Abstract
The reputation of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556), the founder of the Society of Jesus, as a miracle-worker grew during the 1590s, which included his aid in childbirth through handwritten relics. This article examines obstetric miracles associated with Ignatius in the early modern world prior to his canonization in 1622. Through his letters and signature, Ignatius rescued women and their offspring during dangerous and near-fatal deliveries; delayed certain neonatal mortalities long enough for a baptism to occur; and allowed the delivery of a dead fetus to save the mother’s life. While the claims had no bearing on the official declaration of his sainthood, the attributed miracles are emblematic of the concentric and transoceanic nature of his cult. Information and material pathways contributed to the promulgation of the founder’s sanctity in the confines of women in labor and childbirth that had their own patron saints for centuries.
Around the time of his beatification in 1609, Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) seemed to have developed a reputation of helping expectant mothers.1 Now among the blessed, Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus, was closer toward the official recognition of his sainthood through the process of canonization. The following year, a team of engravers in Antwerp prepared an illustrated life of Ignatius, which depicted his biography in fifteen prints.2 The final print had nine scenes showing the miracles done by God through Ignatius with one illustrating his assistance of a woman in labor. Attendants held her in a birthing chair so that the midwife could deliver the infant, while others in the room, men and women alike, prayed. In the background, two women washed a newborn. Surrounded by luminesce, Ignatius “delivers from danger, many in labor, to life.”3
Ignatius as an obstetric patron predated the beatification and extended geographically far beyond Antwerp. This component of his cult first materialized in 1594 with a miracle from Turány, in the then kingdom of Hungary, which was his earliest documented intercession in a dangerous pregnancy. The place of supernatural occurrences in early modern religion ought to be examined due to their prevalence. Historians of science and medicine have examined the import of miracles to both scientific inquiry and the determination of Catholic sainthood.4 Interventions in labor, according to Jacalyn Duffin, were a minute fraction of the miracles featured in causes of canonization during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.5 Yet with Ignatius, the obstetric miracles attributed to him went global with instance after instance surfacing around the world as recounted in annual letters, biographies of the founder, and histories of Jesuit provinces and missions. Mothers and their offspring did not feature in the roster of miracles prepared by the Congregation of Sacred Rites (csr) in favor of the canonization of Ignatius, which was granted in 1622.6 Yet between 1594 and 1622, obstetric miracles seemed to be a worldwide phenomenon with their frequency and range prompting further investigation.
When scholars have examined his canonization, the administrative procedure paired with its bureaucratic and political wrangling are usually overemphasized. This is much to the detriment of quotidian devotions.7 Instead of examining the process, I look to the sources for what they say about early modern religious experience with my attention directed toward miracles, especially those involving women. Recent work has described how Jesuits circulated news and representations of Ignatius and his miracles. All the more compelling are the intercessions that did not make the cut, such as those reported beyond Europe.8 These overlooked events conveyed the breath and the depth of the saint’s cult that operated outside the auspices of csr, which was made possible by the Society’s use of early modern global networks to circulate information and devotional objects alike.9 Some research focused on German-speaking regions and China has uncovered the obstetric aspect of the founder’s cult, although it tends to be regarded as a late seventeenth-century phenomenon.10 This article argues that the relationship between Ignatius and women had a longer and more global history than currently presented. Much has been made of the spiritual, handwritten, and fiscal exchange between female patrons and members of the Society since the lifetime of Ignatius.11 Yet cultic devotions of women to Jesuits remain overlooked, which is a missed opportunity to assess lived religion in early modern Catholicism.
The article focuses on handwritten media as thaumaturgical relics. These include signatures and letters attributed to a holy person, which are among medieval and early modern “textual amulets” as examined by Don Skemer.12 As objects accompanying Jesuits in their global movements, relics cannot be disassociated from the history of the Society’s missions.13 Proximity to a holy person allowed relics to transmit their presence anywhere across time and place, whether for personal devotions or for the establishment of new churches as required by canon law.14 Relics enabled the transoceanic circulation of Ignatius in myriad forms. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, for example, a piece of the Jesuit founder’s sackcloth stopped a hurricane in the Caribbean in 1598, whereas an unspecified relic, a “precious treasure” (precioso tesoro) dislodged a trapped vessel on route to the Philippines the following year.15 Information and material pathways developed the transoceanic cult of the Jesuit founder by way of his intercessions on behalf of women in labor and childbirth that had had patron saints for centuries. The canonization procedure did little to develop the global cult of Ignatius. Rather, it was propelled by the reportage of obstetric interventions and its sacred conduits. This popular devotion spread quickly and widely, which has implications on the mechanisms behind early modern sanctity and the possible agency of communication networks. The relics of Ignatius circulated in the same pathways as the accounts of these miraculous relics. These narratives had a mobility comparable to other devotional objects, be they relics or images.
Sainthood and Childbirth
While the Virgin Mary was the best known, Margaret of Antioch (c.289–c.304) became the widespread patroness of childbirth during the twelfth century, a status she maintained into the early modern period. Because she was said to have burst through the belly of a dragon that ingested her, Margaret asked God to allow her to help women suffering in childbirth. Margaret’s efficacy was invoked most powerfully through the application of her girdle or belt on the woman in labor. Other reported aids included the placement of handwritten materials, including manuscript copies of her biography. Though the cults of Mary and Margaret were the most popular, there were other patrons of dangerous childbirth, including Anne, the mother of Mary in Christian apocrypha.16
These patronesses had to coexist with a new generation of holy men and women dubbed the beati moderni (modern blessed) after the establishment of the csr in 1588, some of whom aided women in labor. The noted founders Filippo Neri (1515–95) of the Oratorians and Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) of the Discalced Carmelites performed miracles of this type respectively in life and posthumously.17 Four years after his death Carlo Borromeo (1538–84), the reformer and archbishop of Milan (in office 1564–84), intervened in a difficult pregnancy. Thanks to his shirt placed upon the mother, the child who was thought to be dead, lived and was named Carlo after his intercessor. The mother recovered fully as well. A painting from 1610 commemorated the event as part of a cycle made at Milan Cathedral to honor his canonization that year.18 Jesuit beati moderni assisted mothers in problematic pregnancies as well. The “Apostle of Asia” Francis Xavier (1506–52), for example, performed miracles of this type in Goa and Paris decades before his beatification in 1619 and his canonization alongside Ignatius a short while later.19 The relics of Stanisław Kostka (1550–68), a young Polish novice beatified in 1605, assisted that same year two women in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine).20 Yet, these reported miracles paled in number when compared to Ignatius, whose patronage was worldwide as well.
