Calendars; England, 1595

Title

Calendars; England, 1595

Shelfmark

Christ Church MS. 456

Associated place

Paris

Place of origin

England

Date

1595. Item 1 mentions ‘hoc anno 1595’, a date confirmed by the list of feasts at fol. 25v.

Language

Latin

Contents

Form

codex

Support

Paper (watermark: golden fleece; English royal arms within the garter, as in our MS 140)

Physical extent

Fols: 38 (numbered: i-iii, 1–35)

Hands

Written by one scribe, usually in a tiny italic script, but item 1 in a larger and more uneven variant, and the notes at fol. 25v-26 are in secretary.

Binding

Limp leather with, on front and on the spine ‘Calendarium Romanum Written’ in a slanted humanist bookhand (probably neither the scribe nor the named early owner), s. xvi/xvii. Two small holes on each cover where there would have been ties. A ChCh bookplate on inside of front cover, above which the pencil shelfmark ‘O.S.3.10’ (s. xix), cancelled and replaced by present shelfmark which is also on a tab on the spine.

Provenance

The paperstock of this fascicule, from the mill of John Spilman (like our MS 140), suggests that it was compiled in England, with the opening letter discussing the differences in the celebration of Easter between the author’s community and those ‘overseas’, in other words, placing the author in England and discussing the recent papal reform of the calendar. The small manuscript may not, though, have stayed in England for long. The only internal evidence for the early history of this fascicule is the signature of an early owner which appears thrice within the book: ‘Tho: Carre’ (fol. 2, 9, 17). Given the Catholic affinities of the first calendar, this owner is presumably to be equated with Miles Pinkney of County Durham who took the alias of Thomas Carre when entering the English College at Douai in 1618. If so, he patently could not have been the pamphlet’s first owner: he was baptised four years after it was compiled (on him, see Joseph Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History, or bibliographical dictionary of the English Catholics..., 5 vols (London, 1885–1887), 5:313–17; Joseph Bergin in Oxford DNB). His career was based mainly in Paris (with a brief return to England at the Restoration, in the train of the dowager queen, Henrietta Maria), and it was in the French capital that he died on 31 October 1674. This suggests that the manuscript travelled across the Channel a few years after production and spent there some of its early life.

The next stages in its history, after Carre’s ownership, are not known. The shelfmark at the front pastedown (see binding) demonstrates that, at ChCh, it entered the Orrery collection but it would appear that it was not given by Charles Boyle, 4th earl of Orrery (1674–1731) himself: the manuscript records no earlier shelfmark, as do other Orrery volumes, it does not appear under this shelfmark in the earliest of the catalogues (MS LR 22 and 23), and it was placed in a section of the collection where other non-Orrery material was placed (so that O.S.3.9 is a collection of pamphlets with handwritten letters from George Keith to David Gregory, Savilian professor of astronomy, both dated 1697). We might surmise that our manuscript was a late arrival, held in the Orrery collection and (as it was not catalogued by Kitchin) removed to the manuscript collection only some time after 1867.