Expanding the Narrative: The Reception of Ignatius of Antioch in Britain, ca. 1200–1700

Abstract

Recent studies of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch have helpfully located seventeenth-century Ignatian scholarship in its ecclesial and political context. Of particular importance, these new works have demonstrated that seventeenth-century British analysis of the genuineness of Ignatius's letters coincided with debates about British ecclesial government and the English Civil War. This essay contributes to such studies by expanding the discussion in three ways. The first two ways extend the study of Ignatian reception backward from the seventeenth century. First, the article observes that the study of the middle recension (the earliest form of Ignatius's letters) can be found in late medieval English theological writings and manuscripts. Second, it addresses how, simultaneously, four Ignatian letters which record a correspondence between Ignatius, John the Elder, and the Virgin Mary were read in Britain. These letters highlight Ignatius's piety and apostolic links. Finally, this essay widens the scholarly narrative of seventeenth-century Ignatian studies by observing that seventeenth-century interpreters drew on late medieval citations of Ignatius and that they were concerned with Ignatius's piety as well as the interpretive puzzles in his letters.

Japanese Monks and Chinese Books: Glimpses of Buddhist Sinology in Early Tokugawa Japan

“…20 (Elrington 1864, p.106): "Libros enim duos nactus sum, alterum in publica collegii Gunwelli et Caii apud Cantabridgienses, alterum in privata D. Richardi Montacuti, Norwicensis nuper episcopi, bibliotheca repositum: qui Ignatianarum epistolarum interpretationem continebant, a vulgata nostra Latina divertissimam"; i.e., "I have come across two manuscript books, one kept in the college library of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, one in the private library of Richard Montagu, lately Bishop of Norwich, which contained a translation of the Ignatian letters very different from that of our usual Latin versions". 21 For a recent account, see (Lockadoo 2020). For ecclesiological and political reasons Ussher's work was soon attacked by no less a figure than John Milton (1608-1674); for a while in the nineteenth century further manuscript discoveries in Syriac appeared to cast doubt on his analysis, but as will be seen from the next note, by the late nineteenth century his deductions had been deemed irrefutable.…”