The cult of Ignatius breached the traditional curative domains of the Virgin Mary and Margaret. Male patrons infringing upon the domain of female saints corresponded with the increased control by physicians and surgeons, usually men, in what had been the area of expertise of midwives. According to one early modern medical text, delivering babies was the purview of midwives. However, this treatise proffered aid elsewhere in the form of treatments to ease pregnancy pains, to allow mothers to breastfeed, and to ameliorate fertility issues in both men and women.21 Accusations of witchcraft and infanticide also dogged midwives, further delegitimating their involvement in pregnancies.22 While there was an increase in male patrons, the traditional patronesses continued to be petitioned. A polemical work by a Scottish Calvinist pastor in France, amid disparaging commentary on the invocation of saints, observed that “pregnant women, and those who feel their contractions, besides the Virgin Mary, invoke particularly Saint Margaret: lest the Virgin Mary […] being occupied elsewhere, cannot help.”23 Even among parties hostile to Catholic devotions, the cults of the Virgin Mary and Margaret were linked with childbirth into the seventeenth century. Despite the ascendency of Ignatius in this regard, traditional patronesses remained in place.
The new glut of male patrons challenged the long-held primacy of women saints’ specialty in pregnancy-related miracles. This development overlapped the rising tensions between male and female medical practitioners in obstetrics. The realities are messy. This is evident in a case involving Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo (1538–1606), the noted archbishop of Lima (in office 1579–1606). When Toribio intervened in a difficult childbirth somewhere in the viceroyalty of Peru, the csr in Rome consulted with local midwives for their assessment of the event as beyond the forces of nature.24 Masculine and feminine medical expertise and supernatural efficacy shared a conflicted, yet mutual relationship.
Yet, in the closing decades of the sixteenth century, miraculous aid for women in labor, at least as reported in Jesuit annual letters, was the eminent domain of agnus Dei. Literally the lamb of God, agnus Dei came from unused pieces of Paschal candles from the previous year, which were melted and then formed into disks emblazoned with a lamb carrying a vexillum (military banner). Popes would bless the wax circles the first Saturday after Easter in their first year as pontiff and every seventh year subsequently. Although production after 1592 was controlled by the Cistercians, the Society of Jesus were vital players in the distribution chains of these devotional objects, demand for which exploded once late sixteenth-century popes prompted a cult for agnus Dei. And their use to aid women in labor was widespread since the fourteenth century and in their circulation in global Catholicism.25 Jesuit annual letters between 1586 and 1601 spoke of twenty-one instances of assistance provided for mothers in labor by agnus Dei in the Sicilian province and throughout the French and German assistancies.26 But by 1602, reportage on miracles involving these wax objects suddenly ceased in favor of those by Ignatius. Despite some temporal overlap, the cult of Ignatius supplanted them as the primary obstetric patron according to the Jesuits.
Ignatius as Patron of Labor and Childbirth
Ignatius childbirth miracles assume three forms: one, the rescue of both mother and offspring during dangerous and near-fatal deliveries; two, the delay of certain neonatal mortalities long enough for a baptism to occur; and lastly, the allowance of the delivery of a stillborn to prevent maternal death.27 As Italian scholar Alessandra Foscati had demonstrated, miracles of this type and the importance of baptism along with maternal and neonatal rescue had featured in canonization processes since the thirteenth century.28 Despite their absence during the informative and apostolic processes of the canonization proceedings of Ignatius, childbirth miracles are emblematic of the concentric and transoceanic nature of his cult.
The earliest reported childbirth miracle occurred in Turány (now Turany nad Ondavou, Slovakia), a predominantly Calvinist and Slovak-speaking remote town in the kingdom of Hungary.29 In 1594, a Jesuit priest traveled to Turány accompanied by a noble landowner to hear the confessions of local Catholics. As the Jesuit readied himself in the local chapel, two women waited for him, explaining that they came on behalf of a woman in her third day of labor. Death seemed imminent for both mother and child. Once the priest arrived and assessed the situation, he removed from his breviary a piece of a garment worn by Ignatius. He then said: “Put this upon the chest of the suffering in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit.”30 The pregnancy went through safely with the mother delivering a healthy baby. The Jesuit also kept in his breviary an image of the Virgin Mary, a longstanding obstetric patroness that he paired with the textile relic of Ignatius to assist the suffering mother. Mary remained vital to miracles of this type, but relics of Ignatius now supplemented devotions to her. The child was baptized soon after as Georgius Ignatius to honor the Jesuit founder. Given Turány’s location, the infant likely had the Slovak iteration of the Latin name: Juraj Ignác.31
This earliest documented obstetric intercession contained the commonplaces of future accounts. For starters, the Jesuit who facilitated the use of devotional objects often went anonymous, something especially evident in the annual letters. Names, when included, were of persons not affiliated with the Society and not even necessarily the parents. The annual letter of 1594, for example, identified the noble István Petheő (d.1611) as the unnamed Jesuit’s traveling companion to Turány.32 The women whose lives and offspring Ignatius saved were often anonymous as well. So too were any attendants, be they physicians, surgeons, and midwives. One exception was if the child, as was the case in Turány, received the name of their intercessor. The terrestrial agents involved in these miracles mattered little. Instead, the posthumous feats of Ignatius were significant as evidence of his sanctity. Moreover, the import of these events happening in places amid Catholic evangelization was yet another sign of the faith’s primacy against others with the Society at its forefront. In contrast, the media used in these miracles are almost always mentioned. In Turány, a combination of a contact relic and a Marian image resulted in the safe delivery of a healthy child. The pairing of different invocatory techniques would become routine in the following decades, but the early stages of Ignatius as a patron of childbirth often relied on a single object.
