evident when one looks on the inside cover of the third volume of Jewel’s
copy of the venerable Bede’s opera.^49 When I first saw it, the librarian
noted that Jewel had doodled on the title page. I sat staring out onto the
cloisters, and there on the far side of the court, atop one of the buttresses
sat exactly what I had been looking at on the title page of Bede: a
gargoyle, a representation of one of the seven deadly sins. In short, a
Magdalen student had been the artist, and may well have been looking
out the same window I was.^50 This raises the question of how much other
extraneous material within these volumes is the work of Magdalen
College’s wards, and what is Jewel’s. Fortunately Jewel’s clear
handwriting, both his English script and his Latin, is easily enough
discerned within the text.
John Garbrand makes clear that Jewel used a notebook system, along
with the aid of students of some sort for the collection of his facts and
citations. Garbrand, Jewel’s literary executive, in his preface to Jewel’s
Sermons at Court and Paul’s Cross, speaks about Jewel’s practice of
taking notes:
For, besides his advised observation of all such things, as in the
adversary’s books deserved answer; and besides that he disposed a
summary and full collection of such matter as he would use for the
disproof of the same, the which he conceived in short notes; this may
be a notable testimony that he had purpose to set down the
authorities out of the fathers and quotations truly and plainly:
whereas in times before he had gathered sundry books of common-
places out of the Greek and Latin and later writers, he did peruse
afresh the authors themselves, and made every where in them special
marks, for the difference of such places whereof he made choice.
Those were all drawn forth and laid to their themes by certain
scholars, who wrote them out by such direction as he had given
them.^51There are marginalia in Jewel’s hand, and it may be assumed that he did
the lion’s share of the underlining, but much of what he underlined never
made it into his works. His copy of Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia
catholicais filled with underlining, along with the marginal note, Apol.,
orpp.,(papacy) which appears 72 times in his copy of De concordantia
catholica, yet very little of what he underlined made it into either the
Apologia or the Defense of the Apologia. Some of the things are
interesting, such as his side comment on Cusanus’s
Est enim oratio. omnibus creaturis potentior. Nam angeli seu
intelligentiae, movent orbes, Solem et stellas: sed oratio potentior,220 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^49) Beda,Opera(Basel, 1565), 4 vols, Magdalen Library shelf mark, h. 12. 6–9.
(^50) I wondered whether it was the image of sloth – I should have made inquiry. I also
wondered how different were modern students than their past fellows.
(^51) Garbrand’s preface, in Jewel, Works, II, p. 966.
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