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160 Chapter 5 Competing Stories WhoseVincent Ferrer Is It Anyway? When Pietro Ranzano’s new Life of Vincent Ferrer was approved by the brothers of his order in May 1456, it did not immediately have the effect its author and commissioners must have intended: to stabilize an “official” image of the new saint as a healer of Schism and converter of infidels. Rather, throughout the first half century or so after Vincent’s canonization,there were a number of competing stories told about the saint,both in words and in pictures.The new medium of print helped to keep these various images alive, alongside a still vigorous circulation of manuscript materials.In fact,in what would have been,for Ranzano,a frustrating irony, his Life never appeared in print in its entirety until the seventeenth century, and his fashioning of the new Dominican saint did not begin to reliably inform subsequent portrayals of Vincent until the last decades of the seventeenth century.1 Still,if Ranzano did not succeed early on in imposing a single meaning on the memory of Vincent Ferrer, his efforts did accomplish this much in the decades following Vincent’s canonization: a wide dissemination of the miraculous story of the saint and the chopped-up baby. Fifteenth-century authors and artists in fact had more information at their disposal than that provided by Pietro Ranzano in his Life and other 1. The first printed edition of Ranzano’s complete text was that of the Bollandists in the AASS in 1675.For a list of manuscripts,editions,and translations,see Kaeppeli and Panella 1970–93,3:254. A version of Ranzano’s life first appeared in print—though with some omissions and rewording— in Surius 1570–75; I have consulted Surius 1875–80, 4:172–217. On Surius, see D. Collins 2008, 133–34, and chapter 6. 161 COMPETING STORIES writings on Vincent. Already by the 1430s, Dominicans hoping to promote Vincent’s sanctity had begun publicizing the preacher’s career, even as crisis prevented the papal curia from devoting its attention to the cause of canonization . A short biography of Vincent embedded in the moral treatise Formicarius (The Anthill) of the Dominican Joannes Nider, as well as a set of Italian frescoes, is testimony to this early attempt to capture the holy man’s essence. After Vincent’s 1455 canonization, there were also the bull of canonization and the canonization inquests, which by papal order were to be made available for public consultation in Rome at the Dominican headquarters of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. At least two early biographers of Vincent Ferrer besides Ranzano made clear use of the inquests, particularly the miracle-laden Brittany process. And there were still other sources, now lost. A collection of Vincent’s miracles makes reference to an inquest held in Lérida in Aragon in 1451;some of those tales made it into Ranzano’s and others’ biographies. Archbishop Antoninus of Florence mentions a “letter of canonization”—most likely a missive announcing Vincent’s sainthood that circulated among Dominican houses prior to the issuance of the bull of canonization in 1458—an epistle that included at least some enumeration of Vincent’s miracles.2 And there was oral tradition, with its continuing honing of stories about the new saint and accumulating of new ones,as Vincent ’s intercession worked fresh miracles for the faithful. From these various sources, authors and artists pieced together their own Vincent Ferrers, at times in service of a cause—such as the promotion of Observant reforms in the Dominican Order—at times with an eye to nothing more than spinning an engaging and spiritually edifying story. And these tales and depictions stand as witness not simply to the different materials available to a late fifteenth-century hagiographer but also to the various ways in which individuals experienced the new saint.For at a layer further removed from the written and the painted,there stand the reactions of the faithful encountering Saint Vincent Ferrer, emotions and sentiments of which we have only the faintest of traces.But this much is clear:however much the Dominican order, the papacy, the crown of Aragon, and the duchy of Brittany hoped to mold the image of Saint Vincent Ferrer, Ranzano’s Life offered, for the time being at least, only a suggestion of how that depiction might turn out. The Earliest Portraits: Dux Aymo and Johannes Nider The first glimpses we have into a cult of Vincent Ferrer...

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