Scholarship on medieval sanctity has long recognized that saints are made, not born, requiring agreement and negotiation among would-be saints themselves, promoters of saintly reputations, pious followers, and ecclesiastical authorities. Suspect Saints treats some of the obstructions that arose within this complex process in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, specifically when local reputations for piety and sanctity conflicted with ecclesiastical judgments about the “saint's” holiness, heterodoxy, or heresy. Such conflicts were especially sharp as local veneration was outweighed, at least officially, by the papacy's increasing monopolization of sanctity through canonization. Peterson “plac[es] these discussions of religious culture within very localized political change in Italy in the late Middle Ages,” notably the Italian peninsula's urban factions, papal-imperial conflict, and the mutation of “heresy” to incorporate anti-papal and pro-imperial sentiments and activity (2).

Part 1, “How,” surveys four different ways in which we witness disputed sanctity. Chapter 1, “Tolerated Saints,” considers those “saints,” usually laymen serving as aspirational models of holiness, who were not formally canonized but whose cults were tacitly tolerated by the papacy. These demonstrate the mismatch between papal and local lay “standards for sainthood,” and a response to the new formality of the canonization process. Chapter 2, “Suspect Saints,” considers the “ambiguity” of holy persons who, during their lifetime or posthumously, were suspected of heresy and whose cults “church authorities actively tried . . . to discourage” (46). As Peterson argues, such cases highlighted the challenges of discernment and the inherent limitations of inquisitio in determining truth. Chapter 3, “Heretical Saints,” leans particularly on Guglielma of Milan and Gerard Segarelli to show how the controversial status of some “saints” resulted from their followers’ subsequent heretical behavior or beliefs. Chapter 4, “Holy Heretics,” reaches the apex of disputed sanctity, as figures formally condemned as heretics during their lives could be heralded as saints in part because of their patient response to inquisitorial prosecution.

In part 2, “Why,” Peterson examines more closely the reasons and contexts for these disputes. Chapter 5, “Economics, Patronage, and Politics,” presents the economic and political incentives for local communities to support a saint's cult despite papal resistance. In chapter 6, “Anti-Inquisitorialism to Antimendicantism,” Peterson argues that skepticism about inquisitors’ ethics and sincerity in their prosecutions generated both hostility to their religious orders and to ecclesiastical authority. This then interpenetrated with communities’ resistance to papal discernment on sanctity. Chapter 7, “Papal Politics and Communal Contestation,” considers (in the spirit of Carol Lansing) how disputed sanctity engaged with the deployment of heresy accusations as a political weapon, until their “overuse and misuse” weakened their efficacy (195). The final chapter, “Methods of Contesting Authority,” identifies the ways in which communities used savvy knowledge of inquisitorial procedure and legal and canonization processes to combat challenges to their saints.

Suspect Saints greatly concerns inquisition and uses as a source inquisitorial trials (most notably, the Acta Sancti Officii Bononiae) without, however, being a book on inquisition. This leads Peterson to characterize heresy inquisitions as thoroughly unsuccessful, controversial, and disruptive (e.g., “By the late thirteenth century people had lost faith in the friars’ ability to unite Christians, strengthen the faith of the orthodox, and inspire heretics to recant” [159]; and “citizens routinely contest[ed] inquisitors” [196]). Peterson is certainly correct that prosecutions considered as unjust, and inquisitors considered as immoral, generated antipathy and even violence against them and their religious communities. However, and understandably for a book on disputed sanctity, Peterson does not seek out or acknowledge the absence of contestation within thirteenth- and fourteenth-century inquisitorial sources—the calmly (if insincerely) recanting heretics and the local publics who calmly witnessed them. While, then, Peterson very usefully argues for horizontal alliances between laity and local clergy, she maintains a stark binary in which inquisitors are outsiders and local activities constitute a distinct “oppositional” inquisitional culture that wholly and energetically rejects their influence (197–200).

Relatedly, it would have been fascinating for Peterson to set in more direct and sustained relationship her disputed saints and the several failed inquisitor saints in both Italy and southern France. Peterson briefly mentions this class of supposed saints and the fact that Peter of Verona could not get much devotional traction no matter how much encouragement for his cult came from popes and Dominicans (19, 99). Yet failed inquisitor “martyrs” appear here chiefly as confirmation of anti-inquisitorial hostility and resistance and not as another instance of the book's topic: the fragility of sanctity; conflicts among papal and local interests in defining sainthood; and the ideal combination of personally experienced holiness, an organic popular cult, and papal approval. (Peterson's analysis of inquisitor Pagano da Lecco, killed in northern Italy in 1277 and only a tepid beatus, would be quite rich.) The anti-inquisitorial violence of “disputation” generated even more contested sanctity. Peterson mentions Martin Donadieu (d. 1299), a Dominican from Carcassonne and failed saint. When Bernard Gui and Berengar of Landorre talked Pope John XXII out of canonizing Martin, they credited his underwhelming record of miracles to the Carcassonnais, rebels against inquisition at the time of his death and hence unworthy of his beneficial holiness. We can file this within what Suspect Saints’ conclusion emphasizes was the “hyperlocal” quality of making saints, with the preeminence of “experience[ing] the individual's divine gifts” (222, 223).

Peterson's ultimate argument is that communities conservatively protected their “traditional prerogative” to define saints and heretics against the innovation of the papacy's exhaustive claim to those definitions (5). A papacy that sought total control over determining sanctity did not realize the consequences of communities’ refusal to agree, consequences that Peterson has sketched quite vibrantly in this engaging and important book.