Katie Harris died, too young, in the winter of 2025. And so I write this review with some sadness, but a good measure of happiness as well. If – on the level of scholarship – we can lament all the excellent work she promised, we can also celebrate the extraordinary work she left behind. In particular, we can celebrate this book that readily shows off both intellectual creativity and writerly panache to explain the ways in which early modern people conceptualised the past and by this means how issues of truth and discernment were worked out.
The book begins cinematically with two friars entering the Roman church of San Tommaso in Formis to steal a body. The body was that of St John of Matha, a thirteenth-century professor of theology and visionary in Paris who established the Order of the Most Holy Trinity and of the Captives, the Trinitarian Order. The two men belonged to that order and justified their theft by arguing that the corpse should be in a Trinitarian church and certainly not in a church in such disrepair. While the theft itself was controversial, the debates and questions surrounding the authenticity of the bones were more important. These questions and debates are at the centre of this book, which aims to ‘uncover the ways in which history and historical intervention and forgery were created and deployed as a form of proof within the culture of knowledge around the bodies of saints’, a culture marked by a ‘blend of traditional and modern modes of thinking about and interpreting the evidence for sanctity’ (p. 12).
Questions of authenticity resulted from problems related to Trinitarian identity. As Harris describes it, the Trinitarians, though organisationally fractured, rose into greater prominence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But they had a problem: the order lacked a saint. John of Matha pointedly lacked the aura of sanctity, as members of the order do not seem to have venerated him as a saint or proto-saint for much of the order’s history. This changed in the sixteenth century at which point there was not only the suggestion that Matha was a saint, but the claim that he was always taken as such. This novel dynamic seems to have been promoted by the discalced branch of the Trinitarians in particular, but it faced many challenges. There was no centuries-old hagiographical tradition, nor did the order have a consistent history of record-keeping – these were severe problems within a Counter-Reformation context in which there were increasingly strict requirements to ascertain sanctity in Rome. Enter Friar Juan Figueras Carpi, who in the first half of the seventeenth century wrote a chronicle of the order based on ‘real’ sources but also on ones that were pure fabrications. Such fraudulence made a certain amount of sense within the contexts in which they were created since ‘[m]any writers of sacred history felt that the history of the church should be shaped more by moral purpose than by historical accuracy – what mattered was not just truth, but Truth’. Harris continues, ‘While nobody openly endorsed forgery, it seems likely that a generous approach toward the sources for history may have extended to the crafting of those same sources – that is, in cases in which the needs of devotion … applied, the ends might conceivably have justified the means’ (p. 88).
These sensibilities were important because, although the miraculous qualities of holy remains remained proofs of authenticity, there was also a move toward ‘historical sources, methods, and modes of thought’ (p. 110). Harris describes with admirable clarity the rules of evidence that became more and more prominent, as shown in the work of the Jesuit rhetorician and theologian, Jean Ferrand. Ferrand, as Harris explains, discussed three types of evidence for the discernment of relics: the human, the divine and the mixed human-divine. Human evidence included things like objects themselves and their textual couching, while divine evidence included things like miracles connected to the object. Regarding the bones in question, it seems that human evidence was prized over the divine as a general circumspection concerning the miraculous became ingrained in the period’s assessment of sanctity. Proponents of the bones’ veracity thus talked about the bones themselves, their physical features, including, for example, their size which tended to conform with Matha’s supposed stature. Other artifacts such as a slip of paper found with the skull of the proposed saint became important as documentation to support the claims being made. Of course, these things were part of an ample array of evidences dependent on the textual findings used to provide proof of sanctity itself. The takeaway for Harris is that, in the seventeenth century, ‘holiness in all its aspects was a profoundly historical project, and just as written evidence was preferred for beatification and canonization cases, so too does it seem to have held pride of place as proof of the historicity, and thus authenticity, of bodies of saints’ (p. 126).
Evidence ultimately had to confront assumptions regarding proofs and certainty. The promoters of the relics argued that proof of the bones’ legitimacy should approach ‘moral certainty’, a form of certainty that allowed for the possibility of doubt and error, the application of which seems to have been accepted by the adjudicating Congregation of Sacred Rights. Nevertheless, the evidentiary armament of the relics’ promoters did not suffice. Questions about how the bones were transported, and by whom, as well as questions about the documented evidence brought to bear simply failed to convince.
The saga of legitimising the bones went on into the twentieth century, but proponents attained a victory in the eighteenth century when the Congregation of Sacred Rites allowed for the public veneration of the bones (though it circumvented the issue of authenticity). Advocates for the bones brought to bear evidence that tended to be more in line with historical scholarship of the day. And yet – and this seems terribly important – success was crucially dependent on factors that were not purely evidentiary. As Harris emphasises, the political context of a supportive Spanish monarchy probably played an important role. Moreover, it seems that recognition of the reputation of the bones, and not so much the complex and nuanced proofs presented, mattered most. In light of this, we must consider more closely the extent to which modes of thought and an ‘empirical new science’ (p. 11) can ever be thought to be meaningful beyond the realm of things like politics and occasional whim.
This book is an exemplary microhistory in that it uses a case study to better understand broader social, cultural and intellectual dynamics. It sheds light on how a different culture configured notions of truth and falsity, doubt and certainty. Moreover, it shows the poverty of teleological narratives about the rise of scientific culture by showing how the Church in spiritual matters could appropriate ‘secular’ scientific methods, or, perhaps better put, how these religious and scientific cultures co-existed and may have been mutually reinforcing. This latter possibility is not explored extensively, but it is certainly worth consideration.
Harris opens worlds of research possibilities and provides a great example of what sound and often dazzling scholarship looks like.
