Whatever happened to Pedro Bautista Blázquez’s toe? Church officials in Rome really wanted to know. In life, the toe had belonged to a Spanish Franciscan friar who became, in death, a potential saint. But finding the toe meant searching the globe. Pedro Bautista had met his end in Shogunate Japan, which had become, for a brief but frenetic time, his vineyard of the Lord. There, in Nagasaki, he founded a church and hospitals for the poor, and it was there that he lost his life – and his toe. On February 5, 1597, Pedro Bautista was martyred alongside twenty-five others, crucified in a neatly aligned row of crosses on a hill outside the city.Footnote ¹

News of pilgrims flocking to the execution site quickly reached Rome. As part of the martyrs’ beatification process in the early 1620s, the Congregation of Rites, which oversaw saint-making, asked witnesses to comment on the location, which had been transformed from a “vile” place into one of “honor.” The cardinals also knew that blood miraculously continued to flow from Pedro Bautista’s wounds for days after his death, “which was witnessed and regarded as a miracle by all.” The martyrs’ blood and clothing were collected while their supposedly uncorrupted bodies were left on the cross. The blood-stained soil was itself gathered and treasured as a relic. At a secret beatification inquest in Nagasaki in 1622, the Japanese convert Michael Inoue recalled that devotees not only soaked “cloths and paper” in the blood of the martyrs, “but even scraped that which stuck to the crosses; and they took away their clothing as relics until [the dead] were left stark naked.”Footnote ² One Christian had apparently gone further to engage in what one historian has called “sacred theft” by making off with Pedro Bautista’s toe.Footnote ³

Yet even with so many people milling about, and so much attention given to the martyrs’ blood and bodies, nobody could unravel the mystery of the missing digit. Rumors of its fate, it seems, spread far and wide, along the same transoceanic itinerary taken by the friar himself: Just as Bautista had first traveled to Mexico in 1580 before making the daunting Pacific crossing to the newly colonized Philippines, and thence to Japan, so, too, did rumors about his toe’s fate travel along colonial and missionary routes. On December 3, 1620, Pedro de Montoya testified in Mexico City that he had been in Manila as events unfolded in Nagasaki. This meant that he had not personally observed the supposed moment when one of the Japanese guards bit off the toe and made off with it between his teeth. But he did know the guard in question. Some time later, Montoya had even seen the toe “wrapped in linen full of blood” and had unsuccessfully offered the guard a sizable sum for it.Footnote ⁴ Another witness, the surgeon Juan Bautista de Aguirre, had lived in Nagasaki and could specify that the toe came from the right foot. He, too, had made an offer, but the guard refused to part with it, “for he kept it as a great relic.”Footnote ⁵ A third witness, a Spaniard testifying in Macau, had arrived in Nagasaki a month after the crucifixion. He had also seen the lost body part and was able to identify it as a big toe.Footnote ⁶ None of the observers, however, could remember the guard’s name. Some claimed to know him by sight, but he might in any case have been easy to recognize for, as a middle-aged Japanese Christian named Kobayashi Sōdai testified, the guard had worn the digit around his neck “as a great relic.”Footnote ⁷ Despite these global efforts, neither the guard nor the treasured toe were ever found. Yet even without the actual object, the tale burnished the holiness of the Nagasaki Martyrs, not only in Japan, but around the globe.

As this anecdote suggests, when Catholicism went global during the early modern period, it did so through the practices, idioms, and procedures of sanctity, in an uneven, messy, embodied process that often escaped control. Officially, the question of an individual’s sanctity was adjudicated by the papacy through the formal processes of beatification and canonization (which from 1588 onward were overseen by the Congregation of Rites). Yet in the early modern period, as in the Middle Ages, “sanctity” always meant more than just canonization. Some of those venerated for their holiness, like Pedro Bautista, pursued sanctity in their own lives (and even deaths) to such a “heroic” degree that they received official recognition: The martyrs of Nagasaki were beatified in 1627 and canonized in 1862.Footnote ⁸ There were, however, many paths to holiness and they were rarely smooth. The pursuit of sanctity manifested itself in different ways and to different degrees, and neither aspirants to sanctity nor their (sometimes overexcited) followers always conformed to official expectations. What united the diverse and disparate members of the worldwide early modern Catholic community was, generally, a belief in the continued immanence of the sacred and the supernatural in everyday life, especially through the cult of saints. This devotion to palpable signs and symbols of the holy in this world not only bound early modern Catholics to their medieval forebears but also separated them from their Protestant rivals.

