1 The Episcopal Library of St. John’s is among the few nineteenth-century libraries that survive in their original setting in the Atlantic provinces, and the only one in Newfoundland and Labrador.1 It was established by John Thomas Mullock (1807–69), Roman Catholic bishop of Newfoundland and later of St. John’s, who in 1859 offered his own personal collection of “over 2500 volumes as the nucleus of a Public Library.” The Episcopal Library in many ways differs from the theological libraries assembled by Mullock’s contemporaries.2 When compared, for example, to the extant collection of the Catholic bishop of Victoria, Charles John Seghers (1839–86), whose life followed a similar pattern to Mullock’s, the division in the founding collection of the Episcopal Library between the books used for “private” as opposed to “public” theological study becomes even starker. Seghers’s books showcase the customary stock of a theological library with its bulky series of manuals of canon law, collections of conciliar and papal acts and bullae, and practical, dogmatic, moral theological, and exegetical works by all the major authors of the Catholic tradition.3

2 In contrast to Seghers, Mullock’s library, although containing the constitutive elements of a seminary library, is a testimony to its founder’s much broader collecting habits. Mullock’s books are not restricted to his philosophical and theological studies or to his interest in universal church history. They include literary and secular historical works, biographies, travel books, and a broad range of journals in different languages that he obtained, along with other necessary professional tools, throughout his career. His love of literature is apparent in his choice collection of classical Greek and Latin works, eighteenth-century English poetry, French and Italian drama, William Shakespeare’s plays, and works by Spanish authors. Perhaps it was the scrupulousness and curiosity of the scholar-theologian that led him repeatedly to seek out authors whose works were placed by the Catholic Church on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), an unusual, though not unprecedented, choice for a Victorian ecclesiastical official. As Pearce Carefoote shows in his article on Mullock’s banned books in this volume, Mullock certainly did not seem to have been restricted by these prohibitive lists.4 He owned condemned works by, among others, Niccolò Machiavelli, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Johannes Buxtorf, Hugo Grotius, Blaise Pascal, Pierre Bayle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Edward Gibbon.5 Yet Mullock’s books, even those banned by the Catholic Church, did not stay within closed doors, as Seghers’s and many of his contemporaries’ personal libraries did. Instead, Mullock transposed to his new field of ministry a model theological library that could significantly challenge its pious readers and inspire them to deeper reflection both in spiritual and intellectual matters. He did not seem to have retained any potentially problematic material, and he offered his entire collection for the benefit of the whole community of St. Bonaventure’s College and seminary, and the Newfoundland public at large. Yet, as Larry Dohey has noted, it is likely that the public function of the library was taken over by the St. John’s Catholic Institute, established with Mullock’s endorsement by Richard V. Howley in 1866. Subsequently, the Episcopal Library was used mainly by the clergy and the students of St. Bonaventure’s College, as well as various Catholic organizations for formal and informal meetings.6

3 Mullock’s multilingual collection, comprising English, French, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Latin, and Spanish books, spans his entire life. Identified on the basis of his autograph signatures (commonly placed on the title page) and episcopal stamps, 1,279 volumes in the current collection can be securely attributed to Mullock; the remaining 1,677 unsigned books printed before his death can be assigned to him only tentatively, although in many cases with reasonable certainty.7 The first signed books date to the time of his entrance into the Franciscan order in 1825 during his theological and philosophical studies at St. Bonaventure’s College in Seville, Spain (1825–29), and the Irish Franciscan College at St. Isidore’s in Rome (1829–30), where he was ordained priest in 1830. His collection continued to grow following his return to Ireland, where he held various ecclesiastical positions in Ennis, Cork, and Dublin between 1830 and 1847. There is a marked shift, however, in Mullock’s pattern of acquisition after his appointment as bishop of Newfoundland in 1848, especially once he conceived of the idea to establish a seminary and school equipped with a well-stocked library in St. John’s. During the 1850s, whole sets of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin, French, and Italian moral theological works, Biblical commentaries, sermon collections, ecclesiastical historical encyclopedias, and practical theological guides arrived en masse, mostly from Jacques-Paul Migne’s Parisian bookstore, to furnish the library with a complete course in theology for Mullock’s newly founded seminary.8 Although not dated or signed as assiduously as the theological collection intended for seminarians, there was a significant addition of educational books in the late 1850s and 1860s when Mullock endeavoured to create an ideal environment for study and a comprehensive curriculum at his foundation St. Bonaventure’s College, which opened its doors in 1856.9

4 But even while his purchases were so clearly focused on stocking the seminary and school library with essential volumes, Mullock did not abandon his personal interests. After his move to St. John’s, his conscious reorientation towards the New World was manifested in the rapidly growing number of books that were printed in or concerned with the affairs of British North America and the United States. Thus, the extant collection constitutes a colourful assortment of highly personal and private, as well as professional and public, books that provide an invaluable and hitherto unexplored primary source for Mullock’s diverse pursuits as a scholar-theologian, historian, ecclesiastical leader, and political and social activist.

5 Until recently, Mullock’s biographers focused chiefly on his contentious political involvement, his reform initiatives (particularly his dedicated promotion of local steam communication and the transatlantic telegraph cable), and his ecclesiastical establishments in Newfoundland. 10 In fact, Mullock’s later reputation rests almost solely on his active participation in the campaign for responsible government prior to 1855, his partisan although conflicted support for the Liberals, and his much criticized role in the riots associated with the 1861 election.11 All of these political events, as it has been noted, were marked by a strong sectarian character that also defined Mullock’s interference in local politics, which ended with his disillusioned withdrawal in 1862.12 As Hans Rollmann has observed, along with his predecessor and mentor, Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming, Mullock was instrumental in redefining the Roman Catholic Church in Newfoundland “from a classical church model with its preoccupation to serve the spiritual and moral needs of the immigrant Irish populace through cultic professionals, to a politicized church intent on achieving civil rights, demographic representation and social equity for its members even at the cost of ethnic and religious polarization.”13 In a fresh biographical survey, Nancy Earle expanded this perspective by tracing the interrelationship between Mullock’s early life and education in Ireland and Continental Europe and his later career.14 Following the footsteps of Daniel Woodley Prowse, who saw Mullock primarily as a scholar, Earle called attention to his considerable scholarly activities prior to and after his move to St. John’s.15 Yet, apart from a survey of his publications by Earle and Anne Walsh, Mullock’s scholarly work remains largely unexamined, despite the fact that the composition of his library, when considered in conjunction with his publications, provides us with important clues as to his academic pursuits and intellectual orientation.16

