Rosalia Assembled: The Construction of a Saint

The title page of VI E 4 in the Biblioteca Regionale in Palermo credits the volume’s eclectic compilation of pages to two locally-notable figures: Vincenzo Domenichi (1580-1636), vicar-general for Palermo’s archbishop, and Vincenzo Auria (1625-1710), lawyer and historian. Neither can be said to be the author in the sense of having composed the individual works contained within, but instead, in this volume they constructed a narrative that depended on the availability of extant materials. The significance of this particular grouping of documents is tied to one rather remarkable event – the rediscovery of St. Rosalia’s body in a cave on Monte Pellegrino in the summer of 1624. Palermo was at that moment in the grips of a devastating plague, and Rosalia was quickly credited with the plague’s end and proclaimed patron of the city. However, historical evidence for both the twelfth-century saint and her subsequent cult were scarce, and this hybrid volume – containing all variety of manuscript material, printed texts, and printed images – shows one possible response to this difficulty. My paper will present a reading of the volume that considers both the kinds of textual and visual material collected and their transmission in print and manuscript form. In doing so, I will argue that practices of material compilation offered persuasive means of composing religious history and that various measures of authority and authenticity could be defined through the bound adjacency of written and printed pages.