Session Abstract

The dossiers of the monumental Acta Sanctorum, meticulously compiled starting in the seventeenth century, give the impression of providing the most “authentic” version of a saint’s life and miracles.  As recent scholarship has emphasized, however, the stories attached to individual saints could be quite malleable.  Whether one considers, like Cecelia Gaposhkin, the French Capetian St. Louis--whose image in the century after his canonization varied according to which religious order was celebrating him in their liturgical offices—or, like Gerald Parsons, the Dominican tertiary Catherine of Siena--who was variously packaged as patroness of Siena, of all of Italy, and of the whole of Europe as one moved from the later Middle Ages, through the nineteenth century, to the post-WWII era—a saint never stood for a single set of narratives, meanings, and aims.  The papers in this panel further explore the polysemic nature of medieval and early modern saints by focusing on the way stories told about the lives and afterlives of these societies’ holy persons transformed according to an author’s purpose, medium, location and intended audience.  The presentations address issues of translation, in the broadest sense of the word, as the papers trace the transformation of narratives from oral to written, Latin to vernacular, and word to image, as well as the metamorphoses of saints’ Lives and miracles as such tales circulated between Europe, Africa, and the New World.

In her paper on “Thomas Becket’s First Miracles,” Rachel Koopmans investigates the way in which miracle stories were mobilized in creating the cult of the twelfth-century martyred English bishop Thomas Becket.  Uncovering the strands of oral evidence behind miracles that were repackaged in written and stained-glass form, Koopmans demonstrates the complex webs of formal and informal communications that lay behind the inauguration of a saint’s cult in medieval Europe.  In the second paper, “Miracles of Mediation and Mobility in the Early Modern Spanish World,” Kenneth Mills looks at the role of miracle stories in shaping of Catholic Christianity in Spanish lands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Dissecting the way in which narratives of the miraculous were honed and repackaged for different societies and in different languages and media, Mills makes a powerful case for viewing miracle stories as a locus through which to view the religious and cultural anxieties of an expanding, multi-ethnic Spanish world.  The third paper, Erin Rowe’s “Black Faces, White Deeds,” directly addresses issues of race and ethnicity in the early modern era, as Rowe investigates the packaging of two Ethiopian saints for Latin American and European audiences.  Utilizing both written and visual sources aimed at various audiences, white, black, and mulatto, Rowe uncovers the way in which stories about the two black saints reveal Christians coming to terms with issues of race, ethnicity, and culture in an expanding Catholic world.  Taken together, these papers indicate how ever-changing stories about saints and their miracles offer a window into the lively cultural negotiations that undergirded the Catholic worlds of the medieval and early modern eras.