER-WORKING CORPSE

In 1588 Pope Sixtus V proclaimed Diego of Alcalá a saint, making him the first person canonized in sixty-five years. Diego had, in fact, long been considered a holy man by his local community, and following his death in 1463 a number of miracles were attributed to him. However, in the wake of the Reformation, many of his wondrous acts were contested.⁸ In the subsequent debate, an unusually large number of physicians testified either for or against Diego. The prominence of medicine in this first canonization after Trent set the stage for the increased use of experts in canonization and what can be thought of as the “medicalization” of the holy body.

One of the most important and contested miracles counting for Diego’s canonization was his postmortem healing in 1562 of Don Carlos, the seventeen-year-old son of King Philip II of Spain. Given the prominence of Don Carlos’s family, this healing miracle gained for Diego almost overnight broad support for his canonization and an enthusiastic patron in the person of Philip himself. The tale of the miracle begins with Don Carlos stumbling down several stairs while chasing a “comely wench.” He then smashed his head against the closed door at the bottom of the staircase with enough force to open a large gash. Although not initially considered life threatening, the wound became badly infected. At the prompting of King Philip II, a team of ten of the most eminent medical practitioners in all of Europe—including Andreas Vesalius—was called upon to attend the prince. Despite their efforts, these medical practitioners feared their young patient would not survive.⁹

That Don Carlos’s wound did heal was attributed to Diego’s intercession. The holy man’s long-dead body was exhumed and brought to the ailing prince’s bedside. According to numerous witnesses, the prince recovered only after his body made contact with Diego’s corpse. Witnesses also noted that the corpse was strangely sweet-smelling and lifelike, despite having spent nearly one hundred years in the ground.¹⁰ On the strength of this miracle and the wave of support that it engendered, Diego was canonized. This act was at least as much a political as a religious move. Pope Sixtus V used this canonization both to reward King Philip for his efforts in defending Catholicism and to encourage him in his planned invasion of England, which took place later that same year.¹¹ Thus, the papacy and the king of Spain desired this canonization.

Even with papal and royal support for Diego, medical opinion surrounding this healing of Don Carlos had been far from unanimous. Don Carlos’s personal physician, Diego Olivares, declared that he did not believe the healing to be unusual in any way: “In my opinion it [the healing] was not [miraculous] because the prince was cured with natural and ordinary remedies, with which one usually cures others with the same injury or worse.”¹² Olivares conceded that Don Carlos had likely been helped by God or his servants, but he cautioned that a miraculous healing must “exceed all natural forces” and this one had not done that.¹³

Another physician, Christobal de Vega, contradicted Olivares and specifically attributed Don Carlos’s healing to the intercession of Diego’s miraculous body. Indeed, de Vega argued that those medical practitioners who did not agree with this account of the cure were acting out of pride and they dissimulated in order to give the impression that the healing was caused “more by their own efforts than by the miracle.”¹⁴ De Vega’s opinion carried the day, presumably because his discrediting of the other medical practitioners was entirely plausible—these men undoubtedly wanted to salvage their prestigious careers after Don Carlos’s near death at their hands.

Almost completely unmentioned in these medical narratives was the miraculous instrument of the cure: the body of San Diego.¹⁵ However, according to several nonmedical witnesses, Diego’s century-old corpse had rotted so little that it appeared to be almost alive. As one witness noted with obvious astonishment, the corpse still “had its entire nose,” which was normally one of the first parts of a body to decay.¹⁶

Despite the failure of the medical team to describe Diego’s corpse, his hagiographers eagerly recounted its degree of preservation. Pietro Galesini, for example, who produced an official vita for the saint during his canonization, stressed the miraculous state of Diego’s corpse during Don Carlos’s healing.¹⁷ Similarly, another biographer, Francesco Bracciolini, recounted in detail the wondrous preservation of Diego’s body upon exhumation.¹⁸

The prominence of Diego’s incorrupt corpse in hagiography but its absence from the medical accounts suggests that postmortem analysis of holy bodies was not yet valued as part of canonization proceedings. Despite this medical disinterest, lay believers eagerly sought signs of the holy in the cadavers of the deceased and publicized their own interpretations of what they found. For them, Diego’s incorrupt body was an obvious demonstration of his sanctity.¹⁹ In the context of the Counter-Reformation, such enthusiasm was both useful and problematic: the Church wanted passionate believers, but sought to avoid accusations that miracles were merely the inventions of overly enthusiastic disciples. How, then, were Church reformers to make such classical signs of holiness rigorous and also controllable?