6 Mullock’s books constitute a rare witness to the concerns and preoccupations of a nineteenth-century scholar-theologian who, as a British subject and a Catholic prelate of the self-styled oldest colony, continually tried to demarcate his position in relation to the evolving religious politics of the British Empire. While Mullock rarely commented in public on other religious denominations, in particular Anglicans and Methodists, with whom he was entangled in the sectarian politics of the 1850s and 1860s, his books confirm that he was deeply interested in these denominations and actively researched their history. Mullock’s books offer an alternative and more nuanced picture of the private position of the searching and questioning scholar as opposed to the authoritative public persona of the ecclesiastical leader. They furthermore shed light on Mullock as the first professional annalist of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland and a general historian of the island whose methodology was fundamentally shaped by nineteenth-century British historiography.

7 The most formative influence on Mullock’s book-collecting practices and his scholarly methods came from his early years as a theological student in Spain and Italy. Although it is difficult to assess the holdings of the library of St. Bonaventure’s College in Seville during Mullock’s time there, the Wadding Library of St. Isidore’s College in Rome has been a major centre of study and research from its foundation in 1622 until the present day.17 In many ways, Mullock’s own collection mirrors the composition of that at St. Isidore’s and in certain areas, such as church history and polemical theology, a direct connection exists between the two libraries. Imbued with the Tridentine spirit of papal Rome still prevalent during Mullock’s sojourn there, the Wadding Library housed a broad-ranging collection, including writings by Catholic and Protestant controversialists and a considerable section on the Counter-Reformational Council of Trent (1559–63). Most likely inspired by the Irish Franciscan custodians of the Wadding Library, in 1846 Mullock purchased the first edition of Istoria del Concilio di Trento (Rome, 1657) by the Italian historian, Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino.18 He also owned a French edition (Amsterdam, 1736) of the Venetian historian and Catholic prelate Paolo Sarpi’s alternative version, Istoria del Concilio Tridentino, first printed in London in 1619. In fact, it was Sarpi’s history of the Council, highly critical of the Papal Curia and much celebrated by Protestants (among them John Milton), that prompted the Jesuit Pallavicino’s refutation.19 As his Tridentine collection attests, Mullock consistently gathered books on both sides of any particular controversial issue or religious debate, especially in the service of his own scholarly endeavours. It is all the more surprising because Mullock upheld throughout his entire life a neo-ultramontane position that exalted the authority of the Roman pontiff and maintained his universal jurisdiction, and he demonstrated unfailing loyalty to the papacy, which seemed to have been formed during his Continental studies and had certainly been cemented in Rome. Yet, notwithstanding his position in ecclesiastical matters, his private collection, from its inception, was enriched with both Catholic and Protestant volumes that, as we will see, he would systematically gather for and regularly refer to in his publications both before and after his move to Newfoundland.

8 Prior to his arrival in St. John’s, Mullock’s scholarly career was dedicated to popularizing in English the works of Alphonsus de Liguori (1696–1787), the Italian theologian, writer, poet, and musician.20 Mullock, who considered Liguori an exemplary churchman and a supreme spiritual guide, published the saint’s first English biography, The Life of St. Alphonsus M. Liguori, Bishop of St. Agatha, and Founder of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, which, as he notes in his diary, “[He] wrote . . . during the few spare hours [he] had” while he was guardian of the Franciscan Convent of Adam and Eve in Dublin in 1846.21 A popular devotional book, The Life of St. Alphonsus was intended for the general public by both Mullock and its printer, James Duffy, who as Liguori’s ardent promoter published a series of translations of the saint’s prolific moral theological and devotional writings.22

9 In the following year, Mullock produced an English version of A History of the Irish Franciscans, attributed to Hugh Ward (1592–1635), which appeared anonymously in monthly instalments in Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine.23 Mullock’s incomplete translation of the original Latin manuscript Brevis Synopsis Provinciae Hiberniae FF. Minorum (composed in 1633 and preserved at St. Isidore’s) discloses his methods as a church historian, which were fundamentally shaped by the annalist tradition fostered by the founder of St. Isidore’s College and its library, Luke Wadding (1588–1657). Similar to Wadding’s Annales Minorum (1625–54), Mullock’s extensive commentary notes in A History were based mainly on manuscripts he found at St. Isidore’s and the Vatican Library.24 As he states in his introduction, “a few explanatory notes are added to the translation, which will be of some use to those unacquainted with monastic peculiarities, and which we consider necessary for the elucidation of the text.”25 Although he does not specify the actual manuscripts in his notes, he derived additional information on the life of Irish provincials from the seventeenth-century Series et Ordo Vicariorum et Ministrorum Provincialium that formed part of the Brevis Synopsis and covered the period between 1460 and 1630.26 Mullock, however, did not include a full translation of Series et Ordo but used it as a reference for his commentary. He turned, furthermore, to original records he collected, in an antiquarian spirit, while serving in various positions in Ennis, Cork, and Dublin following his departure from Rome in 1830.

10 As guardian of the Convent of St. Francis in Cork in 1838, Mullock transcribed a considerable number of manuscripts, including the Brevis Synopsis, as well as charters and letters, in a notebook, presently in the Franciscan Library Killiney, to which he repeatedly refers in A History.27 In his commentary note on Wexford friary, for example, Mullock remarks on the valuable library and archives that housed many interesting manuscripts relating to Irish ecclesiastical affairs. On his note on the Franciscan friary in Galway, he inserts a full translation of an original Latin document concerning the establishment of the nuns of St. Clare on Nun’s Island, which he found there.28 He likely gathered these historical documents during his visitations to various Irish friaries between 1830 and 1838.29 He sporadically referred to printed sources, such as Thomas Carlyle’s edition of Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, which was first published a year before A History in 1845.30

11 Although the few printed sources mentioned next to the archival material in his commentary notes did not survive in the Episcopal Library, Mullock did own several books concerning the history of the Church in Ireland. Similar to his books on the Council of Trent, they reveal an unbiased collecting habit. Mullock, for example, seems to have consulted from time to time Walter Harris’s translation of Sir James Ware’s History of the Bishops of the Kingdom of Ireland (Dublin, 1739).31 A dedicated collector of manuscripts and original documents, the Protestant Ware (1594–1666), with unusual openness, collaborated with Catholic scholars and published, among others, the Jesuit Edmund Campion’s History of Ireland. That Mullock was influenced by Ware’s research-based methods and revisited his account as an important reference is attested by his inscription dated 1862 on the front fly-leaf of his personal copy of Ware’s History, where he meticulously recorded the names and origin of the bishops of Newfoundland.

