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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
At Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection has recently acquired a fascinating manuscript of late sixteenth-century Roman Catholic devotional verse in English (Osborn Shelves a30). Following the liturgical year from Trinity Sunday to the feast of Saint Catherine on November 25th, these fifty-eight poems celebrate the solemnities, feasts, and memorials of the Roman liturgical calendar throughout the approximately twenty-six weeks comprising the major portion of ‘ordinary time’. Presumably, this collection would have had a companion volume, now lost, covering the period from Advent to Pentecost which includes the principal solemnities and great seasons of the liturgical year.
1 Many Elizabethan priests were constantly on the move, not least because the Act to Retain the Queen's Majesty's Subjects in Their Due Obedience (1581) made it a capital offence for any person to lead another to accept Roman Catholicism. On the fugitive movements of the clergy, see McGrath, Patrick and Rowe, Joy, ‘The Elizabethan Priests: Their Harbourers and Helpers’, Recusant History, 19, (1989), pp. 209–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Heaywood, Edward, Watermarks: Mainly of the 17th and 18th Centuries Monumenta Chartae Papyracae Historiam Illustrantia I (Hilversum, Holland: Paper Publications Society, 1950).Google Scholar Of course, ‘pot paper’ was quite common throughout the later decades of the sixteenth century. Without the improbable good fortune of finding an exact match in the watermarks, such evidence should not be taken as definitive. On a secret supply of Jesuit-owned paper for Elizabethan recusant manuscripts and printed texts, see Pollard Brown, Nancy, ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England’, in English Manuscript Studies, 1100–1700, Beal, Peter & Griffiths, Jeremy, eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 1, 120–143.Google Scholar Unfortunately, the paper used in our manuscript does not come from the supply of Henry Garnet, S.J.
3 Godfrey Anstruther, OP, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558–1850. Four volumes (Ware and Durham: St. Edmund's College and Ushaw College, 1969), 1, p. 221.Google Scholar According to McGrath, Patrick and Rowe, Joy, ‘Anstruther Analysed: The Elizabethan Seminary Priests’, Recusant History, 18, (1986), pp. 1–13,Google Scholar Peter Martin, upon his arrival in England in 1597, became one of as many as 111 active seminary priests then working in England, though the actual figure may be up to fifty percent lower; see esp. pp. 6–7.
4 See the fine study of Rhodes, J. T., ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Recusant History, 22, (1994), pp. 7–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the importance of manuscript sources in this period, see Love, Harold, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 John O'Malley, S.J., The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1993), pp. 115–126.Google Scholar
6 The Stonyhurst Southwell MSS., for example, reveal that the Jesuit Robert Southwell had to teach himself the finer points of English usage and syntax upon his return to his native England after many years of living on the Continent. I have been unable to discover any information about Peter Martin's whereabouts before his studies at Valladolid.
7 Pollard Brown, Nancy, ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England;, op. cit., pp. 120, 125–29, 137–40.Google Scholar
8 Like Thomas Traherne some sixty years later, however, our author sometimes evinces a tendency to begin a difficult structure, only to abandon it in mid-poem as it proves too demanding. In the manuscript's first work, for example, the six initial stanzas all have the closing couplet, ‘declayre/compare.’ Then, variant words with the same sound are introduced (‘fayre’ and ‘rare’), until these too are jettisoned for the somewhat strained ‘praise/disblaze’ and the too conventional ‘sure/endure’ rhymes. Here, ambition exceeds execution.
9 For a selection of poems by Constable and many of his contemporaries, see Imogen Guiney, Louise, ed., Recusant Poets (London: Sheed & Ward, 1938).Google Scholar
10 The author has conflated the stories of St. Christina of Bolsena, persecuted under Diocletian for fracturing her father's gold idols and selling the metal for the relief of the poor, and St. Christina of Tyre, whose flesh was torn with hooks from her body for refusing to sacrifice to the gods. As a sign of her defiance, she picked up a piece and threw it at the judge who sentenced her. The stories were commonly confused, not least because their feasts were celebrated on the same day.
11 On the various attitudes of English Catholics under Elizabeth, see Holmes, Peter, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar Also useful are Morey, Adrian, The Catholic Subjects of Elizabeth I (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978)Google Scholar and Raleigh Trimble, William, The Catholic Laity in Elizabethan England, 1558–1603 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1964).Google Scholar
12 Rhodes, J. T., ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, op. cit. pp. 7–12.Google Scholar
13 Elizabethan recusant poetry commonly cited the martyrs of the apostolic period as models for the faithful; see, for example, ‘True Christian hartes, cease to lament’ (1616) in Old English Ballads, 1553–1625, Rollins, Hyder E., ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), pp. 79–86.Google Scholar
14 The second poem, ‘Of A miracle’, is particularly interesting in that it narrates the story of a Jewish boy who, having spent much time playing with Christian children, decided to receive communion. When his evil father discovered what the boy had done, he attempted to burn the child to death, but the boy was miraculously spared. The community then committed the father to the flames in punishment, whereupon he died. The boy subsequently explained that, when he was in the flames, he saw a vision of the Virgin and Child, which evidently was the source of his preservation. This miracle was the occasion of the conversion of many Jews to Christianity.
15 It is possible, though unlikely, that the blank leaves could have been reserved for the feast of the dedication of the Basilica of S. Mary Major in Rome, on August 5.
16 The date of the feast of St. Euphemia, September 16th, was omitted from the manuscript because of a scribal error. The verses in her honour appear between the Exaltation of the Holy Cross on September 14 and the feast of St. Matthew on September 21st.