ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the question of issues of how the Clementine Curia censured all of these phenomena in the case of the Beati moderni: imprint and image type, iconographic attribute and semiotic agent, and the kinds of ritual behaviors that might be permitted to accrue around these signs, pictures, and things. It reassess how Counter-Reformation image regulation worked in theory versus practice, specifically in instances of contested Beati moderni hagio-imagery, especially altar images and printed images, two curiously interrelated forms that appear to have incurred the most intense curial scrutiny and regulation ca.1600–1610. Extending the patently Oratorian mode of hagio-historiographic interpolation, the chapter explores how hagio-historiographic interpolation of servi di Dio into the record could be accomplished by visual, material, and ritual in addition to textual means. Grasping the polyvalent hermeneutics of printing and prints can help us to understand better why the Curia subjected Vita prints representing the not-yet-canonized to such close scrutiny and tight regulation.
