Manuscripts

Queens’ MS 25

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Soliloquia
Latin and English
England, early fifteenth century

Annotations on its final leaf suggest this early fifteenth-century English volume to have been the property of Mary Tudor. As a philosophical work of one of the church fathers it is easy to see how it might have interested the Catholic princess. In the seventeenth century, however, when the volume came to Queens’ its contents held direct relevance to the philosophical advances of the time. Framed in the form of a dialogue between himself and reason, Augustine exhibits a quest for self-knowledge redolent of seventeenth-century preoccupations. Indeed, recent scholars have seen in Soliloquies inspiration for Descartes’ famous dictum, ‘cogito ergo sum’ (usually translated as ‘I think, therefore I am’).

Written in a Gothic bookhand (textualis), and decorated with burnished gold, this copy would appear to have been produced in a commercial workshop of the kind that had become common by the fifteenth century (rather than in a monastery).

Of the several provenances indicated the most interesting is the one apparently linking Queens’ MS 25 to Mary Tudor: ‘Thys bok ys my ladey Maryes [?] the Kyenges dautter. jhs keppe and send the kyenge a pryenche. John huse the kyenges treu seruantt’. A later inscription by Edward Martin indicates that he bequeathed it to the College in 1662 during his second period as Queens’ President (1631–44 ejected, 1660–2). However, his position as a high church figure linked to the Royalist cause introduces a note of intrigue in relation to his ownership of the volume. Library documentation indicates that Queens’ MS 25 was in fact owned by the library well before the time of the civil war and Martin's bequest. As a book replete with Royalist and Catholic significance, it seems possible that it was deemed vulnerable to roundhead vandalism, and was thus removed to safety by Martin prior to his ejection from the college in 1642.