A new Traherne manuscript: the primitive version of Roman Forgeries

Jean-Louis Quantin

For further details, see the announcement published in the TLS on 26 January 2024: Jean-Louis Quantin, ‘Saved from the rubbish heap of history: the discovery of a new Traherne manuscript’.

As has always been the case since the late nineteenth century, the discovery of a new Traherne manuscript – the eleventh one to come to light – was essentially a stroke of luck. Last June, I was going through a box of papers of the former librarian of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, my late master Pierre Petitmengin, to see whether some use might be made of them for a posthumous collection of his essays.

In the course of his long quest for the papers of the Huguenot refugee and scholar Pierre Allix, Pierre Petitmengin had consulted a British Library manuscript, described in the catalogue as a fragment of a seventeenth-century ‘treatise on collections of councils’. He must have quickly realized that it had nothing to do with Allix, but he took the trouble to write down a few extracts from it. They struck me as strongly reminiscent of some passages in Roman Forgeries and yet not quite identical with them.

I had to wait until my usual English vacation enabled me to travel to London, and to examine the manuscript for myself. As explained in my TLS article of 26 January 2024, comparison with the 1673 printed edition of Roman Forgeries clearly showed that the manuscript is the wreck of an earlier, much larger, and quite digressive version, which Traherne subsequently abridged and rewrote for publication. In the printed Roman Forgeries, he describes his book as an ‘epitome’ (‘You will find other kinds of Arguments in the subsequent Epitome’): the expression has hitherto gone unnoticed, but it makes sense when understood in reference to the full, earlier version. Does Traherne’s comment in Commentaries of Heaven, about the forgeries of Antichrist (‘we have prepared a whole Tract upon that Theme, (an intire volume) fit to be published’), refer to the original or the shortened text? The question may prove impossible to decide.

As my own expertise lies in the history of 17th-century religious scholarship rather than on Traherne’s manuscripts, I sent photographs to Julia Smith, who kindly confirmed that the hand was undoubtedly that of Traherne.

A note on the front endpapers, in the hand of Sir Frederic Madden, Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum, and signed with his initials, states tersely: ‘Found among refuse Papers. Dec. 1856’. Madden wrote the same note, also signed ‘FM’, on the manuscript that has the next shelfmark among the Additional MSS, a copy of a polemical exchange in 1662 between the Catholic convert Hugh (Serenus) Cressy and Bishop Morley of Winchester, about the attitude of the episcopal clergy during the Civil War and Interregnum.

The affinity of topics makes it likely that both manuscripts were relics from an Anglican theological library, which somehow made their way together into the British Museum. There is no indication that the Cressy manuscript was originally connected with Traherne: the hand is neither his nor, Julia Smith tells me, that of any of his known associates. Madden’s very detailed diary, held at the Bodleian Library, offers no clue as to the circumstances of the discovery, which suggests that it was anything but spectacular. The credit for rescuing a mutilated anonymous manuscript on conciliar collections, whose interest he must have found rather dubious, should nevertheless go to him.

Roman Forgeries had already the distinction of being the only work that Traherne saw through to publication in his lifetime. It is now the only one for which both an autograph working manuscript and a printed version are available. The discovery should be an incitement to reconsider the work, especially in order to study Traherne’s literary efforts to make theological controversies palatable to a larger audience – examples have been given in the TLS. Moreover, some important developments of the manuscript, especially an entire chapter on Catholic canon law, are lacking in the printed book. Since the manuscript is really a different work, rather than a draft of the printed Roman Forgeries, it will be published as an additional volume of the Oxford Traherne, edited by Austen Saunders and myself.