Agnus Dei: Wax amulet. No U.S. copies.

[Agnus Dei] / Vincenzo Bonardo. Discorso intorno l’antichità, origine, modo di fare, benedire, battezzare, e distribuire li sacri Agnus Dei. In Roma: Nella Stamperia di Luca Antonio Chracas. Presso la Gran Curia Innocenziana, 1700. 8vo [15.5 x 10.6 cm], [4] ff., 79 pp., [1] p., with [1] f. engraving bound after title, and with woodcut initials, tail-piece and printer’s device. Bound in contemporary vellum, title in manuscript on spine, gold-tooled cover borders, sprinkled edges. Biding stained, ownership annotation on front free endpaper (“Ex libris Serangeli 1725”), early price note on lower pastedown. Internally with some edge toning.

Rare (no U.S. copies) 1700 edition—published in Rome in celebration of the Jubilee—of Vincenzo Bonardo’s treatise on the ‘Agnus Dei,’ i.e., the disk of wax stamped with an image of the Paschal Lamb that was made by melting down the leftover Easter candles from the major churches in Rome.

The Pope traditionally blessed and consecrated these wax disks after Easter on the first year of his pontificate and every seventh year thereafter. Believers historically wore them suspended around their necks or preserved them in their homes as objects of devotion. They sometimes were used to protect against storms, floods, fires, pestilence, and demonic possession.

This edition is illustrated with a full-page engraving of an Agnus Dei monument carrying the arms of the book’s dedicatee, Francesco Pignatelli (1652-1734). The engraving was executed Pietro Santi Bartoli (1635-1700) after a design by the architect Carlo Fontana (c. 1634-1714).

Considered to be “the first treatise on the origins and the virtues of the agnus dei” (Cooper, p. 226), the Dominican Vincenzo Bonardo’s work first appeared in 1586 in anticipation of the first Agnus Dei blessing of Sixtus V’s pontificate. The work was republished periodically in advance of such ceremonies for subsequent newly elected popes (e.g., 1591, 1624, 1692). Each edition is quite rare.

Bonardo examines textual and archeological evidence for the origin of the practice, discusses symbolism (e.g., the meaning of the disk form), protocols for distribution, and the vanity of those who wear the Agnus Dei as adornment. He frowns upon the practice of placing the Agnus Dei in treetops, breaking them into pieces to place in the fields, throwing them into raging floodwaters or fires, burning them like incense and wafting the smoke in one’s house or in vineyards and fields, etc. The work concludes with a bibliography on the topic and the Latin liturgical ceremonies relevant to the Agnus Dei.

OCLC and KVK locate no U.S. copies of this 1700 edition. The only U.S. copies located of earlier editions are at the Library of Congress (1586) and Yale (1591).

*IT\ICCU\BVEE\030040; Irene Galandra Cooper, “Investigating the ‘Case’ of the Agnus Dei in Sixteenth-Century Italian Homes,” in Domestic Devotions in Early Modern Italy, M. Cory, et al., eds., pp. 220-43.