"Stenchie Protestants" and other terms of endearment

Hello everyone and happy new year! Apologies for the long silence on the Cwm Jesuit Library blog - the last few months have been heavily focused on writing, writing and more writing! 

I am currently about half way through the thesis as a whole (50,000 words done, 50,000 to go...!) and just wanted to share these extremely anti-Protestant sentiments I have found written in several books:

HCL U.5.9 - William Bishop’s A Reformation of A Catholike Deformed: By M. W. Perkins (England, 1604)

"Heretical opinions long since condemned by God his church"

"To frequent Protestants churches is to profess their religion. But to profess their religion is forbidd by ye lawes of nature of God, of ye church as a mortal sinne & not dispensable. Ergo to frequent Protestants churches is forbidd by all lawes mentioned is a mortal sinne  & not dispensable."

HCL N.6.3 - Richard Smith, A conference of the Catholicke and Protestant doctrine (Douai: 1631)

"Scripture Expressly Saith that the good workes of the just are a sweete odour  [.] A most sweete odour, a smoake of incense before God - the same say Catholikes.  Protestants expressly say: that the good workes of the just in the sight of god are filth, dung, nothing but polution. filth & dung = that they be stenchie, doe stinke before god, if they be thoroughly examined: that inherent justices are filth." 

Just a snippet of the wonderful hidden treasures within the Cwm Library to whet your appetite (and to keep me focused through the next block of writing)  - lots more to come! More information about each book mentioned above can be found on the cathedral library catalogue. 

Please note that all images are the property of Hereford Cathedral Library and should not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the librarian, Dr Rosemary Firman. 

Between the covers: Evidence of owners

In this post I am going to focus on one set of inscriptions that appears with some frequency within the Cwm collection - the signature of Edward Poyntz (c.1570-1615). Those of you who have heard me present papers at various conferences over the last few months will have been made aware of the significance of these inscriptions.

Poyntz's signature appears on 25 of the books, all printed between 1564 and 1605. The inscriptions usually feature an abbreviated form of his name, a price, a date that is often 1605 and his motto 'Potiora Spero' (I hope for better), as in the illustration below (click here for more information):

C.3.1 - In Canticum Canticorum (Paris: 1603) 

Edward Poyntz was a member of the well known Catholic family of Iron Acton in Gloucestershire, as well as Tockington and Caerleon in Monmouthshire. He was the son of Sir Nicholas Poyntz (1537-1585) and his second wife, Lady Margaret Stanley (d. 1586), and as such has all but been ignored from official family records. 

Poyntz seems to have been an active member of the Catholic community, described in a 1605 report by the High Sheriff of Herefordshire as being "altogether Jesuited". The same report connects William Morgan of Llantarnam with "Jones the Jesuit, the firebrand of all", illustrating the strong links between members of the clandestine catholic community that analysis of the Cwm library begins to unlock. 

The Poyntz family were notoriously Catholic - it was said by superstitious locals that when Edward's father Sir Nicholas Poyntz died in 1585, thousands of ravens rested on his house and the nearby church where he was buried for a whole month afterwards.

Eventually my research led me to Edward Poyntz's will, made in October 1613 and proved shortly after he died in September 1615, which contained a rather significant bequest that "he bequeath all his bookes to Nicholas and John Poyntz his sonnes to be equallie parted between them." (TNA PROB 11/126)

A bit more research revealed that his youngest son John Poyntz (1602-1671) entered the Society of Jesus a few years later, professing his four vows in 1640 having been ordained in 1633. John is more commonly known by his alias John Stephens and by his other two aliases of Campion or Scripsam, which is why the connection had not been made before with the more famous Poyntz family of Iron Acton. Jesuit records state that John Stephens (vere Poyntz) served at the College of St Francis Xavier between 1640 and 1646, which is presumably how Edward Poyntz's books ended up as part of the Cwm library. 

This case casts an interesting light onto how the Cwm library may have been formed, highlighting the  possibility that it is in fact composed of several personal collections, somewhat haphazardly added in to the core Jesuit collection. 

'World is Our House' - some photos!

I am very grateful to Gordon Taylor LRPS who has provided me with these images of the day - all images are the property of Gordon, and should not be used or copied in any way

College Hall, Hereford Cathedral - packed with delegates!

