I recently went to Rome to visit a historic library closely aligned with collections of Jesuit books here in the UK. The Venerable English College in Rome is a seminary for training English priests, and currently Scandinavian priests as well. It is not a Jesuit institution. However, for 200 years it was run by Jesuits, from 1579 until the Suppression of the Society in 1773. During this long period of Jesuit management, the VEC built up a large library, and it is this which I went to visit.
I was welcomed very generously by Professor Maurice Whitehead, the Director of Heritage Collections, and Dr Renaud Milazzo, the rare books cataloguer. I had met Maurice a couple of times before, and Renaud I had met remotely, as part of the Jesuit Rare Books Group which I started a few years ago as a forum for discussion for archivists, librarians and others who care for collections of Jesuit books relating to the English Province. This includes book collections based in Spain and France as well as Rome and the UK, so it is difficult for the whole group to meet in person, and mainly we meet online.
My first morning in Rome, Maurice gave me a tour of the building and filled me in a little about the history of the VEC, which extends back to 1362 as a hostel for English pilgrims. The building itself stretches along the via Monserrato, just a stone’s throw from the Palazzo Farnese. It wraps round a series of internal courtyards, some used for access or parking, but one is a beautiful garden, complete with lemon trees. One wing was originally built as a palace in the late seventeenth century by Cardinal Philip Howard OP, who was Cardinal Protector of the College from 1679 until 1694.
Maurice then took me to the libraries. We walked through the ‘Third Library’, fitted out with ornate black and gold nineteenth century bookshelves and containing mainly eighteenth century books. Beyond that are the Reading Room, the Archives room, the modern library above which is the locked mezzanine where the oldest books are kept. These were the books I was most interested in visiting, as they are a counterpart to the book collection we have in Mount Street.
Some of the Rare Books in the Mezzanine Library at the VEC
As soon as I saw the library, differences between the collections at the VEC and at Mount Street were clear. So many of the books in Rome are folios, with significantly fewer quarto or even smaller format books on the shelves. The collection in London has few big books, more quartos and many very small formats such as duodecimo and beyond. This can be explained by the roots of the collection in London being in clandestine libraries in the English mission, where small easily transportable books made sense in a world where owning or dealing in Catholic books was dangerous. Another difference was the relative ornateness of the bindings. The bindings at the VEC are not massively elaborate show bindings, but on the whole they were fine, either leather with abundant use of gold, or stamped pigskin. The vellum bindings were originally of good quality. At Mount Street the older bindings are predominantly limp vellum wrappers. This difference has the same explanation as the different formats; in a time of persecution the requirement for a library was not for books that look grand on shelves - a better choice was limp vellum bindings, more durable and easier to hide or transport in a bag or pocket than leather covered wooden boards.
Talking about this with Renaud, he pointed out that many of the books at the VEC were printed on best quality paper, by really good printers, such as Giunta and Aldine Manutius. By contrast the Mount Street rare books were printed by a complete mixture of printers, many of them by the English College Press at St Omers which specialised in printing books for the English Catholic market, but also by a variety of other continental printers. Others were printed on clandestine secret presses in England, which were by definition ephemeral organisations putting out books in dangerous situations. The resulting print quality of the books is far lower, and the quality of the paper is very variable.
The majority of the VEC rare books have been at the College since the late sixteenth century and have clear provenance marks linking them to individuals involved with the VEC around the time the Hospice became the College in 1579. The inscriptions recording the donations of four men in particular stood out.
Gregory XIII was Pope in 1579, and he was generous to the new foundation, as he was to many new institutions in Rome. Inscriptions recording his donation are present in many books in the library. Cardinal William Allen was one of the main re-founders of the College in the late 1570s, seeing it as a counterpart to the English College he had already founded at Douai. He too was a generous donor of books to the library. The first Cardinal Protector of the VEC was Cardinal Giovanni Morone, and his inscription is to be seen in many books, including a complete set of the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Robert Persons SJ was twice Rector of the VEC, dying in position in 1610. He bequeathed a large number of books to the library. This includes much of his own writings, and his donation is particularly rich in controversial literature, of which he himself was a prolific author.
