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  • Dévotion et légitimation. Patronages sacrés dans l'Europe des Habsbourg ed. by Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux
  • Damien Tricoire
Dévotion et légitimation. Patronages sacrés dans l'Europe des Habsbourg. Edited by Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux. [Collection Religions, 8.] (Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. 2016. Pp. 265. €23,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-87562-106-1.)

This anthology focuses on the fabrication of saints and holy patrons in Baroque Europe. It studies the reason for their multiplication, but also the limits of their official recognition and the failure of many cults. It explores how the devotion towards holy patrons helped to legitimize earthly institutions. Among others, it explores how cults were used to strengthen the links between dynasties and territories. [End Page 146]

The title of this collective volume is somewhat misleading because the book explores the history of sacred patronages not only in Habsburg territories, but also in Poland-Lithuania and in non-Habsburg Italian principalities and republics. The main emphasis lies on Baroque Bohemia, an area on which the editor, Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux, is an eminent specialist.

The volume raises a number of issues. First, it studies sanctity in its different dimensions. According to Ducreux, much has been written recently on "state saints," but holy patronages often had also other functions: they legitimated dynasties, local identities, religious orders, and moral conceptions, among others. To pick out one example in the volume, Sara Cabibbo and Magdalena Jacková show the plurality of functions that the cult of John of Nepomuk fulfilled in Sicily and Bohemia.

Second, the editor and several authors react against the view according to which the posttridentine Catholic Church was a homogeneous and highly centralized institution. They highlight the local character of many patronages and the fragmentation of the sanctity landscape (among others Cécile Vincent-Cassy and Paolo Cozzo). Even if the dynamics leading to the instauration of holy patronages were local, actors on the spot often tried hard to persuade Rome to recognize officially some cults and rituals. Yet local practices often existed through centuries without an official approval from Rome, and liturgy was far from being homogeneous across Europe.

Third, the articles highlight the uncertainties and opacity of procedures in Rome. The decision-making process was usually very slow, unpredictable, accompanied by many hesitations, and dependent on patronage and, not least, on chance. It is not always easy for historians to understand why some procedures led to an approval, and others did not, and the authors of this volume often confess their ignorance.

What is sure: we cannot say that there was a general and centralized campaign of the Catholic Church in order to assert sanctity against the ideas of "heretics." On the contrary, Rome blocked many demands coming from across Europe. The volume shows that east-central European Church officials had great difficulties in obtaining the recognition not only of new saints, but also of saints considered as such for centuries and of corresponding rites. However, it is not totally right to assert that "with the exception of […] Josaphat Kuncewycz […], no request to beatify contemporaries from this region […] was successful in Rome in the 17th and 18th centuries" (p. 24); was Stanislaus Kostka not a Pole?

As a consequence, uncertainties about the status of venerated figures were very common, as Ducreux and several authors point out. If we take into consideration that even saints whose cult was both old and very common were often not recognized as such before the nineteenth century, it is no wonder that historians have sometimes great difficulties in deciding whether a figure was actually considered a saint or not.

The volume presents interesting case studies whose numerous results cannot be summarized in the framework of this review. They show that modern historiography [End Page 147] about sanctity and holy patronages has lost its apologetical character and presents a complex picture of the fabrication of the saints and the interactions between religion and politics in the early modern times.

Damien Tricoire
Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg
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