Speakers in Panel 1 (L-R):
Professor Peter Davidson, University of Aberdeen
Dr Adam Mosley, Swansea University
Dr Peter Leech, Swansea University

Speakers and organisers in the beautiful Cloister Gardens (L-R): Canon Chris Pullin, Dr Rosemary Firman,
Professor Maurice Whitehead, Dr Adam Mosley, Hannah Thomas, Professor Peter Davidson, Janet Graffius,
Dr Peter Leech, Revd Dr Thomas McCoog, SJ

Hannah Thomas speaking to delegates from the Irish Jesuit Archives Damien Burke and Vera Orschel









Speakers in Panel 2 (L-R):
Janet Graffius, Curator of Special Collections,
Stonyhurst College

Hannah Thomas, Swansea University

Revd Dr Thomas McCoog, SJ, Fordham University, New York and Archivist of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, London

'The World is Our House': a symposium of Jesuit culture at Hereford Cathedral

An exciting symposium celebrating the rich diversity of Jesuit culture has been launched to take place at Hereford Cathedral on 21 June 2013

The symposium, which will also celebrate the ongoing Cwm Jesuit Library project, will take place in College Hall, and will also feature an exhibition which will be open throughout the day

For more information, please visit the conference web page at worldisourhouse.blogspot.com - news and updates about the conference will be posted here as soon as they are released, so please enter your email address in the 'follow' box for automatic updates

Booking details will be released on the conference web page in the next few weeks, more news to follow soon!

Provenance Research Queries

Hi everyone, and a happy new year to you as well!

2013 has arrived, bristling with resolutions and good intentions, and for me, I am determined to begin the new year by trying to answer some of the mysteries of the Cwm Library that the project has turned up in the first year and a half.

First on the list is identifying this particular example of blind tooling:

This 'SI' tooling has been found on some 14 volumes in the Cwm collection at Hereford Cathedral, tooled in the centre of both the front and the back covers. All the volumes with this provenance were printed between 1603 and 1622, in Lyon, Antwerp, Cologne and Munich, and all were bound in brown calf leather in the seventeenth century. More information about each volume can be found by searching the Hereford Cathedral Library Catalogue.

It is likely that it stands for 'Societa[ti]s Iesu' (the Latin form of the Society of Jesus), but it could also represent a motto or phrase that has fallen into disuse, or is not immediately obvious. I am spending the next few weeks looking into as many other rare books collections as possible to try and establish what this could mean for the Cwm library collection - is this a standard mark for Jesuit library books? Is this unique to the Cwm collection? What does it stand for? What can be learnt about binding practices? Where might these volumes have been bound?

Any suggestions or possibilities gratefully received - watch this space!

Catalogues, Castles and Jesuit Colleges

The last few weeks have been extremely busy in the Cwm Project. The main focus of my work at Hereford Cathedral Library has been trying to establish exactly what arrived at Hereford from the Cwm in 1678/9, when this was first treated as a distinct collection, and what (if any) records survive of catalogues, or lists, or any other notes of the books and papers within the collection. 


Currently, after many hours of sifting through boxes of notes, drafts, works in progress and lists compiled by several previous librarians at the Cathedral, still no list of what came from the Cwm to the Cathedral seems to have been made prior to Geraint Bowen's article 'The Jesuit Library in Hereford Cathedral' published in Bulletin of the Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries, Vol 20 (1965) and Vol 21 (1965), pp.13-34 and pp.17-27 respectively.


I have been focusing on the work of three librarians in particular, who all made an enormous difference to the way the library at Hereford was organised, looked after and enabled the survival of many of the precious items within the library that would otherwise have been lost. Francis Tebbs Havergal (1830-1890) who was appointed Deputy Librarian in 1854, F C Morgan (1878-1978) who started voluntarily working at the Cathedral Library after his retirement in 1945 and his daughter Penelope E Morgan (1916-1990) who began helping her father with his work at the Cathedral Library after her retirement in 1953: both were appointed Honorary Librarian in recognition of their work. All three worked tirelessly to catalogue and list the many books (in several locations before the lovely current building was extended and opened in 1996) and to reorganise the whole function of the library as a working research repository. Penelope Morgan in particular has been of the most relevant value to my work, especially her Retrospective Accession Register (compiled c.1985) which details sources and donors of books where known, and lists all the books in the chronological order that they were received into the library.