At this juncture, the eminent Spanish canon lawyer Francisco Peña, spurred by the canonization of San Diego, in which he took part, realized the usefulness of medicine in both justifying and controlling the interpretation of bodily evidence of the holy. In his role as a member of the Tribunal of the Rota, the highest ecclesiastical court, which judged evidence in canonization proceedings, Peña helped make the medically verified holy body a key miracle for any potential saint.²⁰ In so doing, Peña removed a key aspect of local piety from the bishops’ authority and thereby contributed to the overall strength of the papacy in the early modern period.²¹

Francisco Peña was well suited and ideologically motivated to make a significant change to the understanding of sanctity in the early modern Catholic world. Born in Villaroya de los Pinares, near Saragossa, Spain, he was a highly learned individual, holding doctorates in Roman and canonical law as well as in theology from the University of Valencia. King Philip II of Spain introduced Peña to the papal court during the reign of Pope Pius IV (1566–1572). Despite this introduction, which might have prompted feelings of loyalty to the Spanish monarch, Peña immediately embarked on a number of projects that served to expand papal power and jurisdiction. These ventures included the censoring of works that criticized papal power, a revision of the standard manual on inquisition procedure, and the publishing of a number of hagiographies.²² Although these tasks might seem disparate, the proclamation of saints and the actions of the Roman Inquisition both increasingly came under papal purview and eventually were considered expressions of papal authority during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.²³

According to Peña’s personal testimony, the task to which he most seriously applied himself was the canonization of the saints. As he asserted in his vita of Carlo Borromeo (canonized 1610), canonization was the “most important and most arduous thing that the Holy See controls.”²⁴ In stating this, as first auditor and then deacon of the Tribunal of the Rota from 1588 until his death in 1612, Peña perhaps indulged in slight self-aggrandizement; this assignment of preeminence made him a central figure in the Curia since the Rota was the highest court in the Church and was charged with weighing the evidence in canonization trials to ensure that it was sufficient and sufficiently accurate before a process went forward. Peña thus had a major role in determining who was a saint during the very years in which sainthood was first being articulated after the long hiatus of the sixteenth century. In particular, Peña was deeply involved in the canonization proceedings of Hyancinth of Poland, Raymond of Penafort, Francesca Romana, Carlo Borromeo, Filippo Neri, Teresa of Avila, Elizabeth of Portugal, and Andrea Corsini.²⁵ Additionally, as he oversaw the Rota during the early proceedings for Isidore the Laborer, Francis Xavier, and Ignatius of Loyola, Peña likely exercised a strong influence over these canonizations. During these proceedings, which stretched over thirty-five years, from 1594 (Hyancinth) to 1629 (Andrea Corsini), the medical examination of the corpses of prospective saints became regular. Peña was, at least in part, responsible for this new emphasis on the body as is documented in many of his writings.

Revealingly, an early sign of the importance that Peña attached to the holy body emerges from the vita he wrote for Diego of Alcalá. Like other hagiographers, Peña commented on the failure of Diego’s cadaver to rot and on its sweet smell despite having spent nearly a century in the ground. However, unlike hagiographers before him, Peña used a full eight pages to provide details about the corpse and its appearance.²⁶ In this section of this vita, he suggested various methods to establish an incorrupt corpse, including a detailed description of its level of preservation, the evaluation of firsthand witness reports, and the listing of similar, medieval cases in which this miracle was approved.²⁷ In short, Peña deployed a mix of empirical evidence and historical precedent to document how Diego’s body had miraculously resisted rot. Clearly, Peña was preoccupied with the ways in which the miracle of an incorrupt body, in particular, could be established.

Peña’s emphasis on the importance of the incorrupt body as a sign of sanctity is a repeated theme in his printed works. In his vita of Saint Raymond Penafort, for example, Peña argues that “the sweet odors that issue from the tombs of the dead are miraculous” and furthermore are “the sign that within them resides the Author of life [God].”²⁸ In his vita for Francesca Romana, Peña states that there is only space to discuss her most important miracles, “among which was the sweet odor that issued from her body, with which Divine Mercy well demonstrates the holiness of his servant.”²⁹ Additionally, he concludes, “it was a wondrous thing that her body had not spoiled or rotted, but remained soft, flexible, and tractable, as if it were alive.”³⁰ Although the incorrupt body was clearly an important miracle for Peña, in none of his printed saintly vita does he explicitly state that expert witnesses—e.g., physicians—should be used to confirm such miraculous phenomena. Only in an inquisition manual did Peña advise judges to use experts from other fields, including medical practitioners, to help in vetting the potentially holy.³¹ Nevertheless, in his official and private canonization documents, Peña routinely began to call upon medical professionals to confirm the miraculous incorruption of saints’ bodies.