12 Mullock’s early interest in church history continued in his next translation, of Liguori’s The History of Heresies and Their Refutation; or the Triumph of the Church, printed by Duffy in Dublin in 1847.32 Out of Mullock’s early works, The History of Heresies had the most enduring effect and remains the only available English translation up to the present day. According to his preface, Mullock intended his translation of one of Liguori’s chief apologetic works primarily for the “Theological Student” who, in his hope, “will find the Work a compact Manual of Polemic Theology.” Mullock must have had the foundation of a seminary in his new missionary place in Newfoundland in mind when he embarked on preparing an accessible and reliable book of Liguori’s text for educational use. He corresponded with Bishop Fleming from 1843 onward, and on 5 June 1847 Fleming requested Mullock as his coadjutor.33 Mullock deemed Liguori’s work safe to be consulted by seminarians, mainly on the basis of the Italian theologian’s scholarship, for as he observes in the preface, “the Student of Ecclesiastical History can at once compare his statements with the sources from which he [Liguori] draws.” Delineating the model of an ecclesiastical historian, which he himself tried to emulate, Mullock also added that “he [Liguori] was not only a perfect master of his own beautiful language, but profoundly read in both Greek and Latin literature also, and a long life constantly employed in studies, chiefly ecclesiastical, qualified him, above any man of his time, to become an Ecclesiastical Historian, which no one should attempt unless he be a general — I might almost say a universal — scholar.” He attributed Liguori’s popularity to his clear, lucid style, which in his view lacked any unnecessary ornamentation or inflated statements. According to an autograph inscription, Mullock obtained his personal copy of Liguori’s Istoria dell’eresi colle loro confutazioni (vols. 2–3, Bassano del Grappa, 1791; vol. 1, Bassano del Grappa, 1822), most likely the copy-text for The History of Heresies, already as an ordained priest during a trip to Rome in 1832. 34 As bishop of St. John’s, he further augmented the founding collection with over 50 volumes of Liguori’s diverse moral theological, ascetic, devotional, and historical writings in Italian, Latin, French, and English. Mullock’s commitment to popularizing Liguori’s works lasted until the end of his life, with the final volume arriving at the Episcopal Library from Duffy’s publishing house in the year of his death.

13 Mullock chose a method of translation for The History of Heresies that followed as closely as possible the source-text and was accorded with the precepts promoted for academic prose by humanist scholars since the mid-fifteenth century. In fact, Mullock’s translation was highly praised by the anonymous contemporary critic whose review appeared in the first issue of Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine in 1847.35 He noted that “to say that it [the translation] is faithful, would be its least eulogy; we believe it is exactly in that style which the holy author would have adopted, had he been a native of our own country — there being in it a transfusion of the simplicity, force and clearness of the original.”36 Nevertheless, Mullock occasionally voiced his frustration with rendering more abstract scholastic terms in English for, as he repeated the common complaint of vernacular translators since the sixteenth century, “In the language of Schools [Latin], the most abstract ideas, which would require a sentence to explain them in our tongue, are most appropriately expressed by a single word; all the Romance languages, daughters of the Latin, have very nearly the same facility, but our Northern tongue has not, I imagine, flexibility enough for the purpose.” He sporadically inserted explanatory notes into the original text when he deemed it necessary to provide further details about “the names of the actors” in Liguori’s history or offer brief definitions and clarifications on more obscure subjects. Though Mullock’s commentary is not nearly as extensive as that in A History, it follows a similar pattern, but instead of archival sources it draws mainly from printed accounts.

14 The only part of the text that points to any substantive editorial intervention on Mullock’s part — and further discloses his methods as an ecclesiastical historian — is Liguori’s chapter on the English Reformation, which, as Mullock claimed, was “the most interesting to us.” Here, he continues, “the Student may perceive some slight variations between the original text and my translation. I have collated the Work with the writings of modern Historians — the English portion, especially with Hume and Lingard — and wherever I have seen the statements of the Holy Author not borne out by the authority of our own Historians, I have considered it more prudent to state the facts, as they really took place; for our own writers must naturally be supposed to be better acquainted with our History, than the foreign authorities quoted by the Saint.” Liguori’s sources for this chapter constitute mainly ecclesiastical works by prominent seventeenth-century Catholic historians, such as the French theologians Noël Alexandre (1639–1724), Jean Hermant (1650–1725), and Antoine Varillas (1624–96), best known for his work on the history of heresies, as well as the polemical writings against Lutherans and Calvinists by the Italian Dominican, Cardinal Vincenzo Ludovico Gotti (1664–1742). While Mullock most likely had access to these treatises during his studies and subsequent visits to Rome, or possibly at the Franciscan convent in Dublin, he also acquired personal copies of some of Liguori’s major sources.37 Sometime before his ordination, he purchased 36 volumes of the French lawyer and historian Claude Fleury’s (1640–1743) famed Histoire ecclésiastique (Paris, 1720–41), an indispensable reference work. After his move to St. John’s, Mullock also inherited volumes from his predecessors, and his personal collection at the foundation of the library contained an English translation of Liguori’s other key source, The History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (Antwerp, 1745) by the French historian and bishop, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704). Bossuet’s two volumes are among Bishop Fleming’s few books that survived, as Mullock recorded in his diary, the “dreadful act of the total burning of St. John’s, Newfoundland” in 1846 that left “Dr. Fleming totally prostrated, as all he had in the world was burned,” including his library.38 Yet, Mullock did not just rely on Liguori’s predominantly Catholic sources but found it necessary to check them against Protestant accounts. In the year of the publication of The History of Heresies, he inscribed a seven-volume set of Histoire de l’église & de l’empire (Geneva, 1674–86) by the French Calvinist minister, polemicist, and classical scholar, Jean De Serres (1540–98), who wrote several treatises criticizing Catholic practices, particularly the activities of the Jesuits.