However, as I still have not been able to locate a list or a catalogue of the Cwm collection in any of these papers, the next stage of this part of my research is to pick a few sample books that we now know are definitely from the Cwm and follow them through the several catalogues of the library to try and piece together the story of the Cwm books during their time at Hereford Cathedral. Existing catalogues are:

1. Donors Book, compiled from 1611 
2. c.1718 catalogue
3. 1745 catalogue
4. 1749 catalogue
5. 1780 catalogue
6. 1857 catalogue
7. Card catalogue, started c.1880
8. Slip catalogues, started c.1950
9. Online catalogue

I  have also been able to go and visit several key locations to the project in the last few weeks. I was invited to join Professor Maurice Whitehead and his third year undergraduate students from Swansea University on their visit to Raglan Castle and the Cwm as part of their work for the module entitled 'From Fear to Freedom: Catholics and the State, 1559-1829' at Swansea University:

The day's adventures began in Raglan Castle, originally held by the Herbert family until the marriage of Elizabeth Herbert and Charles Somerset (1st Earl of Worcester) in 1492, when it passed into the Somerset family, where it remained until the castle's surrender on 19th August 1646, during the Civil War. The Somerset family were staunch supporters of the recusant community after the Reformation, and used their enormous wealth and power to ensure the survival of the recusant community, and indeed, the Catholic faith, in the Monnow Valley and surrounding areas.


Several members of the Somerset family were of particular importance to the recusant cause, and supported and maintained the local recusant community from their base at Raglan. Key members of the family were Sir Edward Somerset (1550-1628), fourth Earl of Worcester; his daughter Lady Frances Somerset (d.c.1632) and her husband William Morgan of Llantarnam (d.c.1633), as well as their son Sir Edward Morgan (d.1653), first Baronet Llantarnam. The vast network of recusant connections and support from both the Somerset and the Morgan family continued to foster the survival of the Catholic community in the Marches for many generations and above all secure financial assistance in the form of an annual income that allowed the College of St Francis Xavier to be officially set up by 1622.

Our field trip was rounded up by a visit to the Cwm itself, now privately owned by a very welcoming couple who were all too eager to show us around. We timed the visit very well in terms of the weather, and were lucky enough to be able to eat our lunch in their lovely garden, looking at the amazing view and admiring the Jesuits choice of location in the Monnow Valley!

Between the Covers: Evidence of Readers

Cat. Ref: N.2.15

As promised in the last post, analysis of inscriptions and marginalia in the Cwm collection is now underway, and it is hoped this will start to put some more flesh on the bones of existing knowledge about the Cwm collection. Who used the books? Who owned the books? How did they get to the Cwm? It is important to remember that the Cwm collection is not just important for its religious significance, but also for its part in the history of the book and the early ideologies of book collecting, with the earliest book in the collection dating from 1503. 

With this in mind, the analysis of any marks or inscriptions in the volumes themselves can help to place the books individually, and the collection as a whole, in its proper place in ‘book culture’, and start to piece together a rounded idea of the Cwm Jesuit Library as a working collection of books.

Many of the books have scribbles and notes in the margins, indicating that previous readers have not only read the book, but have engaged with the information contained within it by analysing it and noting its significant points. This is often indicated by a particular mark in the margin next to key pieces of text, much like an asterisk or similar. Many of these take the form of the pointing hand (F), which William Sherman has termed ‘the manicule’ in his recent fascinating book Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

These ‘manicules’ are sometimes ready printed on to the page to draw readers attention to a significant passage, or are drawn by the reader next to parts of the text they found particularly interesting or useful:

Cat. Ref: U.3.8

Cat. Ref: U.16.2

 Sherman also points out that these manicules were often personalised so that an individual reader could be identified from his annotations; such as the distinctive manicules of John Dee and Archbishop Matthew Parker (see Sherman, Used Books, pp.29-37)

Cat. Ref: U.4.20

Cat. Ref: U.3.8

There are several varieties of ‘manicule’ featured in the Cwm collection, from the printed (above) to the hand drawn, and they are extremely varied in detail, not to mention anatomical accuracy! Some are very basic outlines, sometimes with notes on the essential passage and key phrases underlined, whilst others are more detailed, and others still are little more than arrows.

Another point worth noting is that the majority of readers seem only able to draw a manicule pointing to text on the right. The example above of the manicule pointing upwards is the only one in the collection; whilst the example below of the manicule on the right of the text it needs to point at only able to be drawn pointing away from the text in the standard position. 

 Interestingly, the marginalia and manicules in the Cwm collection seem to show that the books were used by a variety of readers, who all felt the need to mark the text in their own way: at least 3 of the examples shown here are all from the same book, and are more than likely done by different readers, each engaging with the text in different ways and for different reasons.

Cat. Ref: U.3.8 

                                                   

More evidence from Between the Covers soon...





PS - All images are Ó Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives and should NOT be copied or used in any way. Thank you for your understanding in this. 

The Cwm Collection continues to expand!

