Nineteen English and two French contributions to this volume analyse the ‘heroic model’ in Europe and around the world. They explore how Catholicism legally and devotionally shaped the concept of saints, martyrs and role models, which can be viewed through the lens of soft power, namely how ‘cultural hegemony’ was created and then projected globally (pp. 13, 14). In the brief introduction, the editors emphasise the extent to which saints are products of their time or the time of their canonisation. They also discuss the degree to which the process was part of Rome’s ability to legally cement its centralising authority, and, in line with nearly half of the contributions, the authors examine how the Jesuits created new models of holiness globally.
The volume begins, however, with a chapter that does not focus on the Jesuits: Timothy J. Johnson’s examination of how the Franciscans adapted to the matrilineal framework of Timucua culture (p. 15) as they developed a ‘maternal matrix of ministry’ (p. 26), more specifically, Friar Francisco Pareja in his 1627 Secunda parte del Cathecismo, which opens multiple avenues for future research on Franciscan devotion to matrilineal culture in American communities. This is followed by Paolo Cozzo’s chapter on the transfer of holy bodies by ecclesiastical figures with emotional ties to certain communities (p. 39), and the geographical focus is now Piedmont. Cozzo highlights how noble families played an even more prominent role in moving relics from Rome to their places of origin (p. 39). This long-term phenomenon ebbed and flowed but persisted from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth (p. 41), with occasional contextual shifts, yet the flow of martyrial remains from Rome to the rest of Italy ended right before the twentieth century (p. 44).
Eliseo Serrano Martín examines why one member of the Order of Friars Minor, Pascual Baylon, was sainted whereas another, Pedro Selleras, was not. He lays out the lives and posthumous assessments of these two friars and clearly describes the different stages, the people involved in testifying and the precise nature of their testimonies. Martín’s second example is intriguing: two attempts were made to achieve sainthood for Selleras, but without success, even though the similarities between the two friars are many (p. 66); Martín argues that it might be equally interesting to study those who did ‘not rise to the altars’ (p. 66). Perhaps the variables dictating the outcome of a martyr’s beatification are many and are not always measured similarly. This chapter is followed by Pierluigi Giovannucci’s study of how the Lambertinian tendency of assessing a martyr’s death was a significant factor in determining their sanctity (p. 86). Both chapters carefully investigate the church’s ‘legal regulation of holiness’ (p. 85).
The first of seven chapters on the Jesuits, Vincenzo Lavenia’s textual analysis of a seventeenth-century compilation of world events during the first half of that century, Il mercurio del decimosettimo secolo…, continues the theme of sanctity and miracles in a gazette and how this genre promoted holiness (p. 91). Lavenia emphasises that this genre provides an interesting counterpoint to Rome’s interpretation and scrutiny of non-canonised cults (p. 91), one that did not care about the papal Curia’s rules (p. 101). Guido Mongini continues research on the Jesuits and seeks to engage the question of the extent to which the Society of Jesus was anti-mystical (p. 108) through an examination of its groundedness in the early modern context of politics of enlightenment and charisms.
Antonio De Caro moves the study of Jesuit mystical experiences from Europe to Asia, to the challenges in finding, losing and rediscovering the tomb of Francis Xavier on Shangchuan Island; the quasi-miraculous search included Father Filippo Felice Carrocci urging his religious brothers to lie in the pit where Xavier was buried (p. 127). De Caro thus reconstructs the holy topography as he tracks the development of a sanctuary from the early modern to the modern period, and as the danger of pirate attacks on pilgrims persisted through the centuries in this liminal place of sanctity. Michela Catto’s chapter connects to De Caro’s in two ways: the regional focus – Jesuits in China – remains the same, and thematically Catto examines another tomb, Matteo Ricci’s, and how the fact that Ricci’s body was the first to be officially buried in China, not thanks to martyrdom but by virtue of his intellectual contributions, was a ‘first brick’ for the foundations of the Chinese mission (p. 142). Ana Carolina Hosne provides a third chapter on Jesuit missionaries in China and how they and their heterodox teaching mirrored the Confucian ideals of the Jianwen martyrs during the late Ming and early Qing, whereby literati in both the 1610s and the 1660s emphasised the enshrinement of Jianwen martyrs in their anti-Christian literature (p. 157).
After these three contributions on Jesuit missionary work in China, the collection introduces two chapters in French that examine the more violent deaths of two religious actors, a Franciscan in France and a Jesuit in New France. Frédéric Meyer examines the saintly, heroic or martyrial death of Bonaventure d’Amiens on the battlefield while tending to soldiers in 1629; his soldier’s death was only briefly fitted to the needs of the Church at that time. Pierre-Antoine Fabre carefully lays out the narratives of the extreme torture to which Jean de Brébeuf was subjected in the Americas and argues that witnessing an ultra-violent death was essential to the theology of the martyr (p. 194).
Federico Bonansea examines the Jesuit Pedro Claver’s hagiographical models, his vocation for martyrdom and the relationship between models of sanctity and historical contexts, as outlined by Franco Motta and Eleonora Rai (p. 198). In this case, it was Claver’s engagement with Cartagena’s slaves that fit well with the Church’s nineteenth-century desire to provide examples when they addressed the ‘cruelty of slavery and [sought to] uphold the dignity of slaves’ (p. 209).
Throughout this volume, the contributions maintain thematic coherence and provide global coverage of Jesuit, Franciscan and other Catholic actors, as well as the ways in which the Church moulded images, monuments and narratives to reflect models of martyrdom and sainthood.
