On the Fringes of Center: Disputed Hagiographic Imagery and the Crisis over theBeati moderniin Rome ca. 1600

• Published in: Renaissance quarterly Vol. 64; no. 3; pp. 800 - 846
• Main Author: Noyes, Ruth S.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: The Renaissance Society of America 01.09.2011
• Subjects: Altars; Catholicism; Censorship; Persona; Popes; Religious buildings; Sanctity; Society of Jesus; Studies; Veneration
• DOI: 10.1086/662850
• ISSN: 0034-4338

This article sets forth, through a small collection of case studies, the extent to which the literal and pictorial figures of theBeati moderniconstituted potentially provocative and disputed hermeneutical territory between particular religious constituencies, in this case the Oratorians and the Jesuits, and an increasingly stringent Curia ca. 1600. A reexamination ofBeati modernihagiographic imagery, and curial censorship of such imagery, potentially problematizes scholarly assumptions that these images served the Counter-Reformation Church's demands to control the meaning of religious images and the cult of the saints. Such reassessment calls for the reevaluation of a newly-constituted, uniquely post-Tridentine genre of hagiographic imagery: theBeati modernidevotional altar image and its reproductive printed devotional derivatives.