Initially, only 107 volumes were thought to have survived from the 1679 raid of the Cwm, and these are described and listed by Dr Geraint Bowen in his two-part article ‘The Jesuit Library in Hereford Cathedral’, (Bulletin of the Association of British Theological and Philosophical Libraries, Vol 20 pp13-34 and Vol 21 pp17-27, 1965). A later addition to the list of books, published by Dr Bowen in The National Library of Wales Journal (Vol XXIII, 1983-4), noted that a further 41 volumes had been discovered at the Cathedral that were known to have formed part of the Cwm library due to their provenance and other marks. This made a total of 148 books now known to have survived from the Cwm.

Over the intervening years, several other books had been identified as also likely to have come from the Cwm, due to the provenance of the books (where identifiable), the subject matter and other factors. At the start of this project, September 2011, the list of books known or likely to have come from the Cwm stood at nearly 200.

As the Cathedral Library and Archives are also in the middle of digitising the catalogue for the Chained Library; and several of the latterly-identified Cwm books had come from the Chained Library, it was thought that the best approach would be to go through the books that have yet to be digitised and make a note of any that could also have come from the Cwm. Tessa and myself have spent the last few weeks working through the remaining books (see image) and have so far discovered another potential 50 books that may have come to the Cathedral from the raid on the Cwm in 1679. 

The examination of the chained books caused great interest amongst volunteers and visitors alike, with lots of interest in how the books were handled, how the chains worked, what was actually inside the books and how easy they were to read. Everyone was also very pleased to see that this wonderful old library was still very much a working library with lots to offer a researcher!

The 50 or so books identified by us so far have been broken down into the following categories:

1. Books with names or inscriptions that are on existing Cwm books
2. Books printed by, for or about the Society of Jesus; or those inscribed with ‘College St Francis Xavier’ or ‘SJ’ [Societatis Jesu]
3. Books written or printed by authors or printers that are associated with existing Cwm books
4. Books which need further investigation – these are not obviously related to the Cwm but cannot be ruled out yet due to subject matter, place of publication or inscriptions of the names of known recusants

 We still have several more shelves to go through, so yet more may be found – watch this space!

Welcome to the project!

Welcome to the first post in this exciting new project blog! The project began in September 2011, when the first in-depth analysis of the Cwm Jesuit Library was started at Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives. 

The aim of the project is to analyse and contextualise the Cwm Jesuit Library collection, which was taken to Hereford Cathedral in early 1679 following its seizure at the Cwm, Llanrothal, Herefordshire, the headquarters of the territorial College of St Francis Xavier. This 'College' (an administrative term rather than an educational establishment) was an extensive missionary sub-division of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, covering the southern half of Wales, including Monmouthshire, as well as the English counties of Gloucester, Hereford and Somerset. The Cwm collection, which has never previously been analysed thoroughly, is one of only two surviving from all 14 missionary sub-divisions or provinces of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and as such is an important seventeenth-century survival, which promises to throw important new light on early Jesuit missionary enterprise in South Wales and the Marches. 

This is a three-year joint project between Swansea University and Hereford Cathedral, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and under the supervision of Professor Maurice Whitehead at Swansea University. The project will form the basis of a PhD thesis, which is expected to be submitted in September 2014. 

The Cwm Jesuit Library arrived at Hereford in late 1678/9 under the direction of Bishop Herbert Croft, when the Jesuit College of St Francis Xavier at the Cwm in Llanrothal near Hereford was raided as a reaction to the so-called but non-existent 'Popish Plot'. Initially, only around 100 books were thought to have survived, but recent research has discovered another 100 or so books believed to have come from the Cwm that had been stored elsewhere in Hereford Cathedral Library. This extended Cwm Library Collection of approximately 190 volumes has now been fully catalogued, and is available to search online via the library website: http://www.herefordcathedral.org/library-and-archives/online-catalogue  

Bishop Herbert Croft described the books brought from the Cwm as "Divinity books and others in Folio and Quarto and many other lesser books, several horse loads ... many whereof are written by the principal learned Jesuits ... fifteen or sixteen several printed books containing the Decrees of the several Congregations of that Society [of Jesus] at Rome ... several books lately written and printed against the Protestant religion and many small Popish Catechisms printed and tyed up in a bundle; ... some Welsh Popish books lately written and some Popish manuscripts fairly and lately written ... "  

[Herbert Croft, A short narrative of the discovery of a college of Jesuits at a place called the Come in the county of Hereford... (London: Printed by TN for Charles Harper at the Flower de luce against St Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1679), Hereford Cathedral Library and Archives, reference H.P.271.5]

As the project progresses, it is hoped that much more will be discovered about the provenance of these books, their printers and booksellers, and of course the role of the Jesuits and the Cwm as part of the maintenance and survival of the recusant community in south Wales and the Marches in this crucial period of history.  

All feedback, comments and questions are always welcomed, and we hope you enjoy following the development of this fascinating research project. Thanks for your time!