Making Saints in a Glocal Religion. Practices of Holiness in Early Modern Catholicism

20.–22.10.2021

Holiness in the early modern period was a complex system of beliefs and practices that responded to varied, and often conflicting, social, cultural, and spiritual needs. Like other expressions of piety, the early modern cult of saints was profoundly reshaped by the post-Tridentine Church’s attempts to impose uniformity and the concomitant expansion of Catholicism to overseas territories. Because of this creative tension, curial bodies in Rome often found themselves mediating between increasingly strict definitions of sanctity and local societies’ desire for official recognition of regional cults.

The conference „Making Saints in a Glocal Religion“ (20–22 October 2021, Istituto Svizzero and Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom), organised by Birgit Emich (Frankfurt), Daniel Sidler (Basel), Samuel Weber (Bern), and Christian Windler (Bern), built on the vibrant scholarship on early modern saint-making, providing insights into the polycentrism of early modern Catholicism, a religion at once deeply rooted in local contexts and committed to universal reach. Using this tension as the starting point, the participants sought to understand the „mechanics“ of early modern saint-making and the motivations of stakeholders in the complex interplay between the grassroots and the Roman curia that was at the heart of early modern Catholicism. During two and a half days, over twenty scholars of early modern Catholic sanctity explored the intricacies of saint-making in a glocalised religion in four panels.

The first panel, chaired by Birgit Emich, elucidated how the tension between local religious practices and the universal aspiration of the Tridentine Church played out in practice. Whereas early modern cults of holy men and women were often deeply localised affairs, shaped by interest groups in local or regional Catholicisms in Europe and overseas, the apostolic recognition of saints sought to integrate local devotions into the belief systems and pious practices of an emerging world religion. At the same time, the propagation of „universal“ saints by Rome had a significant impact on local contexts.

Simon Ditchfield (York) introduced the term „glocal“. To him, „glocal“ denotes not a potentially conflict-ridden opposition between a purported centre and a purported periphery, but rather the particularisation of the universal and the universalisation of the particular. Ditchfield argued that it was this reciprocal relationship between the particular and the universal in saint-making that enabled the emergence of Roman Catholicism as a world religion. Focusing his argument on three prominent actors affiliated with the Holy Office, he showed how the cult of saints was reshaped from within the heart of the Catholic Church from the late 16th to the 18th centuries. By focusing on these „exemplary lives“, Ditchfield showed how the process of saint-making started to be seen as an instrument to meet both universal demands and particular needs of the Roman Catholic church as it expanded to the four parts of the then known world.

Erin Rowe (Baltimore) argued in her paper that the meaning and representation of a cult could change over time as it became attached to distinct devotions. Using the example of Saint Efigenia, the daughter of an Ethiopian king who supposedly lived in the 1st century, Rowe showed how the Latin Church, Black Christianity as well as religious orders successfully tried to appropriate this saint at different times. Whereas the Latin Church invented her cult in the 9th century, the saint’s early popularity among enslaved West and Central Africans in colonial America was not due to her propagation by Rome, but the product of efforts within this community to prove the spiritual potential of Black Christians. Later on, yet another group discovered Efigenia for its purposes. Since the Carmelites could not keep up with other mendicant orders like the Franciscans or the emerging Jesuits in producing their own saints, they started to rely on ancient, particularly female ones like Saint Efigenia, in order to prove their ancient tradition. Tracing their descent back to the prophet Elijah, the Carmelites encompassed large swathes of ancient saints into the spiritual genealogy of their order. Many of these saints were holy people with established cults. While the relationship of a specific saint to the Carmelites could be questioned, the sanctity could not.

