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Jonn Colet and the Hierarchies of the PS-Dionysius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

J. B. Trapp
J. B. Trapp*
Affiliation:
Warburg Institute University of London
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Extract

John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s from 1504 or 1505 until his death at the age of 52 in 1519 was a man, according to the brief biography of him written a couple of years after his death by his friend Erasmus—it remains the best sketch of his character—whom neither the smiles of fortune (he was born well-to-do, and was early on the path of ecclesiastical preferment) nor the impulse of a far different natural bent (he was high-tempered, self-confessedly prone to incontinence and luxuriousness, to indulgence in sleep, to jests and raillery, was not even free from the taint of avarice) could divert from the pursuit of a gospel life. His defects he counteracted by philosophy and sacred studies, watching, fasting and prayer, in a life that was both chaste and charitable. His large patrimony went, in the first decade of the sixteenth century, to the foundation of St Paul’s School, ‘specially to increase knowledge and worshipping of god and our lorde Crist Jesu and good Cristen lyff and maners’. There a limited number were to be taught by a High Master and a Sur-Master, with a chaplain, who were to devote their whole time to the school. Delighting in the purity and simplicity of children, Colet saw that ‘a nation’s chief hope lay in having the rising generation trained in good principles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 17: Religion and Humanism , 1981 , pp. 127 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1981

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References

1 Letter to Jodocus Jonas, 13 June 1521; ed Allen, P. S., Opus epistolarum D. Erosmi Roterodami, Oxford 1906-58 (cited here as Allen), vol iv, pp 507-27Google Scholar; no 1211; translated by Lupton, J. H., Erasmus’s Lives of Jehan Vitrior and John Colet, (London 1883) pp 19-47Google Scholar. My quotations are from this translation.

2 Statutes of St Paul’s School, in Lupton, J. H., Life of John Colet, 2nd ed, (London 1909) p 279 Google Scholar.

3 Lupton, Life of Colet, pp 180-90.

4 Cicero, Familiares, vi.6.

5 Guy, J. A., The Cardinal’s Court (Hassocks 1977) pp 41-2Google Scholar. I am grateful to Dr Guy for this and for other unpublished, references.

6 Lupton, Life, p 179.

7 By Richard Pynson; STC 5545.

8 STC 5550; reprinted in Lupton, Life, pp 293-304.

9 McConica, J. K., English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI (Oxford 1965) pp 167-9Google Scholar, 196; cf pp 141-3, 145, 170, 172, 189.

10 Exposition of Matthew vi (1533); ed Walter, H., Parker Society, ii, 1849, p 100 Google Scholar.

11 An Exposition of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ed Lupton, J.H. (London 1873) p 59 Google Scholar.

12 Lupton, Life, p 293.

13 Ibid, p 300.

14 Allen, vol i, pp 268-71; no 116; see now the Correspondence of Erasmus (Toronto 1974) vol i, pp 229-33 (the translation here used).

15 Lupton, Life, pp 199-200.

16 Allen, vol i, pp 245-60; nos 108-111; Correspondence of Erasmus, vol i, pp 202-209.

17 Disputathmcula de tedio, pauore, tristita Iesu . . ., in Luctibratioiies (Antwerp 1503)Google Scholar cf ed Basel 1518.

18 See, most recently, Jayne, Sears, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (London 1963) pp 14-21Google Scholar.

19 Jayne, op cit, pp 17-20.

20 See the marginalia ed by Sears Jayne, op cit.

21 For Meghen, see Trapp, J. B., ‘Notes on MSS written by Pieter Meghen’, The Eook Collector, xxiv, 1975, PP 80–96 Google Scholar; and id. ‘Pieter Meghen 1466/7, Scribe and Courier’, in Erasmus in English (forthcoming).

22 Erasmus, Lives of Vitrier and Colet, ed Lupton, pp 21-2.

23 Jayne, Colet and Ficino, p 130.

24 The best attempt at a chronology so far is by Sears Jayne, ibid, pp 33-7.

25 Trapp, J. B., ‘John Colet, his MSS and the Ps-Dionysius’, in Bolgar, R. R., ed, Classical Influences in European Culture 1500-1700 (Cambridge 1976) pp 205-21Google Scholar.

26 Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius by John Colet (London 1869).