Crucially, sanctity did not adhere only to people and reputations. It was also, as the quest for Pedro Bautista’s toe suggests, tangible. Its materiality allowed it to permeate every aspect of early modern Catholicism. Through images and relics, sanctity could be preserved, shared, consumed, and even stolen. Texts and narratives also mattered. Confessors and other advocates promoted specific holy men and women by documenting their deeds and virtues in written biographies (known as Lives) to wider communities. Sanctity shaped practices of devotion, from daily prayers to long-distance pilgrimage. In the newly connected global Catholicism of the early modern period, saints and the models they provided shaped religious identities in individual and often surprising ways, which authorities could attempt to guide and nurture – but all too often struggled to control, as suggested again by the fate of Pedro Bautista’s errant toe. The quest for and defense of sanctity thus defined every facet of early modern Catholicism. Every aspect of its pursuit refuted the new Protestant dogmas of sola fide, sola Scriptura, and sola gratia. Indeed, we would argue that sanctity possesses a similar conceptual cogency to that Protestant triad, to the point that we might even consider it a core organizational principle of early modern Catholicism – and we have used it as such to structure this volume.Footnote ⁹

Why “Sanctity” Instead of “Reform”?

Early modern Catholics proclaimed their Church to be semper eadem, ever the same, from the time of the apostles to the present day.Footnote ¹⁰ Attempts to capture the ways in which the Catholic Church nevertheless did change have traditionally been dominated by the concept of “reform,” suggesting a form of parity with the Protestant Reformation, which engulfed and then captured much of northern Europe. For much of the twentieth century, the historiography of early modern Catholicism was shaped by this contested concept. Debate raged as to whether such reform was an authoritarian, top-down response to counter the Protestant threat or an independent impulse emerging out of the reform movements of the later Middle Ages, with historians’ positions all too often dictated by their own confessional allegiances. An extensive debate about nomenclature followed, in which historians enacted what Simon Ditchfield called a “hackneyed Punch-and-Judy show,” fighting about whether “Counter-” or “Catholic” Reformation best encapsulated changes whose origins, extent, and impact were all contested. While the debate has moved on, alternative labels, even John O’Malley’s compelling “early modern Catholicism,” have not gained much traction. “Counter-Reformation” remains a convenient shorthand, which most historians now use, albeit divorced from its original context and confessional baggage.Footnote ¹¹ In her introduction to the 2013 Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation – a major source of inspiration for our project – Mary Laven, for instance, set out a “broaden[ed],” “stretched,” and “reshaped” Counter-Reformation that promised both a “chronological extension” and “geographical expansion,” as well as “new approaches,” “new questions,” and “new themes.”Footnote ¹²

As Laven’s words already indicate, early modern Catholicism is a vibrant field of study, one that intersects with many wider historiographical trends, including the turn toward global history, increasing interest in lived experience and material culture, and questions of gender and race. Yet they also suggest that early modern Catholicism, as a field of study, is in urgent need of a new hermeneutical key. This Companion offers sanctity – that is, the pursuit and possession of holiness – as an alternative interpretive paradigm, and as a new prism through which to envision the Catholic Church in the early modern era, a period that not coincidentally also witnessed a wholesale revision of the process of saint making. This volume, then, moves beyond false parallels and equivalences – the understandable urge to furnish both Protestants and Catholics with a Reformation – to study Catholicism on its own terms and at a key moment in its history, a period of both unprecedented challenges and opportunities. We argue that sanctity provides this new prism, and that the function, diffusion, and appreciation of holiness became the single most defining characteristic of early modern Catholicism. Sanctity, more than Protestantism, determined how early modern Catholicism defined itself, how its adherents understood their religion, how it shaped their daily lives, and how we as historians should now study it.

