Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (review)

Too much of a good thing, as everyone knows, can be bad. Such was the case in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, where one of the most difficult tasks faced by the Catholic clergy was that of dealing with excessive fervor among some of the most intensely devout members of their flocks. This conundrum is the focus of Inventing the Sacred, an exploration of several cases of feigned sanctity processed by the Spanish Inquisition in the mid-seventeenth century. Cases of feigned sanctity were fairly numerous at this time, and normally involved women and men who claimed spiritual revelations and ecstasies, and often passed judgment on current affairs, prophesying in the name of God. Discerning the difference between a genuine saint who engaged with the sacred, such as Teresa of Avila, and an impostor who "invented" the sacred–as the inquisitors put it—was seldom easy, for the very process of discernment involved scrutinizing some of the most distinctive teachings of the Catholic Church, and especially those that distinguished it from Protestantism, such as the value of asceticism and prayer, the possibility of mystical encounters with the divine, the accessibility of the miraculous, and the permeability of the boundaries between the spiritual and the material, and the demonic and the divine. Andrew Keitt does a marvelous job of dissecting several such cases, and of explaining how every one of them perched the inquisitors on the edge of a slippery slope.

By the mid-seventeenth-century, the criteria for discerning who was "inventing" the sacred were well established. More often than not, they were found guilty, but it is well known that many who were later canonized as saints also passed through the same ordeal, including John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, and Joseph of Cupertino. Maintaining certain standards was deemed necessary, not just as a question of authority or as a concern with charismatic claims outside of the church hierarchy, but also as a pastoral issue. Those accused of feigned sanctity were examined for signs of delusion, excessive pride, mental illness, or demonic influence. They were also screened to prevent the spread of false teachings and social disorder. Questioning the authenticity of popular holy men, however, was sometimes the same as questioning belief itself.

Andrew Keitt has achieved a remarkable feat at various levels. First, he has plumbed the archival sources and the printed literature very thoroughly and judiciously. Second, he has engaged with all of the scholarship on a broad range of related subjects: Inquisition studies, mysticism, social disciplining, and gender studies, to name a few. His engagement with the scholarly literature is so thorough, in fact, that it turns the book into a very serviceable annotated bibliography. Third, he has made these cases come alive for the reader, not just by crafting an engaging narrative, but also by placing all the individuals and events within their proper context, and giving each of them as much flesh and bone as any microhistory is capable of giving. Finally, he has also brought a keen intellect to bear on questions of analysis and interpretation. Not satisfied with any reductionist thesis, Keitt takes various approaches into consideration, and refrains from privileging any of them. The result is a balanced and very convincing analysis of the larger questions that lurked behind this phenomenon, including that of how the boundaries of belief were drawn in a contentious age. What the reader ends up with is a study that pays equal attention to the negotiation of status, the relation between elites and subalterns, questions of gender, and even the social and political dimensions of metaphysical questions, such as where the line is to be drawn between the world of the senses and that of the spirit, and what difference it makes to draw it one way rather than another.

Keitt's final...