Overview

Exhibit

Overview

Piety

England's Art

Imported Art

Prayer Books

Conversion Books

Today

This exhibition focuses on Catholic preservation of books and works of art important to Catholic culture and worship, especially in England and the United States. Catholic collecting is a highly important but little researched area of cultural history. Many of the treasures of English art that are now in museums and rare book libraries have come down to us because of individuals who were dedicated to preserving pious texts and images, even in the face of opposition. When forbidden public worship in the wake of Protestant ascendancy, Catholics came to identify their faith with the statues, paintings, chalices, processional crosses, and other objects of ritual, prayer books, and works of devotional literature that they were able to use secretly. These Catholics became known as recusants - recusing themselves form oaths of loyalty and participation in the state-sanctioned religion. The exhibition would be accompanied by a two-day symposium at Holy Cross involving an international group of scholars with publication of the collected papers.

Relevance Today
Attention to the motivation for collecting forces us to address equally vehement motives for disuse and even destruction of religious objects even those of significant aesthetic and monetary value. Religious works of art that have survived from the Middle Ages in England have done so in the face of aggressive campaign of destruction, or Iconoclasm. In recent years in Afghanistan, the Taliban prohibited both visual and musical arts and destroyed by dynamite of what was then the largest Buddhist image in the world. The deadly struggle over possession of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, known to the Islamic world as the Haram al-Sharif, testifies to the mesmerizing function of the place and the tangible object to the cultural identity. We see the history of possession in the importance of the restoration of objects pilfered from Jewish citizens by the National Socialists in the German pogrom - sold on the art market and ending up in collections of American Museums. The itinerary of the work of art - here sacred objects - has become a major contemporary interest.

English Catholic Families
The survival of these works of art and books testify to Catholicism as a minority religion, even a severely marginalized one, where the tangible object functioned as a testimony to the vitality of past faith and promise of its future. Important Catholic families of England who preserved works of art are the Arundels and Jerninghams, both of whom are represented by collections in the United States. These families are noted since the time of Henry VIII and continued to exercise their influence despite restrictions on Catholics, fined and bared from public office. Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel 1585-1646, has been the subject of scholarly interest. A century later, his descendant continued the tradition. Henry 8th Baron Arundel patronized John Thorpe, an English Jesuit living in Rome in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Fr. Thorpe acquired art for Baron Arundel, in particular the ebony and silver Flagellation now in the Martin D'Arcy Gallery of Art.

The Jerninghams were an important Norfolk family whose country seat was Costessy Hall just south of Norwich. The were particularly important in Anglo-Catholic affairs between the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 that removed restrictions on leasing and inheriting land to the Act of Emancipation of 1829. Around 1800 Sir William built a new family chapel for his own use and to serve as the parish church for a substantial portion of the population of the village of Costessy. Sir William imported authentic medieval glass to set in its windows, works of art that brought a strong identification of Catholicism. Costessy Hall was dismantled in 1918 sold in its entirely to Gosvesnor Thomas a dealer who furnished numerous panels to American Collectors. The Jerningham panels are represented in the collections of the Harvard University Art Museums and the Worcester Art Museum as well as many other in Europe and the United States.

The Bulter-Bowdens were a Catholic family that kept the single extant copy of The Book of Margery Kempe, most probably copied about 1540 and kept in the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace in Yorkshire until the Dissolution under Henry VIII. The Bulter-Bowdens also possessed one of the prize objects of the fourteenth century, an extraordinary cope embroidered by the world famous English school "opus anglicanum" with sacred scenes, apostles, and saints. The same saints observed in stained glass and rood screens of England are featured in the cope: Lawrence, Mary Magdalene, Helena, Stephen, Edward the Confessor, Nicholas, Margaret, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, Catherine, Thomas of Canterbury, Edmund, and the Apostles. The cope was acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1955.

The objects exhibit as a measure of reflection on a Catholic past and the construction of self-identity. The provenance for almost all of these objects includes not only their production in a Christian (or in a post-Reformation era, Catholic) context but also their ownership by Catholic collectors. Most of the objects come from the collection of the Jesuits at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire or the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Several objects have a particular resonance since they were Mass vessels produced in England when such products for Catholic use were forbidden. A silver chalice now in the Martin d'Arcy Gallery, Loyola University of Chicago, was made in 1684 during English prohibition. The chalice is inscribed so that it is possible to know that it was made as a gift of Elizabeth Rookwood, whose residence was Coldham Hall in West Suffolk. The maker, however, preserved anonymity by not marking the vessel . The inscription designates its use for the Jesuit administrative division called the College of the Holy Apostles, comprising the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridge. Another dates from 1724 and is attributed to a silversmith from Galway, Ireland. The later chalice was made for the Dominican convent of Burisoule (Burrishoole) founded in 1669 in County Mayo in the West Country of Ireland.

Catholics in English-Speaking Colonies
The early years of the practice of Catholicism in the United States also entailed proscriptions against Catholic worship in many colonies. Research of Catholic archives and parishes reveals objects preserved from these early years. The exhibition Sacred Spaces: Building and Remembering Sites of Worship in the Nineteenth Century has indicated the fascinating history of the beginnings of Catholic worship and the extraordinary importance often held by a single painted image or chalice. Chalices and communion vessels were often imported from France and their donation specifically noted in the founding of churches, as demonstrated in the 1830s in Worcester's first Catholic parish, St. John's (originally Christ's Church). Other sites, such St. Louis, founded as a Catholic city, imported paintings from France in 1818 to embellish its first cathedral. Identification of these objects and publication of this history is overdue.