As deacon of the Rota, Peña oversaw the composition of the letters that opened the apostolic phase of a canonization.³² These letters specified how the proceedings should be conducted, including what sort of questions should be asked and which miracles and virtues were to be verified. Beginning early in the seventeenth century, in several cases directed by Francisco Peña, these letters included a clause ordering that the tomb of the purportedly holy individual be surveyed and the body unearthed. This clause apparently meant that medical professionals should conduct a postmortem survey of the corpse, since in these cases a medical investigation immediately followed the visitation of the body.³³ Later letters explicitly required medical intervention. Those opening the apostolic phase of canonization for Peter Alcantara in 1618, for example, specified that his body must be examined by “one or two physicians and one surgeon or other experts with the skills for inspecting the body, the bones, and remains of the servant of God, Peter of Alcantara.”³⁴ In this way, by the early seventeenth century, postmortem examination of a holy body became part of the Rome-directed apostolic process of canonization. This new reliance on expertise represented an extension of centralized papal authority into local communities and a new requirement for canonization. Peña, who already addressed the problem of demonstrating the incorruption of a corpse, was a major figure behind the creation of the new standard. With this innovation, however, he both exploited an old alliance between medicine and religion and benefitted from the newly recognized power of anatomy to make sense of the human body.

THE CHURCH AND MEDICINE

The Church’s alliance with medicine was long standing, and as early as the thirteenth century medical professionals testified to healing miracles in canonization proceedings.³⁵ Medical professionals were asked to take part in these proceedings because they could authenticate the testimonies of “simple people” that might have otherwise been dubious. Local physicians in particular were important as they could rule out possible natural explanations for a healing.³⁶ Joseph Ziegler, however, has observed that such testimony was not a requirement in canonization proceedings and was based on local availability of medical practitioners.³⁷ Medical testimony about healing miracles in late medieval canonization proceedings was therefore ad hoc and represented a nice addition to other witness testimony rather than a replacement of it.

Historians of early modern Europe, including Fernando Vidal and David Gentilcore, note that after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) verification of healing miracles in canonization proceedings changed in two significant ways. First, testimonies became more technical, with medical witnesses relying both on experience and philosophical training to rule out natural explanations for a miraculous cure. Second, medical verification of a healing miracle became regular in this period and, eventually, a specific requirement.³⁸

Despite this recent detailed research on the role of medical professionals in confirming healing miracles, little has been written about their role in the posthumous examination of the corpses of deceased holy men and women. Although Katharine Park has studied examinations of holy bodies in the medieval period, those works that have touched on the early modern period tend to focus on the most famous, printed cases of autopsies, such as those of Filippo Neri, Carlo Borromeo, and Ignatius Loyola.³⁹ The postmortems on prospective saints, however, form an important part of the interaction between Catholicism and medicine in the early modern period both because they were so widespread—nearly every canonized saint and many other holy individuals were subjected to a posthumous examination—and because they demonstrate that the Church valued new medical practices and ways of making knowledge.

Confirming a healing miracle as opposed to judging a body to be miraculously irregular required a different set of skills and implied a different relationship between medicine and religion. In order to confirm a healing miracle, a medical professional was forced to admit that he was unable to explain how the healing occurred and that, to his knowledge, the recovery that had happened was impossible. The success of healing miracles requires the failure of medicine. In contrast, to judge a body holy a physician employed experience, knowledge of modern and classic medical writers and philosophers, and surgical skill to isolate and explain unusual anatomical features.⁴⁰ Therefore, the postmortems on saints were a judgment by the Church of the positive contribution that medical professionals could make in defining the boundaries of the natural rather than, in the case of healing miracles, forcing such practitioners to admit the inadequacy of their skills.