15 As his footnotes reveal, apart from general ecclesiastical historical studies by Continental authors, Liguori consulted three works that dealt specifically with the English Reformation: an account of the Jesuit mission in England, L’Inghilterra, parte dell’Europa (1667), by the Italian Jesuit historian, Daniello Bartoli (1608–85); De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani (1585) by English Catholic controversialist Nicholas Sanders (c. 1530–81); and History of the Reformation of the Church of England (1679–81) by the Scottish historian, philosopher, and Anglican bishop, Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), which covers the progress of the Reformation from Henry VIII’s reign to the Elizabethan Settlement. Out of these sources, the only volume represented in the Episcopal Library is an unsigned edition of Burnet’s History (London, 1850), which made its way to St. John’s after Mullock’s consecration as bishop. The Protestant Burnet composed his History in response to the exiled Catholic Sanders’s virulent attacks on the English Reformation and in defence of the legitimacy of the Church of England.

16 Burnet, who attempted to produce a well-documented account based on authentic historical records, provided a revised version of the providential reading of the Reformation that was started by John Foxe in his Protestant martyrology, Actes and Monuments, in 1563. Burnet systematically addressed the common charges promulgated by Catholics, particularly against Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.39 At the same time, he admitted that Henry VIII, “the postilion of the Reformation, made way for it through a great deal of mire and filth” and reiterated that “He was not to defend him, nor to lessen his faults” but to prove that God used “to employ princes who had great mixtures of very gross faults to do signal things for his service.”40 It was perhaps Burnet’s admissions of Henry VIII’s failings that prompted Liguori to include him in his account as one of the rare English Protestant sources in The History of the Heresies, which is otherwise heavily reliant on the greatly popular, although often grossly exaggerated and biased, anecdotes of Sanders regarding the main actors of the Reformation. Nevertheless, Liguori tends to contest Burnet’s readings of the events, and in the closing lines of his chapter on the English Reformation he even employs an unnamed “foreign Protestant author” to ridicule Burnet’s pride in the idea of an independent national church.41 Thus, through Sanders and Burnet, Liguori introduced, however tangentially, the long-standing historiographical debate on the English Reformation, in which Mullock himself, as his editorial revisions and his extant books affirm, took great interest throughout his life.

17 Mullock’s revisions of Liguori’s original text display a more nuanced interpretation of the Reformation than his source-text and confirm his familiarity with recent historical studies. His choice of checking Liguori’s facts against the atheist Hume and the liberal Catholic Lingard, whom he identifies in the preface, is particularly interesting because not only do they represent divergent contributions to the historiographical controversy over the nature of the English Reformation but they are also contrary to Mullock’s essential neo-ultramontane stance in religious matters. The Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–76), whose complete works were promptly banned by the Catholic Church and stayed on the list of prohibited books from 1761 to 1827, and who was equally critical of Catholicism and the fundamentalism of Protestant reformers, supplied Mullock with a source heavily focused on the “civil history” of the Reformation and the relationship between secular authority and the Church.42 Although Hume depicted the rule of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I as fundamentally autocratic and lacking civil liberty in The History of England, under the House of Tudor (1759), he lauded, in an Enlightenment spirit, the new state church created by successive reformed English governments, highlighting that “of all the European nations which shook off the yoke of papal authority, no one proceeded with so much reason and moderation as the church of England.”43

18 Hume’s views, which were profoundly anti-religious and emphatically anti-Catholic, were countered by the Catholic priest and historian John Lingard (1771–1851) in the eight volumes of his History of England, from the First Invasion by the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary in 1688. Lingard set out to prove with rigorous scholarly methods and careful examination of the available historical sources that English Catholics were never disloyal to the reigning monarch and they could indeed be simultaneously English and Catholic, faithful both to the Crown and the Church.44 Lingard studied in the English College in Douai, France, where he was influenced by the research-based methods of French historians, particularly by Fleury’s Histoire ecclesiastique, the scholarly significance of which he likened to Edward Gibbon’s renowned Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.45 As one of the leading representatives of the liberal Catholic Cisalpine Club, Lingard, however, questioned the infallibility of the pope and his temporal rights in England and denied clerical authority over the laity. In fact, his views could not have been more contrary to the position represented by Liguori and the Rome-centred Transalpinist (ultramontane) Catholics, who defended the infallibility of papal authority and fiercely opposed Lingard. It is thus particularly puzzling that Mullock would turn to Lingard for a Catholic authority on the subject of the English Reformation. His choice may have been influenced by such a high-profile figure of the Catholic Revival movement in England as Nicholas Wiseman, rector of the English College in Rome during Mullock’s studies at St. Isidore’s, with whom he cultivated friendship even after his move to Newfoundland.46 Wiseman, who would be appointed cardinal of England shortly after the publication of Mullock’s translation of The History of Heresies in 1850, kept Lingard, his former teacher, in high regard despite their differing views on papal authority and Lingard’s lingering distrust of the Oxford Movement, whose members, including John Henry Newman, both Wiseman and Mullock were closely connected with.47

19 It seems that Mullock’s reliance on such polarized sources as Hume and Lingard for his revisions of Liguori’s text was defined mainly by their reputation of being impartial historians. Mullock does not quote directly from either Hume or Lingard and his own interpretation of the English Reformation can be traced only through his controlled editorial corrections. More important are his frequent omissions, particularly Liguori’s denigrating descriptions of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I, both of whom the Italian historian tends to vilify, often through unfounded and unrestrained anecdotes borrowed from Valliras’s accounts. For example, Mullock simply overlooks Liguori’s assumption that Anne Boleyn’s mother was previously Henry VIII’s mistress and thus Anne Boleyn was Henry’s daughter.48 Similarly, he does not translate Liguori’s overly excited evaluation of Anne Boleyn, culminating in the insult of her being the Equa Angliae.49 Mullock consistently tones down Liguori’s disparaging portrayal not only of Henry VIII’s second queen but also of her daughter, Elizabeth I, who were traditionally depicted in Catholic histories as the arch villains of the English Reformation and the chief causes of the schism in the English Church. Mullock’s tactful corrections are all the more significant because it was Burnet and Hume who defended Anne Boleyn’s chastity and her general demeanour in the whole affair, while Lingard’s otherwise balanced history reinforced previous hostile judgments about her.

