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
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|