Finzione e santità tra medioevo ed età moderna ed. by Gabriella Zarri (review)

Finzone e santita tra medioevo ed eta moderna. Edited by Gabriella Zarri. (Turin: Rosenberg Sellier. 1991. Pp. 570. Lire 69,000 paperback. This volume contains twenty-two studies of a crucially important but neglected subject, the transformation on the official level of the definition of sanctity that happened in the early modern era. The book grew out of a meeting of scholars convoked to discuss the problem and a subsequent meeting at which the results of their research were compared. This process established the coherence of the volume, whose themes the editor presents concisely in her opening essay, while warning against reading the volume as if it were a "kaleidoscope" without firm structure (p. 9). The authors chart the evolution of the definition by paying attention principally to its verso side, that is, by examining the change in definition of sanctity's opposite number as it moved from "false" to "simulated" sanctity. Among the contributors are some well known on this side of the Atlantic, almost guaranteeing beforehand the high quality of the product -- Zarri herself, for instance, and Andre Vauchez, Adriano Prosperi, Gianvittorio Signorotto, Anne Jacobson Schutte, and Mario Rosa. While the book has as its central theme the change of the idea of sanctity or phony sanctity, it for the most part arrives at conclusion through the analysis of special cases, often with explicit correlation to the great shifts in culture and religious sensibilities of those centuries. The shift in understanding of what constituted sanctity was emblematic of the larger shifts. This makes the book an important contribution to the social history of that long era. With one exception, all the articles that deal with cases deal with women. Thus the volume makes a similarly important contribution to women's studies and to the history of male-female conflict. The juridical expression of the shift, nonetheless, provides a touchstone throughout for testing its course, especially in the important norms laid down by Urban VIII in the early seventeenth century and by Benedict XIV in the mid-eighteenth The volume terminates at that date with Rosa's excellent analysis Pope Lambertini but, significantly, the last name he mentions, the last to appear in the whole book is Bernadette Soubirous. Zarri briefly describes the essence of the shift in her introductory essay (p. 18); others give it substance in detailed studies and indicate its complexity, and Prosperi generalizes about it most effectively, relating it even to changes in ecclesiastical historiography. What was the shift? In the earlier phase the concern with the issue was more "theological" that is, intent on distinguishing "true" sanctity, inspired by God or the Holy Spirit, from "false" sanctity, inspired by the Devil. Within this framework visions and prophecies, for instance, were taken as marks of holiness -- or as marks of diabolical Intervention, with witchcraft one of its important manifestations. …