The Power of Handwriting
Of 126 miracles, nineteen cases involved the founder’s handwriting (see Table 1). It was a relic through its connection to him, whose body was imprinted onto the paper with his name. Other saints had miraculous handwritten relics. A letter signed by Germain of Paris (c.496–576) reportedly performed miracles. In one case, the handwritten object healed a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Bedridden for two years and given a dispatch of the saint by the Abbot, the monk “started to lick the signature of the letter with his tongue and then he was healthy.”33 Many beati moderni had relics of this type. The letters of Teresa of Ávila, for example, were valued for her manual production of the document and her concluding signature.34 A Roman church in 1627, meanwhile, had among its relics “two letters written in the hand of Saint Carlo Borromeo.”35 Nor was the phenomenon exclusive to Catholicism. As German historian Ulinka Rublack argued with respect to Protestant reformers, “grapho-relics” sourced from handwritten inscriptions and signatures of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and other Lutheran reformers had cultic value, which were circulated from Wittenberg by former students of the university to friends and adherents. These, however, were not conduits for God to perform miracles through one of his saints.36
Ignatian signatures as compact handwritten objects circulated widely as evident in one found in Francis Xavier’s personal reliquary kept in Kochi, India, after its opening in 1559.37 They were also highly sought after as seen with Alfonso Carrillo (1556–1628), the rector of the Jesuit college in Sellye in southern Hungary, who sent four requests between March and August 1600 to Rome asking for a signature.38 By the seventeenth century, the handwriting of Ignatius had a reputation for miracles. Around 1591 in Burgos, a Jesuit named Francisco Gómez applied a scrap with the founder’s autograph to heal first his head pains and fevers and then a Flemish man with typhus.39 A signature exorcized a woman in Palma de Mallorca in the Balearic Islands toward the end of August 1598. She had been possessed for eleven years, which caused her to hurl herself against the wall, to levitate, to make animal noises, and to froth at the mouth. But a priest placed the autograph on her. After some convulsions and pained expressions, the demon left her and she was her old self and grateful for God’s blessed hand working through his servant, Ignatius.40 In subsequent decades, Jesuit missionaries in the Andes carried this among other devotional objects to perform exorcisms. The founder’s signature cured a knee ailment in what is now Bolivia in 1609, which was followed the next year by an Indigenous servant’s speedy recovery in Cuzco from injuries sustained in a fall while in the mountains.41 Prior to 1601, the handwritten signature of Ignatius was at the center of five obstetric intercessions, all but one in Palma de Mallorca. The same signature that performed an exorcism assisted four women, who all gave birth to healthy children in pregnancies deemed either fatal or full of complications.42 Orintia Casalia in Rome, meanwhile, had a pregnancy which seemed destined to end in her death and that of her child. But the signature of Ignatius allowed the mother to recover through the delivery of a stillborn child.43
Ignatian Epistles
Letters were regarded as relics too as evident in a lengthy index by Angelo Armano (1572–1611), which was housed previously at the Jesuit college of Manila. This inventory from 1601 cataloged the 155 relics sent to Manila under the auspices of Visitor Alonso Sánchez (1547–93) during his stay in Rome (1589–92).44 Armano counted among them a letter by Ignatius from August 9, 1552 addressed to a Jesuit in Lisbon.45 Although by 1552, Ignatius no longer physically wrote his letters, he often reviewed, annotated, and then signed the materials going out. And along the way to its destination, Jesuits duplicated and forwarded dispatches, which were frequently shared with non-members.46 Even if a letter was not in the founder’s hand, it was his composition and possessed proximity to him. With 6,700 extant letters attributed to Ignatius, 6,500 of which date from Juan Alfonso Polanco’s (1517–76) time as the founder’s secretary (1547–56), there is no shortage of possible relics in circulation. Frequently copied for onward circulation, their number is immeasurable.47
The epistolary obstetric miracles occurred first in Girona, Aragon (1601) followed by Augsburg, Greater Germany (1604), Almagro, Toledo (1611), and Macau, China (1618). The annual letters recounting the events in Girona and Augsburg supplied few details.48 The Society’s establishment in Girona took over a centuries-old Augustinian monastery in 1581 but the college did not receive Acquaviva’s endorsement for another seventeen years. A thaumaturgical letter of Ignatius’s held at the college legitimated the organization’s place within the city’s spiritual landscape.49 What better way to convey your religious supremacy than possessing a miraculous object?
In Augsburg three years later, Ignatius made a twin birth possible. One sixteenth-century medical text described twins as unnatural with breech births being especially dangerous for the mother and requiring a midwife of the utmost skill.50 Though no source is listed, the letter most likely came from the Jesuit college in the city. Established in 1581, the college was bankrolled by the Fugger family, famous for their financial prowess and ability to access information throughout the world. Lutherans in the bi-confessionalized city founded a college the same year resulting in two competing institutions based on hardening religious lines.51 The colleges of both Girona and Augsburg supplied external signs of God blessing their presence within their communities by housing these letters, something so indelible to Jesuit everyday routines.
