Henry of Kirkestede steps slightly further from the shadows

A few decades ago and the name of Henry of Kirkestede would have been known to very, very few. His major work, a Catalogus scriptorum ecclesie, had from the sixteenth century been ascribed to ‘Boston of Bury’. Even after R. H. Rouse had demonstrated that it should instead by attributed to the monk of Bury St Edmunds who became its mid-fourteenth-century librarian, Henry from the Norfolk village of Kirkestede, the error continued to circulate. In the meantime, in editing the Catalogus for the Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues, Richard and his wife Mary Rouse proposed another work for Kirkestede: a Speculum Coenobitarum, discussing the origins of monasticism and celebrating its signifance by listing the saints and other worthy figures who had been monks. The Rouses’ argument that Kirkestede substantially revised and expanded this text produced at Bury, was based on internal similiarities with the Catalogus: what they could not show was a manuscript that made explicit reference to his involvement. Now, we can have yet greater confidence in their inspired supposition because there is a small piece of further evidence that comes from an unexpected location.

I have been mulling over a manuscript in the Vatican, MS. Vat. lat. 1221, largely dedicated to hagiography of Thomas Becket. It is unusual for this type of text in being written on Italian parchment in the fifteenth century in a humanist script with matching bianchi girari initials. It has been known to scholars mainly because it includes an otherwise unknown letter of John of Salisbury. I have had the suspicion that the manuscript, though looking to all intent and purposes as an Italian product was actually the work of an Englishman — there are a couple of moments when the copyist slips into a more gothic script and he shows notable mastery of English placenames. My interest led me to look more closely at all its contents. Near the end, there is a set of lists recording monks who were saints, popes, kings, authors and doctors of the church. Each list is introduced by four lines of verses — verses which also appear in the similar lists that make up the revised Speculum Coenobitarum. But what makes this all the more striking is that those lists include a rubricated colophon which reads ‘Explicit compilatio fratris de kyrkested’.

Now, it might be said that the phrasing is open to interpretation: properly, it should refer to a brother at the monastery of Kirkestede. If so, it would be curious: there is little other evidence of such scholarly activity from that Lincolnshire Cistercian house, and it would beg the question why the compiler of the manuscript does not mention the order in his concluding collection of oaths made on being a monk. A more plausible explanation is that the Christian name ‘Henry’ has been omitted either because the scribe did not know much about him or was transcribing from a copy that itself did not record the forename. It seems to me that the identification with Henry, and thus corroboration of Rouses’ suggestion, is inescapable.

This being so, it raises interesting issues about the popularity of the work. All the manuscripts of the revised Speculum known to date are from English monasteries — in particular, Bury itself, St Albans and Durham. This  copy made in Italy (and soon after production, it can be added, in the papal library) could suggest an international fame that has previously been unnoticed. Then again, as its copyist is likely to be an Englishman, most likely in Rome, it might be said that the work had travelled far from Bury but not far from the English community.

No photo

I arrived in Rome last night for a period of research. So this morning was my first chance on this trip to see the city in daylight. Rome had prepared itself for me: it woke up and put on its blue sky (gently streaked with plumes of high white cloud); it met me not in any fancy dress, but (as I like it) wearing in its lived-in statuesque beauty; it felt fresh as it closed in and breathed on my cheek. You may tell that I am ecstatic with the splendour of it all.

An added, perhaps meaner, joy of my walk was relishing how little of the morning could be caught in photographs. No camera could capture the dappled delight of the sunlight speckling the water streaming from the fountains above the Galleria d’Arte Moderna; it could not comprehend the haze that veils the morning panorama of the city from the Pincio; it could not record faithfully the quality of the light giving each leaf its individuality. The camera never fails to lie. There are virtues in virtuality but the pleasures of reality are vertiginous.

It was after I had walked down from the Pincio to the Piazza del Popolo and entered Santa Maria del Popolo that I encountered the injunction to sum this up: ‘no photo’ is printed in majuscules on A4 paper stuck on the both sides of the chapel containing Caravaggio’s two canvases. There are particular reasons, of course, to avoid photography of those objects in that confined space. But, there, in that holy place, a sin is committed nearly as bad as trigger-happy-snapping. For the price of a small coin, the walls are lit with an intense electric light that floods each of the pictures. It reveals every detail of the design: the folds of the rich drapery of Saul-becoming-Paul, the strain on the right arm of the cross-maker as he lifts the perplexed Peter off the ground. Yet, at the same time, something seems lost through this uncompromising revelation: it somehow evens out the pictures; it flattens them. Was this how Caravaggio intended them to be seen, a pool of light lapping around each element? We tend to like our seventeenth-century music played in ‘period’ style nowadays; is it not time we went in for some period viewing of our own? I waited for the light to switch off and gazed then at a different image of a fallen Saul, in some sort of harmony with the flank of the horse above him. It was something more mystical, less comprehensible – as a miracle should have been. I prayed silently for a few more moments of half-light, but the clatter of the coin falling into the box sent not a soul out of Purgatory, but the soul out of the paintings before us. No photo, yes, but no aggressive artificial lighting either, please.