The Material Culture of Sainthood in Early Modern Global Catholicism

The rise to global dominance of the Iberian empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries corresponded with a period of upheavals and reconfigurations in the Catholic church. The veneration of saints, and particularly the conferral of sainthood on contemporary individuals, became at once a strident point of emphasis and a focus of internal and external controversy. As new saints and blesseds began to ascend to the altars, their cults brought into focus not only conflict with Protestants, but also Rome’s responses to Catholic reform movements, and the tailoring of the Catholic faith to communities of converts around the globe. In zones of Iberian conquest and trade, the veneration of saints was a supple religious practice through which the universalizing impulses of the Counter Reformation and locally relevant forms of lived religion adapted to one another.

Within the abundant recent scholarship on the making and veneration of new saints in the early modern period, texts have been overwhelmingly privileged over images as a category of historical evidence. Originating from the 'Global Economies of Salvation (GLOBECOSAL)' project funded by the ERC and the SNSF, this series, which includes monographs and edited collections, aims to give images and, more broadly, material culture the attention that they deserve in the study of early modern Catholicism’s increasingly global dimensions.