Luke Wadding: A Life

Figures

• Front CoverPortrait of Luke Wadding, oil on canvas (1650s), attributed to Carlo Maratti (NGI.2006.24). Reproduced courtesy of the National Gallery of Ireland1
• Map 1Francis Jobson’s navigational chart of Waterford Harbour, 1591; IE TCD MS 1209 (64). Reproduced by kind permission of The Board of Trinity College Dublin.
• Figure 1.1Family tree of the Waddings of Waterford
• Figure 2.1Illustris Civitatis Conimbriae in Lusitania ad flumen Illundam effigies, Braun & Hogenberg. Engraving of Coimbra on the river Mondego with two scholars in foreground. Reproduced courtesy of Biblioteca de Fundo Antigo da Universidade de Coimbra
• Map 2The Spanish and Portuguese frontier, between the Duero and Tagus rivers (1641), (AGS, MPD,5,176). Courtesy of the Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid.
• Map 3Franciscan province of Santiago, Spain; Manuel de Castro, La Provincia Franciscana de Santiago. Ocho Siglos de Historia (Santiago de Compostela: Liceo Franciscano, 1984). Reproduced by kind permission of the friars of the Santiago province
• Figure 4.1Frontispiece of B.P. Francisci assisiatis opuscula: nunc primum collecta, tribus tomis distincta, notis et commentariis asceticis illustrata (Antwerp, 1623). Reproduced by kind permission of UCD Library Special Collections
• Figure 4.2Frontispiece of Presbeia sive legatio Philippi III. et IV. (Leuven, 1624). Reproduced by kind permission of UCD Library Special Collections
• Figure 4.3Title page of Respuesta apologética contra los que pretenden aver sido N. P. S. Francisco frayle de los Ermitaños de S. Agustín (Madrid, 1625). Reproduced by kind permission of Collegio S. Isidoro
• Figure 5.1St Isidore’s Franciscan College, Rome. Reproduced by kind permission of Collegio S. Isidoro, Rome
• Figure 6.1Detail of title page of Annales Minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum (1st edn, Lyon, 1625), vol. 1. Reproduced by kind permission of UCD Library Special Collections
• Figure 6.2Fra Emanuele da Como, Fresco of Luke Wadding and associates: Antony Hickey, Bonaventure Barron and John Punch, Aula Maxima, St Isidore’s College, Rome. One of a series of frescoes painted in 1672, in honour of the Immaculate Conception and the Scotist school of thought. Reproduced by kind permission of Collegio S. Isidoro, Rome.
• Figure 7.1Signature and personal seal of Luke Wadding, dated 8 May 1626, showing the Virgin Mary above the Franciscan symbol of a cross between the arms of Jesus and St Francis crossed over, both bearing the nail marks of the Crucifixion on their hands; with the inscription ‘Lucas Waddingus’; IE TCD MS 1245, folio 36r. Reproduced by kind permission of The Board of Trinity College Dublin
• Figure 10.1Title page of Annales Minorum seu trium ordinum a S. Francisco institutorum (1st edn, Rome, 1654), vol. 8. Reproduced by kind permission of UCD Library Special Collections
• Figure 10.2Altar-piece of the Immaculate Conception by Carlo Maratti, St Isidore’s College, Rome. This work was completed six years after the death of Luke Wadding. Reproduced by kind permission of Collegio S. Isidoro, Rome.

Glossary

Preface

I began the research for this book many years ago in an essay on Franciscan historiography at University College Cork, followed by my doctoral thesis at Maynooth University, and further detailed investigation at University College Dublin (UCD) on the Wadding Papers. My debt of obligation to friends and institutions is great. I am much obliged to Thomas O’Connor for supervising my doctorate on Flaithrí Ó Maolchonaire. To the Mícheál Ó Cléirigh Institute at UCD, I owe special gratitude for funding, which permitted me three years’ postdoctoral research from 2008 to 2010, before I began teaching with UCD School of History. To John McCafferty and Edel Bhreathnach, I express my thanks. To Séamus Fanning of Waterford for his generosity and words of motivation. To Joseph MacMahon of the Friars Minor of the Irish Province, for his interest in this work at its inception and his encouragement to persevere. To his fellow Franciscan, John O’Keeffe, who permitted me the privilege of staying at St Isidore’s College, Rome. To their confrères, Louis Brennan, Ignatius Fennessy, Mícheál Mac Craith, Benignus Millett, Stephen O’Kane and Gearóid Fran Ó Conaire for their guidance and help with sources. To Joseph McDermott and Lar Farrell for organising visits to Assisi and La Verna. To the Irish Pallotines at San Silvestro in Capite for further accommodation in Rome. I am indebted to Pierre Descotes of the Groupe de l’Institut d’Études Augustiniennes at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) for verifying my translations. To Angelo Bottone and Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh for proofreading. I salute my colleagues, Conor Mulvagh and William Mulligan, for facilitating the research and writing since 2023.