The Church had good reason to view the medical profession, and especially anatomy, positively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The practice of opening human bodies was of long standing by the sixteenth century and had begun in the late medieval period for a number of reasons: (1) to embalm the elite for as part of burial practices, (2) to determine the cause of death, (3) to investigate murders, and (4) to check physical signs of a saint’s holiness.⁴¹ From at least the twelfth century, an additional reason why medical practitioners engaged in anatomical investigations was to support the knowledge they gleaned from classical sources. The medical school in Salerno carried out animal dissection even at this early date. The first recorded use of a dissection to explain conclusions in a medical treatise appeared in a work by Mondino dei Liuzzi in 1316. Nevertheless, these dissections were to serve a didactic function, not an exploratory purpose.⁴² That is, they were meant to illustrate the principles observed in the canonical treatises of Galen, Aristotle, and Hippocrates, not challenge them. It was for this purpose that the Universities of Bologna and Padua established yearly, public anatomical dissections. The practice of public dissection was commonplace by the time they appear in the 1405 university statutes of Bologna and in the 1465 statutes of Padua.⁴³

Therefore, when canonization officials turned to anatomy to help establish bodily miracles, they drew on a number of long-standing autopsy practices in Europe. The initial and ostensible reason that many saintly bodies were opened was to embalm the corpse for display. However, forensic motivations also inspired the dissectors, who sought anatomical explanation of either unusual ailments or behavior in prospective saints. Finally, since these medical men were testifying in a legal context, the established practice of using medical professionals as expert witnesses in criminal proceedings likely also inspired canonization officials. In short, that Peña and other canonization officials turned to anatomy to help demonstrate sanctity was in some ways a logical step, since the opening of human bodies had been commonplace in a number of related legal, funerary, and medical contexts. Indeed, Katharine Park has argued that it was a similar mix of motivations that led to the opening of female saintly bodies in the fourteenth century.⁴⁴

Yet there were also new practices in medicine and anatomy that altered both who was involved with the postmortems on prospective saints and how the evidence found in the body was interpreted. In the medieval examinations of holy women, a physician generally was not present when the body was opened, whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Church required specifically that physicians undertake the examination.⁴⁵ This represents not just a change in personnel but also in what a physician’s duties and knowledge areas were supposed to be. The physicians were expected both to find unusual details in the human body and interpret them in part of an overall discussion of what could be natural for this specific body. That is, canonization officials expected physicians to draw on both empirical and theoretical medical knowledge to speak both about human bodies in general and a specific corpse in particular.

The reason for the Church’s new expectations for their physiciantestators was based on ongoing changes in how knowledge was made in medicine in the early modern period. Although still rooted in classical medical authorities such as Galen and Hippocrates, medicine by the early sixteenth century was undergoing what has been termed a “Renaissance” in its understanding of the human body.⁴⁶ This was fueled by the increasing availability of old texts and a circulation of some newly discovered texts from the ancient world.⁴⁷

During the sixteenth century, medicine increasingly emphasized firsthand experience of anatomy as a guide to understanding the human body. Traditionally considered a low form of knowledge making, one typically relegated to nonphysician practitioners, direct observation as a guide to practice was beginning to be recognized as more important for the medical profession. New works in fact circulated that sought to share such information widely—a clear indication of its value for the profession.⁴⁸ By the early sixteenth century, then, a few physicians, including Alessandro Benedetti, Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, and Niccolò Massa, had conducted autopsies with their own hands as a way of uncovering new knowledge about the workings of human anatomy.⁴⁹

Real change in attitudes toward dissection is evident in the 1543 publication of Andreas Vesalius’s On the Fabric of the Human Body. Despite his reliance on Galen in some respects, Vesalius also argued forcefully for the utility of firsthand knowledge of dissection.⁵⁰ Indeed, Vesalius represented a fusion of knowledge-making techniques, since he employed the empirical methods characteristic of surgeons and apothecaries as well as using classical texts as sources with which to make knowledge about the human body.⁵¹ A number of anatomists, including Realdo Colombo and Charles Estienne, also engaged in this synthesis of empirical and learned practices and added their own arguments about the structure of the human body based on these methods.⁵² By the seventeenth century, Vesalian methods of dissection, according to historian Roy Porter, “had become the golden method for anatomical investigation.”⁵³ This perhaps overstates the case, however, as students at even the best medical schools still might have had irregular access to actual dissections and many practitioners remained unconvinced by the new methods.⁵⁴

Nevertheless, the power of Vesalian techniques is amply demonstrated by the number of landmark anatomical studies that were produced around the year 1600. Such publications documented for the first time the valves in human veins, the mechanisms of digestion, the structure of female reproductive anatomy, and, finally, the circulation of blood.⁵⁵ Many physicians had now embraced an epistemology that fused empirical investigation with textual evidence as a way to understand the human body.

