Image 1: Campion's copy of Aristotle's "Physics" with his commentary and signature
The signature (autograph) at the top of this lower pastedown confirms that Campion owned the book after these two commentaries were bound together in a single volume. His ownership, ‘Liber Edmundi Campiani’, is confirmed by two other inscriptions, one at the bottom of this pastedown, the other on a front endpaper.
Dr Robert Barnes (1514-1604), who was selected to speak before the Queen in the disputation on medicine on 5 September 1566, but stood down for lack of time, gave the book to Merton College, along with 57 other books, on 29 November 1594. The book was presented to Campion Hall by Merton College in 1936.
Image 2: Campion's copy of the Summa Totius Theologiae
Thomae Aquinatis Summa Totius Theologiae signed ‘Edmundus Campianus Anglus Londinensis a.d. Idib. Augusti’ (13 August 1571), shortly after his arrival in Douai, where he studied theology until 1573. The book is heavily annotated, and the first volume has been beautifully restored and digitised. The book was given by Canon Didiot, dean of theology at Little University, to the English Province in 1887, a year after the papal decree Anglia Sanctorum Insula beatified Campion along with 53 other martyrs. It is now displayed at Campion Hall.
Images 3 and 4: Re-bound Campion Hall copy of the Rationes Decem
The most recently discovered of five extant copies of Rationes Decem (Campion's Ten Reasons), found in the sixpenny box of a bookshop in 1936 and bound, at Evelyn Waugh’s expense in 1948, by Zaehnsdorf Bindery (Est. 1842), then under the control of Ernest Zaehnsdorf. It finally merged with Sanorski in 1998.
Image 5: Title page of the unrestored copy (Winchester) of Rationes Decem
The only one of the five extant copies of Rationes Decem (1581), a book printed in the attic of Stonor Park by seven men, to survive in its original binding, the Winchester copy was preserved for at least one hundred years (possibly much longer) by successive parish priests of St. Peter’s, Winchester. This copy (measuring 100mm by 140mm) reveals that the book was stab-stitched by Rowland Jenkes, a famous Catholic bookbinder in Oxford, and bound in a parchment lease of property to the Bellamy family of Harrow. 400 copies were bound in Oxford, but a further hundred were bound in the safe house in Southwark rented by Robert Persons, SJ, and betrayed by Jenkes’s angry journeyman. The Bellamy lease makes it likely that this copy belongs to the Southwark batch.
Image 6: Aboard the S.S. Kraljica Maria, August 1933
Gabriel Herbert, Helen Asquith, Robert Cecil, Julian Oxford, Laura Lovat, Hugh Fraser from the photograph album with professionally typed diary created by Katharine Asquith as a Christmas present for her son, Julian (Trim), and now at Mells Manor.
Image 7: Campion's Agnus Dei
The Agnus Dei found in the roof of Lyford Grange in 1959 is of special significance. Measuring 170 by 137 mm and weighing 236 grams, it is much larger than other surviving examples of these papal gifts, which were made from the wax of paschal candles and chrism. The fact that it was made in ‘Anno VII’ of Pope Gregory XIII (1579), its size, weight and the location where it was found, all make it probable that it was carried to England by Edmund Campion, SJ, the only one of the priests captured at Lyford Grange to have come from Rome, and left in his last hiding-place. Note the flag of St George carried by the Lamb, and the large book beneath the Lamb.