The staff of libraries and archives deserve particular thanks for their patience and courtesy. To Kate Manning, Principal Archivist, and the staff at UCD Archives, for unstinting assistance with manuscript materials. To Evelyn Flanagan, Head of UCD Library Special Collections, Eugene Roche, Rachel Daly and Claire Dunne of Cultural Heritage and Special Collections, for all their help with seventeenth-century printed books. To Seamus Helferty for archival supervision of the project to catalogue and digitally preserve five volumes of the UCD-OFM ‘D’ manuscripts, from 2008 to 2010. At the National Library of Ireland, Gráinne MacLochlainn, Berni Metcalfe, Aoife Murphy and Máire Ní Chonalláin proved supportive and efficient. Caoimhe Ní Ghormáin at the Manuscripts & Archives Research Library, Trinity College Dublin, facilitated the acquisition of images, for which I am grateful. To Jérôme Sirdey, Yves Jocteur Montrozier and Pierre Guinard of the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon for their help relating to seventeenth-century Lyonnais booksellers. I am grateful to José María Burrieza Sánchez for assistance with cartographic material at the Archivo General de Simancas. To Rosie Keane of the National Gallery of Ireland for help with the Wadding portrait in Dublin. Further thanks to Maria Flynn for her prayers. To Carla Margarida da Cruz Valente and Margarida Relvão Calmeiro for their help in obtaining relevant material from Coimbra.

To José García Oro and Fray Natalio Saludes for valuable support relating to the Franciscan province of Santiago. To Brian Kirby, Provincial Archivist of Capuchin Archives, Ireland, and Esther Carreño Corchete of Biblioteca Central Capuchinos, Salamanca, for advice on Franciscan sources. My sincere thanks are due to James Kelly and William Murphy of Dublin City University, Hiram Morgan and Larry Walsh. To Kenneth Nicholls for sharing his extensive knowledge, to Julian Walton for kindly allowing me to consult his unpublished work on Waterford, to Donnchadh Ó Ceallacháin and Ben Murtagh for suggesting the Wadding family tree. To Tim O’Neill for the generous supply of relevant books, Kenneth Ferguson for timely information on the history of art and Liam Brockey for insights into Portuguese historiography.

Portions of this work have appeared in earlier form in print: ‘Illustration and Ornamentation in the Works of Luke Wadding, Seventeenth-Century Historian and Theologian’, in Alexander Wilkinson and Alejandra Ulla Lorenzo, eds, Typography, Illustration and Ornamentation in the Early Modern Iberian Book World (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 350–71; ‘Irish Franciscans and the Santiago Province of Spain’, in Matteo Binasco, ed, Luke Wadding, the Franciscans and Global Catholicism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 19–38; ‘Luke Wadding and the Breviary of Urban VIII: A Study of the Book Trade between Rome, the Low Countries and the Spanish Empire’, Studia Hib., 39 (2014), 87–101; ‘Some Unpublished Correspondence of Luke Wadding OFM to Giovanni Pietro Puricelli, Archpriest of San Lorenzo Maggiore, Milan, and Pietro di Gallarà’, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, 24 (2012), 29–45; ‘Saint Isidore’s Franciscan College, Rome: From Centre of Influence to Site of Memory’, in Enrique García Hernán and Óscar Recio Morales, eds, Redes y Espacios de Poder de la Comunidad Irlandesa en España y la América Española, 1600–1825. Power Strategies: Spain and Ireland, 1600–1825 (Valencia: Albatros Ediciones, 2012), 103–14; ‘A Manuscript Copy of the Declaration of Arbroath from the Roman Archives of Fr Luke Wadding OFM (1588–1657)’, SHR, 90 (2011), 296–315; ‘Correspondence from Jean-Baptiste Devenet and Claude Prost, Book Merchants of Lyon, to Fr Luke Wadding OFM, 1647–54’, AFH, 104 (2011), 519–45; ‘Luke Wadding’s Petition to the Papacy on Behalf of Dutch and Flemish Migrants in Waterford, c.1642–51’, An. Hib., 41 (2009), 1–12.