The Fuggers of Augsburg also had a trading post in Almagro, two hundred kilometers south of Madrid, where they built a local church.52 It was here in 1611 that another letter from Ignatius was involved in a miracle. At the time, the Jesuits had recently gained approval to construct a college in the Dominican university town after a nine-year process.53 The miracle occurring the following year was another legitimating sign for the Society’s presence in a place disinclined to have them there. The incident in Almagro introduced a wrinkle to the formulaic narratives. After the successful birth, the mother and much of the family wished to name the child Ignacio, vocally opposed by others. While grateful for the Jesuit founder’s intercession, some thought that the child should be baptized Lorenzo since his birth occurred on the Feast of St. Lawrence (August 10). Unable to reach a consensus, the two parties cast lots. Ignacio won three times, but the Laurentians asked for a fourth round, which Ignatius also won, and the child received his name.54
This selection ritual allowed God to choose his preference in what seemed a random draw, which was evident elsewhere. Across the globe, a similar debate was in full swing in Silang, Philippines. An image of Ignatius was involved in a successful live birth in 1611. In the inevitable discussion of an appropriate name for the infant, Ignacio was the frontrunner, although others preferred Francisco. Six ballots went into a vessel. Three read Ignacio, while Francisco appeared on the three remaining ballots. A young girl then drew slips on which Ignacio was written five times in a row, which is physically and mathematically impossible. The sixth and final round, which presumably would have yielded a tally for Francisco, was yet another vote for Ignatius. All six ballots in the name selection decision carried the name of the Jesuit founder, which convinced the parents to baptize their son Ignacio.55 In both Almagro and Silang, Ignatius’s successes in name selection debates after aiding in a dangerous pregnancy showed how God favored the founder through wanting infants to carry his name. It also manifested through providential signs linked with his acolytes, especially with respect to the colleges, the nucleus of the Jesuit epistolary network.
The last letter-based miracle explored here occurred in Macau, where an unnamed noblewoman was in mortal danger while in labor. The husband went to the Jesuit college and obtained a letter, after which, all those present prayed for the mother. She recovered and the child lived long enough to be baptized before its death a short time later.56 The college had a reliquary that contained unspecified relics of Ignatius as of 1616. By then, he had gained a reputation locally for his help in childbirth.57 The association between his relics, possibly a letter, and childbirth was apparent before the specific example from 1618. The college of Macau, like its counterpart in Manila, was a repository of relics of Ignatius, which included one of his letters. Among the other Ignatian relics in Macau was his signature that interceded in another noblewoman’s labor, also in 1618, which allowed her to expel a dead fetus before the narrative comes to a jarring end.58 Postpartum care was also in his purview as was the case two years later. Ignatius through the application of his signature became a saintly lactation consultant, helping a woman unable to express milk due to three abscesses on her breast.59
Apart from Macau in 1618, the founder’s signature featured in ten other miracles dispersed across continents between 1601 and 1622. Most of which were concentrated in central Europe with cases in the Low Countries, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire. In Arras, then part of the Spanish Netherlands, the wife of the local baker (uxor vicini pistoris) had been in labor for four days and her offspring had died, while she was near death. But those present knew about the power of the “name of Our Blessed Father Ignatius written in his hand.”60 A Jesuit present at the birth recommended either kissing the signed piece of paper or its application onto the woman. Ignatius through his writing assisted the woman, who fully recovered after her ordeal. Many of these accounts generally follow the same narrative although details are scarce. In Vienna, the labor had lasted six days, whereas in Cologne it was four.61 An expecting mother’s uterus was full of water in Mainz. Someone went to the Jesuit college to obtain the signature and after its arrival, the woman gave birth to twins as had happened in Augsburg.62 The most epigrammatic was not from central Europe, but from Funchal located on Madeira Island: “two women in peril from difficult labor happily gave birth with the applied autograph of Blessed Father.”63 In this case, volume and scope are what mattered most. These snippets conveyed that Ignatius helped in dangerous pregnancies irrespective of geography.
Nagasaki in Japan was the site of another handwritten miracle, where a mother gave birth to a healthy child, who lived after his baptism.64 Although pregnancy loss featured in these miracles, the ability to save a soul through baptism, to save the mother from certain death, and to allow for a successful live birth were all auspicious conclusions to dangerous labors and pregnancies. The permeability of relic and signature in these accounts also make it difficult to determine what object was relied upon. The Japanese annual letter of 1604 recounted three pregnant women who had a relic of Ignatius placed around their neck, which allowed safe deliveries.65 Yet without specific reference to format or an inventory such as that prepared in Manila, there is only uncertainty as to what type of relic was used in these interventions. The use of this Christian devotional object is one more technique for expecting mothers to guarantee a live birth. Notions of maternal self-care in this respect permeated throughout Japanese instructional guides to motherhood from the early seventeenth century.66
We know more about the events in Mexico and in Murcia, however. Starting in Michoacán in central Mexico, the Jesuit annual letter of 1602 spoke of two cases, wherein a signature was placed around Indigenous women’s necks to assist them, one in a potentially fatal pregnancy, the other from an undeliverable dead fetus caused by physical abuse. What facilitated the arrival of the signature in both cases was a Jesuit coming to hear the mothers’ confessions prior to what seemed like their probable demise.67 The annual letter, however, lumped Pátzcuaro and Valladolid (today Morelia) together despite the fifty-five kilometers separating them. Although Purépecha was ethnolinguistically dominant in Michoacán, the region comprised a myriad of ethnic groups and languages.68 Thus, there is no way of knowing from what ethnic group the Indigenous women came from in these accounts since we are not certain which city the following events took place.
