Professor Gerard Kilroy, Visiting Senior Research Fellow in English, describes the Summa below:
Edmund Campion’s copy of the Summa Totius Theologiae (Antwerp: Plantin, 1569)
The marginalia in this book mark the end of one story, the long struggle of Edmund Campion in Oxford to discern the right path, and the beginning of another, glittering European phase, which he would later sign off from “Cosmopoli”. When he was a Fellow of St John’s College, from 1557 to 1570, he had dedicated to Viscount Montague a Latin poem on the early history of the Church and styled himself Edmundus Campianus Oxoniensis. This was about 1568, the year his theological struggles intensified during long discussions with Richard Cheyney, bishop of Gloucester, in the house of Thomas Dutton, the year he was made proctor of the university, and the year when he was trying to avoid preaching at Paul’s Cross. In 1569 he was ordained deacon, shortly before he compounded for the first fruits of the parish of Sherborne, in Cheyney’s diocese, and on Dutton’s estate, but by 1570 he was seeking permission to postpone ordination as a priest in the established church by going to Dublin, where he stayed in the house of James Stanihurst, Speaker of the Irish Parliament. The attempt to conduct his fierce inner debate away from the public eye failed. During the night of 17 March 1571 Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, warned him of imminent arrest, and he was escorted into hiding in an attic of the Barnewall family in Turvey. He left Drogheda in disguise sometime around 9 June 1571. By 30 June he had arrived at Dr Allen’s newly established English College in Douai, Flanders, when Dr Nicholas Sander was adding the dedications to his controversial De Visibili Monarchia, published the following month by another New College fellow, John Fowler, in Louvain.
Campion’s purchase, therefore, on 13 August 1571 of the Summa Totius Theologiae, in a new edition by the great Antwerp printer, Christopher Plantin, marks a significant shift, especially as he now inscribed this expensive book: Edmundus Campianus Anglus Londinensis. Campion underlined and annotated the first volume with his fast secretary hand on almost every page, as if devouring “Doctrina sacra”; in the second volume he annotated only as far as “De peccato blasphemiae” and then skipped the other sins, resuming his intense annotation only with sacramental theology in the third volume.
The book was passed down until, in 1887, shortly after the papal decree Anglia Sanctorum Insula beatifying Campion and other English martyrs on 29 December 1886, Canon Didiot, dean of theology at Lille, gave it to the English Province of the Society of Jesus. It passed from Manresa College, Roehampton, originally the novitiate, to Heythrop College. Before Heythrop, after several metamorphoses, was finally closed in 2018, the Jesuits in Britain transferred it to Oxford, so it could sit beside Campion’s own copy of commentaries on Aristotle, given to the Hall in 1936. It is fitting that the Summa, which brings us close to Campion in the act of reading Aquinas, pen in hand, should now be one of the principal relics of this great Oxford scholar.
