Preparing an undergraduate History dissertation topic: exploring the papers of Edward Meredith, SJ (1648–1715)
Robbie Whittaker, a final-year undergraduate student in History at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, spent one week in December 2019 using the Venerable English College Archives to prepare his dissertation. In this blog, he outlines his experience.
Robbie Whittaker working on the Edward Meredith Papers in the Schwarzenbach Reading Room, 13 December 2019
I had the very great pleasure of spending a week in the Archives of the Venerable English College in early December 2019. The purpose of my visit was to carry out research pertaining to my undergraduate dissertation and I received a warm welcome from Professor Maurice Whitehead, Schwarzenbach Research Fellow, and Emma Wall, a Durham University PhD candidate who was then working in the Archives as an intern as part of her doctoral training programme.
I initially reached out to the Archives in the summer of 2019 to enquire whether or not there was any material which might be of interest to me within the collections: as I had spent much of my undergraduate studies looking at religion in early modern Europe, I was keen to delve deeper into that area. Given that much of my previous study had been rooted in the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth century, it took me a little by surprise that the eventual subject of my research focused primarily on the period from 1680 to 1715.
The response to my enquiry drew my attention to the opportunity of researching a curious character, Edward Meredith, SJ (1648–1715), whose papers lay virtually untouched in the Archives: nearly 750 folios of correspondence, financial papers and other miscellanea relating to Meredith are held in the collections, and Emma Wall had only just completed the cataloguing of that particular material in late November 2019. As an historian, especially one at undergraduate level, it was incredibly exciting and a true privilege to be able to survey and make use of such special, rare material. It was an opportunity I could not pass on, even if the papers belonged to a period a few decades later than that in which my existing better knowledge was rooted.
On reaching the Venerable English College, there were numerous challenges to overcome. Thanks to the recent item-level cataloguing, it was easy to track the names of many of Meredith’s key associates who appeared often in the papers. Much harder, however, was learning how to read the late-seventeenth-century handwriting, and tackling the few scraps written in Italian and other languages. With my trip – generously supported by the Colin Matthew Fund and the Oxford University Society East Kent Branch – lasting just one week, I was under fairly tight time pressure. On the first day I barely managed to get through the first of fifteen folders, and yet, after just a few days, my reading rate managed to increase really quite significantly.
While this was a difficult task to face, more challenging was the fact that I was not entirely sure what I was looking for. The aim was to find material around which my dissertation – a 12,000-word piece of original research – would be based. Perhaps a more conventional route of surmounting this task might have been to consider which historical problem I sought to solve, maybe even to formulate it into a question, and only then seek out the sources through which I would solve that problem. However, I was working in reverse. By the end of my week in Rome, I had the sources – the material I had available to answer my question: now I had to formulate the question.
Thankfully, the depth and richness of the Meredith collection meant there were plenty of avenues which I could have chosen to explore. Most of the papers are letters between Meredith and other prominent Jesuit figures: the extant material shows Ralph Postgate, SJ (1648–1718), rector of the College from 1693 to 1699 and again from 1704 to 1707, as his most frequent correspondent. To understand the content and context of the letters, an appreciation of Meredith’s biography is required.
Born the son of a Cornish Church of England clergyman, Edward Meredith was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1668, he travelled to Madrid and there became a secretary to the English ambassador, Sir William Godolphin (1635–1696).
Portrait of Sir William Godolphin (1635–1696) by Peter Lely (1618–1680)
Meredith converted to Catholicism while in Madrid and returned to England in 1671. He then spent time engaging in pamphlet debates in the 1670s and, in 1684, entered the Society of Jesus. Following the flight of James II to France in December 1688, Meredith travelled to Saint-Germain and resided at the Jacobite court there, probably until 1695. In that year, he moved to Rome, residing at the Venerable English College (VEC) and subsequently relocating to Naples at the turn of the century.
The letters in the Meredith collection date primarily written from his time in Italy, and so focus on the later period of his life. Combining the epistolary material with his earlier pamphlet literature, the precise direction of my research ended up as an evaluation of the character of diasporic Catholicism from circa 1680 to 1715, with the hinge in this period very much being 1688/9.
I identified three key challenges faced in continental Europe by members of the English Catholic diaspora, a group in which Meredith was a prominent figure. The diaspora needed, first, to sustain itself; secondly, to navigate its relationship with Catholics who remained in England; and, thirdly, to overcome the significant intramural tensions which arose within English Catholicism.
Tying together the research I completed while at the VEC, my dissertation shows how Meredith’s example can enrich our understanding of how these challenges were overcome. Only recently have authors such as Gabriel Glickman and Liesbeth Corens shed new light on continental English Catholicism; my work nuances their views somewhat. Whereas Corens describes a ‘borderless community’ existing between the British Isles and continental Europe, I demonstrate through the Meredith papers that being part of a diaspora meant something in itself.
The papers reveal how Meredith – placed in charge of William Godolphin’s legacy – acted as a great patron to many members of the diasporic community, and the letters also reveal strong connections with the Jacobite court. Indeed, a particularly interesting example sheds new light on a disagreement between the royal court and the Benedictine, Bishop Phillip Michael Ellis (1652–1726).
Above all, the papers showed Meredith to be a man acquainted with those at the apogee of the Jacobite court and someone who played a vital role in sustaining those on whom he bestowed patronage. Yet while being a crucial figure in diasporic recusant networks, Meredith was also a man who feared the refusal of the blood of San Genarro to liquify in Naples, who had an unhealthy obsession with his coffee-grinding instrument, and who, on several occasions, as he records in his letters, suffered from a terrible ‘violent looseness’.
It was a great privilege to unearth his secrets through the fabulous collection at the VEC and to use the material to produce my dissertation concerning an aspect of the character of English diasporic Catholicism. I should be glad to reproduce the full report for anyone wishing to learn more and read specific excerpts from the documents.
Letter from Edward Meredith (Naples) to Fr Ralph Postgate, rector of the Venerable English College, Rome, 28 March 1705, AVCAU, Scritture 7/6/18 — one of the many of Meredith’s papers which Robbie Whittaker has used in preparing his dissertation