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A Note on the Life of St Edmund Gennings

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Rogers David
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Extract

It is now not far short of thirty years since, in the pages of the present journal, Antony Allison made his survey of ‘Franciscan Books in English 1559–1640’. In the course of his article he describes the work entitled The Life and Death of Edmund Geninges priest which appeared at St. Omers in 1614. He cited the prime authority of Luke Wadding, the great Franciscan historian, whose Scriptores Ordinis Minorum was published in 1650, that this anonymous account was by the martyr’s brother, John Gennings, who became a Franciscan about 1616, restored the Second Province of the English Friars, and was in fact still alive when Wadding wrote. Further analysing the book, Allison identifies ‘I. G. P’, to whom it is dedicated, as John Gennings Priest, and ‘I. W. P.’ who writes the dedication, as John Wilson Priest, who in 1614 had already for several years been manager of the press operating in the English Jesuit College at St. Omers.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , May 1984 , pp. 92 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1984

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References

Notes

1 Then called Biographical Studies; vol. 3 (April 1955) pp. 16–65.

2 art. cit. p. 27, no. 7.

3 STC. 11728, A & R 358.

4 He died in 1660, aged ‘about 90’ (actually 84); see ‘Necrology of the… Friars Minor 1618–1761’, CRS 24, p. 266. This obituary notice mentions his book Institutio Missionariorum (printed at Doway in 1651) but not the Life of his brother.

5 art. cit. p. 41.

6 Stonyhurst MSS. Collectanea M, fol. 186.

7 art. cit. pp. 62–3, footnote 49.

8 Perhaps without having seen a copy himself; his title is a Latin description of the book, not a quotation of its title page wording.

9 Vol. 8 no. 4, pp. 192–249 and no. 5, pp. 252–284.

10 art. cit. p. 219, footnote 9.

11 Suppressed details include: the author’s initials; the martyr’s birthplace (Lichfield); the name of the gentleman (the martyr James Layburne) whom he visited in prison, and the name of the young gentlewoman (Mistress Lucy Ridley) who secured a thumb of the martyr as a relic—as pictured in the penultimate engraving—and later became a Benedictine (corrected in 1614 to Augustinian) nun at Louvain.

12 Perhaps he bore the whole printing costs. We can infer that Wilson had ample private means from the great benefactions he made to St. Omers College over many years.

13 Liber Ruber of the English College, Rome, CRS. 37, pp. 111–112.

14 After his banishment from England in December 1586 Father Richard Sherwood lived continuously abroad for the rest of his life (Anstruther, The Seminary Priests vol. 1, p. 314).