Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgements. vii -- Introduction. False Saints and Scandalous Impostors... 1 -- Chapter One. The Case of Mateo "the Holy Mat-Maker"... 13 -- Mateo in Madrid... 14 -- The Trial of Faith.. 19 -- A Captive's Audience.. 23 -- Chapter Two. Royal Madrid: New Babylon or Catholic Court.. 35 -- Villa y Corte.. 35 -- Babylonian Madrid. 38 -- A Sacralized Cityscape... 40 -- An Inquisition for Madrid. 45 -- Chapter Three. Visions of Uncertainty... 55 -- Jean Gerson and the Discourse of Discernment... 56 -- Embodied Spirituality. 65 -- From Illuminism to Imposture. 78 -- Chapter Four. Interiority, Discipline, and "Unconfined Women".. 87 -- Interiority and Social Discipline.. 88 -- Beatas at the Catholic Court... 91 -- Spiritual Governance, Popular Piety, and Gender. 99 -- Publicizing Piety. 107 -- Chapter Five. Spiritual Plagiarism.. 114 -- Counter-Reformation Self-Fashioning?. 116 -- The Writings of María Bautista... 118 -- Impersonating Saint Teresa. 129 -- Chapter Six. The Miraculous Body of Evidence.. 139 -- Medical Discourse and Visionary Experience... 144 -- Naturalization and Its Discontents... 151 -- Deposing the Devil. 172 -- Chapter Seven. Medicinal Monarchy.. 183 -- Medical Politics.. 183 -- Philip IV and the Construction of Royal Thaumaturgy. 193 -- Conclusion. 202 -- Works Cited.. 207 -- Index. 225.

This volume examines the Spanish Inquisition's response to a host of self-proclaimed holy persons and miracle-working visionaries whose spiritual exploits garnered popular acclaim in seventeenth-century Spain. In an effort to control this groundswell of religious enthusiasm, the Spanish Inquisition began prosecuting the crime of feigned sanctity, attempting to distinguish "false saints" from their officially approved counterparts. Drawing on Inquisition trial records, confessors' manuals, treatises on the discernment of spirits, and spiritual autobiographies, the book situates the problem of religious imposture in relation to the Catholic church's campaigns of social discipline and confessionalization in the post-Tridentine era and analyzes the ways in which conceptual controversies in early modern demonology, medicine, and natural philosophy complicated the church's disciplinary aims.

Description based on print version record.