Although jarring to modern sensibilities, the divergent outcomes in each case would have been regarded as fortunate. One of the Indigenous mothers in Mexico was able to deliver a boy, who lived long enough to be baptized. Ensuring eternal life for a soul through baptism was a favorable result that would not have been possible with a dead fetus. The other expecting mother in Michoacán, who had been beaten by an unidentified man, had the fetus inside seemingly dissolve after two days allowing her to recover her health. She had had pain severe enough to make giving her confession impossible. The signature of Ignatius stopped the pain instantly and the account implied its efficacy in making the source of this discomfort disappear.
Only one of these signature intercessions mentions the mother by name. Catalina de Moratalla of Murcia in southeastern Spain was the wife of Don Alonso de Esquivel. In 1612, she was almost at term, when she got very sick and had problems with copious blood loss. During labor, she fainted and seemed as if she would die. A Jesuit applied a signature of Ignatius and said a short prayer aloud. The outcome was the easy birth of a son and her speedy recovery. In honor of her saintly interlocutor, Catalina named her issue Ignacio.69 Doña Catalina and Don Alonso were prominent enough that a humanist chronicler celebrating the city of Murcia included a genealogy of the family, where Don Ignacio can be found, still alive, in 1621.70 The fortuitous culmination of Doña Catalina’s problematic pregnancy was one of many possibilities that privileged the recovery of the mother more than the child. But if born alive, baptism was paramount to safeguard the child’s salvation.
Conclusions
Relics of Ignatius functioned as the material means through which women in dangerous pregnancies all over the world could be rescued whether or not the outcome was a successful live birth. His letters and his autograph transformed into curative materials in circumstances of probable maternal suffering and death. God through Ignatius could perform miracles when relics were placed around the mother’s neck, put upon her chest, and kept near her. Despite the repetitive nature of many of the narratives, examining this type of miracle allows us to understand not only the global cult of Ignatius, but also his place in atypical patronages of the beati moderni. These occurrences also supply us with examples of how devotional objects circulated in the early modern world and how they were used. And the news about these events can help us understand how information could travel and the problems caused by its transport.
The role of images, textual artefacts, and other media played a role in these miracles is apparent in the accounts of obstetric miracles as well. A biography of Ignatius, for example, could help a woman in a dangerous labor. In 1611, a woman in Le Puy-en-Velay, near the Loire River in southern France and the start of one of the main pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela, had a dead fetus trapped in her womb. Thanks to a copy of the founder’s life placed upon her chest, she was able to pass her stillborn child.71 The phenomenon went unimpeded by political and linguistic lines with instances reported wherever Jesuits were present. This diversity in geography and medium further conveys the extent and idiosyncrasies of the cult of Ignatius.
Canonization did not interrupt Ignatius’s intercessions in dangerous pregnancies. Alonso de Ovalle (1603–51), when writing about the Jesuit mission in the Chilean port town of Coquimbo, wrote that “if I wanted to add here the marvels that each day our Lord has worked and works by the intercession of our Father Saint Ignatius in that land, especially in the dangers of childbirth, this entire book would not be enough.”72 And the medium through which these interventions happened included the founder’s signature. Instances of obstetric aid by Ignatius came from Protestant regions as well. Catholic expecting mothers in the Dutch Republic appealed to this patronage to help in their pregnancies. In Dokkum, near Groningen, an untold number of women received his intercession in 1664. Whereas in the Calvinist town of Alkmaar, outside Amsterdam, Jesuits reported several successful deliveries thanks to Ignatian relics in 1648, 1650, 1661, and 1664.73 Not limited to Catholic polities, Ignatius’s status as a patron of women in difficult labors and dangerous pregnancies was firmly entrenched by the time of his canonization in 1622 and remained so. This reputation was a significant part of his global cult, one propelled by his miracle-working, which arose from devotional objects and news circulating throughout the transoceanic Jesuit world.
Thanks to Simon Ditchfield for inviting me to participate in this special issue. The anonymous reviewer’s comments were helpful and much appreciated. Finally, the author is grateful to Grace Harpster, Paul Nelles, Rachel Miller, Thomas Santa Maria, Francis Galasi, Father René Javellana, Nadine Amsler, and Lauren MacDonald for their invaluable assistance in the development of this article.
The workshop of Theodoor Galle prepared the Vita beati patris Ignatii Loyolae religionis Societatis Iesu in 1610. On this collection of engravings, see Walter S. Melion, “‘In sensus cadentem imaginem’: Varieties of the Spiritual Image in Theodoor Galle’s Life of Blessed Father Ignatius of Loyola of 1610,” in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 63–107; Catherine Phillips, “Between Madrid and Antwerp: The Life of Ignatius Loyola, Antwerp, 1610,” In monte artium 11 (2018): 47–63.
Jan (ii) Collaert, Miracles of Ignatius Loyola, 1610, engraving, 35 x 45 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, rp-p-1963-292. Scene D: “Multas in partu a uitę discrimine vindicat.”
A small sampling is Gianna Pomata, “Malpighi and the Holy Body: Medical Experts and Miraculous Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 568–86; Jacalyn Duffin, Medical Miracles: Doctors, Saints and Healing in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Fernando Vidal, “Miracles, Science, and Testimony in Post-Tridentine Saint-Making,” Science in Context 20, no. 3 (2007): 481–503; Laura Ackerman Smoller, “From Authentic Miracles to a Rhetoric of Authenticity: Examples from the Canonization and Cult of St. Vincent Ferrer,” Church History 80, no. 4 (2011): 773–97; Iona McCleery, “Christ More Powerful than Galen?: The Relationship between Medicine and Miracles,” in Contextualizing Miracles in the Christian West, 1100–1500, ed. Matthew Mesley and Louise Wilson (Oxford: Medium Aevum, 2014), 127–54; Bradford A. Bouley, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017); and Jenni Kuuliala, “The Saint as Medicator: Medicine and the Miraculous in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Italy,” Social History of Medicine 34, no. 3 (2021): 703–22. While not a historian of medicine or science, indispensable reading is Brad S. Gregory, “No Room for God?: History, Science, Metaphysics, and the Study of Religion,” History and Theory 47 (September 2008): 495–519.
