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Cardinal Giuseppe Garampi (1725-1792): An Enlightened Ultramontane. By DRIES VANYSACKER. Brussels, Belgium: Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1995. 336 pp.
Since there are almost no bibliographies of eighteenth-century Catholic churchmen in any language, this major scholarly study of an important Italian cardinal is most welcome. Giuseppe Garampi was a highly learned author of articles and books on several mainly historical subjects, prefect of the Vatican Archives, papal nuncio to Poland and then to the Austrian Empire, and an organizer of a network of authors and churchmen dedicated to the promotion of papal supremacy in the church.
Vanysacker lists the only previous works on Garampi, a few monographs on specific points, opining that one reason for the lack of a full-scale study is the enormous mass of material available. The Vatican Archives contain 305 volumes or folders of Garampi's papers, and 22 crates of other material. These include some fifteen thousand personal letters in...