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Dear Thomas Wetzstein,

I entirely agree that permission for (local or universal) public veneration,  
public cultus, in other words, was the chief 'sign' of papally vetted sanctity 
(canonization) as laid down in the *Liber Extra* and discussed by canonists. 
(But as you know, the Fourth Lateran also insisted on the papal approval of all 
new relics.) 

Institutionalized memory, I would argue, is another matter. Each local 
community could remember its own beati. Canonized saints, however, were those 
who generally lived in the memory of the church as a whole, both in respect to 
authorized, universal, annual feast days, and in medieval universal or 
(general) ecclesiastical histories (e.g. a work I was looking at today, the 
*Historia ecclesiastica* of Ptolemaeus of Lucca, Muratori, RIS, XI, cols. 
753-1242). The humble and neglected chroniclers, after all--more than either 
the proud theologians or domineering canonists--were the memory cells of the 
church.

Gary Dickson
University of Edinburgh  



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