Rebecca Messbarger, a professor of Italian in WashU’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in Arts & Sciences, has published a chapter titled “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 traces how successive popes and vectors of papal authority have influenced a range of social and cultural developments, from western Europe to the global south. Messbarger, an authority on the Italian Enlightenment, explores how, in the century following the Council of Trent — itself a response to the Protestant Reformation — canonization procedures began to prioritize physical evidence and incorporate medical forensics.
This alliance between faith and medical science, Messbarger argues, would culminate in the 18th-century treatise “De servorum Dei beatificatione, et beatorum canonizatione (On the Beatification of the Servants of God, and on the Canonization of the Blessed),” which continues to regulate aspects of canonization procedure today. Published from 1734-38 by the future Pope Benedict XIV, while he was Archbishop of Bologna, the work “marked a pivotal shift in the expression of papal authority consequential for the conception, knowledge and treatment of the physical body.”