In the last paper of this section, Nadine Amsler (Fribourg) traced the relationship between Jesuit hagiography and Christian piety in early modern China. She showed how Catholicism interacted with the rich indigenous tradition of sainthood that the Jesuits encountered in China, and how missionaries and Chinese Catholic communities constructed sainthood by combining Roman with Chinese elements. The fact that the original Chinese veneration of holy men and women in all major local religious traditions bore a resemblance with aspects of the Catholic culture of sainthood helped to establish the latter within the local communities as Jesuit missionaries brought together local practices of holiness with Roman notions of sainthood. This in turn facilitated and encouraged the emergence of „sinified“ versions of Catholic sainthood, whose local cult placed heavy emphasis on the effectiveness of sacramental objects associated with the saints. Although European missionaries attempted to promote the cult of Chinese holy women, the latter failed to win official recognition from Rome. Amsler concluded that studies on local practices in places where Catholicism existed alongside other religious traditions as a localised minority religion could contribute towards a multi-facetted history of practices of holiness.

In his comment on the section, Vincenzo Lavenia (Bologna) reflected on the difference between the terms „global“ and „universal“. While the condemnation of the Chinese and Malabar rites in the early eighteenth century affirmed the universal aspirations of the Roman Church, it could not go unobserved that the global expansion of Catholicism elicited local forms of veneration. Traditional historiography, with its focus on what happened in Europe, understood the propagation of the Catholic faith to be closely intertwined with Iberian colonialism. When looking solely at formal canonisations, the Spanish Empire seems to have prevailed for a long time thanks to the pressure the Spanish court exerted on the papacy. However, the recent local histories of sanctity, as well as the panel, show a variety of cults that Rome often did not know how to deal with. As Lavenia concluded, the self-proclaimed „universal“ was often itself deeply embedded in the local context of the Roman curia, whose members had little time for the more hybrid, more open and more inclusive religion that was taking shape as Catholicism expanded beyond Europe. The slogan „think global, act local“ was not the one that guided the advancement of Christianity.

The general discussion focused mainly on „foreignness“ in the pantheon of saints. Although the panel identified patterns of universalisation within the process of saint- and cult-making, it was noted that this universalisation did not generally lead Europeans to adopt extra-European saints as their own. Although foreign saints and venerated individuals who died in odour of sanctity were used to advance specific agendas in Rome and other European contexts, they remained foreign. At the same time, the saint’s/saintly person’s foreignness could be seen as an asset to propagate the colonial as well as the missionary endeavours within the European society. Comparing global trade and missionary attempts, the participants recognised a need to explain the respective foreignness in a creative act that worked both ways, fashioned to fit the needs of the European or indigenous audience. The discussants identified missionaries as the Church’s virtuosi mediating between the particular and the universal.

Who were the beneficiaries of canonisations? What did different actors expect from the official recognition of their candidate for sainthood? In what ways did the Church benefit from canonisations? These were the questions posed for the second conference panel, which discussed holiness as symbolic capital. The section, chaired by Daniel Sidler, tackled the fundamental questions of prestige and socio-political relevance that formed the backdrop to canonisations in the early modern period.

Cécile Vincent-Cassy (Paris) started out with a case study on the last wave of canonisations of Spanish Habsburg saints. As part of a multiple canonisation in 1690–1691, three Iberian candidates were elevated to the rank of sainthood in Rome. In the light of increasing symptoms of Spanish decline, this exploit seemed to cement, at least in the field of sainthood, the Spanish Habsburg dynasty’s continuing claim to supremacy. By focusing on the different localities, forms and spaces of the celebrations following the canonisations, Vincent-Cassy set out to reconstruct what the actors and groups involved in them hoped to convey both about themselves and about others. Vincent-Cassy shed light on different contemporary perspectives on the canonisations, which not only hinted at the precarious state of the monarchy, but also at the diversity and rivalries within the Catholic Church and the monarchy. The universality of sainthood was called into question by regional and group-specific interests, manifesting themselves in the ad hoc hierarchisation (and even omission) of the canonised saints. Although the canonisations constituted an ideal opportunity for Charles II to demonstrate the vitality of his declining (and heirless) dynasty, the king opted instead to give clear precedence to one of the newly canonized saints, St. John of God, the founder of the Brothers Hospitaller. The resulting conflict with the mendicant orders and between rivalling court factions put at risk the integrative potential of the multiple canonisations. Neither the pompous festivities nor the prayers for royal offspring held in the processions in Madrid were able to disguise the disintegrating forces at work within the monarchy. Vincent-Cassy argued that the abundance of Spanish saints and the resulting rivalry further destabilised the monarchy.

