The Production of Truth in the Manufacture of Saints. Procedures, Credibility and Patronage in Early Modern Processes of Canonization

Abstract

This chapter traces the design of truthfulness and credibility in the two modes of decision-making: bureaucratic procedures and spiritual and liturgical settings that converged in the canonization of an early modern blessed or saint. These procedures were linked with the careful framing or, if necessary, obfuscation of local and clientelistic mechanisms that proved pivotal to the manufacture of saintly personae, but that simultaneously threatened to thwart the universal validity of the papal decision to elevate a person to the honour of the altars, shedding light on the production of truth in early modern Catholicism.