20 Similarly, with the insertion of an occasional mollifying adjective, Mullock altered the negative assessments of both Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s minister and Lord Chancellor, and Thomas Cranmer, the first archbishop of the reformed Church in England, who was particularly the target of Catholic critics, among them Lingard.50 In fact, Lingard was forced by reviewers to clarify his interpretation that undermined the prevailing Protestant interpretations and publish a public response in the form of A Vindication of Certain Passages in the Fourth and Fifth Volumes of the History of England (1826). Interestingly, in some cases Mullock seems to have followed the interpretation of Protestant historians. As the anonymous contemporary reviewer of The History of the Heresies somewhat resentfully pointed out, Mullock would not automatically follow Lingard’s position: “we could have wished, that the translator had adhered a little more stringently to the promise which he made, we are certain, in all sincerity, that is, to collate the author’s history in this portion of it with Hume and Lingard, and in case of apparent discrepancy between them, to prefer the authority of our own writers.”51

21 Although the extant portion of Mullock’s personal collection does not contain any surviving copies of either Hume’s or Lingard’s histories, it houses Lingard’s Catechetical Instructions on the Doctrines and Worship of the Catholic Church (London, 1844), along with one of his pamphlets published on the occasion of a formal controversy with Shute Barrington, bishop of Durham: Remarks on a Charge Delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese of Durham by Shute, Bishop of Durham, at the Ordinary Visitation of That Diocese in the Year 1806 (Dublin, 1822).52 Even though some of Mullock’s key sources are missing from the Episcopal Library, a conspicuous number of books treating the English Reformation form part of it. Similar to the historical studies Mullock consulted for The History of the Heresies, they represent a variety of perspectives and include both Catholic and Protestant controversialists, among them such high-profile seventeenth-century converts as Thomas Ward (1652–1708) and Isaac Papin (1657–1709). The Episcopal Library includes an unsigned American edition of the highly popular burlesque, England’s Reformation: A Poem in Four Cantos (New York, 1846), by Ward, who had been raised as a Calvinist but, as a result of his theological studies, joined the Catholic Church. It is supplemented by two volumes of Ward’s Errata to the Protestant Bible: Or the Truth of Their English Translations (Dublin, 1807–10), which Mullock inherited from his predecessor, the third vicar apostolic of St. John’s, Bishop Thomas Scallan (1793–1830).53 It may have been Ward’s (Burnet’s opponent) and the French Huguenot theologian Papin’s (Burnet’s former protégé who was received into the Catholic Church by Bossuet) connection with the influential Anglican bishop, one of Liguori’s major English sources, that led to their inclusion in the Episcopal Library.54 More contemporary Continental studies show the same polarized approach detectable in Mullock’s editorial methods. These include An Amicable Discussion on the Church of England and on the Reformation in General, by the French theologian, Bishop Jean-François-Marie Le Pappe de Trévern (1754–1842), which was dedicated to the clergy of every Protestant communion, and History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1846), the work of the Swiss Protestant minister Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné (1794–1872), which exemplifies an alternative viewpoint to that of Trévern. In the collection, these works are supplemented by the English political writer William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation (London, 1829), where Cobbett (1763–1835) focuses on the damaging social and economic impact of the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries, especially on the exploitation of the English poor in the countryside as a result of the Crown’s appropriation of Church lands. Although Cobbett derived his view from Lingard’s History, his account is shaped by his own radical political agenda rather than by a measured interpretation of the events.

22 Mullock’s interest in the English Reformation and the marked concentration on English Catholic and Anglican authors in his personal collection were most probably motivated by contemporary ecclesiastical politics, specifically in the period of Catholic relief in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Not only did ecclesiastical politics provide a backdrop for the historiographical debate on the English Reformation, but it also fundamentally shaped and informed the historical sources Mullock gathered as reference works for his own scholarship. The thorny legal issue of reconciling the temporal and spiritual authority of the English monarch and the Roman pope, originating from the English Reformation, was essential to Catholic relief, which was fully achieved in 1829, just a few months before Mullock entered St. Isidore’s College on 26 June. Although the political struggle for emancipation had largely subsided by the time Mullock finished his studies in Rome, it continued to define the discourse on the English Reformation and the flood of Catholic and Protestant literature published on the subject within this period. Mullock, whose early life and education in Ireland were deeply affected by the political efforts to attain Catholic emancipation, inserted a lengthy section in The History of the Heresies detailing the by then defunct penal laws against Catholics, and this is the only extensive editorial note in the volume. Significantly, Mullock revisited this topic in his unfinished history, “Memories of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland,” where he dedicated a considerable section to the enforcement of penal laws against Catholics, a hotly contested topic in Newfoundland in the 1820s.

