In her previous books, Stefania Tutino uncovered the complexity of the Catholic Church, seen as a multi-layered organization, in which different systems of truth coexisted in a quite unstable equilibrium. With this new volume, she keeps the focus on her theoretical premises while trying to address a new audience and to experiment with an alternative way of presenting her findings. A Fake Saint is micro-history. As she mixes up different micro-historical trends, not only does Tutino aim to investigate a specific case in order to resurface thoughts and strategies of individuals and communities, but she also seeks to captivate a large public of non-specialists through an engaging reading. To accomplish this, Tutino provides an essential apparatus of footnotes and condenses the main bibliographical references into a lengthy final note.
The case under scrutiny revolves around the life of the “Blessed Giovanni Calà,” published in 1660 in Naples by his descendant, the Duke of Diano, Carlo Calà, and translated into Latin five years later. Giovanni was allegedly a captain of the imperial army in the late twelfth century. After a miraculous apparition of an angel, he decided to leave the military career and to follow Joachim of Fiore as a hermit in Calabria. In this new role, Giovanni performed several miracles and even received the gift of prophecy. The main problem with this holy man was that nobody had heard of him until his descendant Carlo decided to celebrate his deeds. Yet Carlo did not invent anything. His biography rested on solid evidence: medieval manuscripts discovered in local libraries, monasteries, and family archives—and, as the new taste for material culture required, the body itself of the saint, miraculously recovered in the woods around Cosenza. In other words, the case for Giovanni's sainthood was supported by the most up-to-date scientific knowledge of the time: antiquarianism.
The major obstacle in Giovanni's journey to canonization, however, was constituted by the Congregation of the Index—namely, the Roman agency in charge of book control. As the research of Andreea Badea has recently shown, in the course of the seventeenth century the Congregation was becoming an arena for erudite struggles, which took into account both the orthodoxy of the writings under examination and their historical truth. One of the most contentious fields of debate among Roman censors regarded works on alleged saints. The reason is quite simple: on the one hand, after the Reformation, papal authorities had become very careful in matter of cults and miracles; on the other hand, to prove someone's sainthood, it was necessary to rely first of all on historical evidence.
Here lies the core of Tutino's book. From this viewpoint, Chapters 6 and 7 are fundamental. They describe the legal opinions of Stefano Gradi and Ludovico Marracci, Roman scholars entrusted by the Roman congregation with the review of Calà's hagiography. Their texts are interesting at several levels. First, they show an innovative mastery of the new disciplines of diplomatics and palaeography. They discuss the quality of the writing material, the ductus of the handwriting, the problems of chronology, and the treatment of sources. And finally, they concur that the documentation that Calà had presented in support of the Blessed Giovanni's miracles was fake. Despite the results of their analysis, they staunchly disagreed on the outcome: Gradi suggested the cardinals to forbid Calà's books; Marracci instead recommended approving them.
This disagreement helps clarify the role of antiquarianism within the debates about truth in the Catholic Church. In the early modern world, truth was based more on credibility than on factual considerations. Beyond doubt, the evidence called upon to testify in favor of Giovanni Calà was untrustworthy. This did not mean per se that the Blessed Giovanni had never existed. In Marracci's view, there was nothing that prevented speculating about his deeds: after all, his life followed in the footsteps of Catholic hagiographies; if it was not true, it was certainly possible. It was not a task for Roman censors to decide whether the content of a book was true but only that it did not oppose the immutable truth of the Catholic doctrine. Calà's volumes did not pose any danger to the Church teachings and therefore could circulate without any restriction.
In the conclusion, Tutino affirms that her intention was to offer some teachings “about early modern Catholic culture and about life in the seventeenth century” (158). While the author's understatement is highly commendable, a reviewer should have no moral reservations about enlisting pedantically the different elements that Calà's story helps to uncover. First, A Fake Saint highlights the “governamentality of silence” that the Roman Curia developed to conciliate its claim for universalism with the drive for autonomy of local ecclesiastical organizations. As Christian Windler puts it, papal congregations often decided not to decide so that the internal pluralism of the Church could be preserved under the Roman roof. This was exactly what the Congregation of the Index did in the Calà affair: at first, it accepted Calà's books—then, it required the author to add a preface to the volumes, then again decided to prohibit them altogether, and, finally, chose not to take any stance on the matter. Second, the book shows how censorship should (or could) work. The Index's task was simply to test the boundaries of what could be said, without engaging in lengthy discussions about the quality or the convenience of a work. Third, antiquarianism was much more than a method, it was a quite fashionable strategy of social and political legitimacy. Calà's books presented themselves as a suitable means to convince large swaths of the population that the Blessed Giovanni had what it took for becoming a saint. The authenticity of the antiquarian documentation was a detail of secondary importance; what mattered was that historical evidence had the marks of credibility.
