UCSB History Associates Lecture: “Pious Postmortems: Anatomy and the Making of Saints”, Professor Brad Bouley

During the Reformation, the Catholic Church suffered a crisis in one of its oldest and most powerful institutions: belief in the saints. To support the veneration of these individuals, canonization officials turned, it would seem paradoxically, to medical science. Canon lawyers and physicians thought that medicine could be used to prove miracles. The category of supernatural was, however, a tricky one and so canon lawyers, theologians, and doctors developed a range of techniques to establish the bounds of nature. This talk examines the means used to determine the existence of the supernatural in human bodies. Surprisingly, the tools employed in the search for the holy mirror and presage many of the techniques later used by experimental scientists to establish the factuality of unusual observations.

The speaker, Brad Bouley, completed his PhD at Stanford in 2012 and taught at Penn Sate until he joined the UCSB History department in 2017. His specialty is Italian history from the 16th through the 18th centuries. Bouley studies the intersections of religious history, the history of science, and the history of food and urban provisioning. His first monograph, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe, was published last year.

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