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Chapter 2. The Process of Canonization
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49 Chapter 2 The Process of Canonization Like any other candidate for sainthood in the later Middle Ages, Vincent Ferrer was the object of a lengthy canonization process (or processus, in the Latin of the papal curia), which was essentially a judicial trial. Because canonization involved a process and did not consist in a single act or declaration by the pope, a number of players were involved, each of whom was able to put, in however small a way, his or her own spin on it. While the basic steps of that process had remained fixed since the late thirteenth century, even in the mid-fifteenth century there was no standardized form or procedure for carrying out those steps.1 Particularly at the local level, the so-called inquests in partibus (local fact-finding inquests) were shaped by the prelates delegated to the task by the papal curia and by the procurers (or organizers) appointed by local clergy or secular leaders to organize, supervise, and in general see the matter through to completion. Here on the ground, the procurers and the clerics who ran the inquest in partibus had extraordinary leeway in shaping the picture of the proposed saint that would eventually be presented to the pope and College of Cardinals . In Vincent Ferrer’s case, four such inquests gathered information about the proposed saint. The organizers of these inquests carried out their tasks in decidedly different ways. Records survive from three of the four, 1. See Vauchez 1997, 40–57; Kleinberg 1989; Delooz 1969, 28–36; Krötzl 1998, esp. 120; 1999; Toynbee 1929; Kemp 1948; Goodich 1995, esp. 7–17; Wetzstein 1999, 42–58; 2004a, esp. 354–499; Klaniczay 2004; Lett 2008; Katajala-Peltomaa 2009. 50 CHAPTER 2 offering an excellent view of how various approaches led to differing portraits of the same man. If the primary purpose of the local canonization inquest was to gather a body of reliable evidence about the putative saint’s life and miracles, it also had a second, unspoken, function that could not have escaped the notice of its organizers. As records from the Brittany inquest into Vincent Ferrer’s sanctity reveal, the inquest could also serve as public spectacle. Vincent’s case is unusual in that the organizers included a meticulous description of the ceremonial aspects of the proceedings as part of the records they prepared to forward to Rome.2 In the tableau of ritualized gatherings and processions that surrounded the opening and closing of the inquest, its organizers and participants both portrayed the case for Vincent’s sanctity in pageant and encapsulated the steps of the canonization process in visual form. And these ceremonies were merely a foretaste of the hoped-for goal: the moment when the pope would proclaim publicly that Vincent Ferrer was a saint. An eyewitness account of the pageantry surrounding Vincent’s canonization in 1455 is one of the rare descriptions of such ceremonies we possess from the later Middle Ages.3 The papal canonization ceremony, too, offered a living tableau of Vincent Ferrer’s sanctity, complete with dramatic interruptions of divine intercession . And Vincent’s promoters, like corporate sponsors of modernday sporting events, got to associate their names publicly with the new saint’s. From beginning to end, the canonization process both generated the legal case for the candidate’s sainthood and advertised his holy reputation (or fama sanctitatis) to an admiring audience. And at every step of the way, the participants in the process had the opportunity to shape its content. Postulators like Duke Pierre II of Brittany, Juan II of Castile and León, and Alfonso V of Aragon, and the procurers who were often their agents hoped to present as strong a case as possible for the candidate’s canonization, arranging witnesses and questions to that end. One of the most striking aspects of the Vincent Ferrer process is the way in which the various parties interested in his canonization each tried to mold the proceedings in their own way. As contemporaries were well aware, human agents (and the hand of God) could have a profound impact on the judicial process that was canonization. And, as participants in the stages of the process also knew very well, the audience for the canonization process was not simply the papal curia but the entire body of the faithful. 2. This description is the most detailed of the few surviving examples cited in Wetzstein 2004a, 408–9. 3. On the ceremony, Dykmans 1985, 4...