We are, indeed, aware of two possible criticisms of our proposed framework. The first is that our pitch may seem confessional, perhaps even pious. As a cardinal in charge of saint-making recently put it, “sanctity is part of the Church’s DNA.”Footnote ¹³ And yet, as historians, we are not obliged to follow the Catholic Church’s judgments, nor do we take its conclusions about the sanctity of particular individuals as preordained. Even – or perhaps especially – a towering Counter-Reformation figure like Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, was the subject of scathing criticisms within the Catholic Church. As Chapter 1, by Madeleine McMahon, shows, Borromeo’s eventual canonization had plenty of internal critics. Philip Neri, another future saint, denounced Borromeo as an “audacious robber of holy and learned men,” who plundered from other dioceses to decorate his own.Footnote ¹⁴ The title of saint is both seductive and authoritative. It conveys an air of certainty and finality, removing any messiness and ambiguity from view. Historians should never treat the label as a given, but study how it came to be applied. As the chapters in this Companion demonstrate, the history of early modern Catholicism looks very different when we approach saint-making as a contingent process, whose outcome only seems inevitable in hindsight.

This brings us to a second possible objection, namely, that the hermeneutic of “sanctity” merely returns us to earlier modes of Counter-Reformation historiography dominated by “great men.”Footnote ¹⁵ We would be the first to concede that Catholic saints were the original celebrities and superheroes.Footnote ¹⁶ The popularity of individual saints or particular types of sainthood can reveal much about the priorities and preoccupations of early modern Catholicism. But ultimately saints – like modern celebrities – were also creations, and the creation process was often bound to overstate the star’s own agency, power, and influence. This pattern is to some extent inevitable: To be declared a saint, one needed to demonstrate truly heroic levels of virtue, often accompanied by miraculous deeds. Yet there were many seemingly-deserving candidates for sainthood whose causes faltered or failed, and their stories challenge those narratives which place too great an emphasis on the agency of the saints themselves. Indeed, the fact that only the dead could become candidates for canonization points to the substantial role played by others in a saint’s elevation.Footnote ¹⁷ This volume therefore highlights the agency of the many humans who helped to create saints – both official and unofficial ones – as a way of broadening the social and cultural history of early modern Catholicism to include, for example, the physicians who examined dead holy bodies for signs of divine favor, the hagiographers who celebrated their lives in writing, and the ordinary pilgrims who added their medallions to rosaries or who visited their shrines in search of a miracle cure. As the contributions collected in this Companion will suggest, the quest for sanctity was the single most defining characteristic of early modern Catholicism.

A New Paradigm for Counter-Reformation Scholarship

The present collection illustrates the importance of sanctity as an interpretive paradigm in four ways. First, the pursuit of sanctity, or true holiness, was the consummate concern underlying early modern confessional conflicts, and lay at the heart of Catholic self-definition. Indeed, devotion to the saints deeply informed the original historiographical “Counter- vs. Catholic Reformation” debate. The saints formed the great dividing line between Protestants and Catholics.Footnote ¹⁸ Unsurprisingly, a sixty-five-year hiatus in official saint-making (between 1523 and 1588) has therefore often been depicted as “a failure of [papal] nerve.”Footnote ¹⁹ As we have already seen, however, the saints never went away. In the face of Protestant attacks, saints – and the miracles they continued to work – proved to Catholics that their Church was possessed by the Holy Spirit, and not by a diabolical one. These Reformation polemics were dressed up in the contested language of true versus false sanctity. Christians had not forgotten that Saint Paul had warned about false apostles, or that Satan could appear as an “angel of light.”Footnote ²⁰ The early seventeenth century also saw extensive concerted Catholic efforts to both boost and regulate the numbers of the holy through the establishment of the Congregation of Rites and an active return to saint-making.

Second, sanctity also animated the lives of the Catholic faithful. Saints, to quote Pierre Delooz’s famous dictum, were only ever saints for “other people,” and it was only through the arduous efforts of others that any cause eventually succeeded.Footnote ²¹ Devotion to the saints and belief in the holiness of certain spaces and objects bound together all Catholics, whatever their status or background, even as the sacred also provided the ingredients that enabled them to individualize their faith. Saints shaped every aspect of individual Catholic lives: from their birth names to the preambles of their wills, from the daily liturgy to their roles as intercessors at times of illness or personal crisis. Saints inspired – and in cases such as Ignatius of Loyola and Teresa of Ávila literally created – new modes of interiorized prayer and offered new models of holiness for the faithful to pursue. The very personal and often self-conscious striving to be “like” a saint brought the devotions of both the Catholic faithful and their clergy to new heights of intensity. On the communal level, saints served as patrons and organizers. In life, they founded religious orders, led dioceses, or converted regions; in death, they were venerated as protectors of churches, regions, families, confraternities, exile communities, and more. Depending on the circumstances, their cults could inspire obedience to (secular or religious) authorities, or legitimate or encourage resistance, for example as patrons to a minority religion in Elizabethan England or to ethnic minorities in the Spanish empire. Whatever their precise role, the saints collectively were the hallmarks of Catholic identity writ large.

