The Trust On…
The Late Medieval Archives of the Venerable English College, Rome
Philip Muijtjens, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium), was awarded a research grant by the Yorkist History Trust last year to spend three months in Rome to investigate the archives of the Venerable English College (VEC), an institutional descendant of the medieval English Hospice of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. For more information about the grants offered by the Trust, please click here.
Not far from the world-famous Palazzo Farnese is a small, ancient square which has seen the organised presence of a number of non-Italian nations in Rome since the mid-fourteenth century. Today we find in this small piazza the Venerable English College, a seminary which has as its primary aim to house and educate Catholic priests who hail from England. Importantly, the English College (simply known as Collegio Inglese in Italian) was founded in 1579 on the physical and institutional remains of a much older institute which had served and represented the English nation in Rome for centuries already, namely the Hospice of Saint Thomas of Canterbury.
In 1362, directly next to the house of Saint Bridget of Sweden (d.1373) and the aforementioned square, a hospice was founded to cater to the needs of the increasing numbers of individuals belonging to the English nation, who found their way to Rome for pilgrimage, business, or other reasons. Dedicated to the Most Holy Trinity and Saint Thomas Canterbury, the hospice quickly expanded its real estate portfolio in the neighbourhood where it was located, the ancient rione (Roman neighbourhood) of Regola. The foundation of the English Hospice of Saint Thomas was part of a larger tendency which saw the rise of nation-oriented institutes being founded in Rome and other parts of the Italian peninsula from the mid-fourteenth century onwards. Often simply called natio in Latin at this time, a nation is here understood as a group of individuals who, within the international context of Rome, maintained certain cultural traits to identify themselves as a separate group based on their origins from a country outside Italy. Like most of these so-called nations in medieval Italy, the English nation was a narrowly yet vaguely demarcated group which, depending on political and social factors, included individuals from modern-day England, Wales, Scotland, and (parts of) Ireland.
The Venerable English College is still thriving and active on the original location of the former Hospice of Saint Thomas in Rome, even carrying the same dedication. As the institutional descendant of the medieval Hospice, the College preserves a considerable archive dating back to the medieval period. With generous support from the Yorkist History Trust, I was able to spend three months in the archive of the Venerable English College in Rome to prepare for a preliminary list/catalogue of the medieval (i.e. pre-1540) material.
As such, I worked in the archive almost every workday in autumn 2024, always with the excellent support of College Archivist Prof. Maurice Whitehead and Librarian Renaud Milazzo. As expected, much of the surviving medieval material in the College’s archives relates primarily to the Yorkist period and the decades leading up to the Reformation. My work consisted of consulting all the volumes of the medieval period, most of which contain collections of financial, administrative, biographical, and other material. Within the VEC archives, this collection is called the Libri (Liber in singular). I decided to consult all the Libri covering the period of ca.1340-1540, as there is no consistent overview of their content and a lot of the information was spread across the volumes in question.
In addition, the large and very numerous financial accounts on the daily running of the Hospital have yielded very important documents which give further insight into the role which the Hospital played in international relations between Rome and the British Isles and beyond. While the English Hospice archives are unique compared with other medieval, nation-oriented hospital archives in Rome in terms of their preservation and scope, the records which are of interest to the project are scattered throughout the aforementioned volumes.
The Libri give the very clear impression that they were repositories of knowledge regarding the management of the Hospice of Saint Thomas in medieval Rome and of its wealth but also of the many individuals and groups who were involved in the daily running of the Hospice. For instance, we find ample references to the daily acquisition of foodstuffs in the late fifteenth century, often paired with the recording of English pilgrims who showed up at the Hospice on those days. The surviving records also contain long lists of individuals renting real estate from the Hospice in Rome, which often contain important details on foreigners (including English) who had already been settled in Rome for decades around 1500. This great level of detail is really quite unusual to find in Italian hospice archives, as the suppression of medieval institutes often led to the division of archives according to more modern notions of administrative bodies. As such, the medieval Hospice archives cover in one place more aspects of life in medieval Rome than most surviving archives in the same city. By bringing together sources discussing the networks and running of the Hospice, this archive is a prime candidate to allow for valuable insights into the many aspects of society and life in Rome and in England. Yet the range and extent of the medieval archival material in the College is not only very rich, but also very much overlooked.
As of yet, there is still no reliable edition of any part of the medieval Hospice archives. A comparison of known, printed source material with the original material from the VEC archives has indeed shown that the few extant printed transcriptions are incomplete and not reliable. Significant parts of this medieval material have never been studied in great detail. The only publications which makes sources from the Hospice archives more or less accessible remain the 1962 (reprinted in 2005) publication The English Hospice in Rome by John Allen et al., and Margaret Harvey’s The English in Rome 1362-1420 (Cambridge, 1999) which is the only systematic study of the Membranae (parchment charters) in the College Archives. While these and other studies remain relevant, they do not comprise exhaustive editions of sources from the Hospice archives, which have the potential to tell us much more about the networks between Rome and England that existed in the later Middle Ages.
This extended research, which was only possible because of the generous support provided by the Yorkist History Trust, will result into a number of academic publications which will come out in the following two years. Currently, I am preparing an academic edition of those parts of the Libri contained in the VEC archives, to be published by the Trust, which shed more light on the life and networks of the English Hospice of Saint Thomas in the period of ca.1362-1540. The ultimate purpose of this edition will be to make the records of this rare, Roman archive accessible to those with an interest in the many international dimensions of medieval English society.
My heartfelt thanks go out to the Yorkist History Trust and to the Venerable English College for their fantastic support and encouragement which have been so valuable in this formative stage of my academic career.