23 Mullock seems to have followed closely the often conflicting positions taken by the chief Catholic players of the emancipation movement in England who also contributed to the historiography of the English Reformation from a characteristically Catholic perspective. They were divided into two groups: the Cisalpinists, who, like the supporters of French Gallicanism and Austrian Josephinism, promoted the idea of the independence of the national churches, and the Transalpinists, who defended papal infallibility and stressed clerical authority over the laity. Considering Mullock’s ultramontane sympathies, it is not surprising that his collection includes writings by John Milner, the vicar apostolic of the Midland district and leader of the Transalpinists. Apart from Milner’s main ecclesiastical historical contribution to the Reformation debate, The History Civil and Ecclesiastical & Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester (Winchester, 1809), sometime between 1830 and 1847 Mullock also obtained a copy of his Letters to a Prebendary, Being an Answer to Reflections on Popery, by the Rev. J. Sturges (Derby, 1843).55 In Letters, Milner engaged in a heated controversy with Sturges, the Anglican chancellor of Winchester and chaplain to the King, over the latitudinarian and anti-Catholic doctrines of the late bishop of Winchester, Benjamin Hoadly, in which papal supremacy played a central role. Milner, in refutation of Hoadly, offered a detailed historical account of the question of supremacy with a special focus on the fate of English Catholics from the time of the Reformation. Although Milner tried to tread carefully on the fine line of the limitations of the pope’s temporal authority and his right to depose heretical princes (a crucial issue in Catholic–Anglican relations since Elizabeth I’s excommunication by Pius V), he was criticized by Cisalpinist Catholic writers, particularly Joseph Berington, who took Sturges’s side in the debate. Founder of the lay Catholic Committee (later Cisalpine Club), the main champions of Catholic emancipation, Berington was a representative of liberal English Catholics and, as such, passionately opposed to papal intervention in the English Catholic Church, insisting that “He was no Papist, neither is his religion Popery.”56 Interestingly, besides Milner’s public arguments with Berington and Sturges, preserved respectively in A Serious Expostulation with the Rev. Joseph Berington: Upon His Theological Errors Concerning Miracles and Other Subjects (London, 1797) and Vindication (London, 1805), along with his best-selling controversial work The End of Religious Controversy, in a Friendly Correspondence between a Religious Society of Protestants and a Roman Catholic Divine (London, 1845), a three-volume set of The Faith of Catholics, on Certain Points of Controversy (London, 1846) by Berington and his allies, the prominent liberal Catholic James Waterworth and John Kirk, found a place in the Episcopal Library.57

24 The much-contested question of papal supremacy that divided English Catholics became even more germane following Pius IX’s ascension to the papal throne in 1846, which accelerated the spread of the neo-ultramontane movement.58 Significantly, Mullock’s outlook on the doctrinal issue of papal infallibility, along with that of the leading figures of the Catholic revival and the Oxford Movement with whom he would build up extensive connections, was deeply affected by this powerful shift in Roman ecclesiastical politics. It is not surprising, therefore, that Mullock’s personal collection comprises a significant number of treatises on papal supremacy by Anglican theologians and Catholic apologists, as well as unsigned catechisms of the Church of England published by a range of Anglican writers, including John Jewel, William Gilpin, Isaac Barrow, and William Wake, the seventeenth-century archbishop of Canterbury. Mullock’s copy of Wake’s Exposition du catechisme de l’eglise Anglicane, où sont expliquez les principes de la religion Chrétienne (London, 1722), which Mullock signed sometime between 1850 and 1856, further illustrates his familiarity with the key figures of the historiographical debate on the nature of the English Reformation. Much extolled by Burnet, Wake’s French edition was meant to respond to the charges expounded by his Catholic rival, Bossuet, in Exposition de la doctrine de l’église catholique. To indicate the precariousness of possessing such sources, in Mullock’s copy a handwritten Latin inscription on the title page cautions the unsuspecting Catholic reader that such material should be read carefully and certainly with the permission (cum permissione) of higher ecclesiastical authorities.

25 But apart from these classics, Mullock also collected books on the subject by his influential contemporaries, and he seemed to have been particularly engaged with this issue around the time of his move to St. John’s. Mullock inscribed his copy of The Validity of Anglican Ordinations and Anglican Claims to Apostolical Succession Examined (Philadelphia, 1848) by Richard Kenrick (1806–96), the archbishop of St. Louis, as titular bishop of Thaumacene sometime between 1847 and 1850, as he did for The Primacy of the Apostolic See Vindicated (Philadelphia, 1845) by Kenrick’s older brother, Francis Patrick Kenrick (1796–1863), the archbishop of Philadelphia, then Baltimore, shortly before his own consecration as bishop of Newfoundland in 1850. The Kenrick brothers were closely associated with Mullock’s Roman circle and played an instrumental role in what Colin Barr has called the “hibernacization of the American Church,” which was orchestrated from Rome by the neo-ultramontane rector of St. Isidore’s, Paul Cullen (1803–78), who was largely responsible for the Romanization of the Catholic Church in Ireland as well as in North America.59 Both Validity of Anglican Ordinations and Primacy of the Apostolic See contained updated historical overviews of these much-contested Anglican and Catholic doctrines, with special focus on the formative influence of the English Reformation. Francis Patrick Kenrick’s work must have proved especially useful for Mullock’s public lecture on “The Current State of the Church,” presented at St. Bonaventure’s College in 1861, as it supplied invaluable source material on the protocols of papal elections and the accompanying ceremonies. As Mullock’s closing footnote on the chapter on the English Reformation in The History of Heresies indicates, for him the ongoing historiographical controversy had immediate relevance beyond Catholic emancipation. As his diverse secondary sources and the composition of his library show, Mullock’s early scholarship responded directly to contemporary concerns associated with the newly emerging and strengthening Catholic Church in England as well as North America, and more indirectly to the crisis within the Church of England, which led to the rise of the Oxford Movement during his early career in the 1830s and 1840s.

26 Yet, Mullock’s attention in The History of Heresies is not limited to English affairs; it extended to the challenges posed to the Catholic Church on Continental Europe and in North America by newly emerging religious groups of the past 80 years, which he briefly surveys in a supplementary chapter attached to his translation of Liguori’s history.60 As Mullock admitted, his intention was to provide a more comprehensive overview of the heresies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, “but, then he considered that it would be out of proportion with the remainder of the Work.” Accordingly, he inserted a short encyclopedic entry detailing the upsurge and spread of Rationalism, Hernhutters or Moravians, Swedenborgians or New Jerusalemites, Methodism, Mormonism, and German Catholicism. Mullock’s succinct accounts describe the main tenets of these religious movements and the biographies of their spiritual leaders, accompanied by his cursory refutation of their doctrinal fallacies. Interestingly, compared to the considerable number of books treating the English Reformation and the theology of the Church of England, Mullock uses only a few secondary sources to inform him on these movements, which are represented only sporadically in the current collection. He derived his assessment of Rationalism from Catechesimo intorno al Protestantesimo: ad uso del popolo by the Italian Jesuit scholar Giovanni Perrone (1794–1876). Mullock likely became acquainted with Perrone, a celebrated lecturer and head of dogmatic theology at the Jesuit Collegio Romano (Roman College), during his own studies in Rome.61 Nevertheless, it remains a question whether Mullock himself added the unsigned copy of Perrone’s Catechesimo (Rome, 1854) to the Episcopal Library or if it was acquired by his successor and biographer, Bishop Howley, along with a two-volume set of Perrone’s treatise on Christian marriage (De matrimonio Christiano, Rome, 1858) that Howley inscribed at the Propaganda Fide in Rome in 1867. For information on the Moravians, Mullock turned to his own series of Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1797) as well as church history of the German Lutheran Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1693–1755). The latter, which is not part of the current collection, he most likely consulted in the updated English translation by the Scottish theologians Archibald Maclain and Charles Coote.62