Donation inscriptions from Pope Gregory XIII, Cardinal Morone and Fr Robert Persons SJ
These – and many other gift inscriptions in the books – are a material corroboration of written accounts of how the library of the newly fledged English College was built up, and are a testament to the relative stability of the College over the following centuries. Mainly, complete runs of books from the same donor are still together, and have been in the same institution since the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. This is in marked contrast to our rare books collection in Mount Street, which is the rump of many former Jesuit libraries, from across Britain, and indeed Europe. This is due to the far more turbulent history of the Jesuit English Province. Jesuit libraries in England and Wales were illegal and were liable to confiscation, like the Jesuit missionary library at Cwm, which was raided in 1679, and the Jesuit library at Holbeck in Nottinghamshire, also confiscated in 1679, though some of the books at Holbeck escaped confiscation and are now in our collection. The English colleges and religious houses in North Western Europe, safe havens in the seventeenth century, by the end of the eighteenth themselves had to evacuate at speed during the French revolution, often bringing only part of their book collections back to England. The inscriptions and provenance marks in the Mount Street books record centuries of libraries coming together and being broken up and books being moved from one institution to another. By contrast, the books at the Venerable English College in Rome tell a story of relative stability and continuity.
Currently, the finding aid for the rare books at the VEC is a 100-year-old card catalogue. Renaud is cataloguing the books now to an incredibly detailed standard. He records full bibliographic data on each book, including collation, the thickness of the paper, the size of the illustrations and woodblocks. The detail is meticulous, noting narrative biographical, historical and any other related information. In a relatively short time, he has made significant inroads into the collection – it’s an impressive achievement.
My trip was not all work and no play. There is a little café tucked inside the walls of the VEC which, as well as making excellent mid-morning coffee, provides delicious lunches – and despite being mid-January there was warmth and sun enough to enjoy it outside.
And this brings me to a serious point about discussion groups, and how to hold them. Without the ability to hold meetings online, the Jesuit Rare Book discussion group would never have got started, and would not be able to meet twice a year. It’s really useful, and a good way to know about each others’ work and projects.
But it was over lunch and a glass of wine at a Roman restaurant that Maurice and I had the level of discussion that led to interesting ideas about book distribution systems among Jesuit institutions in the seventeenth century. Maurice’s unrivalled depth of knowledge about the Venerable English College, Jesuit educational history, and book use and supply together with my familiarity with the Mount Street collection, sparked some real insights and opened possibilities of avenues for further research. Meeting in person, physically looking at books rather than at catalogues or photographs of books is so necessary for sparking ideas. I’m not denigrating meeting remotely – without it there is no way the Jesuit Rare Books group would have started, let alone continued its current pattern of meeting twice a year. But the magic happens when this is supplemented by relaxed and hospitable meetings with room for wide-ranging and off the wall idea sharing. And not just because Rome is lovely and the sun was shining and the wine good, though that may have helped!
Bibliography:
Hendrik Dijkgraaf, The Library of a Jesuit Community at Holbeck, Nottinghamshire (1679). LP Publications, Cambridge 2003
L.W. Jones, ‘The College Library’, Venerabile Volume 4. 1929-1930. Pp226-235, 329-338
Hannah Thomas, ‘The Society of Jesus in Wales c. 1600–1679: Rediscovering the Cwm Jesuit Library at Hereford Cathedral’, Journal of Jesuit Studies 1, 2014, 572–88
Maurice Whitehead, English Jesuit Education. Expulsion, suppression, survival and restoration, 1762-1803, Ashgate Publishing, Farnham, 2013
Michael E Williams, The Venerable English College at Rome. Gracewing, Leominster, 1979, 2nd edn 2008.
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