Last week I discovered a couple of items that excited my inner historian. They related to key periods in our Catholic history.
The first I discovered when checking that items were stored appropriately. There was a box of books and when I opened the first volume, I saw it had been printed in Kororareka.
I had long known that in 1841–42, Jean Baptiste Pompallier had established a Roman Catholic mission in Russell, which contained a printing press for the production of Māori-language religious texts. But this was the first time I had seen one of the texts from that press.
The second item that made my heart jump was a folder containing “12 leaves from a 15th century Roman Catholic prayer book.” The front page had this inscription.
Curious about this, I showed the pages to Christopher de Hamel, a visiting expert in medieval manuscripts. He concluded that they were from England, printed in Europe and dated from before the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII (Read more about this here: Dissolution of the monasteries). Given that many books were destroyed in this purge, these are a rare find.
This is a rare find! So much detail in just one page.