27 Mullock did not provide any secondary sources for his entries on Emanuel Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and the prophetess Johanna Southcott (1750–1814), whom he associates with the Methodists. Nor are any relevant volumes found in the Episcopal Library for his concise section on the German Catholic Church. The only exception is Mullock’s personal copy of the controversial Reformation in the Catholic Church of Germany, and the Downfall of Papal Authority (London, 1819) by the liberal Catholic Ignaz Heinrich von Wessenberg (1774–1860), which Mullock acquired as an ordained priest between 1830 and 1847. Influenced by Josephinism from his early career, the German scholar and vicar-general of the diocese of Constance, Wessenberg was a staunch advocate of a German National Church and a vocal opponent of papal interference in ecclesiastical affairs until his retirement as a churchman in 1827, thus sharing views similar to those of liberal English Catholics in the period. Mullock, who toured the Hapsburg Empire and Germany, visiting Vienna, Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin, Magdeburg, and Hamburg in 1843, seems to have intended to acquire some linguistic skills in German.63 The few books by German Catholic theologians that remained in the Episcopal Library — notably the influential polemical work of Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), Symbolism, or Exposition of the Doctrinal Difference between Catholics and Protestants (New York, 1844), and of Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger, The Church and the Churches: or, the Papacy and the Temporal Power: An Historical and Political Review (London, 1862) — suggest that Mullock sought to gain insight into the position of his German colleagues, who were equally divided about the issue of papal authority. Perhaps as a sign of their common background and loyalty to Rome, Mullock’s personal copy of Möhler’s Symbolism was given to him by the archbishop of Halifax, the Cullenite William Walsh, who dedicated it to his friend in St. John’s on 4 August 1851.64

28 The most elaborate and thoroughly referenced section of Mullock’s supplementary chapter, however, is devoted to Methodism. In his sketch of John Wesley’s life, the history of the Methodist society, and their doctrines, Mullock highlighted their influence in the colonies. Although condemning his attacks on the pope, Mullock noted somewhat regretfully that “had Wesley . . . been born and disciplined, from his youth, in the doctrines and practices of the Catholic Faith . . . he might have been one of the lights of his age and perhaps, have carried the Gospel with effect to the nations still sitting in darkness.”65 Mullock used three major Methodist sources for his account: the Wesleyan minister Joseph Benson’s An Apology for the People Called Methodist (London, 1801), John Wesley’s diary, and the General Report of the Wesleyan Centenary Fund, published in 1844. Mullock’s personal copy of Benson’s Apology, which he signed as a Franciscan friar before his ordination in 1830, confirms his early interest in Methodism, as does the two-volume set of The Life of Wesley: And Rise and Progress of Methodism by the poet and reviewer Robert Southey (1774–1843). The latter volume appeared with the notes of the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and with Wesley’s biography by the Protestant theologian Alexander Knox (1757–1831), a leading political advocate of Catholic relief in Ireland. Mullock seemed to have consulted Benson and in particular Southey for his remarks on Wesley’s contentious relationship with the Calvinist George Whitefield and the Moravians, particularly Count Zinzendorf. In fact, it may have been Southey’s chapter on the “fanatical language” of the Moravians that prompted Mullock’s unequivocal condemnation of those he may have later personally encountered during his visit to Labrador.66 As in the case of the English Reformation, Mullock’s early interest in Methodism was highly pertinent to contemporary religious politics, especially because of the growing Methodist presence in North America, and influenced his later (inconsistent) relationship with Methodists in the political and the religious arenas of Newfoundland.67

29 Notwithstanding his learned refutation of Protestant heresies, the apologist Mullock obtained several books advocating religious tolerance. As a young Franciscan, he acquired a copy of the Huguenot Bernard Picart’s seminal Céremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde (Amsterdam, 1723), a pioneering work calling for religious liberty, which he later supplemented with Thomas Clarke’s History of Intolerance. Observations on the Unreasonableness and Injustice of Persecution, and on the Equity and Wisdom of Unrestricted Religious Liberty (Waterford, 1819) in the middle of the political turmoil in 1860.68 His books of reference for his translation of Ligouri’s The History of Heresies and his supplementary chapter expose that Mullock was familiar with and open to the arguments offered by historians of diverse background who did not share his own neo-ultramontane beliefs, and who even advocated unrestricted religious liberty.

30 Similar to his book-collecting habits, after his move to St. John’s Mullock’s scholarly activities had been redirected towards the immediate needs associated with his new position as bishop of Newfoundland. As a historian, he turned his attention to documenting the local history of the island, which he extensively toured as a bishop.69 Significantly, Mullock applied to his writings in this period the same approach to scholarship that characterized his earlier publications. To publicize the recently completed cathedral, he composed a booklet on The Cathedral of St. John’s Newfoundland, with an Account of Its Consecration in 1856, which first appeared in Duffy’s print shop in Dublin and later in various languages all over Europe.70 At the same time, Mullock also began his ecclesiastical history of Newfoundland — “Memories of the Catholic Church in Newfoundland” — of which only the first part survives in an unfinished autograph manuscript.71 In “Memories,” Mullock delineates the history of the island with special focus on the fate of Catholics from the time of John Cabot’s discoveries to the governorship of Richard Edwards, where his extant notes end abruptly in 1779. Mullock meticulously chronicles the events related both to the English Catholic Lord Baltimore and to the activities of French Catholics prior to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) in Newfoundland. In the same antiquarian spirit that characterizes his editorial notes in the history of the Irish Franciscans, Mullock cites at length original documents he discovered in the archiepiscopal archives of Quebec concerning French Catholic establishments, and in particular the foundation of the French Franciscan convent in Placentia. Using historical arguments, he refutes Lewis Amadeus Anspach’s claim about the Jesuit presence in the island in his A History of the Island of Newfoundland (London, 1819). In the annalist tradition of the historians of St. Isidore’s, Mullock inserted several chapters on the history of Irish Catholics, detailing their relationship with the English authorities throughout the eighteenth century and surveying the interactions of Catholics and Protestants during the terms of the various governors. Based on his research of the registries and public records, he gives accounts of a number of incidents when penal laws were enforced against the Catholic population in the period, using the methods of scientific inquiry he learned from British (Catholic and Protestant) historians he consulted for his translation of The History of Heresies.