This brings us, third, to the usefulness of sanctity for historians. As models of holiness – as the chosen intercessors of ordinary Catholics – the community of saints represents the diversity of early modern Catholicism much better than did the Church’s institutions, which were dominated by European clergymen. The cult of St. Benedict of Palermo, for instance, thrived among Black diasporic communities across the Spanish Habsburg empire because the saint was, as one devotee put it, “black like me.”Footnote ²² The fate of Pedro Bautista shows that Catholicism spread beyond the borders of European empires as well. The presence, relics, activities, and memory of future saints enabled Catholicism to take root in new regions and sanctify them. Indeed, saints included women and men of all races and many nations, even though they were by no means a perfect representation of the faithful.

This last point – that saint-making was an unequal process – urges historians of sanctity to move beyond the small number of saints officially canonized during the period to examine the broader number of unofficial and aspiring saints, and hence to the study of sanctity more broadly. These “failed” saints – holy figures who did not receive official recognition from Rome – are as important as the success stories. Their lives remind us that claims to sanctity were invariably deeply contested, even among Catholics. Unsurprisingly, the adjudication of sanctity was a highly gendered process – female visionaries often fell victim to charges of demonic possession – and a racialized one as well.Footnote ²³ Not only institutional factors were at work, however. Collective memory and devotions mattered too. Some aspirant saints were demonized in life, others swiftly forgotten after death. Still other causes – for instance, those of the English Catholic martyrs – remained vibrant. Sustained by communities of followers, they finally received official recognition centuries later.

Fourth and finally, historians also need to revisit sanctity not only because it provided the Church’s lifeblood, but also because it defined many of the key conflicts within Catholicism. The beatification proceedings of the martyrs of Nagasaki also bear witness to vicious infighting between Franciscans and Jesuits, for example. Sanctity by its very nature was controversial. Saints could inspire loyalty from adherents and suspicion from institutions in equal measure. Even those saints most strongly associated with the Counter-Reformation – such as Ignatius and Teresa – had run-ins with religious authorities. Widespread fears about fake saints, demonic possession, or unlicensed devotions all made canonization procedures contentious, lengthy, and expensive. Popular devotions may have sustained early modern Catholicism, but they also gave rise to institutional attempts to contain, regulate, or prevent them. In turn, the fact that successful canonizations were costly and rare also encouraged rivalry and competition between the adherents of different causes.

Sanctity thus reveals the innermost tensions within Catholic Reform, because it provided a language through which the faithful could give meaning to their faith. It sits at the intersection between individual communities and the universal Catholic Church, as a source of perpetual dialogue – and, often, opposition – between local religious practice and universal institutions and regulations. Its study helps us to understand the nested and contested nature of early modern Catholic identities and the equally complex issue of where agency within the Church really resided. In other words, because sanctity, in all its forms, mattered so much to so many early moderns, it offers scholars a uniquely powerful vision of Catholicism, one that both closely suits the period and encapsulates recent historiographical trends.Footnote ²⁴ The study of sanctity, then, demands a bold and broad inquiry, which ranges from popular beliefs to theological doctrines, from lived experiences to formal regulations, and from local customs to Roman institutions. By definition, then, its story is inherently global; it cannot be authentically written as a European history with a “world” section pasted in. Sanctity shows a Church that is decentered, driven less by its institutions than by a worldwide community of the faithful. The study of sanctity thus reflects and builds on the most recent scholarly developments in religious history – including the move away from concepts of reform. “Sanctity” also opens a window onto topics that are harder to define by other rubrics, but which very much defined people’s lives in the early modern period, such as “holy bodies,” “collections,” “memory,” and “sacred space.”

