Rare Books 3: The Paperwork of Canonisation

Saint Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566-1607) is a household name if you are a Florentine or a Carmelite. Here is the recommendation for Pope Clement X (1590-1676) to “expedite” the process for her to be made a Catholic saint. (Rome, 1673) Notes: If a V is a U, we must still present it as a V, according to Paul Shaner Dunkin, ‘How to catalog a rare book’, 2^nd edition (Chicago, 1973). Hence ‘Bvlla’ &c., though I entered ‘Bulla …’ as an added title. Lettering inconsistencies are multiple in such works and deliberately put there to annoy the cataloguer. Angeli de Paulis is not a household name, even in the global village of the internet. Here is his ‘positio’ for canonisation, proposed by Cardinal Giovanni Antonio Guadagni (1674-1759), the well-connected Carmelite powerbroker (Rome, 1739). Notes: It’s uphill becoming a saint. Not only is a ‘positio’ itself called ‘super dubio’ but this one has appended ‘responsio ad animadversiones’ from people called sub-promotors, this time Joseph Luna and Johannes Prunettus, who may have stalled (the usual term) the Venerable Servant of God Angeli de Paulis’ progress to sainthood. He is most likely to be Blessed Angelo Paoli (1642-1720), even from some internal evidence, but I cannot confirm this until I revisit the Library to delve deeper into special sources next week. Cardinal Guadagni always had several Carmelite causes on the go, though his own cause for beatification keeps stalling, most recently in the years after his name was again put forward in 1940.

An account of my visit to the Carmelite Postulator’s Office in Rome in 2011 can be found here: http://thecarmelitelibrary.blogspot.com/search/label/Rome