Markus Friedrich (Hamburg) illustrated an order’s attempt to fashion its own saint. He compared two different Jesuit hagiographies on Petrus Canisius, focusing on the organisational challenges in the promotion of Canisius’ sanctity. Shortly after Canisius’ death in 1597, two hagiographies written by Jesuits were published – one in the Upper German province, one in Rome. Friedrich argued that saint-making in the sense of „saint writing“ was a chaotic venture, which was not governed by central decisions on who was to write the vita of a potential saint. Even in the case of the Society of Jesus, which is universally known for its hierarchical organisation, the promotion of saintliness was subject to the back-and-forth between Rome and the provinces. In Friedrich’s case study, the two hagiographies were less the product of ideological differences than the difficulty to coordinate initiatives in different locations.

If the two first contributions focused on the importance of saints for monarchies or religious orders, Samuel Weber highlighted an aristocratic family’s effort to elevate one of their own to sainthood. Drawing parallels between the early modern courtisation and the baroque revival of canonisation, he placed the aspiration of the noble Borromeo family to acquire a family saint within the broader bid to accumulate symbolic capital to distinguish themselves from rivalling aristocratic families. However, in his analysis of the fashioning of Carlo Borromeo as a family saint, Weber showed how the narrative had to remain malleable. He distinguished three consecutive narratives of his life that corresponded to different stages of the family’s relations with the Spanish Crown, which had a decisive impact on the stories the family told of their saint. While saints were seen as heavenly protectors for their families on earth, their narrative had to be groomed continuously for the saint to be useful to the project of cementing the family’s position within the aristocracy.

In his comment, Christian Windler emphasised the composite character of early modern Catholicism. According to Windler, the contributions showed the great internal diversity of early modern Catholicism, its „polycentricity“ or, as Windler suggested, highlighting structural similarities between the Church and early modern monarchies, its composite character. Based on the three papers that examined how the canonisation of an aspiring saint could be turned into symbolic capital before, during and after the successful conclusion of the procedure, he illustrated this new concept. While sainthood was by definition a universal quality, its uses were not only specific to communities but could even be divisive. Therefore, one might argue that early modern Catholicism was not only composite in terms of governance, but also in terms of religious practices. In addition, although it was the pope who ultimately ruled on canonisations, the narratives on which the papal decisions rested were cultivated by family clans as well as secular and clerical bodies that pursued their own agendas. The Curia’s stylisation of papal decisions on canonisations as independent from nepotistic networks made the symbolic capital of the achieved sainthood all the more valuable to actors who readily appropriated them in their quest for distinction.

The following general discussion reconsidered the concept of „composite Catholicism“, in particular its specifically early modern character. Several arguments were formulated in favour of the concept: legal and structural similarities between secular composite monarchies and the early modern Catholic Church (i. e. privileges of subaltern bodies, or the relations of subaltern actors to the respective „centres“); strong rivalry between competing institutions at all levels. It was only from the 18th century onward that Catholicism became more centralised and therefore less polyvalent. A second lively debate concerned the appropriateness of considering saint-making as a strategy of living clerical or secular actors alone: does this not underestimate the agency of the candidates to sainthood themselves in the process? Although it might be challenging to track down historical evidence, canonisations hinged on local miracles which conditioned the agency of a would-be saint’s earthly promoters – secular rulers, religious orders or families.

The making of saints was a complex between actors at the grassroots of local devotions and within the Roman Curia. Partly to contain the influence of translocal networks, the papacy sought to bureaucratise canonisations and regulate the procedure more strictly. The third panel, chaired by Christian Windler, revealed the dynamics between Roman and local procedures, the consequences of Roman formalisation for informal practices, the role of rivalling Roman congregations and the importance of personal networks in the process of saint-making. It offered new perspectives on the decision-making process underlying canonisations by considering the different agencies of actors in the local contexts and in the Roman „centre“ of saint-making.