Duffin, Medical Miracles, 90–91.
Francesco Maria del Monte, Relatio facta… super vita, sanctitate, actis canonizationis et miraculis Beati Ignatii fundatoris Societatis Iesu (Rome: Heirs of Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1622), 32–44.
Miguel Gotor, I beati del papa: Santità, inquisizione e obbedienza in età moderna (Florence: Olschki, 2002), 231–43; A. D. Wright, “‘La sua santità non inclina niente’: The Papacy and the Canonization of Ignatius Loyola,” in Ite inflammate omnia, ed. Thomas M. McCoog (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2010), 441–55; Esther Jiménez Pablo, “La canonización de Ignacio de Loyola (1622): Lucha de intereses entre Roma, Madrid y París,” Chronica nova 42 (2016): 79–102.
Axelle Guillausseau, “Los relatos de milagros de Ignacio de Loyola,” Criticón 99 (2007): 5–56; John W. O’Malley, Saints and Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 257–98.
Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 193–237; Paul Nelles, “Cosas y cartas: Scribal Production and Material Pathways in Jesuit Global Communication (1547–1573),” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2, no. 3 (2015): 421–50; https://brill.edhh.ma/view/journals/jjs/2/3/article-p421_3.xml (accessed January 26, 2022); Jonathan E. Greenwood, “Los milagros americanos de Ignacio de Loyola y la red de información transatlántica de los jesuitas,” Hispania sacra 72, no. 146 (2020): 491–99.
Nadine Amsler, Jesuits and Matriarchs: Domestic Worship in Early Modern China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 95–97; Dominik Sieber, Jesuitische Missionierung, priesterliche Liebe und sakramentale Magie (Basel: Schwabe, 2005), 121–24; Trevor Johnson, “Blood, Tears and Xavier Water: Jesuit Missionaries and Popular Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Upper Rhine Palatinate,” in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe 1400–1800, ed. Robert Scribner and Trevor Johnson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 183–202; Georg Schreiber, “Heilige Wasser in Segnungen und Volksbrauch,” Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 44 (1934): 198–209.
For just a few examples of this scholarly work, see Susan Broomhall, “Devoted Politics: Jesuits and Elite Catholic Women at the Late Sixteenth-Century Valois Court,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 2, no. 4 (2015): 586–605; https://brill.edhh.ma/view/journals/jjs/2/4/article-p586_3.xml (accessed January 26, 2022); José Martínez de la Escalera, “Mujeres jesuiticas y mujeres jesuitas,” in A Companhia de Jesus na Península Ibérica nos sécs. xvi e xvii: Espiritualidade e cultura, ed. José Adriano Fritas Carvalho (Porto: Universidade do Porto, 2004), 369–83; Olwen Hufton, “Faith, Hope, and Gender: Women’s Religious Experiences in the Early Modern Period,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 128, no. 2 (2016), doi:10.4000/mefrim.2673.
Don C. Skemer, “Magic Writ: Textual Amulets Worn on the Body for Protection,” in Schriftträger-Textträger: Zur materialen Präsenz des Geschriebenen in frühen Gesellschaften, ed. Annette Kehnel and Diamantis Panagiotopoulos (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 127–49.
Ines G. Županov, “Relics Management: Building a Spiritual Empire in Asia (Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries),” in The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of the World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 448–79; Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, “Reliquias globales en el mundo jesuítico (siglos xvi–xviii),” Hispania sacra 70, no. 142 (2018): 555–68; Hélène Vu Thanh, “L’économie des objets de dévotion en terres de mission: L’exemple du Japon (1549–1614),” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 183 (2018): 207–25.
Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 220. Essential reading is Pierre-Antoine Fabre, “Reliquias romanas en México: Historia de una migración,” in Saberes de la conversión, ed. Guillermo Wilde (Buenos Aires: Editorial sb, 2011), 205–24; Julia M. H. Smith, “Portable Christianity: Relics in the Medieval West (c. 700–1200),” Proceedings of the British Academy 181 (2012): 143–67.
Greenwood, “Los milagros americanos,” 494–96; Francisco Colín, Labor evangelica (Madrid: José Fernández de Buendia, 1663), 399–400.
Skemer, “Magic Writ,” 137–39; Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, Forgetful of their Sex: Female Sanctity and Society, ca. 500–1100 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 229–31; Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 72.
Antonio Gallonio, Vita del Beato P[adre] Filippo Neri (Rome: Luigi Zannetti, 1601), 136–37; Francisco de Ribera, La vida de la Madre Teresa de Iesus (Salamanca: Pedro Lasso, 1590), 552–53.
Maria Cristina Terzaghi, “Miracolo di Clementina Crivelli Arese (frammento),” in Il Cerano (1573–1632): Protagonista del Seicento lombardo, ed. Marco Rosci (Milan: Federico Motta, 2005), 161.
Orazio Torsellino, De vita Francisci Xaverii (Liège: Henricus Hovius, 1597), 255, 257–58.
Annuae litterae Societatis Jesu anni mdcv (Douai: Widow of Laurent Kellam and [His] Son Thomas, 1618), 924.
Damián Carbón, Libro del arte de las comadres o madrinas y del regimiento de las preñadas y paridas y de los niños (Palma de Mallorca: Hernando de Cansoles, 1541), 10v–11v, fols. 47, 95–96. See also Bouley, Pious Postmortems, 131.
Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 122, 141; María Tausiet, Abracadabra Omnipotens: Magia urbana en Zaragoza en la Edad Moderna (Madrid: Siglo xxi, 2007), 166–68.
