Pole and His Books at Lambeth

The Reformation Cardinal exhibition at Lambeth Palace Library opened last week. It's an exhibition featuring some of his books (appropriately enough for a Library):

Pole’s was a life steeped in books. He was a scholar and a collector of one of the period’s most intriguing libraries, and it was in books that he fought his battles and made his strongest statements for reform. This exhibition gathers books from Oxford, London, and Rome to tell his story. The Pole who emerges is a complex and agonized individual, someone of sincerity and of evident charm, a connoisseur, a man of strong faith, a European statesman—and a battler for moderation within the limits of the possible.

There's an excellent digital exhibition for those of us who can't get to London before December 15, divided into "eras" of his life as a student, controversialist against Henry VIII, Cardinal scholar in Rome, Viterbo, and Trent, and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Mary I. Each section highlights books, letters, and other documents: the books he studied, the books he wrote, books he inspired to renew the life of the Catholic Church in England, and books evaluating his role in the English Reformation and that renewal. 

The summing up:

Since [his death], he has been at the heart of two contrasting legends of English history. In one he is seen as the cruel agent of ‘Bloody Mary’ and an instigator of the burning alive of approximately three hundred English and Welsh men and women for their non-Catholic religious beliefs. The other legend of Pole as a saint and almost a martyr for the Catholic faith began to form immediately after his death. Biographies of the late cardinal were written and edited by men who had known him, notably Ludovico Beccadelli, and by supporters, not least at New College in Oxford, where a third of the fellows refused to accept Elizabeth’s religious settlement of 1559, resigned their fellowships, and moved abroad.

The role that Pole had played, his legacy for English Catholics in particular and for the European Counter-Reformation more broadly, would remain as meaningful as it was complex.

You have click on each image in the sections, scroll down a narrative panel or click on arrows to follow the explanation about the context and the provenance of each book or document, and then close the tab to return to the exhibition page and open another image. 

Two of the most interesting in the section on Henry VIII and Pole's "disagreements" are a Psalter with St. Thomas a Becket's name all blotted out and Pole's copy of the Bishop of Exeter John de Grandisson's Life of Becket, one of only six copies of the work to survive Henry VIII's attacks on the martyred saint.

Image Credit (Public Domain:) El cardenal Reginald Pole, por Sebastiano del Piombo