Commentarius Rinuccinianus

Gráinne McLaughlin

The Commentarius was written in Florence by two Capuchin friars between 1661-1666. Father Richard O’Ferrall was the elder of the two and he died in August 1663. By this time well over a third of the work had already been completed and Father Richard had doubtless, as the more senior cleric, had been a major influence in terms of the overall design of the work and the disposition of the material. The work was completed by Father O’Ferrall’s colleague, Father Robert O’Connell, who had already written a substantial work, the Historia Missionis Hiberniae Fratrum Minorum Capuchinorum. It is arguably O’Connell’s voice and temperament which resound in the Commentarius, as can be seen by comparision with the tenor of the Historia.

Upon its completion, the manuscript of the Commentarius remained in the Rinuccini library in Florence until approximately 1850, when it entered the Trivulzi library in Milan on the marriage of Marianne Rinuccini to the (then) Marquis Trivulzi. Regrettably the manuscript, together with many original supporting documents, was destroyed in 1943. It is fortunate that Father Stanislaus Kavanagh had recently completed his work on editing the text before the disaster happened, although the destruction of the original has made the resolution of the hundreds of textual problems in the printed edition more difficult to resolve. In seeking to resolve such textual difficulties, resources are limited to the following.

In the eighteenth century Thomas Coke (the future Earl of Leicester and owner of Holkham Hall) had a transcript of the original Commentarius manuscript made in approximately 1716-17, during his grand tour of the Continent. Although this manuscript copy (known as the Holkham transcript) of the original is littered with transcription errors, it nonetheless is an important link in a chain of events which brings us back closer to the original text than people have realized. This is because John T. Gilbert arranged to have a copy made of the Holkham transcript. This manuscript copy or transcription was made in approximately 1883 and is known as the Gilbert transcript. The Gilbert transcript was acquired by the municipality of Dublin in 1900 and is still in Pearse Street, in what is now Dublin City Archives. The Capuchins in Dublin were allowed to make a typed copy of the Gilbert transcript, which was itself a copy of the first but inaccurate copy of the Commentarius manuscript, the Holkham transcript.

Given the tendency for new errors to be introduced every time a text is copied, it might have been expected that the Capuchin typescript would be of less use to modern scholars than the earlier copies. However, it emerged in the course of my research that Father Stanislaus Kavanagh had in fact taken the Capuchin typescript with him in a large trunk to the Trivulzi library in Milan, when he went to examine the original manuscript of the Commentarius. This means that the Capuchin typescript, the latest copy of the original manuscript, is in fact, due to Kavanagh’s annotations and corrections to the typescript, the nearest thing will ever have to the original manuscript. It is important to emphasize how very considerable Kavanagh’s achievement was in editing this massive text of over one million words of Latin narrative, exegesis, and supporting sources in situ, notwithstanding the hundreds of errors introduced by the printers which are in addition to the hundreds of errata identified by Kavanagh himself.

The edited Capuchin typescript is now with the Gilbert transcript in Dublin City Archives, thanks to the generosity of the current Capuchin Archivist, Father Pádraig Ó Cuill and Dr Máire Kennedy of Dublin City Archives. Both the on-line version of the English translation of the Commentarius and the future edition and translation of O’Connell’s Historia are indebted to the former Capuchin Archivist, the late Father Benedict Cullen, the godson of Stanislaus Kavanagh. The Earl of Leicester also kindly gave permission for photographs of the Holkham transcript to be taken.