As all the above suggests, it is impossible to understand any aspect of early modern Catholicism without touching on the subject of sanctity and how it was lived, contested, represented, and consumed. And yet Counter-Reformation sanctity has received remarkably little systematic treatment since Peter Burke’s memorable but tentative 1984 essay, “How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint” – with the notable exception of Gabriella Zarri’s work on female sanctity.Footnote ²⁵ Most key studies on sanctity as a whole have been produced by scholars of late antiquity or the later Middle Ages.Footnote ²⁶ Scholarship from the last decade or so has increasingly emphasized – in works that include studies of the causes of individual saints,Footnote ²⁷ groups or types of saints,Footnote ²⁸ and the movement of holy images, objects, and narratives locally and globallyFootnote ²⁹ – that sanctity was central to the early modern world. Through these valuable case studies, the field has moved definitively away from an earlier, more reductive vision of saints that depicted them instrumentally, as objects of confessional polemic, as papal bargaining chips, or as symbols that stood for something else more “real,” such as political, civic, or religious identity. Thus, rather than looking through saints toward something else, more recent scholarship has asked how various facets of early modern culture could be understood by looking with saints. Our volume advances this approach, drawing on emerging work to create an authoritative synthesis that will be a key resource for the future study of early modern Catholicism in all its diversity.

The framework laid out above necessarily entails an interdisciplinary approach. Reflecting what Simon Ditchfield has called the “dynamic nature and range of the cultural work performed by sanctity and the cult of saints,” contributors speak to the role of sanctity in relation not merely to ecclesiastical history but also to art history and material culture, the history of scholarship, popular culture, science and medicine, high politics, sacred space, memory, judicial proof, empire and colonialism, and more.Footnote ³⁰ Our volume brings together these various threads into a cohesive overview of this growing and vibrant field. It provides a valuable road map to this area of inquiry and to the many fields with which it intersects. We hope it will shape scholarly conversations for many years to come.

Section Objectives and Outlines

Through four parts, this book charts how sanctity was conceptualized, represented, and experienced – activities that both mutually reinforced and challenged one another. The holiness of saints was celebrated, defended, and imitated by others and – formally speaking – recognized only after their death. In a wide range of contexts, from hagiographies to canonization proceedings, saints did not speak but were talked about. Part I, “Models of Sanctity,” therefore looks two ways. On the one hand, the chapters, proceeding from the fundamentally imitative nature of sanctity, examine both standard (confessor, martyr, and virgin) and emerging categories of official sainthood to ask how they mattered in the Counter-Reformation era. On the other hand, they also remind the reader that saints, for all their alleged supernatural virtues, were humans with agency too. These two elements are linked. Following on from Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 11 to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ,” some of the towering figures of early modern Catholicism molded themselves according to classical or medieval models. Chapter 1, by Madeline McMahon, examines how the traditional typology of confessor-bishop saints fared in an era when bishops themselves dramatically altered and expanded their roles in the wake of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Chapter 2, by Alejandro Cañeque, explores how the ancient martyrs, the first and original category of saint, became newly relevant in the early modern period, as Catholics pushed or defended their faith across various frontiers in Asia and the Americas. Using Spain as her case study, in Chapter 3 Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida analyzes the fate of competing models of female sanctity, rooted in models provided by Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Ávila, in the face of changing interests and shifting institutional concerns. Chapter 4, on devotion to the Virgin Mary, by Christina Lee, recognizes the unique and growing importance of the Marian cult in the early modern period, as its different iterations traversed the globe while also taking root in new local contexts, in areas as diverse as Mexico and the Philippines. In Chapter 5, Erin Rowe details how images of ancient Black Christians began to proliferate throughout early modern Catholic churches, in response to the rapid acceleration of the transatlantic slave trade and increasing diplomatic relations with the rulers of Ethiopia. Finally, in Chapter 6, Noria Litaker discusses the growing popularity of new “old” saints, discovered in Rome’s Catacombs and transported both to Catholicism’s confessional frontiers beyond the Alps and to the New World.

