Calendar (1566-1752) now available to purchase from Messenger website
The Jesuit Irish Mission: A calendar of correspondence 1566-1752 is now available for sale on the Messenger Publications website. Irish Jesuit Documents in Rome: Part 4 Recently I was struck by one of the letters I calendared, because of its personal and warm tone. While it’s quite normal to find well-wishes and paternal encouragement in the letters, along with prayers, this was different: here the General Superior in Rome (still Claudio Acquaviva) writes to an Irishman in Antwerp in the second person singular. Normally, correspondents used the formal way of address in the third person: the writer talks in a sort of “pluralis maiestatis”, and the recipient is “Your Reverence”. (This is a huge source of confusion at times, for example when the writer refers to the recipient and another, properly “third person”, in the one sentence or clause!) The man the letter is written for is Laurence Lea from Waterford, and after reading the letter I looked him up in […]