Founder, Healer, Blessed, Saint: Collecting and Interpreting Miracles in the Early Modern Iberian World

Accumulating miracles as evidence of sanctity is well-documented, but the process for the Jesuit founder, Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), was one of the first to rely upon a sacred economy in which news, medicine, images, and hagiographies disseminated globally. What made this possible was an empirical epistemology wherein the gathering of sense data was used to assess and represent the miraculous, even when these supernatural intercessions failed to receive official recognition from the newly established Congregation of Sacred Rites, the Catholic body that oversaw Ignatius’s canonization in 1622. This dissertation helps us understand information management in the early modern world as well as written, visual, and medical understandings of divine intercession through the synthesis of religious history, art history, and the history of medicine. To begin, I chart the development of the culture of miracles from Ignatius’s birth in 1491 to the start of the Iberian Union in 1580, a period that included the early years of the Society of Jesus and European expansion. My attention then shifts to the career of Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527-1611) and his writings on the life and miracles of Ignatius: the Life of Ignatius and Flos sanctorum. Once averse to miracles, he became, in the 1590s, the enthusiastic collector of the cures and exorcisms performed by the Jesuit founder since his earlier ambivalence toward them severely damaged the chances for canonization, a process further undermined by papal hostility. Ribadeneyra also established the visual culture of Ignatius and his miracles before it became the predominant domain of Flemish engravers. Print became the primary means to enumerate and illustrate the miracles of Ignatius. Images, however, took on a life of their own by becoming miraculous objects. As the Congregation of Sacred Rites examined Ignatius’s miracles, especially those performed through images, medical practitioners proved crucial to this process. Physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and midwives experienced and interpreted miracles with the aid of their first-hand experience, which clashed frequently with the traditional medical curriculum. Physicians, likenesses, and Ribadeneyra’s Life of Ignatius converged in the Iberian world through the reports excluded from the official canonization procedure. The incipient empiricism is situated globally with the aid of the Jesuits’ sacred economy, which collected and circulated representations, hagiographies, and reports of miracles