Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618-1750 (review)

Schutte notes that the term pretense in the English subtitle implies fraud, but the original Italian implies only something akin to "claim." The sixteen people investigated by the Venetian Inquisition either claimed themselves, or were claimed by others, to have shown attributes of sanctity. Whether such episodes were real or faked is an issue that Schutte raises at the outset and then skirts, concluding that the question is badly posed, based as it is on modern notions of truth value and reality that would have been out of place 400 years ago.

That her sample is not large and the outcome of several cases is uncertain are beside the point, since Schutte did not aspire to write only the history of pretesa santita' in Venice. Having introduced the cases, Schutte drops them altogether for the better part of 100 pages, looking into belief and repression in early modern Europe at large. She shows the Inquisition in Venice to have been mild (only two people executed in a century and a half), yet inclined to prejudgment. She then turns to the issue of the discernment of spirits, examining theological writings and manuals for spiritual directors. The authors of these tracts, she demonstrates, exhibited consistent skepticism regarding visions, doubting divine origin and imputing devilish inspiration or fraud. Most of these writers presumed visionaries to be "little women" whose weakness of mind and spirit made them susceptible to error.

At this point, Schutte leaves pretended sanctity altogether and examines analogous phenomena. Witchcraft might seem an odd topic in this context, since none of the sixteen hapless people in Venice were accused of it, but in this deft treatment, it fits: Both witchcraft and pretesa santita' involved the direct participation of the laity in the mysterious, without the intervention or sanction of ecclesiastical authorities, and both phenomena were subject to investigation and repression. The same could be said of demonic possession and exorcism, as well as inedia (seen in those who claimed to eat virtually nothing or to subsist on communion wafers alone), which are the subjects of subsequent chapters.

The overwhelming majority of those involved in such practices were women. Seven of the sixteen investigated in Venice were male, but they were not so much visionaries themselves as avid promoters and/or enablers of visionary women. By engaging in such activities, these women took at least a measure of control over their lives, and often attained a status and level of authority denied them by the structures and institutions of their day. They also tended to be poor and uneducated; the authorities' concentration on "little women" carries with it implications of class as well as gender. For their part, theologians and inquisitors were always patriarchal, and often patronizing. The intent of exorcist, confessor, spiritual director, and inquisitor alike was to exact submission and obedience from the women whom they oversaw.

Schutte does not see the whole business of inquisition as a crudely functionalist reinforcement of class- and gender-based hegemony, though such reinforcement was certainly a consequence. At the heart of it all was a profound anxiety: Were these visions the work of God or the devil; were they the delusions of the weak-minded; or were they simple fraud? Schutte suspects fraud in a few cases, and dismisses another case as simply an unjust accusation. The rest, however, lay in a gray zone where sincere conviction, self-promotion, and pretense might not be mutually exclusive. There was certainly some "self-fashioning, with an intent to deceive" (227), but it might have been mixed with a conviction of God's presence. Since a prophetic religion like Christianity always allows—at least in principle—that marginal people can be divinely inspired, the inquisitors had to admit the possibility even though they wanted to deny that...