The Works of Thomas Traherne Volume II Thomas Traherne (1637–1674), a clergyman of the Church of england during the restoration, was little known until the early twentieth century, when his poetry and Centuries of Meditations were discovered. There have been since miscellaneous publications of his poetry and devotional writings. The Works of Thomas Traherne brings together all of Traherne’s extant works, both published and unpublished, in a definitive, printed edition for the first time. Volumes II and III make available a single manuscript held at the British Library, Commentaries of Heaven. organized topically, it was intended to cover the whole of the alphabet but extends only through ‘a’ and part of ‘B’, with 95 prose articles altogether. In this remarkable work, Traherne takes it upon himself to provide ‘felicitie’, the ‘mistress of all other sciences’, an authoritative place within the acquisition of knowledge by explicating words with the express purpose of revealing ‘all Things’ to be ‘our Treasures’ and ‘objects of happiness’. It possesses the characteristics of a commonplace book, encyclopaedia and dictionary, and contains poetry, meditations, scholastic disquisition, philosophical discourse, pastoral counsel and polemic. The unusual range of subjects all intricately interwoven into a self-sustaining fabric, from ‘abhorrence’ to ‘ant’, ‘aristotle’ to ‘atom’, shows Traherne to be imaginative and compelling in his approach to Christian theology, while maintaining his orthodoxy as a priest. It is essential reading for anyone studying Traherne, the seventeenth century or the spiritual life. The Works of Thomas Traherne Volume II CoMMenTaries of Heaven Part 1 abhorrence to alone edited by Jan ross D. s. BreWer editorial matter © Jan ross 2007 all rights reserved. except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner first published 2007 D. s. Brewer, Cambridge IsBn 978–1–84384–135–7 D. s. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd Po Box 9, Woodbridge, suffolk IP12 3Df, Uk and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 mt hope avenue, rochester, nY 14620, Usa website: www.boydellandbrewer.com a CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by antony rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire Contents General Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations x Introduction xi Physical description of the manuscript xii Identification of scripts xv Dating of the manuscript xvi Provenance of the manuscript xvii Commentaries of Heaven and the Commonplace Book xix Traherne’s sources and method of composition xxi Traherne’s method of cross-referencing xxv Traherne’s purpose xxvii Traherne’s ordering of his subject xxix Seventeenth-century contexts xxxiii General editorial principles xxxviii List of topics xli Commentaries of Heaven 1 Textual Emendations 425 Appendix 513 Commonplace Book 515 Commonplace Book Topics with Foliation 515 Commonplace Book Sources 517 Cross-references 523 Cross-references in Commentaries of Heaven 523 Cross-references in the Commonplace Book 526 vi The Works of Thomas Traherne Cross-references within Commentaries of Heaven to topics within the Commonplace Book 527 Internal Cross-references within Commentaries of Heaven 528 Cross-references not in Commentaries of Heaven nor the Commonplace Book 528 Manuscript Foliation of Topics in Commentaries of Heaven 529 Glossary 531 General Preface Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) left a substantial body of work, primarily in manuscript form, when he died in 1674 before the age of forty. He published only one work during his lifetime, Roman Forgeries (1673), and prepared for the press Christian Ethicks, which appeared posthumously in 1675. He remained for the most part unknown until Bertram Dobell published his poems and Centuries of Meditations in the early twentieth century. The story of the discovery of Traherne’s manuscripts is well known, beginning in 1896–97 when William Brooke chanced upon a group of manuscripts of Traherne’s works in both prose and poetry. Included among them were the Centuries and what is now known as the Dobell Folio, which contains Traherne’s autograph poems and the Commonplace Book.1 In 1910 H. I. Bell found and published Philip Traherne’s hand-written edition of Thomas’s poems, Poems of Felicity.2 In 1964 James Osborn unexpectedly found the manuscript containing the Select Meditations.3 This was followed in 1981 by the identification of Traherne’s ‘Commentaries of Heaven’ by Elliot Rose.4 It was not until 1996–97 that other Traherne manuscripts were discovered. ‘The Ceremonial Law’, an eighteen-hundred line poem, was identified as Traherne’s by Laetitia Yeandle and Julia Smith.5 Jeremy Maule found yet another Traherne manuscript in the spring of 1997,6 which consists of four more works by Traherne, plus a fragment.7 There are no doubt other 1 See Bertram Dobell, ed., The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, B.D. 1636?–1674 (London, 1903; repr. 1906); and Centuries of Meditations (London, 1908). 2 See H. I. Bell, ed., Traherne’s Poems of Felicity (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1910). 