484d Angelus, Richard. (1601-1678) Certamen seraphicum provinciae Angliæ pro sancta Dei ecclesia. In quo breviter declaratur, quomodo Fratres Minores Angli calamo & sanguine pro fide Christi sactaque eins ecclesia certarunt.

Douai: Typis Baltasaris Belleri, 1649

$5,000

Quarto, 5.375 x 7 in. First edition. [ ]2, a4, e4, i4, A-Z4, Aa-Yy4. This copy is in good condition with a brown stain to the outer edge of one leaf: D3, and some worming inside the lower bottom blank margin. A paper repair on the title page affects a handwritten inscription above the imprint. A fine engraving with eight vignettes surrounds the text of the half-title. Five contemporary engraved portraits of the featured martyrs are loosely inserted before their chapters (see below). J. Gillow’s bookplate is pasted on the front free endleaf. A small library stamp from the Bibliotheca Nacional in Lisbon appears on the verso of the second free leaf. This copy is bound in contemporary full calf with some wear on the edges and has been recently rebacked.

The subjects of the five engravings of the martyrs are: Joannes Baptista [i.e. Thomas Bullaker]; Paulus a Santa Magdalena [i.e., Henry Heath]; Francis Bell [a.k.a. Arthur Bell]; Martin Woodcocke [a.k.a. John Woodcocke]; and Christophor Colman. All, excepting Colman, are depicted with a noose around their necks and a bloody knife in their chest. All five of these English Catholic priests were executed for their religious beliefs during the seventeenth century. Their executions are related in lurid detail in this controversial book. The issue was so politically charged that this work could not be printed in England.

Angelus a Sancto Francisco was the name assumed by the Yorkshire born Franciscan, Richard Mason. There is some dispute as to the nationality of his extraction; while it is agreed that he was a native of the English county of Wiltshire, a Franciscan manuscript record, dated 1721, mentions his having been “for some time dean of a Catholick deanery in Ireland,” suggesting that his family may have been Irish. Gillow, in his Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics, suggests that if Mason ever held a deanery in Ireland, it must have been under the Protestant Establishment, in which case Father Angelus, as he was known among his contemporaries, would have to be reckoned among the seventeenth-century converts. In any case, Mason rapidly became eminent in the order, being created a doctor of divinity and appointed successively to the high administrative offices of definitor, guardian, and visitor of the province of Brabant. Elected provincial in 1659, he visited Paris in an unsuccessful attempt to obtain permission for the settlement there of a colony of Franciscan sisters from the convent at Nieuport (Flanders) to which he had heen confessor. From 1662 to 1675 he lived in England, as domestic chaplain to Lord Arundell of Wardour, after which period he retired to the convent at Douai to prepare for death.

STC French 496; NUC (DHN, Imuns, Dfo, MH).