Birgit Emich examined the role of kinship relations in canonisation proceedings. In doing so, she turned her attention to the papal nephews who in the heyday of papal nepotism in the decades around 1600 had left their mark on almost every area of papal politics. Due to the social and political importance of holiness, the canonisation procedure might seem predestined to be structured by the logic of gift exchange, with the papal nephews as patronage-managers of the pope playing an important role in the elevation of new saints. Surprisingly, according to Emich, their influence was mostly limited to their formalised roles in the canonisation process. Emich explained this with the preoccupation of the 17th century papal church to separate the logic of patronage as far as possible from the core areas of theological decision-making, including canonisations. Canonisation processes had to be shielded from criticism in order to become examples of a reinvigorated and observant papal church. The revised procedural rules promoted the differentiation of institutionalised process roles and hindered informal exchange relationships. Another factor that helped separate canonisation from papal nepotism was the evolving concepts of family and kinship within the saint’s cosmos and its interaction with the world. In this regard, Emich noted an increasing „spiritualisation of kinship and family“ in the ecclesiastical-religious context and a concomitant devaluation of biological-dynastic relations in the realm of holiness.

In the following contribution, Maria Teresa Fattori (Berlin) turned her attention to the juridical-bureaucratic dimensions of the apostolic process of beatification and canonisation. This procedure was meant to produce moral and juridical certainty in evaluating candidates for holiness. On the basis of the treatise „De Servorum Dei“ of Pope Benedict XIV (a former Promotor Fidei), Fattori reconstructed how the 18th century papacy sought to produce moral certainty in questions related to sainthood, which served as a basis for infallible judgement in the matter of canonisation. The multi-staged procedure, which even included the public display of dissent, was designed to generate legitimacy and achieve the necessary unanimity before universal veneration was prescribed. Still, in what Fattori called a „charismatic turning point“, the procedure in its decisive phase had to open itself up for divine intervention in order to reach its conclusion. Only through prescribed moments of silence and prayer, during which the pontiff sought God’s help in the matter, could the decision-making process achieve infallibility. Placing „De Servorum Dei“ and the pontificate of Benedict XIV in the longue durée of papal reforms, Fattori argued for a progressive centralisation and monarchisation in the matter of saint-making from 1588 (Congregation of Rites) to 1743.

Turning away from Rome to the local and regional level, Marie-Élizabeth Ducreux (Paris) drew attention to the fact that Catholic sainthood in the early modern period was a phenomenon that is only comprehensible by looking both at local veneration and universal recognition of saint’s cults. Taking less well-known cases of trials for canonisation and recognition of cults from a territory roughly coinciding with the composite monarchy of the Austrian Habsburgs, she elaborated on the meanings of „local“, „regional“, „global“ and „universal“ in the veneration of holy men and women. Ducreux argued that the circulation and movement of saints, both across time and borders as well from the local to the regional, global and universal level, need to be taken into account when trying to understand specific cults, their longevity, or their failure. Secular powers and dynasties, local and regional church exponents as well as the devout played an integral part in deciding over a cult’s local or large-scale recognition. By means of adopting patron saints and promoting their cults, by obtaining privileges for veneration or by pushing the canonisation process in Rome through high-ranking networks, the official status and the reality of saint’s cults were always a multifaceted affair. The classification of saints and cults into precise categories thus becomes problematic as Ducreux showed in her analysis of exemplary cases in which cults underwent significant changes over time. The cult of the „Good Thief“ served as an example of decentralised and delocalised expansion – or even „nomadism“ – of a devotion. Using the case of Agustine Gazotto, Ducreux showed the making of a „translocal“ saint, and in the case of Hemma of Gurk, the sudden resurgence of her cult seemed closely linked to the reforms of Joseph II and shifting diocesan borders.

