medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
I must take issue with this characterization of Cruz. (The book is still in print, TAN Publishers, Rockford, IL.). In her introduction she outlines how she undertook extensive correspondence to verify references to incorrupt bodies. She is not naive or overly credulous. She knew she could not trust every account she ran across. She did not have resources to visit each site claiming to preserve an incorrupt body, thus conducted her research by mail. But she is quite aware that this makes her results less firm than if she had empirically verified them herself. She is careful in her introduction not to overstate her case. In a number of instances, of course, the evidence that existed in the past is now gone and cannot be empirically verified today. Here she is open to more criticism about taking written sources at face value, but, as we have gone round and round on this topic on this list, just how hermeneutically suspicious and how credulous a historian ought to be regarding sources from the more distant past is a matter of one's underlying philosophical commitments. And the scientific work on the sudarium of Oviedo and the Shroud of Turin and the titulus fragments (Carsten Thiede and Matthew d'Ancona, _The Quest for the True Cross_) should at least make us cautious about the extremely skeptical approach--in more than one instance, claims that had been sweepingly dismissed as impossible or preposterous since the Enlightenment are being corroborated by new techniques. Does this mean that all claims of extremely unusual phenomena should be believed? Of course not. They simply should not be easily rejected because of their unusuallness. At the very least, Cruz's book shows that the phenomenon of verifiably incorrupt bodies of saints is real and surprisingly widespread, even if some claims are exaggerated or false.
Clearly this phenomenon would benefit from some of the sophisticated (and expensive) analysis devoted to the Shroud of Turin (www.shroud.com). I agree that Cruz's book is not entirely satisfactory and that more thorough study should be done. But I don't think she should be considered merely piously credulous. She operated with the same basic critical method that any good historian does. Cruz lacked the resources to carry out the definitive work we should like to have, and someone ought to take it up, but Cruz did not lack a commensense critical spirit, which is more than one can fairly say of Nickell.
Did she fail to live up to her standards in some instances? Was she taken in by false information in some instances? Undoubtedly yes. Is the book definitive? No. But it is more honest about itself than Nickell's. Obviously both have to be used critically until someone does visit each and every site.
I would recommend the account by Herbert Thurston in _The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism_. Thurston was a Jesuit and employed the available critical methods of his day (ca. 1900). It is shorter than Cruz and by no means constitutes the definitive work we need, but it offers a control factor against which to read Cruz and Nickell.
Dennis Martin
>>> [log in to unmask] 03/10/02 01:02PM >>>
medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
At 4:25 PM +0100 3/10/02, julouis wrote:
> > Katherine of Bologna (d. 1463) Katherine is another non-decomposing late
>> medieval Italian female saint (there seems to be a disproportionate number
>> of them)
>
>Like st Jean-Marie Vianney (d.1859) in Ars (near Lyon), ste Bernadette
>Soubirous (d.1879) in Nevers and... John XXIII !
>Have someone informations about the non-decomposing saints ?
I am sure there are better sources, but the only one I have
information on is _The Incorruptibles_ by Joan Carroll Cruz. I don't
know whether it is still in print, but I believe so. The author is
very credulous and repeats every story she has heard, whether it is
substantiated by evidence or not. (And since it is a book for a
popular audience, she does not cite sources.)
There is also a popular book by a skeptic, _Looking for a Miracle_ by
Joe Nickell, which criticizes a few of these cases. He has his own
prejudices, of course, but it is still an interesting book.
--
_________________________________________________________
O Chris Laning
| <[log in to unmask]>
+ Davis, California
_________________________________________________________
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
**********************************************************************
To join the list, send the message: join medieval-religion YOUR NAME
to: [log in to unmask]
To send a message to the list, address it to:
[log in to unmask]
To leave the list, send the message: leave medieval-religion
to: [log in to unmask]
In order to report problems or to contact the list's owners, write to:
[log in to unmask]
For further information, visit our web site:
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/medieval-religion.html
|