Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics: Disputed Sanctity and Communal Identity in Late Medieval Italy by Janine Larmon Peterson (review)

Suspect Saints and Holy Heretics uses thirteenth- and fourteenth-century disputes over local saints’ cults as a means of examining the conflicts that arose between an imperial papacy and the independently minded communes of northern and central Italy. Janine Larmon Peterson thus engages with several historiographies, including the late medieval cult of the saints, heresy and inquisition, the centralization and bureaucratization of papal administration, and the Guelf-Ghibelline conflicts that wracked the region throughout this period. By taking a comparative approach which examines several saints’ cults and by remaining focused on points of conflict, Peterson expands our appreciation for the extent to which the question of who had the right to define the sacred was often contested in the Later Middle Ages, and closely tied to the vicissitudes of papal and local politics.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, in four chapters, delves into the evidence provided by more than twenty cases of disputed sanctity. These chapters outline a typology of four different kinds of disputed sainthood. The first, tolerated saints, were those individuals who were venerated by the local community but never received papal canonization; suspect saints were those whom inquisitors suspected of heresy but never successfully condemned them for it, thus enabling local veneration to continue; heretical saints included figures who received local veneration, but whom inquisitors eventually condemned as heretics and whose cults they sought to suppress; finally, holy heretics were individuals whom members of the local community venerated even though they had already been condemned for heresy.

The second part, also divided into four chapters, explores the broader rationales, trends, and strategies that lay behind the conflicts surrounding the cults, whether those be economic interests, anti-mendicant and anti-inquisitorial sentiments, or communal resistance to papal ambitions. The eighth chapter, examining “methods of contesting authority,” is especially interesting in that it demonstrates how local agents understood and had recourse to legal methods and judicial venues when challenging the actions of inquisitors. Throughout the work, Peterson is persuasive in her framing of the disputes as between local communities and the imperial papacy, rather than between lay and clerical social orders. She shows how the local clergy, both regular and secular, often allied with the local laity in combatting the efforts of the papacy’s typically mendicant and inquisitorial agents. Peterson also clearly demonstrates how orthodox members of local communities continued to venerate certain figures after inquisitors had expressed their suspicions or even condemned those figures of heresy.

One of Peterson’s goals is to contribute to recent scholarship that seeks to correct a historiography that has over emphasized the “hegemonic” position of the late medieval church (p. 4). In particular, by exploring cults which were never canonized, she hopes to contrast her work with that of Vauchez, which centered the papacy by examining documents produced within the machinery of the papal bureaucracy. Yet the papacy looms large throughout her book. Indeed, the very categories Peterson uses to classify a saint (tolerated, suspect, heretic) depend on the cult’s relationship to papal authority. Some of the strategies communities used to contest inquisitorial authority participated within what Peterson calls an “oppositional inquisitorial culture” (p. 197) by accepting the logic of the inquisitorial office and its methods. This, to me, seems to be the very definition of hegemonic. Nonetheless, this is a careful study of a wide range of texts, including a great deal in manuscript sources. Peterson provides nuanced readings of the evidence and intervenes in numerous scholarly discussions. What she has produced is a text that is essential reading for all scholars interested in the religion and politics of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy.