Cover -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Expertise and Early Modern Sanctity -- 2. A New Criterion for Sanctity -- 3. Negotiating Incorruption -- 4. Medicine and Authority: Creating Elite Asceticism -- 5. Engendering Sanctity -- Conclusion -- Appendix: Postmortems on Prospective Saints -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z
Summary
In Pious Postmortems, Bradford A. Bouley considers the examinations performed on reputedly holy corpses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at the request of the Catholic Church. Bouley concludes that neither religious nor scientific truths were self-evident but rather negotiated through a complex array of local and broader interests