Research in Rome, a year on: reflections of an aspiring doctoral student

From April to June 2019, Christopher Archibald, who had then just completed a research masters degree in early modern English literature at Balliol College, Oxford, worked in the College Archives on a student work placement supported by the British Province of the Society of Jesus. Now an aspiring doctoral student at New College, Oxford, where he is studying seventeenth-century English Catholic literature of the Civil Wars and Revolution, Christopher reflects in this blog on his experience – and the ways in which it helped prepare him for his current studies.

Not long after arriving in Rome in early April 2019, I looked at the VEC’s seventeenth-century Pilgrim Book. This manuscript records those visitors who dined at the College in the seventeenth century. It is known to literary scholars primarily for documenting the visits of poets Richard Crashaw (1612/13–1648) and a ‘Dominus Miltonus’, almost certainly the famous John Milton (1608–1674). As I soon realised, this fascinating manuscript far surpasses its use as a footnote in the biographies of literary celebrities. It includes diverse travellers: Roman cardinals, English aristocrats, ex-convicts from Moorish captivity, political writers, artists, and saints. It provides a tantalising glimpse of the extraordinary life of the Venerable English College in the early modern period. Over the following few months, I began to appreciate that the College’s archives are as richly varied and fascinating as its dining table must have been in the seventeenth century.

The main task of my internship was contributing to the cataloguing of the collection of unbound manuscripts, the Scritture. Working through this part of the archival collection brought me into contact with a wide range of manuscripts: letters, wills, inventories, literary works, and voluminous property disputes. I was also very fortunate in being able to examine materials for my own research, and am still working on the documents I looked at a year ago now. I had hoped to find evidence of the College’s seventeenth-century dramatic productions, but had not been prepared for the array of extraordinary baroque sermons, orations, and poetry. The breadth of the archival collections and their potential importance to scholars across the disciplines cannot be overestimated: during my three months at the VEC, I only scratched the surface, but I left Rome in late June 2019 having learnt an enormous amount and armed with even more questions to think about.

The usual experience of an archival researcher is of ‘calling up’ a manuscript which magically appears from unseen backrooms; I am therefore enormously grateful for having been able to spend an extended period of time within the collection itself and for having had the chance to browse its riches. As I worked on the catalogue, questions emerged of how to categorise and organise material and to think about the collection as a whole. The complex history of the VEC archive – first arranged by early-seventeenth-century Jesuits and re-ordered after the suppression of the Society of Jesus – is an object lesson in the different ways archival information can be organised and the important consequences of such decisions.

Understanding the coherence of the archive and wider context of items within it was invaluable. It demonstrated how different documents can illuminate each other in surprising ways: financial records provide new clues to the College drama and to the biographies of students and visitors; contemporary letters offer insights into the political and religious writings of expatriate English and Welsh Catholics; in one case, we discovered that a recurring name in the legal and financial documents, John Dodel, also appeared as the addressee of an ode by English Catholic exile and Neo-Latin poet, James Alban Gibbes (1611?–1677). As the cataloguing project continues, such links will surely provide new insights and important breakthroughs.

Christopher Archibald in the Schwarzenbach Reading Room, 13 May 2019, during his internship in the College Archives

Throughout my internship, I was struck by the busy life of the College Archives: we were visited by scholars from across the world with interests encompassing bibliography, art history, musicology, medieval history, and literature, as well as by parish groups, university students, and interested individuals. One definite highlight was the conference on the Magna Carta, hosted at the VEC on 16 May 2019 on behalf of the British Embassy to the Holy See, after which we had a private tour of the Vatican Secret Archives. This was an extraordinary experience – led through its endless warrens and vast stacks, we finished in the beautiful ‘Meridian Hall’ of the ‘Tower of the Winds’. Throughout its history, it has served variously as an observatory and a bedroom to Queen Christina of Sweden.

Though I did not visit the Secret Archives as a researcher, I was fortunate to examine documents in the Vatican Library and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu or central Jesuit archives, relating to the Venerable English College. Combining evidence from these libraries on either side of the Tiber provided a detailed picture of the VEC’s theatrical productions in the mid-seventeenth century.

I have continued to encounter links to the VEC’s collections since returning to the UK. The first room of the Tate Britain’s recent ‘British Baroque’ exhibition included an allegorical painting by John Michael Wright (bap. 1617, d. 1694), favourite painter at the Restoration court of Charles II.

John Michael Wright (1617–1694), ‘Astraea Returns to Earth (The Apotheosis of Charles II)’[1]

Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, photo in public domain

As the VEC archives record, whilst in exile in Rome, Wright painted the scenery for the College play in 1645 and was thanked with a new pair of stockings. His time abroad undoubtedly influenced his later and more famous work. It is certain that the VEC archives hold the answers to many more questions posed by documents and artefacts held elsewhere in the city and the world.

My time at the VEC has proved invaluable to my current doctoral work. Over the three months I came across primary texts that form the basis of my current writing, gained a new appreciation of both the College’s wide-ranging literary culture and its history, and benefited hugely from Maurice Whitehead’s expert advice on researching early modern English Catholicism.

The potential for the College Archives to invigorate research across the humanities is very exciting. I hope the current project to maintain, conserve, and redevelop the archives and thus to preserve them for future generations continues to go from strength to strength. I am enormously grateful to Maurice and the staff of the College for welcoming me, and to the British Province of the Society of Jesus for funding my stay. Having dutifully deposited a penny in the Trevi Fountain, I am hopeful I will return to Rome before too long.

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[1] The painting is an allegory of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and its subject-matter concerns the Greek goddess, Astraea, the embodiment of Justice, who was the last immortal to leave the earth before it descended into chaos and whose return is therefore a symbol of a new golden age.

Inspiration for this theme came from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (a book for which Wright seems to have a particular fondness, owning four copies) and probably also from the panegyric, Astraea Redux, published on 19 June 1660 by the poet, John Dryden (1631–1700), to welcome the new reign of Charles II. Astraea is also referred to in Book IV of Milton's Paradise Lost.

In the foreground, a golden-haired seraph, with flowing cloak and large wings, holds a sash bearing the words, Terras Astraea Revisit (Astraea has returned to the land). The top half of the scene shows the star-maiden, Astraea, with long golden hair and dressed in flowing robes, gesturing upward to a five-pointed star with her right hand. With her left, she points a sceptre towards a portrait of Charles II, which is held by three putti reclining on clouds. On her left another putto bears the heavenly scales of justice.

Below, other putti bear up to the heavens an uprooted oak — an allusion to the royal oak at Boscobel House, Shropshire, on the estate of the Catholic Giffard family, in the boughs of which Charles II hid, and thanks to which his life was saved, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

This painting, in its original pinewood frame, formed the central ceiling panel of the bedchamber of Charles II in the Palace of Whitehall, destroyed by fire in 1690. It was very probably painted shortly after the Restoration in 1660.