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The Ambiguities of the Holy: Authenticating Relics in Seventeenth-Century Spain*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abstract
Recent scholarship has shown that, even at the heart of the Catholic world, defining holiness in the Counter-Reformation was remarkably difficult, in spite of ongoing Roman reforms meant to centralize and standardize the authentication of saints and relics. If the standards for evaluating sanctity were complex and contested in Rome, they were even less clear to regional actors, such as the Bishop of Jaén, who supervised the discovery of relics in Arjona, a southern Spanish town, beginning in 1628. The new relics presented the bishop, Cardinal Baltasar de Moscoso y Sandoval, with knotty historical, theological, and procedural dilemmas. As such, the Arjona case offers a particularly vivid example of the ambiguities that continued to complicate the assessment of holiness in the early modern period. As the Bishop of Jaén found, the authentication of relics came to involve deeper questions about the nature of theological and historical truth that were unresolved in Counter-Reformation theory and practice.
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- Copyright © 2012 Renaissance Society of America
Footnotes
The comments and critiques of several audiences have been indispensable in the preparation of this article. Special thanks are owed to participants in The Vision Thing: Studying Divine Intervention, a National Humanities Center SIAS Summer Institute (2007–08), and especially to the seminar's conveners, William Christian, Jr. and Gábor Klaniczay. Portions of this research were also presented at “Feeling the Divine”: Emotions in Religious Practices — Historical and Cross-Cultural Approaches, at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (2009). For their helpful input on earlier versions, I should like to thank Martin Claussen, A. Katie Harris, Karin Vélez, and Amanda Wunder. Many thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their cogent observations and suggestions. Research and writing have been made possible by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the joint U.S.-Spanish Fulbright Commission, Princeton University, and the University of San Francisco Faculty Development Fund. All translations are the author's, except where otherwise noted.
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