In the first hundred years after the Council of Trent, Catholic authorities ordered the posthumous medical examination of almost all people who had died, quite literally, “in odor of sanctity.” Religious officials, physicians, and surgeons were appointed to verify whether the body presented signs of a preternatural (i.e., unusual but natural) or a supernatural (i.e., miraculous) nature. Partly as a response to Protestant attacks on the cult of saints, such experts examined incorrupt bodies smelling good after being buried, wondrous anatomical anomalies, and bodily traces of asceticism. Bradford A. Bouley's book is a study of “the role played by anatomical evidence in the creation of saints” (2) in this period. Unlike most studies done so far, Bouley focuses on the cases concerning “prospective saints” and not only on canonization processes, and looks for a comprehensive assessment of the phenomenon (2). The book is based on thirty-three cases taken from the records of the Congregation of Rites (founded in 1588) in the Archivio Segreto Vaticano, listed in the appendix, and the narrative is grounded in a methodological symmetry between the successful and the unsuccessful cases.

Bouley's study aims at contributing to the current debate about Catholicism, medicine, and natural science in early modern Europe. Recent scholarship tends to sketch a complex view in which religion and science—especially anatomy and medicine—were not enemies but negotiated with each other. Bouley decisively argues that “anatomy defended Catholicism” by helping the Counter-Reformation church assert its own identity and renew its cult of the saints. The author argues that through anatomical assessment of holy bodies, religion played a fundamental role in shaping medical and natural knowledge of the human body according to the new and rising empiricism of the seventeenth century. Even if the evidence provided by holy anatomies could be the subject of “double knowledge” (89) and be interpreted according to medical or theological needs, the fact that Catholic authorities valued and privileged the expertise of university-trained physicians helped boost the status of the learned medical man within a notoriously competitive medical marketplace. Medicine and the cult of saints “mutually reinforced one another” (131). Bouley shows an acute awareness that the Inquisition-style canonization processes organized by the Congregation of Rites must be read critically and obliquely, and that the physiognomy of Counter-Reformation sainthood must be looked for through the folds of these negotiations between officials, local believers, patrons, saints, and physicians.

Chapter 1 details changes in the process of canonization that happened after the Council of Trent and details the stages, characters, and major stakes of negotiating sainthood. Chapter 2 tells the story of how Catholic officials in Rome came to slowly accept the increased role of medical expertise in assessing sainthood. Against the background of a growing trend to trust experts (theologians, legal experts, artisans, and physicians) at the expense of popular piety, Bouley shows that in the sixteenth-century physicians became more and more interested in discussing unusual cases, including holy anatomies, and that local church officials picked up this trend for their own purposes, ultimately influencing the authorities in Rome. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two specific wondrous phenomena: miraculous incorruption after death, and asceticism (especially in the form of enduring the pains of kidney and bladder stones) as evidence of sainthood. Chapter 5 examines the role of gender in the shaping of both medical expertise and Catholic sainthood, and argues that the very act of performing a postmortem “established gender roles for all involved” (8): unlike what had happened in the Middle Ages, holy anatomies asserted the nonsexual, and therefore universal, identity of male saints and the subordinated, and sexual, nature of women.

Pious Postmortems is a masterfully crafted historical anthropology of the body and its different perceptions in the age of the Inquisition and the Scientific Revolution. Ultimately, it describes how popular devotion was translated into medical language, and how improvements in anatomy came to be used by the officials controlling the Catholic cult of saints. It is elegantly written, carefully researched, and impressively well supported by archival material. Bouley is able to show that religious and medical men differed, agreed, but above all negotiated about the truth of the human body. At times, the liveliness of this archival material pushes Bouley to underestimate factors other than the collaboration between religion and anatomy in the rise of an empiricist ethos in early modern natural knowledge (such as artisanal practice, the culture of collecting, mental habits related to commerce, etc.). However, this book seriously invites us to think about how Catholicism directly and indirectly fostered medical knowledge; it is a must read for historians of medicine, while also recommended for scholars of popular devotion and the social history of the Catholic Church.