George Thomson, La chasse de la beste romaine (La Rochelle: Heirs of Jérôme Hautlin, 1611), 439. “Les femmes enceinctes, & qui sentient leurs trenchees, outre la Vierge Marie, invoquent particuliereme[n]t Saincte Marguerite: de peur que la Vierge Marie […] estant empeschee ailleurs, n’y puisse assister.”
Bouley, Pious Postmortems, 32, 155n111. According to a life produced soon after his beatification in 1679, he was credited with four intercessions in pregnancies, all of which happened in Peru: Anastasio Nicoselli, Vita del beato Toribio Alfonso Mogrobesio Arciuescouo di Lima (Rome: Niccolò Angelo Tinassi, 1680), 259, 302–3, 312–13, 315–16.
Vu Thanh, “L’économie des objets,” 209–10, 214, 217; Irene Galandra Cooper, “Investing the ‘Case’ of the Agnus Dei in Sixteenth-Century Italian Homes,” in Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, eds. Maya Corry et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 220–43; Claudia Brosseder, The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 148–49, 330n82. A new Jesuit-centered examination of the agnus Dei is forthcoming from Paul Nelles: “Wax Lambs and Feather Saints: Devotional Object in Global Transit (Rome-New Spain),” in Paul Nelles and Rosa Salzberg, ed., The Mechanics of Mobility in the Early Modern World.
Based on the analysis of the printed annual letters of 1586, 1587, 1589, 1593, 1594, 1595, 1598, 1599, 1600, and 1601, Jesuits reported miracles in the following places: Vienna, Austria (1586/7); Bourdeaux, Aquitaine (1586/87); Cortryck, Belgica (1589); Rodès, Toulouse (1589; 1593, 1598); Perigueux, Aquitaine (1593); Regensburg, Greater Germany (1593); Tournon, Lyon (1593); Mineo, Sicily (1594/95); Turin, Milan (1594/95); Fribourg, Greater Germany (1594/95); Monreale, Sicily (1598); Labach, Austria (1598); Heilingenstadt, Rhineland (1598); Turócsz, Austria (1599, 1600); Hall, Greater Germany (1599); Cologne, Rhineland (1600); Paderborn, Rhineland (1601); and Antwerp, Belgica (1601). The Belgian province did not divide into its Dutch and French halves until 1612.
Ignatius during the period between 1594 and 1622 was involved in no less than 126 intercessions involving dangerous pregnancies. This figure is not meant to be exhaustive since to tabulate each reported miracle in every Jesuit province is impractical. Instead, printed compilations of Jesuit annual letters allow a glimpse into the scope of these obstetric miracles due to the books’ abridgement and editing of the correspondence sent from each province. The best examination of the published annual letters is Markus Friedrich, “Circulating and Compiling the Litterae Annuae: Toward a History of the Jesuit System of Communication,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 77, no. 153 (2008): 3–39. The full inventory of the reported obstetric miracles will be made available in an online inventory titled “Obstetric Miracles attributed to Ignatius of Loyola, 1594–1622” available at https://www.academia.edu/69507538/Obstetric_Miracles_attributed_to_Ignatius_Loyola_1594_1622 (accessed January 26, 2022).
Alessandra Foscati, “I miracoli del parto: Personaggi e rituali nelle fonti agiografiche tra xiii e xvi secolo,” Reti medievali rivista 19, no. 2 (2018): 63–83.
Graeme Murdock, “‘Pure and White’: Reformed Space for Worship in Early Seventeenth-Century Hungary,” in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 231–50, here 235–36.
“Littera annua provinciae Austriae Societatis Iesu anni 1594, Vienna, 1595,” in Monumenta antiquae Hungariae (hereafter Mon. Ant. Hun.), ed. László Lukács, 4 vols. (Rome: Institutum historicum Societatis Iesu, 1969–87), 4:117. “Hoc, inquiens, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti pectori laborantis imponite.”
Georg B. Michels, Habsburg Empire under Siege: Ottoman Expansion and Hungarian Revolt in the Age of Grand Vizier Ahmed Köprülü (1661–76) (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2021), xvii. The Hungarian form of the baptized child’s name would be György Ignác.
Biographical information can be found in Karl Wagner, Collectanea genealogico-historica illustrium Hungariae familiarum, quae iam interciderunt (Bratislava, Pest, and Leipzig: Johann Michael Landerer, 1802), 108.
Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum, o las vidas de sanctos, 2 vols. (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1616), 2:278. “començo con la lengua a lamer la firma de la carta, y luego q[ue]dò sano.” Although he supplied a bibliography at the life’s end, Ribadeneyra did not make it clear from which source this account hailed from.
Nuria Sanjuán Pastor, “When Flesh becomes Word: Teresa of Ávila’s Handwritten Relics,” Hispanófila 181 (2017): 17–30, here 19; Juan Luis González García, “‘Celestiales tesoros’: Coleccionismo y circulación de reliquias en la Monarquía Hispánica,” in Extraña devoción: De reliquias y relicarios (Valladolid: Museo Nacional de Escultura, 2021), 61–75, here 61–62. This exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Escultura had an eighteenth-century reliquary that contained a dozen signatures of Teresa.
Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Sacra Congregazione della Visita Apostolica 3, 11v: Visitor’s Report of San Paolo in Piazza Colonna, December 3, 1627. “Epistolae duae scriptae manu S[anc]ti Caroli Borromei.” My thanks to Grace Harpster for this reference.
Ulinka Rublack, “Grapho-Relics: Lutheranism and the Materialization of the Word,” Past & Present 206, supplement 5 (2010): 144–66.
Županov, “Relics Management,” 470.
