This project aims to analyze the first model of female sanctity during the Counter-Reformation. Teresa, canonized in 1622, has traditionally dominated the study of this period and has been assumed to be the main model of female sanctity proposed after Trent. However, sixteenth-century models of female sanctity were not monolithic, as demonstrated by the object of study of this project. An earlier model, promoted after the Council of Trent and before Teresa’s canonization, was constituted by a group of Castilian women who lived between 1400 and 1550 and partially responded to the Italian model of sante vive, first studied by G. Zarri. While the historiography of the Counter- Reformation in Italy has dealt with the evolution of this model after the Council, in Spain studies on female sanctity have started from the canonization of Teresa to analyze her numerous followers.
Influenced by St. Catherine and her Italian imitators, the Castilian living saints enjoyed revelations and charisms; they saved souls from Purgatory; they tried to reform the Church and with their prophetic gifts participated in politics; some of them performed miracles during their lifetime; they undertook extreme fasting and penance and were encouraged by an audience that took note of their trances.
Nevertheless, unlike their counterparts in the Italian peninsula, none of them has been beatified so far.
Until Teresa’s canonization, these women maintained a reputation as saints supported not only by a popular cult but also by publications approved by post-Tridentine civil and ecclesiastical authorities, where their lives were summarized, glossed, and adapted to the new religious climate. The rewriting of their lives between 1588 (when canonization was resumed after the Reformation) and 1625 (when the first new rules against unauthorized cults were introduced) shows how conceptions of female sanctity were changing before Teresa gave the final push and emerged as the new paradigm, somewhat superseding the previous model. These living saints have already been dealt with by the two previous projects directed by Sanmartín, which began to publish their lives in the Catalogue of Living Saints. However, their importance in the Counter-Reformation has not yet been analyzed, nor why this model of female sanctity was not successful in the end.
The main objectives of this new project are 1) The completion of the Catalogue of Living Saints with new additions; 2) The study of how the living saints constitute the first hagiographic model in the Counter-Reformation before the canonization of St. Teresa and the subsequent decline of the paradigm; 3) The completion of the database and geolocation based on the new design implemented at the end of the previous project.