3 ‘A New Traherne Manuscript’, The Times Literary Supplement (October 8, 1964): 928. 4 ‘A New Traherne Manuscript’, The Times Literary Supplement (March 19, 1982): 324. 5 ‘Felicity disguisd in fiery Words: Genesis and Exodus in a newly discovered poem by Thomas Traherne’, The Times Literary Supplement (November 7, 1997): 17. 6 Denise Inge and Calum McFarlane, ‘Seeds of Eternity: A new Traherne manuscript’, The Times Literary Supplement (June 2, 2000): 14. 7 For a discussion of the manuscript discoveries through 1993, see the Index of English Literary Manuscripts, Volume II: 1625–1700, Part 2, compiled by Peter Beal (London and New York: Mansell Publishing Limited, 1993), pp. 477–506. viii The Works of Thomas Traherne missing notebooks and perhaps poems and treatises, as references in some of his works suggest. There has been no attempt to gather all of Traherne’s extant works into a uniform, printed edition, with the purpose of giving a sense of the manuscript or printed originals. The primary purpose of this edition, therefore, is to present a definitive printed text of all of Traherne’s extant works, both published and unpublished. It will not include his notebooks, which are primarily extracts from other writers and are not, therefore, Traherne’s ‘works’. In his 1903 introduction to Traherne’s poems, Dobell wrote that ‘there is a picturesqueness, a beauty, and a life about the manuscripts which is lost in the cold regularity of type’,8 to which Peter Beal has added that Traherne’s texts ‘should be edited according to manuscript, rather than according to individual “work” as defined by modern editors’, since ‘the MS is “the work”’.9 This edition will present Traherne’s texts by manuscript insofar as possible, giving due attention to the physical aspects and integrity of the manuscripts themselves, hoping to bring the reader as close as possible in a printed format to the manuscript originals and to the distinctive quality of Traherne’s writings. His printed works will be edited with the same intention. The text of Traherne’s works will be printed in seven volumes, with an eighth volume of commentary. Annotations in the separate volumes will be limited to textual notes, biblical references and immediately essential commentary. Each volume will also contain a glossary. The eighth volume will hold the majority of the commentary, as well as an index to all the volumes. It will also include a brief biography of Traherne and short essays about his influences and sources. The arrangement of Traherne’s separate works within the volumes is not an attempt to represent them chronologically, since their dates are uncertain.10 8 The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, B.D., pp. xxiii–xxiv. 9 Index of English Literary Manuscripts, p. 482. 10The General Preface has been slightly revised. In Volume I of The Works of Thomas Traherne I stated in error that William Brooke’s discovery of some of Traherne’s manuscripts in 1896 included ‘The Church’s Yearbook’. Brooke’s discovery included the Centuries and the Dobell Folio. Acknowledgements I am grateful to Mr and Mrs Lawrence Wookey for allowing me to read the manuscript of Commentaries of Heaven in their home in 1982; they were most generous and hospitable. Mr Wookey, who found the manuscript, was a businessman not an academic. He told me, when I examined it in Toronto, that he didn’t care who Traherne was or what the manuscript meant to scholars. All he wanted out of it was ‘a trip around the world’. However, his careful and safe keeping of the physical manuscript (literally in a strong-box) as well as his perseverance in his search for its identity is another instance of the providential as well as responsible preservation of Traherne’s most important works, and Traherne scholars owe him a debt of gratitude. I am grateful for the Fellowship at the George Bell Institute and for its support. Warm thanks go to the fellows of the Institute for their good company and sustaining encouragement, and especially to Dr Andrew Chandler, its director. I am grateful also to the British Library for permission to publish in print the contents of the manuscript as well as to reproduce the plates. I wish to express my gratitude especially to Mr Hilton Kelliher for generously allowing me to work extensively with the manuscript at the British Museum in the 1980s and to Mr Michael Bogan at the British Library, St Pancras, for his kind assistance throughout my work for this edition. Thanks again are due to the staff of the Duke Humfrey’s Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their continued goodwill and help in this project. I am once more indebted to Dr Richard Luckett, Pepys Librarian, Cambridge, whose counsel from the outset of my work with Commentaries of Heaven in 1982 has been invaluable. It was Dr Luckett who suggested that Mr Wookey get in touch with Stephen C. Massey of Christie’s New York and put the manuscript up for auction. And thanks again to Professor Gerald Bray for help with Latin. I owe a continuing debt of gratitude to Professor Stephen Taylor, Pru Harrison, Melanie Barber, Ruby Reid Thompson and Anne Lamb. And especially and always to Allen, sine qua non.