27 Now MS Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, 929; see Trapp, Pieter Meghen (n 22).

28 For Urswick, see Emden, A. B., Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to 1500 (Oxford 1957-9) pp 1935-6Google Scholar; id, Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge 1963) pp 605-6, 685; Gale, F. K., Christopher Urswick, unpub MPhil thesis (University of London, Warburg Institute, 1974)Google Scholar.

29 Rice, Eugene F. Jr., Renaissance News, xvii, 1964, pp 108-9Google Scholar.

30 The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèure d’Etaples and related Texts, ed Rice, Eugene F. Jr. (New York and London 1972) pp 60–71 Google Scholar.

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32 Lamentii Vallensis . . . in Latinam Novi Testamenti intcrprelationem . . . adnotationes, Paris 1505; cf Valla, Lorenzo, Collatio Novi Testamenti, ed Perosa, A., (Florence 1971) p 167 Google Scholar.

33 Jewel, John, Reply to Harding’s Answer (1565), Works (London 1611) p 8 Google Scholar; ed J. Ayre, Parker Society, 1845, pp 113-4; cited by Lupton, , in his ed of Colet’s Treatise on the Sacraments of the Church (London 1867) p 5 Google Scholar.

34 CfFicino, , Preface to De sole et limine, 1493, in Opera omnia (Basel 1576) p 965 Google Scholar. The best accounts of Colet and the Ps-Dionysius, apart from Lupton’s is by Hunt, E. W., Dean Colei and his Theology (London 1956) esp pp 103-30Google Scholar.

35 Allen, vol ii, p 599; Correspondence of Erasmus, iv, p 398.

36 Lupton, Life, pp 193-8.

37 ‘The gloomy Dean and the Law: John Colet 1466-1519’, in Essays in modern Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes, ed Bennett, G.V and Walsh, J. D. (London 1966) pp 18–43 Google Scholar.

38 See, most recently, Duncan, J. Derrett, M., ‘The Affairs of Richard Hunne and Friar Standish’, in The Apologye of Syr Thomas More knyght, ed Trapp, J.B (Yale Edition of the Works of St Thomas More, ix) (New Haven 1979) pp 213-46Google Scholar.

39 On Barnes, see most recently Lusardi, James P., in The Confutacyon of Tyndales Answer made by Syr Thomas More knyght, ed Schuster, Louis A. and others (Yale Edition, viii) (New Haven 1973) pp 1365–1416 Google Scholar.

40 Apologye, ed cit, pp xh-lxvii; but see now as a corrective to views there advanced, Guy, J. A., The Public Career of Sir Thomas More (Brighton 1980) esp pp 42-8Google Scholar, 151-6.

41 Apologye, p 169.

42 Exposition of Romans, ed Lupton, J.H (London 1873) pp 88-9Google Scholar.

43 Erasmus, Lives of Vitrier and Colet, 1883, p 28.

44 Jayne, op cit, p 131; cf Cole’s Catechism, in Lupton, Life, pp 287-8. The concept is Augustinian; see the references in Burnaby, J., Amor Dei, reprint ed London 1947, pp 116-21Google Scholar, 256-8 and see O’Donovan, O., The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine (New Haven 1980)Google Scholar which I have not been able to use. I am grateful to Professor E. F. Osborn for help.

45 Colet, Hierarchies, ed Lupton, 1869, pp 4, 167.

46 Jayne, op cit, pp 112-3.

47 Hierarchies, pp 31-2, 185.

48 Ibid, pp 40, 190.

49 Ibid.

50 Ibid, pp 41-2, 191-3.

51 Cambridge University Library, MS. Gg, iv.26, fol 63r; see Jayne, op cit, pp 60-68.

52 Exposition of Romans, 1873, pp 132, 227. For a valuable essay on Colet as commentator, see Jarrott, C. A. L., ‘Erasmus’s Annotations and Colet’s Commentaries on St Paul’, Essays on the Works of Erasmus, ed Molen, R.L.De, (New Haven 1978) pp 125-44Google Scholar.

53 Jarrott, C. A. L., ‘John Colet on Justification’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, vii, 1976, p 60 Google Scholar.

54 An Exposition of St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, ed Lupton, J. H., (London 1874) pp 137 Google Scholar. 256.

55 Exposition of Romans, 1873, pp 70, 183.

56 Jayne, op cit, pp 82-3.