In completing this work, many thanks are due to James McGuire. I also acknowledge the assistance I received from Beatrix Färber and James Egan. To Enrique García Hernán, Igor Pérez Tostado and Óscar Recio Morales for inviting me to participate in their projects. To Eduardo de Mesa Gallego for conversations about early modern times. To Tony Mason, I pay special tribute. For her encouragement and cooperation throughout, I am most grateful to my wife, Hélène, who read every chapter and made many helpful suggestions.

Abbreviations

Note on Conventions

I have aimed to provide the closest possible translation in its historical context. Unless otherwise stated, the translations and figures are my own work. I report the original text in a footnote for citations in languages other than English and have expanded manuscript contractions marked in italics.

In the twentieth century, a second, separate numbering system was recorded on manuscript material in UCD-OFM, D.02 to UCD-OFM, D.04. Both sets are inserted here. I have retained the original orthography wherever possible and designated references to NLI microfilm to indicate that documents can be consulted at the National Library of Ireland.

Footnotes referring to the Annales Minorum and the Scriptores ordinis minorum relate to the third edition and the new edition respectively, as outlined in the list of abbreviations. However, when discussing Wadding’s dedicatory letters and original approbations, the first edition of both these works is cited with the publication details enclosed in parentheses.

The Gregorian Calendar, introduced by Gregory XIII in 1582, became identified as New Style. It was immediately adopted in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and France. Whereas in England and Ireland, the Julian Calendar, or Old Style, was still in use in 1752. To avoid confusion, all dates are left at the date of the original document.

Introduction

The Franciscan Luke Wadding is rightly regarded as a pivotal player in the seventeenth century. A well-known figure internationally, Wadding was a priest, a scholar, an educator and a mediator who packed into a life of seventy years incessant activity. From his early life in Ireland to his education in Portugal and Spain, from his career in Rome and the civil wars of the 1640s to the compilation and distribution of books, Wadding was not merely a survivor from the sixteenth century. Born in Ireland, he achieved distinction in Mediterranean Europe, which was comparatively unaffected by the Reformation and where Catholicism continued to operate unimpaired. Essay collections tend to survey peripheral events not directly related to the subject. The following monograph seeks to reveal fresh perspectives about Wadding. Since the central relationship between his religious concerns and contemporary politics has hitherto been overlooked, this book begins with a thorough assessment of change in late sixteenth-century Waterford. From the start, the question arises, how did Wadding’s upbringing influence his subsequent formation? Before now, his early years have received little attention.

Wadding provides an important framework for understanding Ireland and Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His life, therefore, requires rigorous reassessment because parts have been studied in detail but separately from its continuity as a whole. This book provides an account of early modern authority and obedience. We follow Wadding from his family of origin in Ireland to the taking of vows with the Franciscans in Portugal, followed by the Spanish Habsburg presence in his life and the influence of papal primacy, before finding his own authority challenged at St Isidore’s, the first of his three colleges, founded in 1625. Tracing this journey enables us to discern the influence that his own education brought to bear on the faculty and curriculum at the two houses he established in Rome and at the Irish Franciscan noviciate in Capranica.

In his chronicles and correspondence, Wadding approached history at a world level with an interpretation of events from the late Middle Ages until the early sixteenth century. In these terms, Wadding’s finest achievement was the Annales Minorum. First published in eight volumes, it remains the most valuable source of Franciscan history from the order’s origins in Europe to its continuance in the New World. By closing his eighth volume in 1540, Wadding dealt with the Reformation and the organisation of new missions with contrasting effect. An adequate appraisal of his contribution to the Irish presence on the continent and how this related to life in Ireland is essential to our understanding of the seventeenth century.

In response to the Reformation and its consequences, Wadding espoused the Franciscan view that renewal of the Church needed to be continual and, following the example of St Francis of Assisi, that reform began within each individual first. This equates with the tradition of being ‘renewed in the spirit of your mind and not to be conformed to this world, that you may prove what is the good and pleasing and perfect will of God’.1 As reform was closely connected with education and had to keep being intentional, Wadding recognised that the Church required the instruction of teachers at centres of excellence such as St Isidore’s. The idea of a universal Christian monarchy under the providential leadership of the Habsburgs and the papacy endured until the 1630s.2 Until that time, an alliance existed between Spain and the Irish Friars Minor.3 Therefore, Luke Wadding’s early affiliation to the Spanish Habsburgs occurred in the context of their aspiration to re-establish the unity of Christendom. However, political decline ensued for Spain during the reign of Philip IV, which led him to declare: ‘All are against us; we are against all’.4 Once settled in the bosom of Rome, Wadding gravitated towards the papacy. His role in Urban VIII’s spiritual endeavours and the pope’s reassertion of supreme papal authority are dealt with from Chapter 4 onwards.

