The Punishment of Saints as Pious Blasphemy in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period

Abstract

This article is devoted to the wide set of practices of coercion and punishment of saints via their images that are well documented in the Catholic world from the early Middle Ages to the Early Modem period. According to the basic historiographical narrative, the humiliation of saints officially practiced by medieval monks and canons was prohibited by the Second Council of Lyon in 1274, leading to the gradual marginalization of this devotional “instrument." Nevertheless, exempla that presented the coercion of saints as a legitimate (although radical) method of communication with supernatural powers continued to appear in collections for preachers even in the Counter-Reformation period. At the same time, by the late Middle Ages and the Early Modem period, these practices had been gradually reinterpreted as superstition and/or blasphemy (sacrilege). This transformation is due to two interdependent agendas: the growing delegitimization and even demonization of popular religion by Church intellectuals and prelates, and the Protestant iconoclasm of the l6th and lyth centuries, which made the ecclesiastical authorities, who were anxious to protect the core of the traditional faith, much more sensitive to any form of irreverence or deviance toward statues or other images of saints.