Contents: Twelve True Stories The Roman Inquisition in Venice "Little Women" and Discernment of Spirits From Study to Courtroom Refashioning "True" Holiness Sorceresses, Witches, and Inquisitors Healers of the Soul Healers of the Body Rings and Other Things Time and Space Gender and Sex Pretense?
The product of many years of careful and systematic scholarship in numerous archives, Aspiring Saints reads beautifully and displays a remarkable intellectual range. Schutte goes beyond defining the subject exclusively in terms established by the ecclesiastical authorities, clearly showing how ideas of saintliness and diabolic influence were not so much separate categories but points on a spectrum of behaviors. Although these twelve cases were classified by the inquisitors, the book really becomes one about the defendants and their world. -- Edward MuirNorthwestern University, author of Mad Blood Stirring
Anne Jacobson Schutte is a professor of history at the University of Virginia. Her previous books include Pier Paolo Vergerio: The Making of an Italian Reformer and Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint (edited and translated).
[An] engagingly written and meticulously researched book... Schutte surveys an impressive array of material dealing with how pretense of holiness was conceptualized. -- Andrew Keitt Sixteenth Century Journal A compendious, broad-ranging account of the theological and canonical culture of the Counter-Reformation... Schutte deploys her twelve cases to illustrate the class and gender characteristics of the Inquisition's examination of would-be saints and their disciples. -- Stanley Chojnacki Journal of Social History The greatest merit of this masterfully-structured and elegantly-written book consists in its efforts to explore the discourse concerning the pretense of holiness and the judges' mental and cultural categories. -- Adelisa Malena Renaissance Quarterly A masterful synthesis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Inquisitional history, demonstrating how-at least from the Church's perspective-its post-Tridentine efforts to discipline, confessionalize, and centralize had paid off. Journal of Religion Learned and insightful... Schutte embarks upon a wide-ranging examination of the intellectual underpinnings of accusations of false sanctity and provides a wealth of information about court procedure, canon law, and theology. She is as interested in the development of ideas about 'genuine' and 'false' holiness as she is in their practitioners. -- Jodi Bilinkoff Journal of Modern History Schutte provides lucid introductions to topics as varied as inquisitorial procedure, medical theories of ecstasy, theologians' efforts to distinguish good spirits from evil ones, and learned and commonplace assumptions about gendered bodies. -- Daniel Bornstein Historian
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