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The Supposed Source Of Persons's “Christian Directory”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

J.P. Driscoll S.J.
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Extract

From the time of its first appearance in 1582 until the present day there has been confusion as to the sources of Robert Persons’s Christian Directory. Gaspar Loarte and Luis de Granada have each been represented as the principal source used by Persons who has come to be regarded as little more than a translator or editor. In the case of Loarte, Persons himself was indirectly responsible for the confusion. A study of the Christian Directory and its contents, however, reveals that Persons did not borrow from Loarte at all and that if he borrowed from Granada it was only in a very minor way.

Type
Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 5 , Issue 6 , October 1960 , pp. 236 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1960

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References

1. The Exercise of a Christian life. Written in Italian … and newly translated into Englishe. By I.S. [London, 1579.] Not in STC. A & R 462.

2. A Brief Answer unto those idle and frivolous quarrels of R.P. against the late edition of the Resolution by Edmund Bunny. London, 1589. STC.4088. Intended to accompany Bunny's 1589 edition of the work (STC 19364).

3. London, 1721. I, cols. 356-362.

4. Oxford Books: A Bibliography of Printed Works Relating to the University and City of Oxford, Oxford, 1912. I, p.16.

5. English Devotional Literature 1600-1640, Madison, 1931, p.141.

6. Tudor Books of Private Devotion, Madison, 1951, p.170. (Loarte, moreover, was not an Italian, but a Spaniard.) Finally, A. C. Southern writes that Persons's book “may best be considered as a free adaptation of its Italian original, Gaspar, Loarte's Essercitio …” Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559-1582, London, 1950, p.186.Google Scholar

7. In his second edition (1585) Persons changed his title to The Christian Directory, because, as he wrote in the Preface, “the other book of Christian exercise hath bene set forth a parte by itselfe.” (p.20). He is referring to the second edition of Brinkley's translation of Loarte published in 1584 at Rouen (STC 16643). It was not, therefore, because of Bunny's use of the H82 title that Persons made the change, as Maria Hagedorn suggested (Reformation und Spanische Andachtsliteratur; Luis de Granada in England, Leipzig, 1934, p.110). It seems moreover that Persons did not learn of Bunny's pirated version of his book until his own 1585 edition was already in the press: on page 322 he inserted this Annotation:

“The print being come to this place, M. Bunny's edition of this book was delivered to me, out of whose infinite corruptions, maymes, and mang-lings divers thinges shal be noted hereafter in the margent.”

8. op.cit. col.357.

9. Of prayer, and meditation. Wherein… Paris, 1582. tr. Richard Hopkins. STC 16907.

10. op.cit.

11. Ibid, p.115. A. C. Southern, op.cit. p.186 refers to this conclusion by Dr. Hagedorn with approval: “In point of fact Persons drew his matter not only from Loarte, but also, in respect of his illustrations, comparisons and quotations from Luis de Granada's Quia de Pecadores(1573), as has been clearly pointed out by Dr. Hagedorn.”

12. Hagedorn uses the translation by Francis Meres, London, 1598, as in the parallels quoted below. I have also made use of the Spanish text in the Paris edition of 1880.