Description
Book SynopsisIn Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy''s toleration of unofficial saints'' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult''s merits or the saint''s orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority.
Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints'' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sourcesincluding vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutesPeterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the pheno
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Peterson (Marist College) focuses here on these local cults and the papacy's responses to them, and why followers were willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate them. As he finds, some cults were tolerated by the papacy and inquisitors, yet others were condemned posthumously, like Guglielma of Milan, or during their own lifetimes, like Gerard Segarelli.
-- T.M. Izbicki, Rutgers * CHOICE *
Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics asks us to rethink how the spectrum of religiosity might be defined. At one end are found saints, at the other heretics. Janine Larmon Peterson deftly demonstrates that the divide between the two can often be extremely narrow to the point of dissolving completely. One person's saint becomes another's heretic, and vice-versa. Peterson has produced a rigorous and thought-provoking study which allows us to see the rich textures and sophisticated debates underpinning medieval beliefs around sanctity and holiness.
* The Medieval Review *
One is struck by how consistently Peterson's arguments create a sense of a late medieval world in which nothing about the dispute over sanctity is predetermined, everything is in play, and everyone is aware of that fact. This is a strength of the book. This ambitious work both synthesizes a complex historiography in a concise, clear way and suggests new frameworks for the study of sanctity going forward.
* SPECULUM *
Table of ContentsList of Tables and Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Tolerated Saints
2. Suspect Saints
3. Heretical Saints
4. Holy Heretics
5. Economics, Patronage, and Politics
6. Anti-Inquisitorialism to Antimendicantism
7. Papal Politics and Communal Contestation
8. Methods of Contesting Authority
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