As an ecclesiastical historian once stated: ‘History should be studied always as a process, not a picture’.5 This study is divided into ten different stages corresponding to Wadding’s experiences in Ireland, the Iberian Peninsula and Italy. Wadding did not spring ready from nowhere. Since no serious account exists of his early years, these will be examined in the first chapter as a necessary background to this study with a description of Wadding’s infancy and youth in Waterford, the city of his birth, taking account of the influence that his family had upon his life and the schooling he received. It explains the various crises that occurred in the port city at that time, the relevance of the Anglo-Spanish war in Wadding’s early life and the events that led to his departure from Ireland for Portugal. Once informed by Counter-Reformation teachings, religious thinking in Ireland coalesced against the Reformation campaign by 1580.6 This points to religious beliefs among the laity and indicates how they participated in the early stages of the Counter Reformation in Ireland.

We then follow Wadding to Portugal. The second chapter discusses what he referred to as his ‘apprenticeship’ as a Franciscan friar, before assessing the progress he made as a scholar from the perspective of places of learning connected with him and his writings about Portugal. This involves tracing the journeys that he made and describing the people he met on the way, based on his own accounts. At twenty-five years of age, Wadding left Portugal for Spain where he studied and taught until 1618. The third chapter accompanies him from Salamanca to Madrid as a Franciscan friar of the Santiago province, the friendships he established and the rivalries he encountered with members of other religious orders.

The next chapter describes the first two decades that Wadding spent in Italy from his arrival in Rome as part of the mission to promote the Immaculate Conception, to his research in many regions and cities, such as Umbria and Naples, followed by his return to the Eternal City. Extensive studies and continual pastoral work by mendicant friars required the accumulation of books and the creation of libraries. Wadding played a major role in defending the credentials of St Francis of Assisi and of the Franciscans more broadly. This part of the book concentrates on three of Wadding’s first editions which illustrate the links between the Habsburg Netherlands, the Iberian Peninsula and Rome.

The fifth chapter concentrates on the foundation of St Isidore’s in 1625 and deals with daily life at the college, and similarities with the Franciscan College of the Immaculate Conception in Prague, as well as the patronage enjoyed by Irish friars in Rome and the reception of students at the seminary for Irish secular clergy. As a censor of the Holy Office and chronicler of the Franciscan family, Wadding actively helped other scholars. Details are given in the following chapter, together with the concerted exchanges between Wadding and the book trade in the French city of Lyon where he brought eleven volumes to print. Handpicked intermediaries worked on his behalf to facilitate the distribution of his Lyonnais works for more than twenty years. These aspects of Wadding’s life enable us to follow the progress of his publication programme and reveal his prudent efforts to achieve greater unity within the Franciscan family. This approach also illustrates some of the hurdles that Wadding faced.

The prominent role Wadding fulfilled at the Roman curia included the selection of bishops for Irish dioceses. The many demands on his time reflect the breadth of the Irish Franciscan’s experiences as theologian, historian and consultor to the papal secretariat. These points, along with the links between empire and print, are described in Chapter 7. Wadding contributed to the revision of the Roman breviary of Urban VIII. Printed in Antwerp, the intended market for new liturgical books included Spanish overseas colonies. Following his studies in the Iberian Peninsula, his work in Rome, and his contacts with the Plantin-Moretus press, Wadding took a keen interest in the evangelisation of the New World.

The narrative then moves back to Ireland in the 1640s. At first sight, a Franciscan’s involvement in a military campaign may seem ambiguous and historians have shied away from dealing with Wadding’s experiences during the wars of that decade. Nonetheless, early modern Europe was violent, divisive and restive. Wadding was pressed into service by the supreme council of the confederation of Kilkenny to obtain papal sanction and finance for Gaelic and Old English Catholics who took up arms in an uneasy alliance. This chapter measures the tensions and political sensitivities that Wadding encountered in his efforts to obtain support during a difficult decade. Through his diplomacy, his cultural experiences and his intellectual connections, Wadding enables us to reach a better understanding of the great struggle in seventeenth-century Europe between France and Spain.