In his book, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain, Andrew Keitt argues that the spate of prosecutions of "scandalous impostors" in Madrid in the first half of the seventeenth century reveals a profound conceptual uncertainty in the Counter-Reformation church about the nature of the supernatural. This analysis brings with it a critique of recent scholarship emphasizing "social disciplining" as a motivation for clerical actions; that is, that prosecutions of feigned sanctity were a means for the early modern church to control and monitor its flock more thoroughly. To make his case, Keitt proposes to employ an ambitious number of theoretical strategies: anthropological models, analyses of discourses of gender, the "social disciplining" analysis mentioned above, and analyses of the ontological questions raised by the participants themselves. Keitt states on page three that he considers his monograph a "thick description" of the topic, but that Geertzian model doesn't really pinpoint the book's intellectual strength. Instead, Keitt's analysis really comes alive in his unraveling of the epistemological questions raised by these trials.
The first two chapters set the stage for the rest of the monograph, describing one trial in particular and, in the second chapter, seventeenth-century Madrid. These are the chapters with the "thickest" description, and they do provide an important context for what is to come, particularly Keitt's summary of one trial in particular, and his explanation of the emergence of a separate inquisitorial jurisdiction for Madrid. That said, they are perhaps the least effective chapters, since they do not entirely clarify how this context will matter to the larger epistemological argument, and what about this context we should take as particularly significant for the argument Keitt wishes to make.
But as Keitt turns his attention toward intellectual questions in Chapter Three, the book comes into its own. Building from Dyan Elliot's work in particular, Keitt points to the importance of Jean Gerson in the construction of the church's understanding of the discernment of spirits. He also provides an excellent explanation of affective spirituality, recogimiento piety, and the challenges of understanding the many kinds of spirituality labeled "Illuminism" in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain.
Throughout, Keitt faces understandable difficulties marrying the narrative of multiple trials to his analysis of the intellectual questions underlying these trials. For the most part he navigates those difficult waters well, though this means that the trials tend to move from the foreground to the background depending on their importance to the chapter. In Chapters Four and Five, the participants move to the fore once again. In Chapter Four, Keitt deftly handles many of the issues that emerge for analysis in the trials themselves, including the complex relations between the aspiring visionaries and their handlers, the tensions between interiorized practices and exterior forms, and even competition among the putative saints themselves, finishing with a brief summary of the results of the trials. In Chapter Five, Keitt focuses on one document in particular: the autobiography of one of Madrid's aspiring saints, Maria Bautista. In this unique document, one beata, or holy woman, voluntarily wrote in her own hand an explanation of her spiritual history. Here Keitt is most thoughtful in his use of gender to analyze Maria's words.
Individual cases recede again in the last two chapters of the book, which take a broader view and focus particularly on epistemological questions. They are also the strongest and most interesting chapters of the work. Chapter Six, "The Miraculous Body of Evidence", tackles head-on the question that inquisitors and other religious thinkers of the period struggled with: what is the relationship between the natural, the preternatural (the actions of angels and demons, who could only work within the laws of this world), and the supernatural? Defendants were particularly reluctant to acknowledge the preternatural limits of the devil (177). Rather than seeing inquisitorial persecutions as a confident display of power, Keitt focuses on the ambivalent, hesitant intellectual grounds on which the inquisitors try to argue about the role of the otherworldly in this world. Caught between Protestant critiques of the miraculous on the one hand, and aspiring saints who confused distinctions between the supernatural and preternatural on the other, Catholic thinkers were left in what Keitt sees as a defensive posture, insisting on increasing proof for miracles, rather than seeing miracles as being proofs of sanctity.
In the seventh chapter of the book, Keitt compares this increasingly labored intellectual rationale of miracles with an abortive attempt to claim for the Castilian monarch, Philip IV, thaumaturgic powers. The effort fails, Keitt argues, not merely because of Iberia's long history of skepticism regarding royal healing power, but because the same epistemological questions driving suspicion of aspiring saints also makes thaumaturgic kingship suspect.
In his Conclusion Keitt emphasizes his interest in underlying theological questions, turning away from any mention of individual trials to address larger questions about how sanctity was understood in Catholic and Protestant Europe. This allows him to make explicit a critique implicit throughout the book, namely, that other scholars have misunderstood Baroque Catholic piety as equating the seen and unseen, appearances and essences. This is an interesting and important point. It might have been helpful, though, if the Conclusion had also tied together the complex elements of Keitt's argument--individual trials, gender analysis, thick description, epistemological questions, and political analysis--for the reader. A book as interesting and methodologically sophisticated as this one should do as much.
A brief word should also be said about Inventing the Sacred vis-a-vis historiography of the Holy Office. Though Keitt makes interesting and effective use of inquisitorial sources, it is not accurate to refer to Inventing the Sacred as a history of the inquisition per se. This is in many ways a good thing; by examining inquisitorial sources in a broader context (in this case, in contemporary discussions of the nature of the sacred in early modern Spain), Keitt is able to bring a fresh eye to the material and in the process contextualize the Holy Office itself. Keitt's argument that the Inquisition is a "mediating force" (136) in the life of at least some of those accused, for example, reinforces that the Inquisition is no longer seen by scholars as the stereotyped, repressive institution that it was once imagined to be. Similarly, Keitt's insistence on the ability of all the participants in these events to make use of the Holy Office (at least to an extent) for their own ends follows recent historiographical trends in writing on the Inquisition, and again may be in part a result of his attempts to place the Holy Office itself in the context of its time and place. Yet his discussion of how to read the sources, while good, might have reflected the extensive secondary literature on this topic. And his frustration with secondary sources on the comisarios, or assistants to the Inquisitors, might have been alleviated by making use of the all-too-infrequently cited article by Sara Nalle, "Inquisitors, Priests, and the People during the Catholic Reformation in Spain," Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 557-587. These minor criticisms aside, Keitt's work moves the historiography of the Inquisition forward in useful ways, particularly for what it shows us about how the Inquisition operated in situ in seventeenth-century Madrid.
In all, Keitt's is a useful book, and should interest many, providing as it does a close analysis of how elite thinkers and more mundane madrilenos understood sanctity in the latter half of the Hapsburg era.