Daniel Sidler provided insights into the making of „local saints“ in early modern Switzerland. Besides universal intercessors like Mary, post-Tridentine saints like Ignatius of Loyola or Carlo Borromeo or the Roman catacomb saints, there was an entire group of „local saints“, men and women who passed away in the odour of sanctity. Although their veneration was an integral part of the local cultures of piety, most of these figures were never beatified nor canonised and thus lacked the official Roman approval of sainthood. By looking at these cases, Sidler illustrated the desire and strategies of local actors to „make“ their own saints. The increasingly restrictive Roman parameters for achieving sainthood made canonisation an ambitious and rarely successful project. By denominating local saintly figures with the label Vielselige and by consciously forgoing a formal campaign for canonisation in Rome, local actors managed to create spaces in which the veneration of their own saints remained possible. Through spatial rearrangements that needed the support of influential ecclesiastical and secular actors and often in the slipstream of officially recognised saints, local saints were granted the honour of central places within churches and chapels. Discussing multiple examples, Sidler showed that important decisions about the making of saints were made at the local level. In doing so, he stressed the need to look at decision-making at different levels in order to understand the full breadth of the processes of the making and venerating of saints in early modern times.

In her comment, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger (Berlin) drew attention to the shared social logic in heaven and on earth. The history of sanctification, she argued, could serve as a mirror of all kinds of transformations in the early modern world. According to Stollberg-Rilinger this analogy expands even to the process of state-building, as the tendency to have dynastic, national and imperial saints demonstrated. All political entities needed the help of saints to integrate their territories. Transformations and changes in the veneration of saints could thus partly be explained by the changing needs for integrative and flexible cults. The actors in these processes were not only high-ranking aristocrats but also subaltern believers: the need for divine proximity permeated all segments of society. Secondly, she stressed the functions and consequences of formalisation in the early modern period. The stunning degree of formalisation could be considered as a prime example for legitimisation by procedure. Procedures legitimised both the final outcomes and the authorities handing down the decisions. Stollberg-Rilinger pointed out that the need to stage the canonisation procedure as consensual and the integration of the holy spirit can be read as signs of inconsistency that showed how little the Church trusted its own rationality. Questioning the extent to which the canonisation process really was separated from the logics of patronage, Stollberg-Rilinger cautioned against overrating the formal procedure and encouraged the audience to inquire further into the contingency of the single steps in the procedure.

In the general discussion of the panel, different issues concerning the mechanisms between local and Roman procedures in the making of saints were raised. It was asked what impact the universalisation of saints by means of canonisation really had on local veneration. When inquiring into the experience of devotees, no clear-cut correlation seems to have existed between the „hierarchical“ position of a saint and their efficacy as an intercessor. The discussion also dealt with the role played by informal gift-exchange and the logic of do ut des in the making of saints as well as on the rationality behind the apostolic decision-making process. Not only should it be of interest for future research to follow up on the actual degree of contingency in the canonisation procedure but also on the inherent contradictions and long-term consequences of staging decisions as infallible.

The final panel, chaired by Samuel Weber, addressed questions relating to the networks connecting the local with the Roman level. The four contributions analysed networks of actors as well as the objects that circulated in these networks and showed how these influenced the spread of veneration and the making of saints throughout the Catholic world.

As Christophe Duhamelle (Paris) pointed out, the discovery of catacombs in Rome in 1578 initiated a process that led to the extraction of tens of thousands of „holy bodies“. They were declared saints by the Roman bureaucracy and subsequently distributed as relics of early Christian martyrs throughout the Catholic world. After their extraction, the mostly unidentified remains were named, certified and then shipped off to far-away destinations, where they were distributed and integrated into local practices of faith. This was achieved by activating the networks of influential players in Rome – e. g., members of the Swiss guards and cardinals –, who acted as distributors of relics to their home country and fostered or strengthened links with Rome. As the relics allowed the families of these intermediaries to assert their status, the making of Roman saints meant also the making of social groups dependent on Roman networks. Thus, in the case of the catacomb martyrs, the making of saints and the making of networks often coincided, though the usefulness of these networks did not last in time. As Duhamelle showed, while Catholic elites came to dismiss the catacomb saints, the popular veneration of catacomb saints continued well into the 18th century and beyond.

