“`html

Rebecca Messbarger, a faculty member in Italian at WashU’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures within Arts & Sciences, has released a chapter entitled “Popes, the Body, Medicine, and the Cult of Saints after Trent” as part of “The Cambridge History of the Papacy, Volume III: Civil Society” (2025).

Released this spring by Cambridge University Press, the volume examines how successive popes and sources of papal influence have shaped various social and cultural changes, extending from Western Europe to the global south. Messbarger, an expert on the Italian Enlightenment, investigates how, in the century after the Council of Trent — which was a reaction to the Protestant Reformation — procedures for canonization began to focus on tangible proof and incorporated medical forensics.

This partnership between belief and medical science, according to Messbarger, would culminate in the 18th-century manuscript “De servorum Dei beatificatione, et beatorum canonizatione (On the Beatification of the Servants of God, and on the Canonization of the Blessed),” which still governs certain elements of the canonization process today. Published between 1734 and 1738 by the future Pope Benedict XIV, while serving as Archbishop of Bologna, this work “signified a crucial shift in the manifestation of papal authority that was significant for the understanding, knowledge, and treatment of the physical body.”

The post Messbarger contributes to ‘Cambridge History of the Papacy’ appeared first on The Source.

“`