In sum, when the Church turned to physicians to conduct postmortems on holy individuals, it both drew on existing legal, funerary, and medical precedents relating to autopsies and embraced new trends about how medical professionals made knowledge about the human body. The following sections detail how this collaboration between medicine and religion developed over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

THE FIRST ATTEMPTS: IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA AND CARLO BORROMEO

The postmortems performed on Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556) and Carlo Borromeo (d. 1584) represent the first documented post-Reformation attempts to use anatomy to establish sanctity.⁵⁶ In each case, the examination occurred shortly after the holy man’s death, and embalming was the initial reason for opening the corpse.⁵⁷ The embalming of elites had been routine since the late Middle Ages and was not unusual in these cases.⁵⁸ However, upon opening each corpse, the medical practitioners and other spectators involved discovered unusual anatomy. This anatomy then became the focal point of the postmortem. But the significance attached to the anatomy was not fixed: physicians, eager to promote their careers, saw in the bodies of saints the possibility of extending and illustrating their range of medical knowledge. In contrast, hagiographers who wrote about these postmortems sought to use anatomy as evidence of the divine. Each group engaged in the emerging genre of using direct observation to make knowledge so as to further a specific aim.⁵⁹ But the fact that the same anatomical details could be interpreted very differently demonstrates that the meaning of bodily evidence was unstable and subjective. This instability meant that the negotiations about the significance of specific anatomical irregularities led to the exclusion of this evidence from the list of miracles for each of these two saints.

The autopsy of Ignatius of Loyola, occurring shortly after his death in 1556, demonstrates clearly the different meanings and uses of holy anatomy in the mid-sixteenth century. Owing to his prominence as the founder of the Jesuit order, Loyola was opened by the most eminent physician currently residing in Rome, Realdo Colombo (1515–1559), the professor of anatomy at the University of Rome La Sapienza.⁶⁰ The declared reason for opening Loyola’s body was an embalming effort requested by the Jesuits.⁶¹ There may also have been forensic motivation, as Loyola’s final ailment had not been considered life-threatening by his physicians.⁶² Still, the autopsy was not initially expected to confirm any signs of sanctity. It was only because Colombo found such unusual anatomy inside the deceased Jesuit that he thought it worthy of documentation.

Colombo recounted the details of Loyola’s postmortem in his anatomical manual De re anatomica, published in 1559 as part of a narrative that emphasized his own expertise. In fact, the entire text of Colombo’s De re anatomica was intended to promote its author’s reputation and, to some extent, attack Vesalius, whom Colombo viewed as a rival.⁶³ Throughout the text, Colombo based his authority in part on the immense experience that he had with dissection and autopsy.⁶⁴ The section in which Loyola’s autopsy appears, in particular, seems to have been designed to demonstrate Colombo’s superior skill and knowledge as an anatomist. This section purports to treat “those things which are rarely found in anatomy.”⁶⁵ Colombo emphasizes, though, that such rarities were in some ways not new to him: “I, however, from the beginning of my career have dissected innumerous bodies, and in the last fifteen years I have dissected an even greater number in the center of the well-attended academies of Pavia, Pisa, and Rome.”⁶⁶ In addition, Colombo notes that he sometimes “dissected fourteen bodies in a year” and that “no type of body has been denied to me for dissection, except for a man who was mute from birth.”⁶⁷ Thus, this section served to underline Colombo’s skill and demonstrate that he had more knowledge of human anatomy than his contemporaries or than even the classical authorities on anatomy.

Colombo suggests in this section that he undertook a great many private autopsies, which added to his knowledge of human anatomy. As two editors of his work note, it would be difficult for a modern pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies a year to see all the abnormalities that Colombo had observed, let alone a sixteenth-century practitioner who should have at most been opening a few dozen.⁶⁸ Cynthia Klestinec has argued that private, explorative autopsies were much more common and were considered surer ways of gaining knowledge of the human body than had previously been thought for early modern Europe.⁶⁹ By highlighting the extreme diversity that he had seen in human bodies, Colombo was suggesting to knowledgeable readers that he had opened far more bodies than would have been officially allowed. This would, in turn, imply that he had greater knowledge of the human body and accuracy in describing it than his competitors who did not go to such lengths. The postmortem on Loyola, which appeared in this section, was therefore part of a statement about Colombo’s extensive knowledge acquired through firsthand investigation.