Philipp Zwyssig (Zurich) analysed the veneration of Aloysius Gonzaga in the Valtelline and the Roman reception of miraculous events that had taken place in this Alpine valley. Introduced as part of a strategy to increase the symbolic capital of the Gonzaga family, the initially icon-based worship of Aloysius in Sazzo was transformed by the laity into a local practice of devotion which included the use of lamp oil to heal sick people. While the elevation to sainthood revolved around formalised procedures requiring a well-connected network of actors promoting informative processes in the social logic of court society, it was people’s worship, their devotional practices and the miraculous events attributed with them that ultimately determined the fame of sanctity. As Zwyssig put it, saint-making in the confessional age required not only a formal ecclesiastical procedure but also cult practices that met the everyday needs of the laity. Whereas miracles offered opportunities to the post-Tridentine church to promote its specific forms of religiosity, the subsequent spread of further miracles and their stories could hardly be controlled and, turned into a local practice of devotion by the laity, often took a dynamic of their own.

Sainthood, Andreea Badea (Frankfurt) explained, was closely linked to heresy and theological error. Therefore, during a canonisation process, while one party might use accusations of heresy to discredit a candidate for canonisation, the candidate’s supporters could use the same accusations to underline the saintliness of the person in question. As an example, Badea presented the case of María of Ágreda, a Spanish mystic, who had gained fame for falling into ecstasy after taking communion and for experiencing bilocation, thereby attracting the attention of the Spanish Inquisition who initiated a heresy trial. Turning the accusations of heresy to her advantage and skilfully defending herself using theological language and references to Teresa of Avila, María was finally acquitted with the support of the King of Spain. With the help of her confessors, she succeeded in deriving her own fame of sanctity from her brush with the Inquisition. The Franciscans eagerly adopted María’s bilocation experiences in order to defend their controversial baptismal practices in New Spain. Backed by Charles II of Spain and his mother, they pushed for her canonisation shortly after her death, efforts that were met with fierce resistance in Rome and France. Although her book „Mystica Ciudad“ was taken off the Roman index thanks to pressure from Charles II, the French translation was investigated by the Sorbonne and banned in 1696, leading to heated discussions about María’s orthodoxy. In doing so, the Parisian doctors not only challenged the authority of the King of Spain, but also that of the Papal Curia and the Roman Inquisition. María de Ágreda, as Badea argued, is a case in point for the clash of the „baroque“, feminine mysticism of a Spanish nun on the one hand, and the growing rigorism and scientific understanding of theology pursued in Rome and France on the other hand.

Jodi Bilinkoff (Greensboro) gave insight into the field of saint-writing by presenting the relations between John of the Cross (a Carmelite chosen by Teresa of Avila to initiate her reform among the male branch of her order) and his disciples during his time as prior of friaries. Based on testimonies given by friars recorded at the beatification hearings, Bilinkoff analysed the way in which the friars perceived John and pushed for his canonisation. With their testimonies, the friars participated in the process of saint-making by providing intimate details and at times strikingly surprising information on John. While the friars mostly praised John’s virtues and thus validated claims for canonisation, dissident testimonies of harsh treatment by John, complicating and contradicting the narrative of John of the Cross as having complete dominance over his sentiments, were equally present. After John’s death, his body, belongings and any objects he had touched were regarded as sacred relics, used to effect miraculous cures and rescues. As Bilinkoff showed, the promotion of John as a saint was begun by his confrères and carried on after his death, first by friars who had known him, and then by other biographers who contributed to the process of saint-writing.

In the last contribution to the panel, Jonathan Greenwood (Ottawa) dealt with the veneration of Ignatius of Loyola in the Americas and in Europe. The starting point of his paper was the emergence of a cult of Ignatius in Mexico and Peru around 1600. Seeking to canonise their founder, the Jesuits spread the news of miraculous healings in Mexico and Peru attributed to Ignatius throughout the world by sending documents to Rome and other places. Greenwood presented numerous examples of healings by means of prayers to Ignatius, often involving images, „sweet liquor“ or other devotional objects, and explained the way Jesuit letters spread the news of the healings. As Greenwood highlighted, not only news of miracles related to Ignatius were on the move, but also devotional objects themselves, for instance relics, images, engravings and medallions, used to heal bodily ailments or to protect from extreme weather events. Thus, the cult of Ignatius and especially the miracles attributed to him spread throughout the Iberian world, from the Americas, to Europe and Asia, adapting itself to local demands and beliefs. Although well known by means of Jesuit circular letters and compiled in an inventory of miracles by the Jesuit biographer Pedro de Ribadeneira, in the case of Ignatius, only miracles from Europe were part of the canonisation process, the material from outside of Europe was not taken into consideration.

