ABSTRACT
In the introduction to his essay, ‘How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Peter Burke states that saints ‘are well worth the attention of cultural historians not only because many of them are interesting as individuals, but also because, like other heroes, they reflect the values of the culture in which they are perceived in a heroic light’.1 He cautions that, for ‘anyone interested in the history of perception’, saints are less witnesses to the values of the age in which they lived than to the values of the age in which they were canonized.2 And Burke devotes much of this fascinating essay to exploring who was canonized by popes between 1588 and 1767, and to the types of people most likely to gain such recognition in that period. In the Catholic Church, the only saint is a dead saint; but some of the individuals Burke examines had lived and died even centuries before their canonization.