Colombo’s narrative of Loyola’s postmortem clearly emphasized his personal experience with anatomy and his extensive knowledge of the human body. He made it clear that he, rather than a surgeon or barber, opened the body and handled Loyola’s entrails, stating that he “extracted with these hands innumerable stones from his penis and found stones of various colors in his lungs, liver, and in the vena porta.… I saw moreover pebbles in the urinary duct in the bladder, in the colon, in the hemorrhoidal vein and in his navel area.”⁷⁰ Although these were unusual details, Colombo stated he had seen other bodies with similar problems.⁷¹ The narrative, then, advertised Colombo’s expertise: he had been invited to open the eminent leader of the Jesuit order, had performed the autopsy with his own hands, and found details that might be unusual to other anatomists, but which were familiar to him. The saint’s anatomy was important not because of any miracle—in fact, Colombo explicitly states that Loyola’s unusual anatomy is within the realm of the natural—but because it demonstrated Colombo’s skill and the ability of the new anatomists to understand variation within the human body.

In contrast, Loyola’s fellow Jesuit and attendant during his final illness, Giovanni Polanco, immediately interpreted the anatomical details in a religious light. His narrative of the postmortem appeared in a letter Polanco initially sent to the superiors of the Jesuit order. Shortly thereafter, this letter circulated in anonymous copies. That it was widely distributed can be surmised from the fact that copies survive in Latin, Spanish, and Italian versions.⁷² The Jesuits’ attempt to disseminate the knowledge of Loyola’s anatomy suggests that even at this early stage, anatomy could demonstrate his sanctity. Furthermore, circulating Polanco’s observations in a letter full of firsthand experience suggests that these Jesuits actively engaged in the epistemic genre of Observationes in an attempt to make knowledge about the holy.

According to Polanco, the autopsy provided evidence that Loyola had lived a remarkably ascetic life. Polanco’s letter states that, upon opening Loyola’s body, the physicians “discovered that his stomach and intestines were quite small and without anything inside them.” The physicians then declared that they understood these irregularities to be a sign of the great feats of self-denial that Loyola had undertaken.⁷³ The numerous stones found in Colombo’s body were reinterpreted as part of this narrative: Loyola’s extreme asceticism had made his liver harden and produce stones.⁷⁴ These stones would, in turn, have been painful to bear. Thus, Loyola’s anatomy demonstrated that he had lived a life of extreme ascetic rigor that caused a great deal of unseen hardship for the holy man.

This anatomical demonstration of Loyola’s asceticism may have been especially necessary, since other accounts did not cast Loyola as bearing his final illness with the heroic patience of a saint. His friend Pedro Ribadeneira, who wrote the first posthumous biography of the saint, depicted Loyola as so “surrounded and oppressed by infirmities” that he wanted to “see himself with Christ,” that is, die.⁷⁵ This yearning for death because of his pain was in contrast to the advice Loyola himself had given a friend just two years earlier. Loyola told his friend that an illness was “an occasion for merit and the exercise of virtue” in patient forbearance.⁷⁶ That Loyola was in so much pain that he wished for death implied that he was not, in fact, bearing his pain with virtuous patience. Furthermore, as Ribadeneira noted, “the doctors [medici] did not make much of Ignatius’s illness, as it seemed to them to be his ordinary sickness.”⁷⁷ That medical practitioners ignored the call of the famous leader of the Jesuits when he was ill, claiming that it was just his “ordinary sickness,” indicates that Loyola regularly called doctors unnecessarily. In this depiction by his friend and well-disposed biographer, the holy man appears more sensitive to his personal discomfort than a true ascetic should have been. Colombo’s autopsy, as reported by Polanco, vindicated Loyola as someone who bore with extreme patience his bodily infirmities.

Importantly for Loyola’s saintly reputation, the autopsy also uncovered Loyola’s first postmortem miracle. Polanco reported that, given his anatomy, Loyola only “lived due to a miracle for a great deal of time, since with a liver such as that, it would not be possible to live unless our Lord God, in providing for the necessities of the Company [of Jesus], made up for the weakness of his bodily organs and maintained him in life.”⁷⁸ That is, Loyola’s stones should have killed him long before; therefore God must have, through divine intervention, performed a continuous miracle through Loyola’s body to keep him alive. Autopsy had uncovered new and hidden miracles.