Rare books 29: The Tangled Web of Purgatory

Two nineteenth century excavations in the troubled history of Purgatory, thoughtfully brought to light by the prolific French Jesuit Marcel Bouix (1806-1889)(Paris, 1883) Notes: Bibliothèque nationale de France Notice n° :  FRBNF30141460 is a scanty record that gives editorship to Bouix and authorship to one J. Munford; the preface calls him Jacques. Title entry has not followed the lengthy presentation on the title page, in fact has just popped in a few main ideas related to the words on that page. Construction, therefore, from the ground up was required for this work on Purgatory. Further research disclosed that Munford is in fact the English Jesuit James Mumford (1606-1666), someone who would have found himself in a not very nice place if he had stayed in his homeland for any length of time. The other half of the book is by the considerably more renowned person known as Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), something that the BnF has missed entirely. Purgatory remained a burning issue for some through this period, Bouix’s work serving to delineate the doctrinal from the experiential and the populist, and possibly even the geographic. Catherine’s writing, in particular, remains influential to this day, with its emphasis on purgation as a purification rather than a process of torment, albeit temporary. The book is solid text throughout with, disappointingly for this cataloguer, no illustrations.