Part II, “Creating and Contesting Sanctity,” shows how sanctity (and holy sites) were discerned, debated, studied, and authenticated. The stakes were high – the holiness of saints also extended to the movements they founded, the theological ideas they propagated, the visions they received, the places they had lived, the locations of their bodies and relics, and, implicitly, to the followers who had promoted their causes. Such power also sparked fears of heresy and false prophecy, particularly from female visionaries. Were their visions gifts from God? Or were these women frauds or, worse, demonically possessed? In Chapter 7, Jan Machielsen reexamines the evolution of the troubled state of the very process of canonization after the interruption of the sixteenth century, demonstrating the difficulties that Roman institutions faced in containing popular enthusiasm once the proceedings resumed. In Chapter 8, A. Katie Harris shows how the theory and practice of authenticating holy relics reveals broader concerns about the exuberant and vibrant devotional cultures of Counter-Reformation sanctity. The failure of these efforts demonstrates, once again, Catholicism’s long and messy history, as local traditions could be deeply rooted while piety could inspire forgery. In Chapter 9, Eleonora Cappuccilli explores the practice of discernment of spirits – identifying the (demonic or divine) origins of visions – using two famous but very different female mystics as her guides. She shows how their distinct visions and spiritual gifts had unsettling social, gendered, and political ramifications that caused them to articulate different approaches to this vexing problem. In Chapter 10, Bradford Bouley reconstructs the connections between the rise of professional medicine and the increasing reliance on autopsy as a standard to establish a potential saint’s bona fides, as their ascetic or uncorrupted bodies provided evidence of divine grace and intercession.

Part III, “Representing Saints,” considers how the cults of (potential) saints were expressed in the arts: through the liturgy during church services, in saints’ Lives, in literature, and in the visual arts. It considers how hagiographers and visual artists represented and thus promoted candidates for sainthood, while navigating or circumventing the constraints imposed by the Inquisition and other ecclesiastical institutions. In Chapter 11, Antoine Mazurek highlights how the text and placement of a saint’s liturgy in printed prayer books allowed communities to celebrate local heroes without falling foul of ever-shifting universal standards. In Chapter 12, Simon Ditchfield charts the many attempts to set the genre of hagiography on a more secure footing, reminding us that while saints’ official Lives could foster devotion and promote a cult, they were also vulnerable to Protestant attack. In Chapter 13, Cloe Cavero de Carondelet reveals the high stakes involved in depicting potential saints as holy people in art, without causing tension or undermining their chances at official canonization. Using examples from England’s persecuted Catholic minority, Susannah Brietz Monta in Chapter 14 demonstrates the broad scope of literature generated by the cult of the saints in drama, poetry, and prose across the ever-expanding Catholic world, encouraging a sense of community and shared Catholic identity.

Part IV, “Living with Saints,” reveals how saints and sanctity saturated ordinary Catholic lives through objects, spaces, rituals, and collections. Attention to the role of saints in the household, and their intercession in everyday life, lets us understand the shape of early modern communities. In Chapter 15, Anne Mariss uses rosaries to examine the way material objects could be used to express deeply personal affection for saints, and highlights the objects’ critical role in moments of crisis. Using Black confraternities as a case study, Miguel Valerio in Chapter 16 shows the vital role of such organizations in organizing mutual aid, fostering saintly devotions, and maintaining communal bonds. Black confraternities also enabled Afrodescendants to navigate social hierarchies and visibly assert their presence in the Catholic world. Finally, in Chapter 17 Elizabeth Tingle traces the practice of pilgrimage, local or distant, in everyday life, showing the range of benefits to individual pilgrims and their communities. She follows pilgrims on their quests for healing, penitence, and spiritual growth and demonstrates that shrines and saints continued to act as focal points for devotion.

In concluding, the editors would like to record their thanks. First of all, we wish to acknowledge the support of Beatrice Rehl and her team at Cambridge University Press for recognizing this volume’s potential at an early stage. From the outset, this Companion has also been a truly collaborative effort. We would like to thank our expert group of contributors, whose invaluable work we have all too briefly summarized. We remain grateful for their support and enthusiasm – and for their patience with us as editors. We owe a particular debt to Simon Ditchfield for his comments on draft chapters and for stepping in to fill a last-minute gap in our roster.

As the volume entered production, we received the sad news of A. Katie Harris’s passing. Katie’s prodigious scholarship and generosity of spirit contributed immeasurably to this volume. We therefore dedicate it to her memory. May it be a worthy tribute to a much-missed colleague and friend.