“Alfonso Carrillo to Claudio Acquaviva, Sellye, March 9, 1600,” in Mon. Ant. Hun., 4:450; “Alfonso Carrillo to Claudio Acquaviva, Sellye, May 7, 1600,” in Mon. Ant. Hun., 4:462; “Alfonso Carrillo to Claudio Acquaviva, Sellye, July 20, 1600,” in Mon. Ant. Hun., 4:482; “Alfonso Carrillo to Claudio Acquaviva, Sellye, August 7, 1600,” in Mon. Ant. Hun., 4:491.
“Processus Burgenensis ad canonizationem S. Ignatii, Burgos, July–September 1593,” in Scripta de Sancto Ignatio de Loyola, 2 vols. (Madrid: Gabriel López del Horno, 1918), 2:118–19, 123–25. Both 1590 and 1592 were the dates given by the witnesses at the ordinary process.
Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum, o las vidas de sanctos, 2 vols. (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1599–1601), 2:850.
Brosseder, Power of Huacas, 142, 147.
Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum (1599–1601), 2:864–65.
Ribadeneyra, Flos sanctorum (1599–1601), 2:857.
Eduardo Descalzo Yueste, “La Compañía de Jesús en Filipinas (1581–1768): Realidad y representación” (PhD diss., Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2015), 133–34.
“Angelo Armano, Index S[anctis]s[iaru]m Reliquiarum Collegii Manilensis Societatis Iesu, 1601,” reproduced in William C. Repetti, “The Oldest Jesuit Book in the Philippines,” Cultura social 28 (1940): 195–98, here 197–98. Unless the manuscript was moved from San Ignacio Church before the Battle of Manila (February–March 1945), Armano’s inventory would have been destroyed as the mainly wooden church burnt to the ground.
Paul Nelles, “Jesuit Letters,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits, ed. Ines G. Županov (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 44–72, here 46–47.
Nelles, “Jesuit Letters,” 47.
Litterae annuae Societatis Iesu anni mdci (Antwerp: Heirs of Martijn Nuyts and Jan van Meurs, 1618), 228–29; Litterae annuae Societatis Iesu anni mdciv (Antwerp: Heirs of Martijn Nuyts and Jan van Meurs, 1618), 568.
Eduard Sierra Valentí, “Els jesuïtes a Girona (1581),” Annals de l’Institut d’Estudis Gironins 46 (2005): 159–66.
Jakob Rüff, De conceptu et generatione hominis, new ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Sigmund Feyerabend, 1587), 32v-33v.
Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 193.
Häberlein, Fuggers of Augsburg, 80.
Federico Galiano y Ortega, Documentos para la historia de Almagro (Ciudad Real: Hospicio provincial, 1894), 209–10, 216–17.
Annuae litterae Societatis Jesu anni ciƆIƆCXI (Dillingen: Widow of Johann Mayer, s.a.), 76.
Colín, Labor evangelica, 665.
“Francesco Eugenio to Mutio Vitelleschi, [Annual Letter of the College of Macau for 1618], Macau, 21 January 1619,” in Lettere annue…negli anni 1615, 1616, 1617, 1618, 1619 (Naples: Lazzaro Scoriggio, 1621), 392.
“Carta Ânua do Colégio de Macau de 1616, Macau, 1617,” cited in Ana Maria Amaro, “Exorcismos e exorcistas em Macau: Sobre vivência de antigos rituais,” Revista de cultura 10 (2004): 140–50, here 148.
Eugenio, “Annual Letter for 1618,” 391–92.
“Carta Ânua do Colégio de Macau de 1620, Macau, 1621,” cited in Amaro, “Exorcismos e exorcistas,” 148.
Litterae annuae mdci, 745. “nomen B[eati] P[atris] N[ostri] Ignatij, eius manu scriptum.”
Litterae annuae mdci, 641; Litterae annuae Societatis Iesu anni mdciii (Douai: Widow of Laurent Kellam and [His] Son Thomas, 1618), 483–84.
Annuae litterae anni ciƆIƆCXI, 522.
Annuae litterae Societatis Jesu anni ciƆIƆCIX (Dillingen: Widow of Johann Mayer, s.a.), 33. “duae feminae partus difficultate periclitantes, chirographo B[eati] Patris adhibito, feliciter pepererunt.”
Fernão Guerreiro, Relaçam annal…no anno de 607 & 608 (Lisbon: Pedro Craesbeeck, 1611), 141v.
João Rodrigues Giram, Carta anua da vice-província do Japão do ano de 1604, ed. António Baião (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1932), 52.
Marcia Yonemoto, The Problem of Women in Early Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 125–27.
“Martín Fernández, Carta anua de 1602 de la provincia de Mexico, Mexico City, 5 May 1603,” in Monumenta Mexicana (hereafter Mon. Mex.), ed. Félix Zubillaga and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, 8 vols. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1956–91), 8:131.
Martin Austin Nesvig, Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018), 18–20, 159.
Annuae litterae Societatis Iesu anni ciƆIƆCXII (Lyon: Claude Cayne, 1619), 39–40.
Francisco Cascales, Discursos históricos de la mui noble i mui leal ciudad de Murcia (Murcia: Luis Beros, 1621), 327–28.
Annuae litterae Societatis Iesu anni mdcxi (Dillingen: Johann Mayer, 1650), 235–36.
Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relación del reyno de Chile (Rome: Francesco Cavallo, 1646), 366. “Si yo quisiesse añadir aqui las maravillas, que ha obrado, y cada dia obra Nuestro Señor por la intercesion de nuestro Padre San Ignacio en toda aquella tierra, particularmente en peligros de partos, no bastaria todo este libro.”
Hans de Waardt, “Jesuits, Propaganda and Faith Healing in the Dutch Republic,” History 94, no. 315 (2009): 344–59, here 351, 358.