In her comment, Eva Brugger (Zurich) reflected on the entanglements of saint-making practices and networking in early modern Catholicism, as well as the scientification of saint-making in the early modern period, which was closely tied to practices of writing and registering. This scientification, Brugger argued, became manifest in the transfer of relics, miracles and cures into lists and tables and in interviewing physicians as witnesses in order to provide the saint-making process as well as the objects with a scientific veneer. The procedure was embedded into religious, family or gender networks that initiated, promoted and oversaw the process. Saint-making, as Brugger concluded, was a process that required permanent negotiation to balance the divergent needs of actors integrated in multiple networks. To initiate the following discussion, Brugger pointed out that the economy of saint-making, i. e., economic interests that accompanied the appearance of new relics and saints, should also be taken into account.

A general discussion, responding to Eva Brugger’s call for the study of the economy of saint-making, closed the panel. The economic side of saint-making remains difficult to investigate, as information on financial transactions was often hidden by contemporaries or simply omitted by historians considering these questions potentially compromising. Given the strong demand for relics and devotional objects all over the world, the panel stressed the need for more research into the economic dimensions of the process of saint-making, with particular attention to be paid to the „gift register“ in these exchanges. Participants highlighted the strong contrast between meticulous procedures in Rome regarding relics and saints on the one hand and exemptions for all these procedures for martyrs and catacomb saints on the other hand. This was identified as the result of a separation between elite saints acting as role models that did not provide relics, and thousands of catacomb saints providing relics for the masses that acted as a loophole to compensate the lack of supply. In addition, the participants discussed the importance of printing and writing for saint-making, the ambivalent function of lists for historians as well as the promotion of saints by the Jesuits.

A summarising input by Birgit Emich opened the final discussion. She made two observations: Firstly, the panels showed saints to be a construction, the product of the negotiation between basic needs and demands in the fashioning of sainthood. Secondly, sainthood was always under construction, along the lines of space, time and society. Early modern Catholicism being polycentric – or composite, as others might argue –, there were centres at several levels and made up of different fields, interacting with each other. The temporal aspect played out not only in the rhythm and the course of the procedure of canonisation but also in the evaluation of a saintly person’s cults; the age of a cult could fuel veneration or be an argument to shut it down completely. Connecting different time-layers as well as different spaces, Emich presented „sanctity“ as the temporal dimension of universality. Lastly, Emich argued that the societal dimension in the construction of sanctity worked along the same basic practices of patronage and networks as well as categories of gender and concepts of foreignness.

In the following discussion, the assembled scholars tried to determine distinctive features of the early modern culture of sanctity. While some saw a crucial difference in the valuing of ancient and contemporary saints, others argued that this might solely be due to the way early modernists approach sainthood today. With the exception of the case study on the catacomb saints, the cults of ancient saints are hardly investigated, although ancient saints remained very important in early modern times. Generally, distinctions between new and ancient saints are problematic as there were not only continuities but also revivals of cults. Ancient precedents were used to promote modern saints. A determining factor was seen in the procedure of saint-making. While in medieval times saint-making began in the synods, the conference showed that the agents of sanctity in early modern times were manifold and that this could be seen as a decisive change. In addition, early modern concepts of holiness were characterised by specific ideals that had to be symbolised by a saint, such as celibacy or a virtuous lifestyle. As agents of the Catholic faith, saints could be moulded in accordance with the needs of the faithful. Therefore, the early modern period differed from earlier and later times by offering more possibilities for competition between saints.

Concluding the conference, three key suggestions for future research were made: Firstly, taking categories such as gender, age and status into account, intersectionality should be included into the methodological approach of studies on saints. Secondly, cases of unsuccessful canonisations should be considered more systematically as they are illuminating of the limits of the cult of saints. Finally, future research should take heed of the fact that early modern practices of holiness were not constituted of one-directional developments but of different layers, continuities and shifts in perception.