In Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics Janine Larmon Peterson investigates regional saints whose holiness was contested. She scrutinizes the papacy's toleration of unofficial saints' cults and its response when their devotees challenged church authority about a cult's merits or the saint's orthodoxy. As she demonstrates, communities that venerated saints increasingly clashed with popes and inquisitors determined to erode any local claims of religious authority.

Local and unsanctioned saints were spiritual and social fixtures in the towns of northern and central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In some cases, popes allowed these saints' cults; in others, church officials condemned the saint and/or their followers as heretics. Using a wide range of secular and clerical sources-including vitae, inquisitorial and canonization records, chronicles, and civic statutes-Peterson explores who these unofficial saints were, how the phenomenon of disputed sanctity arose, and why communities would be willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate a local holy man or woman. She argues that the Church increasingly restricted sanctification in the later Middle Ages, which precipitated new debates over who had the authority to recognize sainthood and what evidence should be used to identify holiness and heterodoxy. The case studies she presents detail how the political climate of the Italian peninsula allowed Italian communities to use saints' cults as a tool to negotiate religious and political autonomy in opposition to growing papal bureaucratization.

Open Access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities

About the Author

Janine Larmon Peterson is Professor of History, Coordinator of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, and Director of the Honors Program at Marist College. She is the Medieval Europe Editor for the Database of Religious History, and has published in Past & Present, Scriptorium, Traditio, and Viator.

Reviews

Peterson (Marist College) focuses here on these local cults and the papacy's responses to them, and why followers were willing to risk punishment by continuing to venerate them. As he finds, some cults were tolerated by the papacy and inquisitors, yet others were condemned posthumously, like Guglielma of Milan, or during their own lifetimes, like Gerard Segarelli.

-- T.M. Izbicki, Rutgers * CHOICE *

Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics asks us to rethink how the spectrum of religiosity might be defined. At one end are found saints, at the other heretics. Janine Larmon Peterson deftly demonstrates that the divide between the two can often be extremely narrow to the point of dissolving completely. One person's saint becomes another's heretic, and vice-versa. Peterson has produced a rigorous and thought-provoking study which allows us to see the rich textures and sophisticated debates underpinning medieval beliefs around sanctity and holiness.

* The Medieval Review *

One is struck by how consistently Peterson's arguments create a sense of a late medieval world in which nothing about the dispute over sanctity is predetermined, everything is in play, and everyone is aware of that fact. This is a strength of the book. This ambitious work both synthesizes a complex historiography in a concise, clear way and suggests new frameworks for the study of sanctity going forward.

* SPECULUM *


Awards
Runner-up for Hagiography Society Book Prize 2020 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781501742347
Author Janine Larmon Peterson
Format Hardback
Page Count 270
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 25mm