- Title:
- Readers, sanctity, and history in early modern Spain : Pedro de Ribadeneyra, the Flos sanctorum, and the Catholic Community
- Creator:
- Greenwood, Jonathan Edward
- Date Created:
- 2011
- Degree Awarded:
- Master of Arts
- Subjects:
- Religion History, Modern
- Geographical Focus:
- Spain
- Supporting Materials:
- n/a
- Description:
- In early modern Spain and amongst Jesuits, the names Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anglican were synonymous with heresy. This thesis focuses on the Jesuit Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527-1611) and his vernacular compilation of saints’ lives the Flos sanctorum (Flower of the Saints) in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Spain. While the theologies between confessions changed extensively, each drew religious inspiration and solace from reading the lives of exemplars immersed in their respective confessional discourses. While Catholicism maintained the cult and the lives of saints in devotion, Catholics toiled to make hagiography into a collection of genres fit for official veneration. Extant since the early church, hagiography was a collection of literary genres about saints, which included their lives, accounts of their relics and miracles, as well as liturgical readings about them. In the early modern era, these texts provided a representation of the impact of print on religious life. Originally, early modern compilations of saints’ lives derived from the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacobus de Voragine, which circulated broadly since the thirteenth century. By the sixteenth-century and especially after the Protestant Reformations, readers distrusted the lives found in the Legenda aurea. The Flos sanctorum revealed the changing perceptions of sainthood and saints’ lives after the Council of Trent. Amongst Catholic hagiographers, Jesuits maintained a prominent position in this culture of reading, writing, and circulating saints’ lives. As the central figure of my thesis, Ribadeneyra operated in Madrid and compiled a collection of saints’ lives that corresponded with earlv modern Catholic discourse in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. His collection of saints’ lives, the Flos sanctorum, was exceptionally popular amongst early modermn Catholic readers. Simon Ditchfield acknowledges that hagiography contains an ignored component of the histories of early modern science, religion, and politics. The exceptions to this trend are the works on early modem hagiography by Ditchfield, Alison Knowles Frazier, and David Collins. Ribadeneyra’s Flos sanctorum scarcely appears in the historiography of early modern Catholcism or Spain. Meanwhile, the study of early modern life-writing has expanded to include fruitful discussions on the lives of Protestant reformers, present in the work of Irena Backus, James Michael Weiss, and Robert Kolb. This expansion, however, has not included the study of early modern Spanish or Catholic hagiography. Themes and approaches evident in the historiography of life-writing amongst Protestant confessions appear infrequently in discussions of early modern Catholicism or Spain. This study will examine the saints’ lives in Ribadeneyra’s Flos sanctorum, which provided narratives for early modern Catholics to assert a religious identity.
Source
- Preferred Citation:
- Greenwood, Jonathan Edward. 2011. "Readers, sanctity, and history in early modern Spain : Pedro de Ribadeneyra, the Flos sanctorum, and the Catholic Community", Department of History, Carleton University
- Link to this page:
- https://cuhistory.github.io/grads/items/hist_107.html
Rights
- Rights:
- Copyright the author, all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.