31 Mullock shared his interpretation of Newfoundland history in two public lectures that appeared under the title Lectures on Newfoundland, first in St. John’s and later under the title Two Lectures on Newfoundland Delivered at St. Bonaventure’s College January 25, and February 1, 1860, in New York and Montreal.72 The first lecture relies heavily on “Memories” and describes the history of Catholics until the episcopacy of the founder of the church in Newfoundland, James Louis O’Donel, whose loyalty to the British Crown in the political crisis of 1784 he highly praises. Although Mullock derives substantial material from his manuscript notes, he has also some notable omissions. For example, despite the fact that his audience at St. Bonaventure’s College consisted largely of people of Irish Catholic descent, in his lectures Mullock glosses over the “dreary period” of penal laws and “the tyrannical acts of persecution embodied in the proclamations of these [the governors] perhaps honest, but bigoted men.” He emphasizes instead his own positive encounters with Protestants, whom he found to be kind, generous, and hospitable during his trips. In this time of “perfect civil and religious liberty,” in Mullock’s experience “Catholics and Protestant live together in the greatest harmony, and it is only in print [sic] we find any thing except on extraordinary occasions, like disunion among them.” The public expression of these sentiments was particularly unusual amid the political upheaval of the early 1860s in which Mullock himself played such a crucial and much debated role.

32 His love for Newfoundland and his unfailing optimism in its growth are even more evident in his second lecture, which, as Earle and Walsh have demonstrated, goes beyond a history of the church and encompasses wide-ranging material on the geography, geology, fishery, and agriculture of the colony.73 Mullock’s vision for this strategically located “great and noble country,” which in his hope would become an important centre in North America, was largely based on his belief in progress, a commonplace of English historiography by the mid-nineteenth century. Mullock most likely borrowed his confident belief in the redemptive power of national progress from the nineteenth-century British historian and Whig politician, Thomas Babington Macaulay.74 Although Macaulay’s widely popular The History of England is not present in the current Episcopal collection, some of his other books are, among them the Modern British Essayists, which according to his signature, Mullock even took with him to Chateaux Bay, Labrador, in 1852.75 In his historical writings about Newfoundland, Mullock seems to have adopted Macaulay’s concept of English history, that is, “the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement.” In fact, his two lectures are structured according to Macaulay’s tripartite vision of the past (first lecture) and the present and the future (second lecture) that constitute a linear history of development. Similarly, Mullock viewed his lectures on the past and present of Newfoundland as a moral lesson that was to excite his audience’s hope “for its future prosperity.” However, unlike Macaulay, who saw the English past since the Glorious Revolution of 1689 (the triumph of Protestantism over Catholicism) as an unbroken path of progress, for Mullock the historical circumstances of the past hindered Newfoundland’s growth. Yet, in Mullock’s vision, despite all the failings of the past, Newfoundlanders “have increased twenty-fold in ninety years, have built towns and villages, erected magnificent buildings, as the cathedral in St. John’s, introduced telegraphs, steam, postal and road communications, newspapers, everything, in fact, found in most civilized countries, and all this on a rugged soil, in a harsh, though wholesome climate, and under every species of discouragement.”76

33 In his first lecture, Mullock in some sense transposed Macaulay’s providential reading of the history of England and belief in the superiority of Protestantism to Newfoundland and to Irish Catholics. Accordingly, Mullock assigned special role to the “poor persecuted Irish fishermen” and labourers, the enduring monument of whose faith is the Cathedral of St. John’s, who are to restore with renewed vigour “the ancient British faith of Avalon and Glastonbury” that Lord Baltimore failed to revive in the early seventeenth century. In his second lecture, however, Mullock went beyond the confines of Catholicism and expanded his confidence in national development to encompass the whole population of Newfoundland without any denominational discrimination. Like Macaulay, who identified the English as a people of progress, Mullock was convinced that “the present generation of Newfoundland then leaves a mighty inheritance to their children, and we are now forming the character of a future nation. The development of the people is certain. Religion, education, and industry are indispensable to make them a great people. Consider what Newfoundland was fifty years ago, and then you may imagine what it will be a century hence.”77 As his incomplete “Memories” and his two lectures on Newfoundland attest, in his final academic endeavours, which were devoted entirely to the history of Newfoundland, Mullock seemed to have summarized all that he had learned from the Franciscan annalists of Spain, Italy, and Ireland and from a lifetime of reading what was closest to his heart: Irish, French, and particularly British historians. Just as his earlier scholarly pursuits and the establishment of the Episcopal Library, they were manifestations of his dedication to compiling and preserving a body of universal and local knowledge, as well as to disseminating it with the relentless educational zeal of a cultural missionary.

34 Mullock’s highly personal quest, manifested in his scholarship and his books preserved in the Episcopal Library, many of which contradicted his own convictions, considerably modify the existing picture of Mullock as the unbending neo-ultramontane bishop of Newfoundland. They delineate an alternative biography that reveals Mullock’s complex motivations as a social, educational, and political activist, defined by his European background and his persistent faith in the future development of his new place of ministry. His books demonstrate his sincere engagement with the theology and history of other denominations, especially Anglicans and Methodists, with whom he was in daily contact in St. John’s, and with whom he fundamentally shaped not only the political but also the intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century Newfoundland.