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Hildegard’s reception, musical and otherwise, is traced in this chapter. After her death, Theoderic of Echternach completed her Vita, and possibly a series of Eight Readings for her feast day. Gebeno of Eberbach excerpted her works in the Pentachronon, and official canonization procedures began in 1228 (though the process concluded only in 2012, followed by Hildegard’s recognition as a Doctor of the Church). Rupertsberg was destroyed in 1632 and Eibingen dissolved in the early nineteenth century; the Abtei Sankt Hildegard was created in the early twentieth century. Revival of the music began in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first complete edition published in 1969. But only in 1982, with recordings from Sequentia and Gothic Voices, did Hildegard’s music really begin to reach a broad audience.

This chapter engages with the writing of the Scottish-born, Dominican-resident Elma Napier, examining the process of canonization that has allowed this example of Caribbean writing deeply engaged – in terms of both politics and ecology – with the individual landscape of a particular island to be critically shunned. The chapter vividly recaptures the contours of Napier’s varied writing career (including journalism, the novel A Flying Fish Whispered, and her memoir Black and White Sands) and the ways it interacted with her concrete political activities in Dominica. In doing so, it positions Napier as a crucially important cultural producer whose authorial modes – invested in local, ecological politics rather than those of national autonomy – combined with her identity as a white, foreign-born landowner, led to the exclusion of her work from most Caribbean literary-critical discussions. Returning to this overlooked writer’s work, the chapter argues, eschews traditional Caribbean identity politics to reveal a mid-century proto-ecological discourse that assumes increasing relevance as the depredations of global capitalism continue to impact the post-independence Caribbean environment.

Matthew Thomas Payne’s chapter considers the role of franchise management through video games. He uses the case study of Nintendo’s NES and SNES micro-consoles. His essay posits that franchises can refer to both software and hardware, as the built-in games on Nintendo’s mini-consoles function as a form of franchise management and corporate canonizing by privileging certain video game texts over others.

This chapter continues the genealogical account of illegalism, propaganda of the deed, revolutionary warfare, and post-millennial, insurrectionary networks of attack. To this end, the chapter explores the strategy of Paris communard Louis Auguste Blanqui, the contribution of ‘classical anarchists’ and the twentieth century, the influence of European theorists such as Alfredo Bonanno, Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, and the contributions anonymous thinkers who have frequently authored key texts. In the latter portion of the chapter, the focus shifts towards the contributions of Queer insurrectionary praxis and the experience of rejectionist, anti-assimilationists. Finally, the chapter revisits the question of canonization in preparation for the subsequent chapter, which outlines the insurrectionary tendency discursively.

Chapter 1 (Sons and Fathers) examines the Nezha legend in the context of the seventeenth-century Canonization of the Gods, which gave it its present-day shape. It demonstrates that the myth’s patricidal undercurrent is intimately related to the novel’s central topic of regicide. Other stories of conflicts between fathers and sons are also examined, including the cannibalistic tale of King Wen who ate his filial son Bo Yikao.

The introduction explains the Catholic concept of patronage, reviews the broad history of the canonization process, and explains the book’s historiographical interventions and transnational approach. It highlights the dissonance U.S. Catholics felt between belonging to a church that moves slowly, such as in a painstakingly sluggish process, and living in an American culture that adapts easily and quickly. Because new moments generated new models of holiness, U.S. Catholics’ attachment to a newly-canonized saint rarely matched the enthusiasm shown by the generation that had originally proposed him or her as a candidate. What remained constant was U.S. Catholics’ desire to use holy figures to cement their connection to the Holy See and to affirm their place in the American nation.

In 1624 the Estado da Índia and the Society of Jesus jointly staged a reception to honour Francis Xavier's recent papal canonization (1622), a celebration that was markedly different from the small reception held in 1554 to honour the arrival of his "incorrupt" corpse in Goa from Sancian via Malacca. The third chapter develops a discourse and materiality of Goa Dourada by situating the eyewitness testimonies of two ritual participants (one Italian, the other Portuguese) within a larger historical context, as well as those of a multitude of European travellers who flocked to Portuguese India, often described as a "Rome in India" throughout the seventeenth century, Xavier's "miraculous" corpse a recently featured attraction. The focus is on how ritualization provides an arena in which colonial and Jesuit officials promote their respective and collective strengths through the success of Xavier's canonization. However, because of the colonial state's increasingly evident decline, ritual simultaneously serves as a point of distraction from its visible signs of decline, decadence and decay. The spectacle of canonization then turns the focus away from this saint’s corporeality towards his accoutrements in much the same manner that Goa itself had been "dressed up" for this special occasion.

The opening chapter tackles the problematic aspects of literary canonization, with specific reference to the complex process of literary de-canonization and re-canonization in the wake of 1979 revolution. It introduces, for the first time, the work and lives of two generations of poets who belong to the Islamic Republic’s canon of poetry, their approach to, and relationship with, the Persian poetic tradition. The reader thus begins the book grounded in the foundations of a poetic trend in modern Iran that was sponsored and promoted by the establishment following the 1979 revolution. While introducing the ‘key figures’ of the Islamic Republic’s official canon of poetry, the chapter throws light on the complex and multilayered process of reshaping the pre-revolutionary poetry canon in years preceding and following the 1979 revolution

Duffin explains her personal involvement as a hematologist in the miracle eventually ascribed to Marie-Marguerite d’Youville. She then describes her journey to Italy for the canonization ceremony. It involves robbery, storms, parties, and more saints. She visits the Cosmas and Damian Basilica in Rome and notices its proximity to the ancient temple of the twins Castor and Pollux. That observation that triggers the main project of this book. Were the medical twins simply a holdover from the ancient pagan religion? Upon her return to Canada, she discovers some authors have already wrestled with that possibility and she discovers the Toronto feast day celebration for saints Cosmas and Damian.

The research had to be carried to Europe for two reasons: first, to uncover the connections to original sites of devotion to the medical saints, possibly extending back to the pagan twins; second, to investigate what exactly were the miracles approved by the Roman Catholic Church in saint-making. Scholar and collector, Pierre Julien, in Paris provided useful orientation. A ramble to the leading Italian sites of veneration in the lead up to and aftermath of the 2001 feast-day celebrations provoked encounters with custodians of local traditions from Torino to Sicily and many places in between. A first foray into the Vatican archives revealed the great similarities of the approved miracles to those of the American feast-day pilgrims: they were all about physical healing. Many more trips to the Vatican resulted in a book on the miracles used in four centuries of canonization.